be seen as an extension of the United States.” Haqqani, fresh from years of American exile, was picked for the ambassadorship for precisely that unforgivable quality.
Years later, Pakistan’s Express Tribune opened a profile of Haqqani with George Orwell’s description of Squealer in Animal Farm: “a brilliant talker, and when he was arguing some difficult point, he had a way of skipping from side to side.”
“None of this, of course, is to draw a comparison to the esteemed Mr. Husain Haqqani,” the profile continued, “after all, Squealer remained loyal to the pigs throughout.”
RICHARD HOLBROOKE had been a prodigiously young assistant secretary of state for East Asia during the Carter administration before departing to Lehman Brothers during the years of Republican leadership between his diplomatic posts. As in all his roles, he grew close to the journalists around him while working on East Asia. As luck would have it, that included Strobe Talbott, who had, as predicted at Oxford, gone on to a career in journalism, covering foreign affairs for Time.
Holbrooke’s contacts in the Clinton administration were thin. He had backed Al Gore in the 1988 primary, and sat out the Clinton campaign almost entirely, though not for a lack of trying. He badgered friends from Vietnam with better proximity to Clinton—like Anthony Lake, to whom he sent an unsolicited memo describing the brewing conflict in Bosnia as “the key test of American policy in Europe” and warning of the danger of inaction. Holbrooke watched, frustrated, as plum positions went to Lake and other peers. It was only after lobbying from Talbott, who was appointed deputy secretary of state, that Holbrooke was asked to take the post of ambassador to Germany. And it was only by sheer willpower that he ascended to assistant secretary of state for Europe, and then to the defining role of his career, as the administration’s negotiator in the Bosnia conflict.
The ethnic slaughter sparked by the disintegration of Yugoslavia had, for years, been an intractable problem at the periphery of American interests. By 1995, at least 100,000 people—and upwards of 300,000, according to some estimates—had been killed. Faltering efforts at mediation, including one led by Jimmy Carter, had barely interrupted Serbian forces’ aggressions against the region’s Muslims and Croats. It was only after the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica drew international outrage that the United States shifted from its conviction that the violence was a “European problem” and green-lit a more aggressive diplomatic push.
Holbrooke had always viewed the conflict in grand terms—as a test of NATO with potentially dramatic consequences for the future of Europe and, by extension, American strategic interests. When the Clinton administration was deciding who would lead the new intervention, Holbrooke campaigned for the position, hard. He was disliked, but some saw his maverick style as a positive. “The very qualities for which he was sometimes criticized—aggressiveness, impolitic interaction with adversaries, a penchant for cultivating the media—were exactly what the situation required,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher said. The parties to the conflict—Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic´, Croatian president Franjo Tud-jman, and Bosnia’s Alija Izetbegovic´—were scrappers with a history of underhanded tactics. Richard Holbrooke was a rare figure who could meet them toe to toe. Years later, President Clinton toasted Holbrooke with a gentle jab: “Everyone in the Balkans is crazy and everyone has a giant ego. Who else could you send?”
Over a three-month period in 1995, Holbrooke alternately cajoled and harangued the parties to the conflict. For one month, he all but imprisoned them at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio—a stage where he could precisely direct the diplomatic theater. At the negotiations’ opening dinner, he seated Miloševic´ under a B-2 bomber—literally in the shadow of Western might. At a low point in the negotiations, he announced that they were over, and had luggage placed outside the Americans’ doors. Miloševic´ saw the bags and asked Holbrooke to extend the talks. The showmanship worked—the parties, several of them mortal enemies, signed the Dayton Agreement.
It was an imperfect document. It ceded almost half of Bosnia to Miloševic´ and the Serbian aggressors, essentially rewarding their atrocities. And some felt leaving Miloševic´ in power made the agreement untenable. A few years later, he continued his aggressions in Kosovo and finally provoked NATO airstrikes and his removal from power, to face trial at The Hague. The night before the strikes, Miloševic´ had a final conversation with Holbrooke. “Don’t you have anything more to say to me?” he pleaded. To which Holbrooke replied: “Hasta la vista, baby.” (Being menaced by a tired Schwarzenegger catchphrase was not the greatest indignity Miloševic´ faced that week.)
But the agreement succeeded in ending three and a half years of bloody war. In a sense, Holbrooke had been preparing for it since his days witnessing the Paris talks with the Vietnamese fall apart, and he worked hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Crucial to the success of the talks was his broad grant of power from Washington, free of micromanagement and insulated from domestic political whims. And with NATO strikes authorized, military force was at the ready to back up his diplomacy—not the other way around. Those were elements he would grasp at, and fail to put in place, in his next and final mission.
Dayton made Holbrooke a bona fide foreign policy celebrity. The next year, he received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. A Time magazine political cartoon envisioned him as Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, dangling on a wire over the region, sweating bullets. But just a year after Dayton, he was passed over as secretary of state in favor of Madeleine Albright. Holbrooke, devastated, accepted a post as US Ambassador to the UN instead. “I know he wanted to be Secretary of State,” Albright said. “But I was. It was kind of a surprise to many people but I think [especially] to him.” Al Gore later said Holbrooke would have been “first in line” to be secretary of state in a Gore administration in 2000. Circumstance always just managed to snatch away the job he wanted most.
WHEN RICHARD HOLBROOKE PRESIDED over the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995, the United States had only just begun slashing away at diplomatic spending and the shift to military and intelligence dominance that took place after 9/11 was years away. In the years between that triumph in Bosnia and Holbrooke’s next attempt to end a war, the United States’ place in the world would change dramatically. Afghanistan and Pakistan were at the epicenter of those changes.
Before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA had already collaborated with Pakistan in efforts to capture Osama bin Laden. And so it was little surprise that, afterwards, the United States took a narrow, tactical approach, working through Pakistan’s military and intelligence agency. By the morning of September 12, 2001, deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage was meeting with General Mehmood Ahmad, the director-general of the ISI, attempting to lock down Pakistan’s support for American retaliation in Afghanistan. Mehmood pledged that support—and an end to Pakistani collaboration with the Taliban—to Armitage. Musharraf did the same to Colin Powell. Just like that, Pakistan went from foe to friend
