No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  I implored him not to do it. Pakistan had been taking tentative steps toward democracy, with elections scheduled in a few months. Suspending the constitution by declaring a state of emergency would be a huge step back, and it was hardly clear that it would quell the violence; in fact, it might exacerbate it. Musharraf would also, we believed, damage his presidency irrevocably. “You will have no credibility, and I don’t see how you can run for president after you’ve imposed a state of emergency,” I said, hoping that the argument would register. We talked back and forth for fifteen minutes or so. I pleaded with him one more time not to do what I feared had become inevitable. There wasn’t much more that I could do. Several hours later, though, Musharraf publicly reaffirmed his commitment to the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections; he said nothing about a state of emergency.

  “You pulled it off,” the President said when I spoke with him the next day.

  “For the time being,” I responded.

  “Do you think you gave him the right advice?” the President asked. “Suppose his enemies come after him now? He’ll blame us.”

  “Maybe he’ll just blame me,” I answered. “Your relationship with him hasn’t been implicated.”

  It was clear, though, that Musharraf was on borrowed time in Pakistan. I thought he’d run out his string of luck, a view not widely shared within the administration. The question was how to use the time we’d bought to create better conditions for the upcoming elections. The answer, we believed, lay in forging an alliance between the two strongest political forces in the country: Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

  At the beginning of 2007, Musharraf had asked for help in bridging his differences with Bhutto, the powerful opposition leader who’d lived in self-imposed exile throughout his rule. It seemed a long shot, but if the two rivals could come to a power-sharing arrangement, it would shift the weight of politics toward the moderates and undermine the Islamists, as well as Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister who, more so than other prominent figures in Pakistani politics, was suspected of maintaining close ties to the militants.

  Richard Boucher, the assistant secretary for South and Central Asian affairs, became the point man for the United States in exploring a deal. Shuttling back and forth between the parties—usually meeting Bhutto in London—Richard got them close enough to make a face-to-face meeting possible. That encounter took place in the United Arab Emirates in late July, but their discussion was inconclusive. When I talked Musharraf out of declaring a state of emergency, I promised to redouble our efforts to bring the two of them together.

  Boucher shuttled back and forth several times in the fall. By early October, there were four outstanding issues: when would Musharraf shed his military uniform (before or after the elections); would Bhutto and her party colleagues be immunized in the multiple corruption cases against them (including the one against her husband); could she become prime minister despite a constitutional prohibition against a third term (she’d already had two terms); and finally, would Musharraf support her return to Pakistan before the elections?

  I put those questions to Musharraf in a phone call on October 3 at 4:47 P.M. At 5:47 P.M. I got back to Bhutto with his response. At 6:18 P.M. I talked to Musharraf again. At 6:53 P.M. I called Bhutto. That continued every half hour until 11:28 P.M., with nine more calls back and forth.

  Bhutto was suspicious of Musharraf’s motives and he of hers. A phone call would bring us one step closer to a deal, only to have the next call unravel what had been accomplished. Benazir kept saying that she had to bring her party conference along because they didn’t want a deal with Musharraf. I argued that she had to do it for the good of the country—only an alliance between the two of them would allow elections to take place in a stable environment.

  As I shuttled from phone call to phone call, I asked myself again and again if I was doing the right thing. Power-sharing arrangements are fraught with difficulty because, in general, the parties don’t really want to share power. I was also concerned that we might be accused of interfering in the democratic process. Why not just let elections happen and the chips fall where they may? And frankly, both of them had major liabilities and assets: Musharraf had come to power in a coup, but he controlled and was admired by the all-powerful military; Bhutto and her family had severe corruption problems, but she had emerged as a symbol of reform in Pakistan and had generally liberal political impulses. Both rivals were moderates who were willing to fight extremism—at least as much as any Pakistani politician could. A power-sharing arrangement between them would be only one step toward democracy in Pakistan, but I thought it an absolutely essential one before the country could move ahead.

  I went to bed at about midnight, only to be awakened at 12:41 A.M. by Musharraf. Well, I had said he could call anytime. I called Bhutto at 4:58 A.M. and relayed the latest offer. The next morning, I talked to each of them one more time. They had a tentative deal—not firm but detailed enough that Bhutto would be permitted to return to Pakistan to stand in the parliamentary elections that would be held by mid-January.

  The deal had been complicated by rumors that Musharraf planned to take off his uniform only after the presidential elections had taken place; he would stand for president as Pakistan’s army chief of staff. Bhutto had told me that she didn’t trust him to follow through with his pledge. “I’m taking this as a U.S. guarantee that he will,” she’d said.

  The deal was announced on October 4. When Bhutto returned to Pakistan on October 18, her homecoming was met with an assassination attempt as two bombs exploded at the festive rally celebrating her return. She was spared, but nearly 140 people died in the attack.

