Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  I had reason to doubt whether I’d ever experience the Senate in that way. Basic math predicted otherwise. I loved the Foreign Relations Committee, but ahead of me in seniority were two friends and contemporaries: Chris Dodd, a year younger than I was, who had been elected in 1980 to take Abe Ribicoff’s seat, and Joe Biden, sixty-seven, who had been elected at twenty-nine in 1972 (sworn in only after he turned thirty, per the constitutional requirement) and would always outpace any of us in seniority. The three of us enjoyed and respected the committee, its history and its potential impact. I never imagined the Senate without Joe or Chris, and I certainly never dreamed either of them would give up the committee’s gavel voluntarily. Meanwhile, I was behind Max Baucus—with whom I shared a birthday—and Jay Rockefeller on the Senate Finance Committee, and Jay was ahead of me on the Commerce Committee as well. In other words, I had phenomenal committee assignments for me and for Massachusetts, but I had zero expectation of being a chairman of any one of them. It would take an act of God for me to chair any committee besides the Small Business Committee.

  God may well have intervened. Suddenly, Joe was Barack Obama’s vice president. Chris, who was next in line for the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, felt that at least for the 111th Congress, with Connecticut’s economy reeling from the financial meltdown, he had to take the helm of the Banking Committee to oversee financial regulatory reform and focus on the economic recovery.

  So there I was, against a lot of odds: chairman of the same committee before which I had testified at the invitation of Chairman William Fulbright in 1971. This was a committee rich in history—a committee where future presidents, from Jack Kennedy to Barack Obama; future vice presidents, from Hubert Humphrey to Joe Biden; and legends of the Senate, from Henry Clay to Arthur Vandenberg, had all served.

  My chairmanship meant a lot to me. I had invested years to get there. Most of all, I was excited for what we might be able to accomplish. I knew from my own experience in 1971, admittedly in a very different era, that the committee could make a difference and its chairman had a responsibility to try.

  I knew that the new administration, by necessity, would be focused first on rescuing the U.S. economy. That meant there would be ample opportunity for our committee to take on some off-the-grid challenges. I started out with a solid relationship with the president, who had been a member of the committee, and especially with his then deputy national security advisor Tom Donilon, who was as clear-eyed about the challenges as he was competent in harnessing the bureaucratic process.

  I knew there might be opportunities, if not for collaboration, at least for cross-pollination with the new administration, but I was nevertheless determined to protect the committee as its own independent entity, with prerogatives separate from any administration, something Dick Lugar had tried to do during Republican administrations. I also wanted to restore the committee’s investigative capacity, which had atrophied over the years. Remembering how important that work had been in the 1980s and ’90s, I recruited Doug Frantz, the lead investigative journalist for the Los Angeles Times, to come to the committee and build his own cell of investigators. Indeed, there was a lot to do, and I was eager to put my shoulder to the wheel.

  • • •

  EVEN A BRIEF glance at the world beyond our borders indicated that Afghanistan was especially critical for many reasons. As the administration was getting its sea legs, it was clear a new chapter with Iraq was in the offing. The unwillingness of the Iraqi government to provide a workable status of forces agreement to keep a substantial number of American troops in the country seemed to force the administration’s hand. The last American troops would be leaving Iraq.

  As a result, all eyes were shifting from Baghdad to Kabul—back to the war in Afghanistan, which many of us argued had lost its focus the minute the United States, voluntarily and unilaterally, plunged into what I had called the “grand diversion” of the war in Iraq. The Iraq War came at enormous cost to our interests and influence, and Afghanistan in particular paid a huge price for this misadventure in the Middle East.

  As I took on the chairmanship, I remained especially anxious about Afghanistan for a number of reasons. Its history as the “graveyard of empires” was instructive. Afghanistan was the country where Great Britain and Russia had suffered enormous losses. Even knowing that historical background, I still believed that history is not destiny. However, there were some (if not many) people—including some of my staff on the committee—who argued that Afghanistan was destined to be a quagmire because it had been a quagmire for other countries. I thought we owed ourselves a more rigorous intellectual examination. I wanted to know if we had clear goals, with clear limitations and understanding about what we were there to do. I wanted Afghans to understand that we were not there to stay or conquer, with hopes we could avoid the traps that had befallen others. Could discipline and clarity of purpose make a difference for us? I was always mindful that unlike the British and the Russians, we didn’t go into Afghanistan with imperial aims.

  But there were many key questions: Did we have a clear plan and a coherent strategy? Did we know why we were there and when the country would be stable enough to leave?

  When I chaired Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing for secretary of state, I tried to probe these questions, not so much for the benefit of the nominee, who was smart and capable and didn’t need a lecture, but for the entire committee, for all of us involved in foreign policy making. Where were we going in Afghanistan?

  The rationale that had earned one hundred votes to go to Afghanistan was a direct response to an act of war—the most egregious, spontaneous attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. We went in to get Osama bin Laden, and we kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan because they had harbored al-Qaeda and provided it a platform for terror. Most critically, they refused to retract their support when given ample opportunity to do so.

