The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

by Vali Nasr

  But there were deep divisions between Pakistan and India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and less visible but equally important disagreements separating Iran and Russia, on the one hand, from Pakistan on the other. During the Taliban period in the 1990s, these countries had supported different warring factions, and they would do so again, scuttling any final settlement unless they were on board with what Karzai and the Taliban agreed on.

  Holbrooke thought that, as varied as the interests of these regional actors were, it should nonetheless be possible to bring them into alignment. He imagined a Venn diagram in which all the circles would intersect; the small area where they all overlapped would be where the agreement would have to happen. His approach was reminiscent of how Nixon thought of diplomacy with China. Before he got to Beijing in February 1972, Nixon took a pad of paper and jotted on it: “What do they want, what do we want, what do we both want?” Whatever he thought the answer was to that last question was where he anchored his China diplomacy.6

  The most obvious area of overlap regarding Afghanistan was that no one (not even Pakistan), regardless of what other interests they wanted to protect there, wanted to see chaos and extremism reigning in the country. The logical thing to do was to get everyone to agree on the principle of an Afghanistan at peace with itself and its neighbors. You could build on the consensus that Afghanistan should never constitute a threat to any of its neighbors, and that its neighbors in return should not use Afghanistan to wage proxy wars against one another. These were broad principles that could serve as the basis for concrete agreements. For instance, Pakistan might well demand formal recognition of the Durand Line as its border with Afghanistan—a recognition that the Afghans have never agreed to accord this ill-marked international frontier.7 The positive security implications of such recognition would give Islamabad a reason to agree to a lesser role in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s meddling in Afghanistan (supporting the insurgency and interfering with U.S. COIN strategy) has been in plain sight for all to see, but not so Afghanistan’s refusal to abandon claims to Pakistani territory, claims that form one motivation for Pakistan’s desire to meddle in Afghanistan.

  Holbrooke pursued this idea of bringing the Afghans and Pakistanis to see mutual benefit with a vengeance, which is one reason why Kabul looked at him with suspicion and accused him of favoring Pakistan. On one occasion, he pressed Pakistan’s top military man, General Kayani, on what it would take for his country to give up on the Taliban. The general did not want to acknowledge that Pakistan was supporting the Taliban but nevertheless took the bait. He put it hypothetically and listed a few conditions. Right after “Afghanistan should not be an Indian base for operations against Pakistan” came “Pashtuns in Afghanistan should look to Kabul, and Pashtuns in Pakistan to Islamabad,” by which he meant that Karzai (or any future Afghan leader) should stop posing as the “King of all Pashtuns” and Afghanistan should abandon its irredentist claims to Pakistan’s Pashtun region.

  That all sounded reasonable. Pakistan was waging a preemptive war of sorts in Afghanistan. Islamabad wanted Kabul on the defensive and Pashtuns under the thumb of its friend the Taliban lest Afghanistan start causing problems in Pakistan.

  The next stop was Kabul. In several meetings with Afghan ministers, Holbrooke went off script to talk about the Durand Line. He got no takers. In one meeting, after Afghanistan’s interior and defense ministers and intelligence chief were done complaining about Pakistan, Holbrooke told them General Kayani had said that if Afghanistan recognized the Durand Line, then Pakistan would have no reason to invest in the Taliban (he embellished Kayani’s promise, but it was close enough). The three Afghans were caught off guard. They were accustomed to complaining about terrorist-sheltering Pakistan, but not being on the receiving end of a Pakistani complaint. Amrallah Saleh—Afghanistan’s seasoned spymaster and most lucid strategic thinker—leaned forward, looked Holbrooke straight in the eye, and said, “That is not politically feasible, no Afghan government would do that.” But to Holbrooke, that was an opening.

