No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  At the time the decision seemed wise, but once she was pulled, it was hard to send her back. On several occasions over the next three years it would have been helpful to have had a senior diplomatic presence in Damascus. I never asked the President to recall another ambassador, despite provocations in Venezuela and Belarus.

  Events moved quickly in Lebanon. On February 28 the pro-Syrian Prime Minister Omar Karami resigned, ensuring a struggle over the future direction of the country. Remarkably, the pieces were falling into place to begin unwinding Syrian power and influence in Lebanon. The foundation of that outcome had already been laid in 2004 by a coalition led by the unlikely partners George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac.

  During a visit to France in 2003, Chirac had challenged President Bush, saying that he was always speaking of democracy in the Middle East. Why couldn’t something be done about democracy in Lebanon, which had once had relatively free political institutions? “We should save them from Syria,” Chirac said. President Bush was intrigued, and Chirac’s advisor Maurice Gourdault-Montagne and I were told to develop a strategy. We settled on a UN Security Council Resolution demanding the withdrawal of Syrian forces and warning Damascus not to interfere in Lebanese affairs. The resolution passed the night that President Bush was nominated at the Republican National Convention in New York City. There were nine positive votes and six abstentions; no one voted against the resolution. In fact, I personally called the foreign minister of the Philippines at three in the morning to secure the final “yea.”

  At the time, the resolution didn’t seem to mean very much. In fact, Damascus scoffed at it and basically told the United Nations to mind its own business. But now, less than a year later, in the aftermath of the Hariri assassination, international opinion shifted hard against the Syrians. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who hated Syrian President Bashar al-Assad the younger (he had hated his father too but respected him for his toughness), publicly warned Damascus to get its forces out of Lebanon.

  The British had decided to hold a meeting in support of the Palestinian Authority in London on March 1 and 2. Though I’d been to Europe twice since becoming secretary, Tony Blair asked the President to send me to the meeting. The Europeans were always looking for leadership roles in expressing solidarity with the Palestinians. This was one such effort, and the President wanted to oblige his good friend.

  That morning I was due to meet with French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, and with the gathering storm in Beirut we decided to call jointly for Syria to remove its forces. The press took note of the new era of cooperation between France and the United States. It didn’t take long to establish a “new era” in the age of instant communication.

  Before dinner that night I returned to my suite in the Churchill Hotel and flipped on the television. Tens of thousands of Lebanese were in the streets, carrying posters bearing the likeness of the martyred Hariri. Car horns were honking as people yelled epithets at the Syrians, telling them to get out. For one moment I worried that Tony Blair’s Palestinian conference was being overshadowed; then I reminded myself that no one was more devoted to freedom’s forward march than the British prime minister. What a good way for his Middle East conference to end.

  On March 5 Syria announced its intention to withdraw its military forces from Lebanon. Damascus would still have significant influence and covert intelligence personnel deployed in Lebanon through which to exercise it, and it would have its association with Hezbollah. But the balance of power in the Middle East was shifting: on March 14 hundreds of thousands of Lebanese rallied against the presence of Syrian forces in Beirut. A new, pro-Western movement, bearing the name of that historic date—March 14—was born under the leadership of Saad Hariri, the slain prime minister’s son.

  23

  HIGH MOUNTAINS AND DIRT

  I RETURNED TO WASHINGTON from London for only ten days before setting out for South and East Asia. Since becoming secretary I had been in Washington a total of seventeen days, long enough to testify on behalf of the State Department budget before Congress but with time to do little else. The proposed budget requested a 13 percent increase in funding for diplomatic activities. But my preparations to defend it convinced me that the department’s budget process was deeply flawed. “How much do we spend on democracy promotion?” I asked. No one could answer since the line items were arrayed by accounts that related to the offices they supported, not to policy priorities. “How much do we spend on foreign assistance for Nigeria?” Well, they would have to get back to me, because the budgets of USAID and the State Department for foreign assistance were not unified. When one of the very able briefers answered one of my questions about a $1 million item by saying (gently) that I didn’t need to know the details, I resolved to institute budget reform within the department. “I’m not satisfied turning to the staff for an answer if a member of Congress asks about this,” I replied. “One million dollars here, one million dollars there, pretty soon it’s serious money.” I had been a budget officer as provost of Stanford. The budget is the statement of priorities, not just a collection of numbers. Steve Krasner, the director of policy planning, led an effort to reform the process for allocating foreign assistance, and the staff prepared for far more detailed briefings the next time around.

  Then, boarding my plane for the fifth time in two months, I had to remind myself that I’d signed up for “personal diplomacy” and couldn’t complain. Jim Wilkinson, my senior advisor, started tracking my miles, hoping that I’d become the most traveled secretary of state in U.S. history. It was a fun parlor game but a title I wasn’t sure I wanted to have.