  Musharraf’s “victory” in the presidential elections on October 6 only served to inflame the situation. Throughout that month, the Supreme Court considered a petition that would invalidate the results on the grounds that Musharraf had violated the Constitution by standing for election while serving in a military post. As the decision neared, Musharraf became more agitated—apparently worrying that he might face treason charges if the court acted. This time no amount of intervention on my part—or on the part of the President, who warned him against doing so—could stop him from declaring the state of emergency. On November 3 Musharraf suspended the Constitution and fired several top judges, including the country’s chief justice.

  “HE’S DONE,” I told the President that morning in the Oval Office. “I don’t think so,” he responded. “He’s got the army with him.”

  The President then became emphatic. “I don’t want anyone pulling the rug out from under him. The United States isn’t going to be in a position of trying to bring him down.” I didn’t disagree, but we were on record as favoring Pakistani democracy, and Musharraf had just blown up any chance for a peaceful transfer of power.

  “Mr. President,” I said. “I’m on the hook for him to take off his uniform and allow Bhutto to run for prime minister. He made a direct promise to the secretary of state of the United States. If he backs off that now, we’ll have no relationship at all in Pakistan—even if we have one with Musharraf.”

  The only other people in the Oval were the Vice President, Steve, and Josh Bolten, so we could be very direct with one another. “I don’t want people trashing him,” the President said. The Vice President added that Musharraf was essential to the war on terror.

  “But he’s got no credibility left with the Pakistani people,” I said. “It’s only a matter of time until he’s done.” I reassured the President that I’d say nothing publicly to undermine Musharraf but insisted that we’d have to criticize the imposition of martial law. We ultimately did, prompting Musharraf to excoriate Anne Patterson for our “abandonment” of him. The President said that he would personally use the time until the upcoming parliamentary elections to counsel with Musharraf and get him to do the right thing: keep his promise to make the contests free and fair. It was a difficult task, but the President pursued it tirelessly.

&nb
sp; The situation in the country continued to deteriorate. We were urging Musharraf almost daily to commit to lifting the state of emergency and holding elections. Finally, on November 11, he promised to hold the parliamentary elections in January but defended his decision to impose martial law. President Bush was asked about the situation, and, as we had agreed, he called on Musharraf to hold elections and restore the Pakistani constitution. But trying to balance our interests, the President defended the Pakistani’s role in cracking down on extremists and made clear that he was still our ally. Some thought this position came a little too close to absolving Musharraf for what he’d done. The President and I talked about it. We were in an untenable position. Musharraf needed to lift the state of emergency.

  Bhutto went before the television cameras at her compound in Lahore, where she had been put under house arrest. She told the world that she’d no longer deal with Musharraf, dashing any remaining hope for a power-sharing agreement and setting up a confrontation in the January elections. The plan had been to have Bhutto become prime minister should her party win the largest share of seats in Parliament, with Musharraf remaining president. That way moderate forces would be united.

  Now the state of emergency allowed Bhutto to back away from the deal. “My dialogue with him is over,” she said. I called and asked her to reconsider, but she was firm. Several days later Nawaz Sharif returned to Pakistan from exile. Musharraf’s house of cards was crumbling.

  The final act for the beleaguered Pakistani president came as it grew increasingly clear that he was losing support among the army, the institution on which he counted to support his continued rule. After painstaking negotiations, he resigned his military post as he’d promised, handing over command to General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the day before he was sworn in as president. He finally lifted emergency rule on December 15. He would remain president for eight months. But the political reign of Pervez Musharraf was essentially over. Pakistan would have free and fair parliamentary elections, and when Musharraf eventually stepped down, he would do so peacefully. Given the circumstances, that was a significant achievement, and it was in no small part due to the President’s persistent work with him.

  46

  FINAL-STATUS TALKS BEGIN

  MUSHARRAF TOOK OFF his uniform on November 27, the day of the Annapolis Conference for Middle East peace. The days in the run-up to the meeting were dominated by haggling among the parties about whether there would be a joint statement and what it would say. Again the Palestinians looked for as complete a recitation of the terms of an agreement as possible. The Israelis wanted the document to say very little.

  Our preference was to have a framework that enshrined the three elements of a deal: performance on the Road Map; support for direct bilateral negotiations between the parties on the core issues; and a provision that would make implementation of an agreement subject to completion of the Road Map obligations. We were also prepared to establish a timeline for completion: one year. The last provision was controversial and risky. If the parties didn’t conclude an agreement, everyone would talk about failure. But as I told anyone who asked, the Bush administration had a deadline anyway. Within a year there would be a new President of the United States, whether an Israeli-Palestinian peace had been brokered or not.

  Two days before the conference, there was still no agreement on a joint statement. The Israelis and Palestinians had been negotiating on their own with the help of David Welch. I met separately and then together with them throughout the afternoon, but we couldn’t agree on language.

  That night I took Tzipi Livni and the Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qurei (also called Abu Alaa), to dinner at the 600 Restaurant at the Watergate. The management was always helpful and gave us a private room for the dinner and discussion. “I’m not going to negotiate language tonight,” I told them. “But you have got to find common ground. We can’t start the conference with disagreement.” The evening was pleasant, but perhaps the fact that the waiter mixed up the orders—serving the kosher meal to the Palestinian and the beef to the vegetarian Livni—was a metaphor for the confusion of the moment.