  Now, in 2009, almost eight years after 9/11, the impunity with which drug traffickers operated, coupled with stories of rampant corruption undermining the faith of Afghans in their new government and ours, had become significant problems. It seemed we were assuming full responsibility for solving them. I reminded the committee that we had not intended for Afghanistan to become our fifty-first state, a statement that rankled some of the neoconservative media outlets, who thought I was dumbing down our goals in Afghanistan. I was simply stating what I thought was obvious and in this case important: our goal there was stability, an Afghanistan that could hold together on its own, even if it wasn’t going to be a model of Jeffersonian democracy. Looking back, it is amazing to think that was a controversial statement at all. To the contrary, almost a decade later it looks more like an optimistic one.

  The administration was wrestling with this issue as well. There was no consensus. My friend Richard Holbrooke, whom Secretary Clinton had brought on to lead the State Department’s diplomatic effort, ran into a dual buzz saw. He didn’t click with President Obama, and more problematically for Richard, Hamid Karzai decided that Holbrooke was plotting against him, which limited his room to maneuver diplomatically. I’d heard from Vice President Biden that the Pentagon—General David Petraeus and General Stanley McChrystal both—seemed to be pushing the president into a corner about an additional surge of troops, after he had already begun his term by sending thirty thousand more troops than had been promised initially. The president worried that the military’s requests for more troops would be infinite, no matter what the actual conditions on the ground.

  I worried that the debate in Congress and the public seemed to focus almost exclusively on absolute numbers—how many U.S. and allied troops were required, how many Afghan soldiers and police we needed to train, how many more billions we needed to invest at a moment of enormous need at home.

  What we weren’t talking about nearly enough was whether any amount of money, any rise in troop levels or any clever metrics would make a difference if the basic mission was ill-conceived. We ne
eded to expand the discussion to wrestle with fundamental questions and examine core assumptions. We had to agree on a clear definition of the mission and decide what was an achievable and acceptable goal for Afghanistan and for the United States. We also needed to know the size of the footprint that goal demanded and to weigh the probabilities and costs of getting there.

  At the same time, we had to assess and evaluate some intangibles, including whether we were looking at Afghanistan and our presence there through the same set of eyes as the Afghans themselves. On my first trip to Afghanistan as chairman, I looked out the window of the armored Humvee as we drove through the dusty streets of Kabul. A little girl was playing with some toys on the side of the road. My mind immediately flashed back to Vietnam and the kids who often lined the canals or streets, staring at us with a “what are you doing here?” look. Right away I thought, What do we look like to that young girl? I might as well be from another planet. I was driving around in a massive armored vehicle with General Petraeus, a brilliant military leader who literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. We both knew that winning hearts and minds was the centerpiece of any counterinsurgency effort and operations, but one look in that girl’s eyes told me that we faced an uphill battle. I had strong misgivings that even with the best of efforts, we wouldn’t be able to persuade many ordinary Afghans that any foreign military presence on their soil represented a force that could possibly be on their side. We did have vital national security interests at stake and couldn’t walk away precipitously, but I wanted to make sure we weren’t setting ourselves up to wear out our welcome either.

  Afghanistan’s disastrous elections in August 2009 almost left the United States with no choice but to reconsider staying at all. It pulled me into the country’s challenging politics and personalities in ways I wouldn’t have predicted.

  I had long planned to go to Afghanistan and Pakistan over the Senate’s Columbus Day break. It made sense to take five or six days, get out and see for myself what was happening in the country. I managed to get to Helmand Province, the region in Afghanistan they call the “snake’s head”—lush with vegetation—where the surge of new U.S. troops was helping turn Taliban territory back into the hands of the central government and allied troops.

  As it turned out, the real combat I witnessed was political and right in Kabul.

  The tension was palpable. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired general and former commander of our forces in Afghanistan, briefed me and was candid about his level of concern. The August 20 first round of elections had been denounced by many—from the way Karzai had announced the date in the spring (leaving the opposition little time to organize), to the lack of security and turnout, to wide allegations of fraud. After votes were thrown out as fraudulent, neither Karzai nor his leading opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, was over the 50 percent needed to avoid a second-round runoff. Karzai refused to accept that he hadn’t been reelected outright, and he refused to agree to a runoff. Governance was gridlocked with the prospect of the entire government collapsing.

  From the outside, after the disputed election of the late summer, the dysfunction was evident to the entire country. But on the inside, Eikenberry told me it was even worse. Karzai was clashing with Americans and believed that the United States had conspired against him and that the international election observers had disenfranchised his Pashtun voters. He saw the UN monitors’ disqualification of around 250,000 votes from Pashtun areas as an international conspiracy.

  It seemed entirely possible that a constitutional crisis was unfolding, and if some way forward wasn’t devised, then Karzai was going to risk having the NATO coalition fall apart. Clearly, European countries suffering from Afghanistan fatigue weren’t going to stick it out on the ground if the country’s government was imploding. I got the strong sense that the United States wouldn’t be long for the battle either if Karzai transformed himself into an autocrat dismissing the political will of perhaps half of his own population.