  Saleh had just confirmed to Holbrooke that the core issue between the two governments—and hence a major driver of the insurgency that we were spending billions to contain—was a diplomatic matter. There was a diplomatic solution to this war. Of course a resolution would not be easy or immediate, but there was a path to a diplomatic resolution of what motivated Pakistan’s destructive game in Afghanistan. Diplomacy could create an overlap in the Afghanistan-Pakistan portion of the Venn diagram.

  Of course, Holbrooke could not start with the border issue. That was not on Washington’s radar, and there had to be a few smaller agreements between Kabul and Islamabad before you got to the border issue. Kabul thought that America would control the Afghan border as a part of COIN, and Pakistan resisted COIN precisely because it would eliminate Islamabad’s trump card without resolving one important issue that got Pakistan into the Taliban business in the first place. Where he could start talks, however, was with a discussion on trade and commerce.

  During a three-way meeting between the United States, Afghanistan, and Pakistan in Washington in 2009, Holbrooke sat through a discussion on trade. He learned that there was a market for Afghan goods in India, but Afghan trucks and produce could not cross Pakistani territory because there was no transit-and-trade agreement between the two countries (in fact there were hardly any treaties between the two countries). The two had started negotiating a trade-and-transit agreement in the 1960s but had let the matter drop and never resumed it. Finishing that deal became something of an obsession for Holbrooke. He spent hours going over every detail in it and tapped his chief economic adviser, a tireless and talented young diplomat named Mary Beth Goodman, to work on the issue.

  Over the next year, he talked trade with the Afghan and Pakistani foreign ministers every chance he got. They were tired of hearing him make the case for a treaty that they thought had no chance of being signed. They were happy to use the idea as happy talk about the future or to point to each other’s malfeasance, but neither foreign minister was really eager to roll up his sleeves and negotiate a deal. But then, they had no idea how persuasive and tenacious Holbrooke could be.

  The two foreign ministers by turn brought excuses or came up with myriad reasons it would not work, and would then make outlandish demands. The Afghan foreign minister brought India into the discussion hoping that Pakistan would back out, but Holbrooke found a way around that by asking the Indians to reject the Afghan request. Holbrooke lobbied Karzai and Kayani, and then got Clinton to lean on them as well. Eventually both sides, to their own surprise, said yes. That he got the Pakistan military to give its okay (given that the deal would connect Afghanistan and India economically and would require Pakistan to open its border to India) was a mighty achievement.

  But it was not a treaty until both sides showed up for a signing ceremony. Holbrooke used Clinton’s visit to Islamabad in July 2010 to corner both sides into signing the treaty. Ambassador Eikenberry flew the Afghan finance minister to Islamabad and waited there until after the signing to fly him back (so there would be no excuses citing the alleged difficulty of travel). Holbrooke told Goodman to get the two ministers in the same room: “Don’t let them out before they are done; don’t go in, but stay right outside in case they need technical help.” It worked. Afghanistan and Pakistan signed the first treaty between the two countries in decades (in fact, no one could remember when they had last inked one together). It was a giant step in creating trust and momentum to tackle the bigger border issues.

  Now, on any day of the week, you can go to the Wagah, the border crossing between Pakistan and India that sits a short distance from the center of the Pakistani city of Lahore, and you will see a mile-long line of trucks loaded with fruit and other produce, both fresh and dried. Much of this cargo waiting to cross into India comes from Afghanistan. It is legitimate, productive trade, and Holbrooke made it possible.

  After Holbrooke died the State Department promoted the idea of a New Silk Road to giv
e Afghanistan an economic anchor after American troops left. It conceives of Afghanistan as a trading hub for the region.8 The Transit Trade Agreement made this idea possible, and if it ever comes to fruition it will have to be based on what Holbrooke and Goodman negotiated.

  A little over a year after Holbrooke died, in April 2012 India and Pakistan opened their border to trade. The Transit Trade Agreement had given both India and Pakistan reason to expand beyond the Afghan trade connecting the two countries. Pakistan now saw it was possible to trade with antagonistic neighbors. Pakistan would grant India most favored nation (MFN) trade status; Pakistan and India literally lifted entire clauses and passages out of the Transit Trade Agreement to craft their own trade agreement. If all goes well they will get to a transit-and-trade agreement of their own. The Transit Trade Agreement had done good for the region; America had built the foundation for something positive that impacted daily lives.

