by John Kerry
On a personal level, my extracurricular efforts resulted in my becoming a trusted interlocutor with the Pakistani government. I was known to be fair and legitimately concerned about U.S.-Pakistan relations. However, there would soon be another crisis requiring some quiet intervention, a crisis that fell squarely into the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished category that was much in evidence throughout this entire effort. It became known as a four-word phrase that made it all seem more mysterious than it really was—“the Ray Davis affair.”
At the end of January 2011, on the streets of Lahore, which is a pretty tough area and the world’s largest Punjabi city, there was a shoot-out that had left two Pakistani civilians dead. The shooter was an American citizen working for a private security firm, an Army veteran named Ray Davis who was a federal contractor. It quickly became what in diplomatic terms is most unartfully referred to as a shit sandwich. Davis said he was the victim of an attempted robbery, but with two dead Pakistanis and crowds growing apoplectic, police threw him in jail and charged him with murder. Our consulate’s appropriate efforts to secure his release based on diplomatic immunity weren’t working.
There was plenty of public attention in Pakistan, along with a lot of conspiracy theory–type rumors about the CIA that inflamed suspicions about the too many armed Americans to begin with in a country sensitive to our presence—and the streets of Lahore had been seething. Worry abounded on both sides, but we Americans were constantly concerned about how much anyone was really in control in Pakistan—something we all had reason to question again later that spring after Osama bin Laden was found and killed in Abbottabad. We were all aware too of how quickly any spark could set off a powder keg. Sometimes, of course, members of the government in Pakistan played off that dynamic as an excuse not to do things we asked for, but other times it was real. This was one of those times when the complications were real. The local government in Lahore was led by the political opposition to the central government, and it saw a chance to thumb its nose at Islamabad. The crisis metastasized when a local court ruled that Davis didn’t have diplomatic immunity. The Taliban leaped into the fray, promising retribution against any lawyer or judge who set Davis free.
Now we had a real mess on our hands. Tom Donilon, then the national security advisor, thought that a third-party mediator might be helpful—someone who wasn’t part of the administration, someone who knew the Pakistanis and, unlike our capable ambassador, someone who wouldn’t have to operate on a daily basis with the Pakistani government.
Back in Washington, I asked the Pakistani ambassador to come over to my house so we could talk and try to see if we could defuse the situation. We needed a release valve in Pakistan, some expression of remorse. On the Pakistani street, there was speculation about who Ray Davis was, what he was really doing and why, and how many more people like him were in their country. With a situation like this, the public dialogue is never about just one issue. Rather, issues get conflated. This was fast becoming a debate about armed Americans on the streets of a Muslim country, a debate about the CIA, a controversy about everything including drone attacks that were reported on the front pages of newspapers around the world.
Ambassador Husain Haqqani thought that I could help. We wondered if I should meet with the families of the men who had been killed, but that seemed likely to inflame the situation. We discussed whether, by making some kind of statement of remorse in Pakistan, I might defuse some of the public tension. Haqqani had an interesting if unconventional proposal to deploy Islamic tradition that allowed for the payment of “blood money” in return for a life lost—a way to settle a dispute that had resulted in death, a settlement of sorts. First, though, someone had to calm the waters.
My staff wasn’t pleased, but I was headed back to Pakistan to play the good cop in a bad situation. The Obama administration’s public statements were calibrated to emphasize why the international, well-enshrined legal concept of diplomatic immunity is so important and just how much was at risk—including American support for Pakistan—if an American diplomat was left languishing in a Lahore prison cell. Beneath the surface, we all knew that this wasn’t going to get settled through interpretations of international law. It was going to get done through politics.