  Ambassador Eikenberry hoped I could at least engage Karzai a bit more and see if he was willing to listen to the American perspective. I was happy to try, and certainly I could convey just how much the Congress was watching and listening carefully to the standoff in his country. I suspected that half the value I could bring wouldn’t be in what I said but in what I heard. Listening is critical coin in diplomacy, too often devalued and dismissed. I liked President Karzai. I had a good rapport with him in part because I respected his patriotism and the courage of his journey to get where he was. He seemed to know that intuitively. He knew that I listened to him, and frankly, I had a pretty high tolerance for his rants, something I’d learned in the Senate dealing with some colleagues who often needed to vent before you could have a productive conversation with them.

  I came to the table with Karzai able to relate to him on a level that was important: a political level. Most diplomatic issues for the United States were also someone else’s domestic political problem. I’m always a little bit surprised how, in the Senate or in the media, we often chalk up a colleague’s actions to the politics of their base or their complicated standing with voters, but we forget that political leaders of other countries answer to a constituency as well. I was mindful that I could relate to Karzai as one politician to another. I hoped this common ground might help open up avenues for solving problems that otherwise were not apparent.

  Clearly, though, nothing was going to be easy.

  At the time, there was a popular book out about Afghanistan and Pakistan titled Three Cups of Tea, a reference to the old saying that “the first time you share tea, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time, you become family.” I’d soon be joking that my marathon sessions with Karzai were more like three thousand cups of tea. Hours went by, sometimes four, five or six hours at a time. I tried to listen to all his concerns about his country, not just those that were on my agenda. But when we got into the nitty-gritty of the election, the intensity picked up palpably.

  We were sitting in a palace with giant rooms and dark oak paneling straight out of The Addams Family. At one point Karzai looked me dead in the eye and said, “John, I cannot disenfranchise 250,000 Pashtun voters. I will not survive.” He walked out of the room to take a phone call, but I think he intended to let his words sink in and collect himself for his next volley.

  I turned to our deputy ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, Frank Ricciardone, a terrific Foreign Service officer from Medford, Massachusetts. He was always a straight shooter. “Frank, were there actually 250,000 Pashtun voters who were disenfranchised?” I asked. Frank smiled as he replied, “No, it’s more like 25 Pashtun voters, each of them filling out 10,000 ballots.”

  We took breaks over two days to let the tension recede a bit. We spoke about our families and Afghanistan’s history, about his father’s assassination and his own journey home from Pakistan, his aspirations for his country and his concerns about the U.S.-Afghan relationship. He voiced his worry that Afghan Pashtuns were being treated unfairly and complained how no one appreciated the weight of the decisions being foisted upon him. I told Karzai that I thought I had some idea of what he was going through and took him back to the 2004 election, to the years I’d spent building a presidential campaign, the debates with President Bush, the Swift boat smears, and the feeling of elation on election night when I believed we had won. I also talked about the debate I’d had over whether to concede or whether to take Bush to court over Ohio’s provisional ballots and the voter suppression allegations and irregularities with the voting machines. I ended this digression by saying that in the cold light of morning, I had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t good for my country to see two consecutive presidential elections litigated in the Supreme Court when the legitimacy of our democracy was so important. Karzai opened up in a way that he hadn’t before, and I believed he was getting close to accepting that he had to embrace a second-round runoff.

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p; I now began to feel some pressure on our travel clock. I had to get to Pakistan for a preplanned stop that I simply couldn’t cancel. I was reasonably confident that President Karzai was moving to a more reasonable position. Unfortunately, by the time I was wrapping up my stop in Islamabad and aiming to get back to Washington in time for votes, I got a call from Ambassador Eikenberry to the effect that all hell was breaking loose. Karzai had told him there would be no runoff. Eikenberry asked if I could return.

  I called Washington to find out the vote schedule. I asked Leader Harry Reid if there was any way he could delay the votes by one more day. Let’s just say that Harry doesn’t pull punches or waste his time with small talk, and on the best of days, he never ends a phone call even by saying goodbye. Harry was not pleased, to say the least. Before I could explain the details of just how tenuous things were in Kabul, he said, “Absolutely not,” and click, that call was over. I told Eikenberry I didn’t see a way for this to work. He had Secretary Clinton call me. She had been terrific throughout the trip, both in welcoming me as an ad hoc additional member of the team and never making me feel as if I were treading on Richard Holbrooke’s turf. She put the arm on me to give Kabul one more shot. I agreed on one condition: she had to call Harry Reid. She laughed.

  I got back to Kabul around dinnertime, and by the end of what was now my third night with Karzai, I thought we had a deal. When we got to the palace the next morning, it was clear something had changed—and not in the right direction. That’s the nature of diplomacy. You’re dealing with human beings. Sometimes when they sleep on things and talk to different people, they wake up with a different point of view. In this case, I felt as if the political considerations we’d spent so much time working through with Karzai had reasserted themselves. I really was out of time. I had to go back to Washington, and it wasn’t clear if I would be able to return to Kabul anytime soon given the Senate schedule.