  Holbrooke was elated when the trade deal was signed. Clinton congratulated him for once again pulling a rabbit out of the hat. But the White House was silent. This kind of diplomacy was not part of their game plan. They did not know what had happened, or why it would matter to the war. In those days, achievements such as this did not endear Holbrooke to the White House. Instead, the president’s staff treated the accord as a nuisance. Or at least they did until a few weeks later when, hard-pressed to show any progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they suddenly discovered the Transit Trade Agreement. But they still remained oblivious to the potential of diplomacy.

  Holbrooke was undeterred, however. He thought that, in time, the White House would come around and then would be glad to find that all the pieces were already in place. So he started talking to all the countries that mattered, and made repeated requests to be allowed to talk to Iran as well. He crisscrossed the region, and in every capital asked his hosts to lay out their interests in Afghanistan, explain how they saw the region’s future, and let him know what they thought of reconciliation. Then he focused on how to create the overlap of interests. He talked about all this with Clinton and had her support, though the rest of Washington either didn’t know or didn’t care.

  The thorniest issue was India. India and Pakistan had distinct interests in Afghanistan and were deeply suspicious of each other’s intentions. They had backed opposite sides during the Taliban’s war on the Northern Alliance in the 1990s and continued to see Afghanistan’s future as a zero-sum game that could change the balance of power between them. India had invested more than a billion dollars in the development of Afghanistan and was keen to keep its foothold there. Pakistan thought that any Indian presence in Afghanistan would inevitably give India a base in its strategic rear. Indians complained about Pakistan’s support for terrorism and the Taliban; every conversation with Pakistanis on India’s role in Afghanistan seemed to end with charges that India supported Baluch separatists operating out of Kabul.

  Still, Holbrooke thought that it was possible to get past mutual recriminations and focus the two on an Afghan settlement that both could live with. He did not want to solve everything between India and Pakistan—he knew that he would never get a visa to Delhi if he touched the third rail of Kashmir. Concessions on that territorial dispute, over which India and Pakistan in 1999 fought what so far is mercifully the world’s only ground war between two nuclear-armed states, were definitely not on the table. But he thought there must be a sliver of mutual interest in Afghanistan, extremely narrow though it may be, enough to keep both India and Pakistan on board with a diplomatic outcome. So every chance he got, Holbrooke pushed his Indian and Pakistani counterparts to explain their red lines, revise them, and explore the potential for engaging one another on Afghanistan.

  After a lot of back and forth, Holbrooke persuaded General Kayani to agree in principle to talks with India over Afghanistan and Afghanistan only. Holbrooke took that concession—which was not much but enough to work with—to Delhi. The Indians had said all along that they would talk to Pakistan if talks remained focused on Afghanistan and did not include other issues. I remember Holbrooke talking through how India and Pakistan could arrive at their sliver of Venn-diagram overlap during dinner with his Indian counterpart at La Chaumière, his favorite French restaurant in Georgetown. It was December 6, 2010, less than a week before he died of a ruptured aorta. He looked haggard and not in his usual form, but he was about to pull another rabbit out of the hat, a diplomatic coup of serious consequence.

  His counterpart was intrigued. He asked Holbrooke, “How do you envision this happening?” Holbrooke replied, “It will have to be ‘variable geometry,’ some bilateral talks, sometimes three (including the U.S.), and at times a larger conference that would include Afghanistan and even others.” “Diplomacy,” he was fond of saying, “is like jazz, improvisation on a theme.” He was improvising himself, all on the paramount theme of reconciliation.