I met first with some officials in the central government in Islamabad. Prime Minister Gilani and I shared a public message about the importance of all the issues between our two countries, including economic aid and cooperation on counterterrorism. Then, without much announcement to minimize the security risk, I traveled to the eastern part of the country—into Lahore, the belly of the beast. I wanted to make a public statement that would hopefully be heard differently by the public: as a friend of Pakistan, as the author of legislation that aimed to begin a new era of mutual cooperation with the people of Pakistan, I wanted to see this tragic situation resolved. I emphasized that the United States would have our Justice Department investigate what had happened, just as Pakistani justice would be appropriate for Pakistani citizens. It was a tense visit. I went back home, however, confident in our belief that the situation was successfully on a glide path to resolution. A little steam had been let out of the system, hopefully creating enough room for the Pakistani government to work with the families on an agreement for blood money so the whole episode could be put behind us.
When I got back to Washington, jet-lagged but glad the trip was behind me, a staffer had printed out a photo from the wires in Pakistan: a charming image of street protests in Lahore, crowds surrounding a stuffed dummy hanged in effigy with a sign pinned to it that read “John Kerry and Obama.” Lovely. “That’s a keeper,” joked my communications director.
I knew the protest and photo were part of the necessary stagecraft for local politics. A couple of weeks later, the gambit bore fruit: the blood money was agreed to, the families let the local courts know, and Ray Davis was released and whisked home efficiently and quietly. What a process. . . .
Six weeks later, Hillary Clinton called to let me know that American Special Forces had killed Osama bin Laden—not in a cave in Afghanistan or hidden in the mountains of the ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan but living quite comfortably in a gated compound not far from the Military Academy in picturesque Abbottabad. I congratulated her and the administration. The news was quickly made public.
No one should underestimate how gutsy it was for the president to decide to go into Pakistani territory without advance warning to get Osama bin Laden, not knowing with certainty whether the mission would succeed, whether Americans would be killed or it was certain bin Laden was even there. The what-ifs were almost too many to count: What if Pakistan had shot down an American helicopter? What if bin Laden hadn’t been there? What if our members of Special Forces had been killed? What if it turned out we’d entered a compound of alarmed innocent civilians and in the fog of the moment had to shoot? I thought of President Carter’s downed helicopters in the desert in 1980 in a failed mission to free American hostages in Iran and how it may have cost him the presidency. President Obama put his presidency on the line to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Thank God this had worked, I thought, and thank God for the great training and extraordinary capacity of our military and especially our Special Forces—all of them.
After we hung up and I processed it all, another thought crossed my mind—another what-if. What if Ray Davis had still been in jail? When I made my uncomfortable trip to Islamabad and Lahore, little did I know that the intelligence community and the military were already working to plan and execute the raid that killed bin Laden. No wonder there had been so much urgency to get Davis home. All our arguments about diplomatic immunity and sovereignty and the relationship between the two countries would have been out the window if the United States had had to execute the bin Laden raid with Davis sitting there in a jail cell. It hit me just how much Tom Donilon and Hillary, let alone the president, had on their collective desks at once, just how many complicated and interconnected equities were at stake affecting one de
cision, one deadline, one issue—and how little latitude they had to explain or even discuss these problems.
Later that month, the administration asked me to take one more trip to Pakistan. It came at a moment of enormous and understandable tension on both sides of the relationship. The Pakistanis were furious that their sovereignty had been violated without any advance warning by the United States. Their feelings were inflamed by the explanations given by American officials that they feared coordination could have tipped off bin Laden and doomed the mission. It was one of those cases where saying what was true and obvious was far from helpful diplomatically.
There were voices in Congress calling for an end to American aid for Pakistan. There was also a detail important to the American military: one of the Black Hawk helicopters from the bin Laden raid had been disabled on the grounds of the compound, blown up by our forces as they pulled out, but the wreckage, including its intact tail, remained in the Abbottabad compound. The Pakistanis had threatened to share it with China. It was a distraction that served no one’s real interests, but at the time the Pakistanis were not thinking about the long term. I hoped that with so much unresolved in Afghanistan, let alone across another border with India, I could secure a promise from Pakistan to return the remains of the helicopter and see if, once again, there was any way to return this bilateral discussion to real strategic interests.