  My visit to India and Pakistan was principally to establish personal contact with the key players there: Pervez Musharraf and his generals, the Indian leadership and its opposition. But I also met Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Indian National Congress Party, for the second time. The Italian-born widow of the slain son of Indira Gandhi had come to the White House when I was national security advisor. At the time, the Indian National Congress Party was not in office and there was some question from regional experts about the appropriateness of meeting with her. We did meet, and she returned the favor on this trip. People remember whether you’re willing to see them when they’re out of power.

  Now the challenge would be to push forward on the agenda for expanded U.S.-Indian relations that President Bush had begun despite the ascendance of the left-leaning coalition in New Delhi. Sonia Gandhi was a real political power in the country as the leader of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s party. Her opinion mattered, and it was unlikely that the prime minister would take controversial steps without her approval. Our cordial conversation in the sunlit living room of her modest home convinced me that she would be willing to provide the space that Prime Minister Singh and his government needed to stay the course with us.

  After an abbreviated tour of Mughal emperor Humayun’s tomb outside New Delhi, I met with Singh and the opposition leader, L. K. Advani, then held a brief press conference with my counterpart and headed to Islamabad. That was the nature of those whirlwind trips. I wanted to pay appropriate respect to the culture of the countries I visited, maybe even take in historical sites that I’d always wanted to see, but there was so much to do that any attempt to enjoy the flavor of a place felt very rushed. Over my years as secretary the cultural events got shorter and shorter, until we eventually abandoned them altogether. I’ve seen a lot of the world from the vantage point of government buildings and meeting rooms, yet missed much of the color and wonder of the ancient lands I’ve visited. That was my loss, but there was little that I could do about it.

  The whole picture of the post-9/11 world came into sharp relief as I looked out of the window of the C-17 military transport descending into Kabul. Flying over the Hindu Kush and then the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, it was easy to see why the territory had become the epicenter of Islamic terrorism and extremism: tall mountains with narrow passages and caves were everywhere. No wonder terrorists
chose to hide there.

  I landed in Kabul and met with our troops and diplomats, something I always loved to do. The secretary of state always addresses the embassy personnel in what is called a “meet and greet.” It’s a chance to thank the men and women of the Foreign Service for the hard work that they do abroad. The practice of expressing appreciation is particularly important with respect to the locally engaged staff, the citizens of countries around the world who do the bulk of the work in the embassies. In fact, of the 57,000 embassy personnel worldwide, more than 35,000 are foreigners, many of whom have worked a lifetime for the State Department. Kabul had one particularly extraordinary employee, a man who’d personally kept the key to the U.S. Embassy during the long civil war and reign of the Taliban. When Kabul was liberated, he proudly handed it to U.S. forces so that they could reopen the dilapidated building. I was delighted to thank him personally for his service.

  In war zones such as Kabul and Baghdad, I started the practice of greeting both the civilians and our military personnel. Places such as Afghanistan and Iraq were truly a combined effort; there was no tidy division between the tasks of the warriors and those of the diplomats.

  After the meet and greet we drove into downtown Kabul. I don’t know what I expected. I did know that Afghanistan was the fifth poorest country in the world and that it had been wracked by decades of civil war. As we drove along the one existing main street, I could see Afghan merchants sitting in the mud behind little stands selling food or clothes or occasionally homemade tchotchkes. They were clearly industrious and determined but desperately poor. I turned to Phil Zelikow. “The Afghan people have been given nothing but high mountains and dirt,” I said. That map on the table at Camp David after September 11 hadn’t done justice to the difficulty of our task.

  And if our job was hard, Hamid Karzai’s was herculean. I’d met the Afghan leader several times in Washington, but seeing him in his own environment was instructive. This man, who’d put his life on the line at the time of Operation Enduring Freedom, was struggling to govern a country that had throughout its history largely lacked central authority. Karzai appeared genuinely proud of his achievements to that point. The first freely elected president in Afghanistan’s history, he talked of his people’s bravery and determination as we walked through the recently restored gardens of the Presidential Palace. “You should see them building little mud houses out of bricks that they find along the road,” he said. Yet the whole scene had an air of unreality about it. Karzai couldn’t go far from Kabul because so much of the country was still controlled by warlords, who’d been in loose alliance with him during the war but were now reasserting their authority. The Afghan national army barely existed, and the police were even more a force in name only. Prolific poppy production significantly hurt the Afghan economy by fostering corruption. I was incredulous as Karzai talked glowingly about Afghanistan’s excellent dates and pomegranates, as if a limited agricultural sector might form the basis of growth going forward. He noted too that his experts had found old maps that showed oil and gas deposits in the north. Now, with the liberation from the Taliban, they were free to explore them. I’d never been to a place where there was a greater distance between the aspirations of a leader and his people and the reality of their circumstances.

  Yet the Afghans had made progress. I visited a women’s democracy center and thought how impossible that would have seemed a few short years before. There I met a woman police recruit, dressed proudly in a new uniform and wearing no head cover at all—this in a country that under the Taliban had punished women for showing even a little bit of ankle. I left Kabul feeling that the Afghans could succeed, but it was going to be a long struggle.

