The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

by Vali Nasr

  Iran also worries about chaos in Afghanistan. There are as many as 3 million Afghan refugees in Iran already. If the Taliban were to conquer Kabul, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif again, that number could rise, with untold economic and social consequences for Iran. Chaos also means drug trafficking. Iran has one of the world’s largest populations of addicts, and its eight-hundred-mile-long border with Afghanistan makes policing drug trafficking next to impossible. Finally, the Iranians well know that Pakistan is the Taliban’s sponsor, and that Pakistan has always acted to extend the influence of Iran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia into Afghanistan.

  Iran’s position in Afghanistan, opposing the Taliban, supporting Karzai, and favoring aggressive drug-eradication efforts, was far closer to America’s than was the posture of Pakistan. Holbrooke thought he saw enough common interest between Washington and Tehran to bring Iran on board with a diplomatic process to end the war—as had been the case in Bonn in 2001.

  For my part, I advised Holbrooke in 2009 that it was important to engage Iran on Afghanistan because if Iran came to see America’s growing military presence there as a threat, then Tehran might start viewing the Taliban less as a foe than as a potential ally. That would strengthen the insurgency and put us in a difficult spot. We should not assume that Iranian hostility to the Taliban could never soften; nor, I said, should we assume that the Taliban’s dislike of Iran was so great that it would withstand any amount of increasing U.S. military pressure. Taliban cadres pressed hard enough might well reach out for Iranian help in their fight with America.

  A year later, I learned from an Iranian diplomat that the big question being debated in Iranian ruling circles was: Who is the bigger threat, America or the Taliban? The answer was increasingly America. “The Taliban we can handle, but American presence in the region is a long-run strategic headache.” Iran, he said, had started working with the Taliban and influencing Karzai to undermine America’s plans for Afghanistan.

  In late May 2009, there was a conference on Afghanistan at The Hague. During one of the breaks, while all the delegates were milling around a coffee table, Holbrooke walked over to Iranian deputy foreign minister Mehdi Akhoundzadeh, extended his hand, and said hello. Then, without missing a beat, Holbrooke started talking about an Asia Society exhibition he had seen that featured artworks from the era of the Safavid Persian monarchy (or at least that is what he told me later). The startled Iranian envoy was too dumbstruck to say anything. He grinned and nodded, and was very happy when the fifteen-minute courtship was over. The next day the press went wild with the story. It was thought that, as promised, the Obama administration had started its engagement of Iran, and Afghanistan was the vehicle.

  Little did anyone know that Holbrooke did this on his own, hoping to break the ice with Iran and to press both Washington and Tehran on Afghanistan issues by taking the first step for both. But neither side appreciated his guerrilla tactic; Washington in particular was resistant. The White House was allergic to the idea of talking to Iran about Afghanistan. Holbrooke was hopeful that the White House would give diplomacy a chance and believed that it would come around to backing his effort to explore all channels and avenues. But he was wrong. He tried time and again to persuade the administration otherwise, but with the exception of Secretary Clinton, who thought that America was big enough to “walk and chew gum” (that is, talk to Iran about Afghanistan while being tough on them on the nuclear issue), no one else was supportive.

  On the other side, there were plenty of signals that Iran was willing to engage the United States on Afghanistan—approaches by diplomats and intermediaries. It was our routine that every time there was an opening, Holbrooke and I would write a memo on why it mattered to engage Iran on Afghanistan. We would reiterate the point that Iran alone among Afghanistan’s neighbors could serve as a counterweight to Pakistan, and engaging Iran was at the very least an insurance policy to make it less likely that they would work actively to undermine us, and that there was an upside if Tehran decided to reinforce common objectives with Karzai. If there were side benefits to be reaped in terms of managing the nuclear issue, then so much the better, though that was not the main goal. We would brief Clinton on the memo’s contents and then with her approval would send it on to the White House. Holbrooke would then follow up the next time he went to the White House, usually by visiting his old friend Tom Donilon, who served as deputy to the national security adviser at the time before taking over that portfolio himself. Every time, Holbrooke would return dejected. I would ask him what had happened. “Tom says: ‘We have a different theory of the case,’ ” he would tell me. The White House did not want to talk to Iran on Afghanistan, and Holbrooke’s entreaties fell on deaf ears, and he never got to make his case to the full National Security Council or the president.