After stopping in Afghanistan, I flew back to Islamabad. I was traveling with two of my Foreign Relations Committee staff members, Doug Frantz and Fatema Sumar. As a reporter, Doug had covered a large part of the Afghan war, and we talked on the flight about a great what-if that fascinated us both: What if the United States had killed bin Laden at the Battle of Tora Bora at the start of the war?
We could have and we should have. I’d argued since 2002 that it had been an enormous mistake to rely on Afghan warlords at Tora Bora—people who had previously fought on the other side instead of sending in Special Forces to go up the mountain and kill bin Laden.
Now, almost ten years after the 9/11 attacks, we were deeply entangled in a complicated but necessary set of relationships with Pakistan and its security services, with mercurial leaders across the border in Afghanistan, and with the Shia government in Iraq. How different, Doug asked, would it have been had the United States put an end to bin Laden in the first days of Afghanistan?
Then Doug asked another question. If bin Laden had been apprehended at Tora Bora, there would have been no bin Laden tape on the eve of the 2004 presidential election, no last-minute boost in the polls for Bush-Cheney: Would I be the president now? My reply: “If I were, Doug, trust me we’d have a nicer plane.” It was an intriguing historical question, but after conceding the race I have never allowed myself to get lost in hypothetical mazes. It’s a waste of time and energy, especially when there’s so much to do to keep me pointed forward. At two in the morning on a runway in Islamabad, we just put one foot in front of the other and moved forward. We had marathon meetings to undertake that would no doubt exhaust our collective patience.
We went directly to the army enclave in Rawalpindi, where we met for two hours in a smoke-filled room with the Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani and General Ahmad Pasha, the head of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence.
The military leaders are very powerful in Pakistan, far more powerful than those in the United States. Civilian control of the military is sacrosanct for us, so I was always mindful of the optics, but reality dictated that I talk with the people who had the authority to give us what we wanted, and that wasn’t going to be Pakistan’s elected leadership, not on this issue. When it came time for the public press conference, I would insist that it be with Pakistan’s civilian leadership so as not to create a problematic public misimpression, but the hardest conversation had to be with Kayani and Pasha.
It was a tough slog, which didn’t surprise me but certainly tested my patience. We had found bin Laden living it up in the backyard of the Pakistan Military Academy, and yet we were the ones on the defensive? Nonetheless, the generals were outraged. The raid had occurred and they hadn’t known anything about it beforehand. They considered it a violation of their sovereign territory, and I had to work hard to convince them that total secrecy had been imperative. I emphasized that it wasn’t mistrust but operational security so tight that even I was not aware of the raid until after it happened. I think that opened their eyes. I asked them what they would have done if they’d been in our shoes. What if they had located their number one most wanted terrorist enemy in Afghanistan? Would they have called Karzai ahead of time? They smiled. I let them vent, but I always came back to core interests. Both sides had a lot at stake.
At the end of the meeting, we drafted a statement. I had Doug look it over and he said, “If you want to say nothing, this is perfect.” That was precisely what we wanted. What I said publicly mattered far less than what was committed to privately—in fact, at this stage any public statement might only have erased the progress made privately.
The next day, I met with President Asif Zardari, Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani and Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani. They wanted a written statement to assure the Pakistani people that the United States was not going to invade their country and grab their nuclear weapons. It was a curious concern at a moment like this. We negotiated the statement word by word. At one point, someone from the Pakistani side tried to insert a line that read, “I, John Kerry, swear on a blood oath.” That was never going to fly, but it did reveal two things: first, how urgent this issue was to them; and second, that my relationships with Pakistan’s leaders had become personal. I gathered from their suggested language that they judged that I had a reservoir of credibility to help put the relationship on a stronger footing.