  Landing in Islamabad again, I was reminded that Afghanistan’s fate was not its own to determine. Pakistan held more than a few keys to its neighbor’s stability. That was not a good thing.

  My stop in Islamabad lasted about twenty-four hours. My security detail was always concerned about Pakistan and never wanted to chance more than one night there. The agenda with the Pakistanis was familiar to me from my time at the White House: fight terrorism and extremism; reform the army and the security services; turn your attention from India to al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Afghanistan. The interaction was familiar, too, with Musharraf, sitting in his living room at Army House in Rawalpindi, emphasizing all that he was doing to modernize his country and fight extremism. I found myself sympathetic to him, although I didn’t care much for people who lead military coups. But Pakistan was such a mess, and I couldn’t escape the fact that the United States was partially responsible for its radicalization. The point was underscored at the dinner given that night by my counterpart, Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri, who could appear somewhat puffed up. But as the evening went on, a different side of him started to emerge. The “off-script” conversation that night was among the Pakistanis, who talked about what their country had been like in the decades before the war in Afghanistan. They admitted that General Zia ul-Haq had sought legitimacy by supporting Muslim extremists in the early 1980s. That had been a consequential policy choice.

  Nonetheless, they rightly pointed to the United States’ support for the mujahideen’s struggle against the Soviet Union as playing a large role in Pakistan becoming a transit point for jihadists. After the war, some had stayed in Afghanistan, forming the core of the ethnically Pashtun Taliban. Others, including a fair number of Saudis and Egyptians, had returned to Pakistan and now gathered in urban mosques and madrassas and in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, recruiting and training a new generation of radicals. Pakistanis knew that they were responsible for the deeply rooted extremism in their country, but the United States had contributed to it. And then, with the defeat of the Soviet Union, we’d lost interest in—and ultimately contact with—Islamabad, until al Qaeda’s rise had shoved us back together.

  With all that would occur later, it’s hard to remember that in 2005 we thought that the Afghan project was in relatively good shape. We did not yet know that Musharraf was contemplating a new peace accord with tribal leaders in North Waziristan, cutting a deal to live and let live in exchange for stopping the passage of militants across the Afghan border. That policy would ultimately lead to a new safe haven for the Taliban and a downward spiral in Afghanistan, one that we were unable to halt before the end of our term.

  Indeed, the news of the trip related instead to an easing of the tensions that had plagued South Asia. Pakistan and India informed us that they’d begun a quiet back-channel dialogue on the most vexing issue: Kashmir. My long conversation with both leaders convinced me that they were serious and that they might succeed. But the next day, as I began my visit to East Asia with a stop in Tokyo, we got a reminder of Pakistan’s troubles. Twenty-five people were killed when a bomb ripped through a crowd gathered at a shrine in Baluchistan. The glow from positive developments in Pakistan was always short-lived.

  A New Direction in Asia

  IN THE SAME WAY that I’d begun my trip to Europe with a visit to “one of our closest friends,” I landed first in Japan to underscore the centrality of our longest-standing alliance in Northeast Asia. Usually, the arrival ceremony for the secretary of state was a boring affair. The secretary descended the stairs to the waiting handshake of the chief of protocol, who looked the same in every country, no matter how exotic. Then there were a few photographs with the assembled government officials before boarding the motorcade.

  My senior staff suggested that we make my arrivals different by establishing the practice of “greeters,” who would represent the culture of the country. Sometimes the participants were predictable, such as the little girls with bread and salt in Ukraine or the local pop stars who showed up from time to time.

  But once in a while they were unique. That was certainly the case in Japan. I once mentioned that I liked sumo wrestling, an interest I’d developed while teaching at the National Defense Academy of Japan when I was a professor at Stanford. So, Jim reasoned, it made
sense for me to be greeted by one of these revered athletes. At the bottom of the stairs of the plane, I found myself suddenly swept up in the embrace of Konishiki Yasokichi—professionally known as “the Dump Truck”—who lifted me off my feet and into his gigantic arms. I was startled but managed to keep my composure and laughed at the front-page newspaper coverage the next day. In any case, it was a far better greeting than one a few months later in Kyrgyzstan, where the local hero was a falconer. There I looked at the bird of prey, which was eyeing me suspiciously from his master’s shoulder, and decided that there would be no more greetings involving animals. I made quick work of the ceremony and fled into the safety of my car.

  The goal of the trip to Japan was to affirm our relationship with Japan but also to put it in the context of a regional strategy for Asia. In my speech at Sophia University, I intended to make the case for a safer Asia built around the efforts of three great democracies: the United States, Japan, and South Korea. The difficulty of doing so had been underscored a week before, when South Korea had scrambled military jets in response to a Japanese plane that had flown over the disputed Liancourt Rocks (called Dokdo by the South Koreans and Takeshima by the Japanese). Yet over the years we’d make progress toward improved bilateral relations between our two allies—albeit in fits and starts.

  Ironically, one source of conflict between them had the potential to induce cooperation—with China included in the equation. The North Korean nuclear program had engendered tension among the regional states, each of which, of course, was looking toward its own interests.