  Clinton, too, made the case for engaging Iran on Afghanistan at the White House, and did speak directly to the president about the matter. She did not see talking to Iran on Afghanistan as a goodwill signal or a trust-building exercise—although it could have served that purpose. Instead, she simply maintained that it was reasonable to think that given Iran’s geostrategic location and ties to Afghanistan, it ought to be a part of the solution, if only so that it did not become part of the problem. The president seemed to agree,9 but then he let White House staffers decide, and they scuttled the idea.

  The White House argued that talking to Iran about anything other than their willingness to abandon their nuclear program would show weakness. The Iranians might try hard to be helpful in Afghanistan only as more cover for obduracy on the nuclear issue (Iranian nuclear obduracy, as we now well know, happened anyway). By the spring of 2012, U.S. policy on Iran had failed, and relations were on the edge of a cliff. Not talking to Iran on Afghanistan had made no difference. In fact, had there been progress in that arena things might not have gone quite as badly as they did—but we will never know. Engaging Iran on Afghanistan would likely have been good for both Afghanistan policy and Iran policy. Failure to engage showed a lack of imagination in managing both those challenges.

  The heart of the Afghanistan matter, of course, remained reconciliation talks between Karzai and the Taliban. This was where all the Venn diagrams had to intersect, the only agreement that could end the fighting. It was also the necessary cover for U.S.-Taliban talks. As the two military forces on the ground, they did all the fighting, and they had to find their way to a cease-fire.

  In 2009, talking to the Taliban was taboo. The Bush administration had not even countenanced Karzai talking to them—no one should talk to the enemy. The Obama administration was more open-minded; it did not slap Karzai down when he hinted in public that he was talking to the Taliban. Karzai took advantage of this change in attitude and boldly touted reconciliation as a serious option for ending the war, which complicated his already difficult relations with the U.S. military. Karzai claimed that he was in regular contact with Taliban commanders and imagined a grand bargain that would bring true peace to Afghanistan. When, in August 2010, Pakistani intelligence arrested senior Taliban commander Mullah Baradar, Karzai was quick to claim that Baradar (a fellow tribesman of the president’s) was being punished by Pakistan for talking to Karzai.

  Several American allies, too, were busy with Taliban engagement. By mid-2010, it looked as if everybody was talking to the Taliban except us. There was not a week when we did not hear about some contact or meeting with Taliban officials or front men, or receive scintillating messages offering help with release of captured U.S. personnel or proposing a trust-building exercise that expressed the Taliban’s readiness to talk. Britain, Germany, Norway, Saudi Arabia, and even Egypt all reported similar contacts with various Taliban emissaries. It was hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially since opposition to talks by the U.S. military and the CIA made it difficult to verify which claims were true.

  Around this time, in fall 2009, Holbrooke and I had a meeting with Egypt’s foreign minister. Egypt’s intelligence chief, General Ab
u Suleiman (who later became vice president when Mubarak fell), was also in the room. At one point he turned to Holbrooke and said, “The Taliban visited us in Cairo.” Holbrooke said, “Really, who came? Do you remember?” Abu Suleiman reached into his bag, pulled out a piece of paper, held it before his face, and read three names. The last one made us all pause. It was Tayeb Agha, a relative of the Taliban chief, Mulla Omar, as well as his secretary and spokesman, whom we knew to be actively probing talks with the United States on the Taliban’s behalf. We knew Tayeb Agha to be a player, but we did not know then that he would become America’s main Taliban interlocutor in first secret and later formal talks that began in 2011 (and were made public in February 2012).

