No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  Yet the challenge for a policy maker is to interpret the evidence, and that was proving to be difficult. Looking at the same events unfolding on the ground, the Pentagon and the CIA gave very different assessments of the likelihood of war. The Defense Department, relying largely on reporting and analysis from the Defense Intelligence Agency, viewed the preparations as steps similar to those that any military (including our own) would take given the circumstances. In the Pentagon’s view, such a buildup was not necessarily evidence of a formal decision to launch an attack.

  The CIA believed that armed conflict was unavoidable because India had already decided to “punish” Pakistan. That is likely the view that Islamabad held and wanted us to hold too. The fact is that after years of isolation from India, a country that had viewed the United States with suspicion for decades, the CIA was heavily reliant on Pakistani sources in 2001. After repeated crises on the subcontinent over the next seven years, it was an institutional limitation that I would come to understand far better than I did at the time.

  The President and the NSC Principals were frustrated with the ups and downs of the assessment over the next three days. The Defense Department and the CIA remained very far apart. One morning we were presented with a report that there had been firing across the border in Kashmir, which our military attaché judged to be false. Thankfully, he was right. The Principals Committee met every day, trying to make sense of what was transpiring. But one thing was clear: whatever the intentions of the two sides, they could easily stumble into war whether they intended to or not. Those nuclear-armed adversaries could, within a matter of hours, plunge the region into chaos—possibly nuclear chaos.

  The State Department led an urgent diplomatic effort to calm the situation. While trying to defuse tensions, we felt it necessary to affirm India’s right to self-defense. Ari Fleischer did so in a carefully worded press statement on December 18, which also urged New Delhi to take no action that would complicate the situation. It was a direct consequence of how we had come to view the terrorism issue after September 11. In this case we had to acknowledge the right of others to do what we had done in responding to the attack on the Twin Towers but also convince them not to actually do it.

  The terrorists who’d committed the attack against India had clear links to al Qaeda through the web of relationships with extremist groups that Pakistan maintained in the region. The trend had been exacerbated by the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which had led the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, to develop an intertwined network of violent extremists in Kashmir and Afghanistan, who, together with the mujahideen, resisted the Soviet invasion. The ISI was, to say the least, not very careful in separating materiel and training for those extremist groups. When the Soviet Union was defeated in 1989, some of the equipment and support that the United States had provided to the mujahideen stayed behind and added significantly to the further militarization of the region.

  In 2001 the most urgent task was to break the extremists’ hold on Pakistan. President Musharraf was a flawed partner. He’d come to power in a military coup in 1999 and had limited domestic legitimacy. But he’d demonstrated an understanding of the post-9/11 realities in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Now, with India and Pakistan on the brink of war, he had to do more.

  Not surprisingly, India rejected Pakistan’s proposal for a joint investigation into the attacks on the Indian Parliament. On December 21 tensions escalated further as India recalled its ambassador in Islamabad. Through all of the ups and downs and even military confrontations between the two states, this was the first time in thirty years that India was without diplomatic representation in Pakistan. That was a sign of how grave the situation had become.

  Together with the British, we decided to approach the problem on three fronts. First, we would pressure Musharraf to make a public break with extremism. But he could not just utter statements; Pakistani security forces had to go after the extremists and arrest them. Second, we would demonstrate that we were acting too. That resulted in the United States’ freezing assets of some Pakistani terrorist groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba as well as the “charity” front known as Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN). The latter was suspected of helping al Qaeda develop a nuclear weapon. Buckling under U.S. pressure, Pakistan announced that it would freeze UTN’s assets as well.

  Finally, we knew that Musharraf faced deep internal resistance within his security services and even within the armed forces, which would perceive his actions as a capitulation to India. He had to move quickly but carefully enough not to bring about his own demise. Colin and Jack Straw, the British foreign minister, organized a brilliant diplomatic campaign that could be summed up as dispatching as many foreign visitors to Pakistan and India as possible. We reasoned that the two wouldn’t go to war with high-ranking foreigners in the region. Every time they accepted a visit, we breathed a sigh of relief. We needed to buy time.

  But the situation continued to deteriorate. I left for my Aunt Gee’s house in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 23, figuring that the location was close enough to get back to Washington quickly if I needed to do so. On the night of December 25, with my family waiting downstairs for Christmas dinner, Colin, Jack, David Manning, and I conferred in a long telephone conversation. There were new reports of troop movements as well as a disturbing one that India was preparing to move short-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads to the Indian-Pakistani border. We reviewed the list of dignitaries who had been deployed to the region, searching for possible intermediaries through whom we could send messages to the adversaries, and agreed to reconvene the next day. I went downstairs to dinner, but my appetite was gone. Excusing myself from the celebration, I checked in again with Colin, received a situation update from the White House, called the President, and went to bed. Needless to say, I went back to Washington the next day.