  The night before the conference there was a kickoff dinner in the Ben Franklin Room at the State Department. The delicacy of Middle East diplomacy was very much on display, as we had to work hard to make sure that the paths of the Israelis and the Saudis didn’t cross. I’d promised Saud that he wouldn’t be forced into an awkward handshake with the foreign minister of the Jewish state of Israel. It would have been a nice breakthrough but not worth the trouble: We would need Saudi Arabia to make far more important decisions if we could get close to an agreement. After the dinner, I met again with the negotiators, and we made a little more progress. But by the morning of the conference, David, who had been at it all night, told me we still didn’t have a document.

  I arrived at the White House for the helicopter ride to Annapolis with the President. “Do you have an agreement?” he asked hopefully.

  “No, sir,” I replied. “You’re going to have to do it yourself. I’ve got them within striking distance. Now you’ll have to deliver the deal.” The President smiled broadly. I could tell that he was relishing this moment to try his hand at Middle East peace. We agreed that he’d have a private meeting with Olmert and Abbas when they arrived at the Naval Academy. I would continue to work on the negotiators.

  After a few minutes alone with the two leaders, the President called the rest of us into the room. “Okay, we want a deal,” he said. “That’s what my friends and I have agreed. Now, Tzipi, Abu Alaa, and Condi, go get one.” That was really all we needed because the clock was ticking. Olmert spent a few minutes with Livni, and the Palestinians caucused. We finished the statement about ten minutes before the conference was to start.

  Steve Hadley took the document and began to search for a staff aide who could put it into a form that the President could read, meaning in big type. “Give it to me,” the President said. “I’ll just read it as is.”

  The three men proceeded together toward the conference hall—a cordon of midshipmen lining the way. Displayed on the Naval Academy campus were U.S., Israeli, and Palestinian flags. It was not universally noticed, but that was the first time the Palestinians had come to an international peace conference under their own banner. Abbas was very proud.

  When they entered the crowded room, there was great anticipation of what they would say. The betting money was that there would be no joint statement. So when the President, using his reading glasses, which added drama to the already electric moment, read out the agreement, there was an audible sigh of relief. The conference already had a successful outcome: formal bilateral negotiations to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians had been launched.

  The two leaders then delivered remarks, Olmert’s frankly a little more conciliatory than Abbas’s. But there sitting at the table was Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia. Saud had made a special effort to be there, despite his poor health that day. He was wearing his robes, though the Princeton-educated man often wore Western dress when in the United States. I knew that Saud would leave after he spoke, but his presence meant everything. It was also the first time the Saudis had come under their flag to publicly sit across the table from the Israelis. It was a great moment as the representative of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques applauded the speech of the Israeli prime minister.

  After the President, Olmert, and Abbas departed, I took over the chair of the meeting. I welcomed the ministers and made a few remarks about the task at hand, emphasizing that we were present to support the parties, not negotiate for them. I called on Saud early in the queue so that he could leave. The speeches were overwhelmingly positive. Even the Syrian was conciliatory, and I made sure to treat him with respect. Of course Damascus had sent its deputy foreign minister. That’s fitting, I thought. One foot in the international community and one foot in terrorism.

  Everybody who wanted to be seen as a “player” had lobbied to be at Anna
polis, the first Middle East peace conference in almost twenty years. It was quite a gathering, including some ministers whose country’s interest in the Middle East would have seemed remote, to say the least. Brazil laid claim to a spot ostensibly because of its large Palestinian population. The Vatican asked for a representative. Who could say no to the Holy Father? Several small European states just traded on their good relations with the United States to get an invitation. It was quite a scene, with more than fifty delegations in attendance.

  I found it challenging to sit and seem interested in every speech, no matter how irrelevant to the chances for a successful negotiation. I even suggested that not everyone had to speak. Fat chance of that—every minister did.

  Finally, at the end of a long day, I began my comments to wrap up the conference. I’d prepared some fairly innocuous remarks restating U.S. support for the negotiations and employing standard language to reiterate our core positions. But I looked out at the gathering and decided to put my prepared speech to the side.

  “We have said the words ‘two-state solution’ so often that it now sounds rather bland and meaningless,” I began extemporaneously. “But we’re talking about people’s lives that could be changed forever. You see, I know something of what the Palestinians and Israelis feel. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, at a terrible time for black people. I think I know what it’s like for a Palestinian mother to tell her child that she can’t travel on that highway—because she is Palestinian. And the anger and humiliation that comes with that. My mother had to do that—because I was black and there were places that I couldn’t go just because of the color of my skin. But I know too what it’s like for an Israeli mother to put her child to bed and not know if a bomb will kill him in the night. My parents had to comfort me when my little friend was killed in that church in Birmingham in 1963. They must have wondered if I was ever truly safe. People shouldn’t have to live that way. So we need to create a Palestinian state to live in peace and security with the Jewish State of Israel not because of politics. We need to do it for the changed lives—Palestinian and Israeli—that it will bring.”