  Holbrooke took note of all these reports, gauged which ones were serious, and assessed what could be gleaned from them in order to move us closer to the talks. Some in SRAP were frustrated that everyone was talking to the Taliban except America—we were being marginalized, losing out, they would argue. But Holbrooke would say calmly, “Don’t worry, nothing matters until we are at the table. It is good that others socialize the idea and clear the underbrush; our time will come.” As part of his routine reporting, he would tell the White House of every account of talks with the Taliban to get them used to the idea.

  One report in particular proved game changing.10 In February 2010 at the Munich Security Conference, Holbrooke’s German counterpart, Bernd Mutzelberg, told Holbrooke that he had met with Tayeb Agha twice in Dubai, and that the channel to Mulla Omar and the Quetta Shura was real. In their last meeting Tayeb Agha had told Mutzelberg he wanted to talk directly to America. Holbrooke lost no time in taking Mutzelberg to National Security Adviser Jim Jones and his Afghan affairs deputy, General Doug Lute, who were also in Munich. The White House team listened but was not ready to grab at the opportunity.

  Back home, Holbrooke went into overdrive, lobbying hard with the White House to bite on the offer, test Tayeb Agha, and see whether there was anything to what the Germans had stumbled on. Despite Pentagon and CIA objections and White House reservations—but with Secretary Clinton’s aggressive backing—Holbrooke got his way. Secret meetings with Tayeb Agha started, first in Munich, then every so often in Doha.11 Holbrooke never participated and did not live to see them gain momentum, culminating in the Taliban establishing an office in Qatar and formally declaring their readiness for talks with America in February 2012—two years after the Munich meeting. Getting the White House to the table with the Taliban, finally getting diplomacy into the mix in AfPak strategy, had been Holbrooke’s greatest challenge, and he had finally succeeded. It will be his great legacy.

  However, the Obama administration’s approach to reconciliation is not exactly what Holbrooke had in mind for a diplomatic end to the war. Holbrooke thought that we had the best chance of getting what we wanted, and what would be good for Afghanistan and the region, if we negotiated with the Taliban while our leverage was at its strongest—when we had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan, and when it was believed that we were going to stay in full force. He had not favored the Afghan surge, but he believed that once the troops were there, the president should have used the show of force to get to a diplomatic solution.

  But that did not happen. The president failed to launch diplomacy and then announced the troop withdrawal, in effect snatching away the leverage that would be needed if diplomacy was to have a chance of success. “If you are leaving, why would the Taliban make a deal with you? How would you make the deal stick? The Taliban will talk to you, but just to get you out faster.” That comment from an Arab diplomat was repeated across the region.

  But it was exactly after announcing its departure that the administration warmed up to the idea of reconciliation. The idea was not that success in talking to the Taliban would clear the way for a noncatastrophic departure from Afghanistan. It was that since we were leaving anyway, we might as well try our hand at a political settlement on our way out the door. The outcome of talks with the Taliban had no bearing on the course of the war. The war would wind down with or without a peace deal. Reconciliation was an afterthought, a piece of cover to make our sudden withdrawal look more promising than it was.

  Facts on the ground punched a hole in the perception of victory. As we went from “fight and talk” to “talk while leaving” the prospect of a good outcome began to grow dimmer. The Taliban did not think that we were winning, they thought that they were winning. Talks were not about arranging their surrender, but about hastening our departure.12 They could sit at the table and drag out talks. They did not have to compromise on governance when they could just promise to pave the way for our departure. There would be a sense of progress, with the Taliban agreeing to consider a particular offer and then making a minor concession, but all along our forces on the ground would be shrinking—and as they shrank, the balance of power would be shifting in the Taliban’s direction. All they had to do was show some patience, keep their powder dry and their numbers intact, and they would inherit Afghanistan. In the end, there will be talks and small agreements, but not the kind of settlement that would anchor broader regional peace and stability.