  By December 27 the reports were confirmed: India had indeed moved nuclear-capable missiles to the border. Colin called Jaswant Singh, the Indian minister of external affairs, and asked that the two countries sit down and talk. The suggestion was flatly rejected. I called my counterpart, Brajesh Mishra, a senior and experienced Indian diplomat. Brajesh was right out of central casting, British-educated and urbane, unfailingly calm and reasonable. But this time he was on edge and agitated. Musharraf and the Pakistanis had done nothing, he said. War fever was rising in India. Finally, on December 31, Pakistan arrested the founder and leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba. A little over a week later, on January 12, President Musharraf delivered a televised address condemning terrorism in all forms, rejecting terrorist activity in the name of Kashmir, and pledging to ban terror groups. The speech was well received in the international community: we had arranged statements of support from numerous heads of state. India, though, reacted skeptically and kept its troops on the border.

  The next day I suggested that President Bush telephone Musharraf and Vajpayee and thank them for preventing tensions from getting out of hand. “Are they in hand?” the President asked.

  “No,” I said, “but let’s act as if we’re confident that they are.” The President dispatched Colin to South Asia, and he reported that the situation had indeed calmed considerably. The first of several India-Pakistan crises that we would experience in the eight years of the administration had calmed but not ended. A prospective conflict on the subcontinent between nuclear powers always posed grave dangers. With our forces fighting in Afghanistan and stability in Pakistan key to confronting al Qaeda, the outbreak of war in the region would have threatened our interests more directly than ever before.

  A second flare-up would come in May, when three gunmen invaded the family quarters of a military camp in Kaluchak, Kashmir, killing more than thirty people, including ten children. Again, Lashkar-e-Taiba was the suspected culprit. The fact that Pakistan had released its founder just weeks before, claiming that he would be closely monitored, incensed the Indians. With a million troops still massed on the border, the situation becam
e grave.

  We again found ourselves managing a crisis that could lead to nuclear war. In fact, President Bush warned U.S. nationals to leave India due to the potential danger. Given that there were sixty thousand of them in India, this was no small matter.

  President Bush was in Europe for bilateral meetings and a Russia-NATO summit as the crisis heated up. I received an urgent call from Brajesh Mishra and was pulled from the President’s meeting. “I cannot contain the war lobby here without some help,” he said. Making it clear that he was acting on his own, he asked that the President make a statement, which he would use internally to try to hold the line. I went back and talked with Colin and the President, who readily agreed to make the statement, calling on Musharraf to live up to the promises he’d made in his earlier speech.

  In fact, Musharraf had angered the President by conducting a series of tests of short- and medium-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The President publicly expressed “deep concern” with Pakistan and used strong language to urge Musharraf to rein in the militants. Despite that, Musharraf continued to make the situation worse. After saying that Pakistan would “respond with full might” if provoked by India, he announced that he would bolster the troops in Kashmir by moving some from the Afghanistan border. The President then called Musharraf and told him in private what he had said in public: Pakistan had made a choice after September 11 and needed to act or risk losing U.S. support. Don Rumsfeld visited the region to help prevent further escalation. After weeks of dialogue and visits, the tensions between India and Pakistan appeared to cool. I’m quite certain that it was, in large part, due to the good work of Brajesh Mishra.

  IN THE AFTERMATH of the two crises, we accelerated the changes in our policies toward India and Pakistan. Early in the presidential campaign, we’d talked about the importance of India as a rising, multiethnic democracy on the world stage. The President had foreshadowed his interest in strengthening relations with India in his campaign speech at the Reagan Library, and I’d written about the same in my 2000 Foreign Affairs article. In several sessions, the Vulcans had discussed the importance of discarding the Indo-Pak framework that saw relations with the two countries as a reflection of the conflict between them.

  The wisdom of doing so could not have been clearer after the events of December 2001 and May to June 2002. Pakistan was a troubled state, riddled with extremism in its mosques, its madrassas, and, unfortunately, in its security services. The 1947 British “partition” plan carved a Muslim entity called Pakistan out of India. Whatever the motivation at the time, it created a state that defined itself in contradistinction to India. Some Pakistanis would thus see an existential interest in conflict with their neighbor and, since the presidency of Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, a reliance on militancy as a source of legitimacy.

  Our relationship with Pakistan would focus heavily on hunting down and capturing terrorists. We tried to broaden the agenda by supporting Musharraf’s efforts to deal with extremism at its roots and build his country. For instance, we launched a broad $1.2 billion foreign assistance program for Pakistan, with more than $100 million dedicated to education in support of his program to reform the madrassas. We supported Pakistan in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Asian Development Bank as it tried to make economic reforms. But it was an uphill climb. Musharraf seemed to understand that Pakistan had to change, but his lack of legitimacy and, at times, his hatred of India made it difficult for him to fully commit.