  At the end of the dinner his Indian counterpart said he would have to talk to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh directly and would have an answer for Holbrooke within a week. After dinner, I walked with him back to his apartment. He switched on the TV to see the Jets play the Patriots on Monday Night Football. He was pleased. The Indians seemed to be moving in the right direction. We talked through possible next steps. “Be ready to go to Delhi at the drop of a hat,” he said to me. “I may not be able to go, it draws too much attention. Then we go to Islamabad—I will have to work on Kayani—and then maybe back to Delhi. Tomorrow we will go see Hillary and brief her.” Clinton was pleasantly surprised with our account of the meeting and supportive of the hard-earned success. Holbrooke was worried that Christmas vacation could disrupt things. But he was energized and in his element. He intended to be involved every step of the way—in the room when possible, standing outside the door when not.

  Holbrooke had created momentum out of thin air. Even Pakistanis and Indians were surprised at how far he had managed to bring them along. But the India-Pakistan conversation never happened. Holbrooke collapsed at the State Department on December 10, and a few days later he died. Holbrooke was still fighting for his life when Clinton called his counterpart in Delhi to tell him that she would be personally seeing through what he and Holbrooke had agreed on. Shortly thereafter, a message came from Delhi that Singh had given the green light. But progress would be superficial. Both the Indians and the Pakistanis already knew that Clinton was too highly placed to get into the details of their nascent diplomatic opening. She could champion talks, but with the administration’s most tenacious champion of diplomacy out of the picture, the slim opening would close, not just between them but everywhere else the Venn diagrams intersected.

  The problem all along was that Holbrooke had been forced to freelance. He had never received the authority to do diplomacy. The White House failed to endorse his efforts. He pursued them anyway in the belief that diplomacy alone could save America from this war and its aftermath. If he could lay the foundations and point the way, then perhaps the White House would warm to the idea, and when it did it would not have to start from scratch. But the White House—more so than the Indians and Pakistanis—remained resistant to diplomacy and blind to its potential in Afghanistan, and the region as a whole.

  Holbrooke thought that Iran was singularly important to the endgame in Afghanistan. Iran had played a critical role at the Bonn Conference of 2001, which gave Afghanistan a new constitution and government. Iranian support also accounted for that government taking root. Iran had become a surprising force for stability in Afghanistan by investing in infrastructure and economic development and supporting the Afghan government in Kabul and in provinces with ties to Iran. It was a counterweight to Pakistan’s destabilizing influence. Holbrooke thought that America should bring both Iran and Pakistan on board to successfully end the war and leave behind a peace that would last. Ironically, he also thought that we would have an easier time winning Iran’s support than Pakistan’s.

  Iran has deep cultural, historical, and economic ties with Afghani
stan. Iranian influence was ubiquitous in Afghan politics. It was especially strong among the former Northern Alliance forces. Many Tajiks and Hazaras, absent Iranian prodding, might well balk at any deal with the Taliban and plunge Afghanistan back into civil war instead.

  The Iranians were worried by the Taliban and what its return to prominence might mean for the regional balance of power. They had been happy to see the end of the Taliban regime in 2002 and had supported the Karzai government since. The Taliban pushed an extremist version of Sunni Islam that is brutally and even murderously hostile to Shiism. Pakistani Sunni extremists who are spiritual brothers to the Taliban like to send suicide bombers into that country’s Shia mosques during Friday prayer services when they know the largest number of Shia worshippers will be available for slaughter. And as the book and film versions of The Kite Runner dramatized for a global audience, the Taliban enjoyed persecuting their Hazara countrymen, partly on ethnic grounds of Pashtun chauvinism, but also because Hazaras are mainly Shia. In 1997, Taliban forces had overrun the Afghan Shia cities of Bamyan and Mazar-e-Sharif, massacring thousands of Shias and killing eleven Iranian diplomats and journalists. Iran mobilized 200,000 troops on Afghanistan’s border but in the end decided going to war with a neighbor would prove costly. It is the only time since 1859 that Iran has contemplated attacking a neighbor.