  Concerns about human rights, women’s rights, and education were all shelved. None was seen as a matter of vital American interest, and now they had turned into noble causes that were too costly and difficult to support—and definitely not worth fighting an insurgency over. I remember the day in August 2010 when Time magazine put on its cover a gruesome picture of a young Afghan woman named Aisha, a bride in a marriage arranged when she was twelve, whose nose had been cut off as punishment for fleeing her abusive in-laws. The caption under it read: “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.”13

  We in SRAP thought the sky would fall. There would be indignation and protest at the highest level in the State Department and White House, and a reiteration of our duty to protect fundamental rights in Afghanistan. But there was nothing—deafening silence. We had shed the moral obligation that we assumed as our mantle in Afghanistan. Now in private meetings you could hear whispers of “Even if Afghanistan returns to civil war after we leave, we don’t care, it will not be our business.” Washington’s mantra was no longer “Afghan good war” but “Afghan good enough.”

  The White House seemed to see an actual benefit in not doing too much. It was happy with its narrative of modest success in Afghanistan and gradual withdrawal—building Afghan security forces to take over from departing American troops. Pursuing a potentially durable final settlement was politically risky, and even if it worked it would yield no greater domestic dividends than would muddling through until the departure date arrived. The goal was to spare the president the risks that necessarily come with playing the leadership role that America claims to play in this region.

  The problem is that what might appear sensible in the context of domestic politics (and that proposition may yet be tested if a broken Afghanistan begins to export horrors again) does not make for sensible foreign policy; definitely not if the goal is to be taken seriously around the world. The region was looking for sage strategy and follow-through. It got neither. The confusion over the rise and fall of COIN was compounded by vacillation over reconciliation.

  In addition to its poor timing, the White House’s vision of reconciliation was so narrowly conceived that it was virtually guaranteed to fail. Unlike what Holbrooke had had in mind, this reconciliation would be a limited, so-called Afghan-led process, but in effect involve negotiations between America and the Taliban.14 If it ever got off the ground it could have only the narrow purview of producing an agreement over the terms of American departure.

  There would be no effort to include other regional actors in the talks—America promised to keep everyone informed of what happened in the talks and, of course, expected that they would accept the outcome. So Pakistan was asked to deliver the Taliban to the talks (i.e., allow them to travel outside Pakistan to meet American and Afghan negotiators) but not to expect a role in shaping them,
nor a seat at the table.

  Afghanistan’s two most important neighbors were shut out of talks about the Afghan endgame. Since the Taliban’s fall in the wake of 9/11, one or the other of these two pivotal neighbors had been at America’s side. In Bonn in 2001, Iran had been a key player in the talks and backed America’s Afghanistan strategy. In 2009 and 2010, America kept Pakistan positively engaged. Now America was trying to go it alone. Worse, America was trying to fix Afghanistan while actually escalating tensions with both Iran and Pakistan, as if peace could somehow be made to take hold in Afghanistan when the country’s immediate neighborhood was roiled by acute instability. A chaotic Afghanistan in a stable region was hard enough to handle; a chaotic Afghanistan in an unstable region, and with its two most important neighbors in conflict with America, seems nearly impossible.

  Against this backdrop President Obama decided to write his own narrative of the war’s end. He used the grand occasion of the NATO summit in his hometown of Chicago to say, come hell or high water, American troops will leave Afghanistan by 2014. They will do so because the (wobbly) Afghan security force of around 230,000 (down from the original 400,000 number) that we are training is taking over the security of the country (which will cost us about $4 billion a year), and also because a partnership treaty we have signed with Karzai will ensure stability and continuity in that country after we leave.

  But if we leave Afghanistan to a shaky security force and an erratic president, how will we ensure that the state we built will not buckle before the Taliban break up and disintegrate? Afghanistan has none of what Iraq had when we left in December 2011. Iraq had close to a million men in its security forces. It also has oil revenue as well as the requisite education system and social infrastructure to build and maintain a force of that size—and even so Iraq is still teetering on the verge of chaos.