  Pakistan was the source of the A. Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, the place where we captured most of al Qaeda’s leadership and eventually a safe haven for terrorists in the Afghan War. I once described it as taking care of a critically ill patient: you got up every day and dealt with the symptom of the moment, hoping over time to cure the underlying disease of extremism. Later, as secretary of state, I went to many dangerous places: Baghdad and Kabul in the middle of the war; Lebanon in 2006; the West Bank and Jerusalem many times; even Darfur in Sudan. But no place felt as volatile as Pakistan. Those places were riddled by conflict during my visits, so extreme tensions were to be expected; Pakistan was theoretically at peace. Yet the streets of Islamabad were lined with unemployed young men with few prospects and a seething anger. Extremism seemed deeply imbedded in the fabric of the country.

  India felt and was different. It is a mature democracy that seeks to integrate its various ethnic and religious populations. It is not that Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus (among others) have no problems among themselves, and certainly there is still considerable prejudice and discrimination against minority groups. But you couldn’t help but notice that any Indian delegation, whether government or private, was pretty diverse. Whatever its problems, one had to be impressed with a country of a billion people that regularly held peaceful and consequential free and fair elections.

  Moreover, despite large regions where there was crushing poverty and significant problems with corruption, India was beginning to emerge as a global economic force, based largely on the creativity of its people. Both President Bush, as the governor of Texas, and I, as Stanford’s provost in Silicon Valley, had noted with admiration the contributions of the Indian diaspora to the information revolution. Those migrating, opportunity-seeking families maintained their ties to their homeland and were beginning to help India transform. India was not just Kashmir and Calcutta; it was also Bangalore and Mumbai and Bollywood.

  The President thus sought a broad, deep relationship with India, which he saw as a natural fit for U.S. strategic interests. Throughout the spring of 2001 we began to put the infrastructure into place for a transformation in U.S.-India relations. The two countries launched the first political-military dialogue in April 2002. Moreover, the Indian navy began a six-month joint escort mission with the U.S. fleet in the Malacca Strait, one of the busiest maritime trade routes in the world. And the establishment of the Joint Working Group on Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement formalized the emerging common agenda in the war on terrorism.

  There was one issue standing in the way of a true breakthrough in U.S.-Indian relations: cooperation in the realm of high technology. The web of sanctions and constraints, many dating back to New Delhi’s first nuclear weapons test in 1974, made it impossible to engage the Indians in that sphere. The President and I talked about doing something about those barriers. Steve Hadley was fully on board too. But we knew that we’d have to move carefully. Though most in our administration agreed that it was time to move forward with India, the high priests and protectors of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in Congress (and in some corners of the State Department) would resist anything that looked like a change of U.S. policy in that area.

  We all agreed that we could not launch any such initiative with so much on our plate in 2001–2002. But we did begin discussions with the Indians on those issues. The two sides launched the U.S.-India High Technology Cooperation Group in November 2002, pledging to enhance high-technology trade between the two countries. What came to be called the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) initiative was a turning point and the camel’s nose under the tent in regularizing India’s nuclear status and launching a new U.S.-India relationship as full strategic partners.

  10

  THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION

  MICHAEL GERSON, the President’s talented chief speechwriter, had a gift for translating the President’s compassionate conservatism into compelling prose, perhaps because he believed in it strongly himself. I loved working with him, not just because he was a wordsmith but also because he was an intellectual sounding board. In late October 2001 we met to discuss what the President would say at the upcoming opening session of the UN General Assembly, which had been postponed for two months due to the September 11 attacks. In his first address to the world since that day, the President would obviously talk about terrorism. But he also wanted to reaffirm his support for peace between Israelis and Palestinians as a pillar of a new and more stable Middle East.

  The i
nitial draft of the speech avoided the word “state,” saying instead that the Palestinians should govern themselves in line with what was at the time U.S. policy. When we showed the speech to President Bush, he asked with characteristic directness, “Does that mean they will have a state?” I answered that it did but that the United States had always treated the question of how the Palestinians would govern themselves as a final-status issue and thus a matter for negotiation.

  The President had always found the indirect language of the Middle East peace process frustrating. A few days after he became President, he’d challenged me when I’d given him a carefully worded statement to deliver to the press on the South Lawn prior to boarding Marine One. “Why do I have to say it this way?”

  We didn’t have time for a long historical discussion, so I just said, “Mr. President, if you change one comma, you will have changed U.S. policy in the Middle East.” He relented and read the statement as written.

  But now, almost a year into his term and with significant experience in the matter, the President wanted to say what he meant and say it directly. We agreed that he would call for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

  The President then asked if the state would be called “Palestine.” That was even trickier because the Israelis had always imbued the name “Palestine” with deep historical meaning. They considered its use a prejudgment of the question of what parts of “Judea and Samaria,” biblical names for territories in the West Bank, could be ceded by Israel, if any. I answered that it would likely be called Palestine but did my best to explain the somewhat circular Israeli logic on the matter. The President would have none of it. He wanted to talk about the establishment of the State of Palestine and how it would live in peace and freedom alongside the State of Israel.