The Pakistanis announced that they would be returning our helicopter tail and would renew engagement in other areas of cooperation. The internal challenges of Pakistan, coupled with their own complicated domestic politics, preordained that this was never going to be an easy relationship. As it had been for decades, it would continue to be marked by mistrust, highs and lows, moments of confrontation and openings for occasional breakthroughs. For every member of Congress back home who thought we should just write off the relationship, I always thought, What’s your alternative? Walk away from Afghanistan? We did that in 1979 and we know how well that worked. Cede a relationship with Pakistan to China or Saudi Arabia? Lose our leverage to get involved as a broker on both sides when India’s tensions with Pakistan would inevitably flare up? Shut down our channels of communication with a nuclear power in the world’s most dangerous region, surrounded by pockets of extremists? Good luck with all that.
As we flew home, Doug joked to me, “Senator, will you swear a blood oath that we never have to go back to Pakistan?”
• • •
DESPITE THE OBAMA administration’s early interest in a pivot to Asia, which to many in the Middle East sounded like a receding of interest in their region, there was a full plate of issues that would inevitably draw any administration back into what some derisively called “the sandbox”—Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and other Middle East countries where there were myriad issues to be addressed, each of which had a common thread running through the tapestry: Syria. A new round of peace negotiations was being started by the president’s special envoy, George Mitchell.
In the years preceding the Obama administration, Syria had been engaged in peace talks with Israel brokered by Turkey. The country had also been a key transit point for weapons and fighters into Iraq. It remained Iran’s last ally in the region, played a destabilizing role in Lebanon, and was a chief sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah—a series of actions and behaviors that quite appropriately kept Syria on a list of the state sponsors of terror.
The Bush administration’s approach had been a policy of nonengagement. They saw meetings and diplomacy as a reward. President Obama viewed diplomacy as a means to an end and believed that
a meeting was a tool, not a gift. This was common sense and Diplomacy 101. You would always be careful about how you choreograph engagement. Sometimes it’s smart to start with a quiet back channel that doesn’t raise public expectations or complicate existing relationships, and certainly you don’t roll out the red carpet and lavish public praise on a bad actor. In my mind, however, meeting, talking, listening and exchanging arguments and ideas are the only ways you can test whether there’s a potential avenue for progress.
You can’t be afraid to have a conversation, and my experience has always been that even if the conversation goes nowhere, there has at least been a signal or demonstration that you’ve tried. This can help bring allies and partners to your side in the event that you have to build support for sanctions or military force. Of course, when it came to Syria, it made sense to try to engage diplomatically to change Syrian behavior on any number of issues, because the alternatives were always imperfect. The country—75 percent Sunni, 12 percent Shia—was a demographic powder keg that would be hard ever to put back together again if it broke apart, and that process could be very ugly for Syria, for its neighbors and for the world.
It was worth an attempt to see if engagement could lead somewhere. Many regional issues ran through Damascus, as mentioned, and there was a case to be made that Syria’s actual interests were not advanced by being entirely aligned with Iran. Bashar al-Assad, the relatively new head of state, had demographic pressure to deliver something resembling economic opportunity for his population. On the surface, it didn’t seem unfathomable that the regime might soften its approach in some areas in return for relief from sanctions and a new relationship with the West and with Israel. After all, that kind of reconciliation has been known to happen in the Middle East from time to time: Jordan and Egypt were once Israel’s leading enemies, before, with American backing, they negotiated peace agreements that have endured for a long time now. The entire story of the region is marked by shifting allegiances—alliances always in transition—and ongoing assessments of interests. With Syria, there had even been what looked like occasional instructive moments: after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, President George H. W. Bush did the improbable and convinced then Syrian president Hafez al-Assad to join an American-led coalition against a fellow Baathist regime. Secretary of State James Baker made more than a dozen trips to Syria before Operation Desert Storm, and the first President Assad’s price was simple: U.S. support for Syrian dialogue with Israel. The ultimate challenge—moving Syria away from its marriage of convenience with Iran and into a different relationship with Israel—wouldn’t be easy, but why shouldn’t we at least try?
