the president, I referred to Vietnam and was told by Hillary that the president did not want any references to Vietnam,” he said in one, his voice sounding tired on the scratchy tape. “I was very struck by this, since I thought there were obviously relevant issues.” “He was incredibly unhappy with the way he was personally treated,” Hillary Clinton reflected. “I was too. Because I thought a lot of what he was offering had real merit and it didn’t somehow fit into the worldview that the White House had.” Holbrooke had allowed himself to be categorized not as someone to be heard but as someone to be tolerated.
But the more meaningful divide was with the military. Holbrooke was no dove. He had supported the invasion in Iraq, and at the outset of the review, he endorsed an initial deployment of troops in advance of the Afghan elections as a stopgap. But he felt military engagement should be organized around the goal of achieving a political settlement. He was alarmed by the force of persuasion the military voices at the NSC table commanded, sometimes crowding out nonmilitary solutions. “I told David Axelrod that we had been dominated much too long by pure mil-think,” he said in another tape. “Military thinking and military domination. And while I had great respect for the military, uh, and Petraeus was brilliant, I liked them as individuals and they were great Americans, they should not dictate political strategy, which is what’s happening now.”
After one meeting, he emerged, exhausted, and told Vali Nasr something absurd: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had bigger folders. His maps and charts were more colorful. The SRAP team had cranked out voluminous policy papers, but they were going unread by many of the president’s advisers. “Who can make graphics?” he asked in one meeting. Everyone looked at me. “Ageism,” I muttered, and went to work making technicolor PowerPoints out of his policy proposals, which he dictated in minute detail. Often, they focused on political and diplomatic solutions he felt were being given short shrift by the White House. A series of concentric circles showed the complex landscape of global players he felt the United States needed to do more to engage—from international donors, to NATO states, to rising powers like India and China. Triangles linked by arrows illustrated trilateral relations between Pakistan, India and the US. A flow chart, titled “Changing Pakistan’s Behavior Toward the Taliban,” offered a storybook simplification of his plan for the most difficult bilateral relationship in the world:
1 Focus on entire country with new US-led international assistance and new commitments campaign …
2 … Which builds pro-US-sentiment …
3 … Which helps turn the Pakistani government and Pakistani military toward our position …
4 … Which gets Pakistan’s military to take more action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The graphics did little to move the needle. Advocates for a full troop surge were more numerous and had better access than voices of caution. Riedel rode on Air Force One with the president, and briefed him without others present. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates supported his generals and their lobbying for a robust troop surge. Retired General Jim Jones, the national security advisor, did as well. So did his deputy in charge of Afghanistan, Retired Lieutenant General Doug Lute. Hillary Clinton, despite her advocacy for Holbrooke, was fundamentally a hawk. “There’s plenty of blame,” Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security advisor, later recalled. Holbrooke’s “biggest defender was Hillary, and yet she constantly sided with the generals in the policy discussions.”
“I was convinced that Richard was right about the need for both a major diplomatic campaign and a civilian surge,” Clinton said. “I did disagree with him that additional troops weren’t needed to make that work, because I thought, given how the Bush administration had kind of lost interest in Afghanistan because of their hyper-concern about Iraq, that the Taliban was really on the upsurge and that there had to be some demonstration that we’d be willing to push back on them.”
Holbrooke had to hold his tongue, but he knew force alone couldn’t solve the crisis in Afghanistan. “My position was very precise,” he said over a meal with Bob Woodward, who recorded the conversation. “I will support you in any position you take cause you’re my boss but you need to know my actual views. I have serious concerns about the fact that our troops are going to be spread too thin and I’m most concerned we’re going to get into a mission/resource mismatch. A lot of people thought I was overly influenced by Vietnam. It didn’t matter to me. At least I had some experience there.”
“I always had such regret about the Holbrooke thing,” Rhodes said. “It went wrong and it feels very unnecessary when I look back.” It was, he reflected, like “Holbrooke was in a game of musical chairs, and he was the guy without a chair to sit in.”
One of the Kafkaesque qualities of the period was the profusion of seemingly duplicative reviews—not just the White House’s process led by Riedel, but prior assessments by Petraeus, and one by Stanley McChrystal, the new general in charge of Afghanistan. Just before McChrystal released his recommendations, Holbrooke told our team exactly how the process would play out. There would be three choices. “A ‘high-risk’ option,” he said, gesturing above eyeline, “that is what they always call it, which will call for maybe very few troops. Low troops, high risk. Then there will be a ‘low-risk’ option,” he said, moving his hand down, “which will ask for double the number they are actually looking for. In the middle will be what they want.” Holbrooke had seen this movie before. The first recommendation of the final Riedel report was for a “fully resourced” counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. After months of dithering, the President chose COIN, and a deployment of 30,000 additional troops.
Obama announced the surge with an expiration date: two years later, in mid-2011, withdrawals would begin. Conspicuously absent from either the Riedel report or the president’s announcement was any commitment to negotiation, either with Pakistan over the terrorist safe havens, or with the Taliban in Afghanistan. There was “no discussion at all of diplomacy and a political settlement,” Vali Nasr recalled. “Holbrooke wanted the president to consider this option, but the White House was not buying it. The military wanted to stay in charge, and going against the military would make the president look weak.”
IT WAS RAMADAN in 2010, and Umar Cheema, a Pakistani journalist, woke up in the middle of the night to spend time with friends while they waited for suhoor, the predawn meal with which observant Muslims break fast. They hung out at Daman-e-Koh park, which in the day overlooks spectacular views of Islamabad and at night turns into a warren of romantic courtyards and gardens, bathed in golden light. The group left at around 2:30 a.m., crowding into Cheema’s car for a ride to their respective homes. He had dropped off the last of his friends and was on his way home when he noticed two cars had been following him. One, a white Toyota Corolla, fell in line behind him. Another, a black Jeep, pulled in front of him.
As he stopped, three men in police uniform jumped out of the Jeep. They said, strangely, that he’d run over a man and fled the scene. Cheema, who wrote for Pakistan’s The News and had won the Daniel Pearl Fellowship for foreign journalists and worked for the New York Times,
