Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  When Petraeus appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee for his confirmation hearing in late January 2007, I pressed him on these points. I pointed out that the counterinsurgency manual he had written himself at the Army’s Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, said that military progress was linked to internal political progress and that one could not be achieved without the other. We had learned the same lesson trying to bring peace to the Balkans. “You are being sent to administer a policy that frankly does not reflect your experience or advice,” I said. “You wrote the book, General, but the policy is not by the book. And you are being asked to square the circle, to find a military solution to a political crisis.”

  Fortunately, when he got to Iraq, Petraeus followed a strategy that looked a lot more like what he had advocated for in his writings and what I had pressed him on during the hearing instead of the Bush Administration’s approach to date. Petraeus’s comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy became known as COIN. It focused on protecting civilian population centers and winning Iraqis’ “hearts and minds” through relationship-building and development projects. The slogan for the strategy became “Clear, hold, and build.” The goal was to rid an area of insurgents, defend it so they couldn’t return, and invest in infrastructure and governance so residents saw an improvement in their lives and would begin defending themselves. Under Petraeus, American troops in Iraq left their large, heavily fortified bases and fanned out into neighborhoods and villages, which put them more directly in harm’s way but also enabled them to provide security.

  Equally important, if not more consequential, there was a game-changing development on the ground that few saw coming. A number of Sunni sheiks who had formerly supported the insurgency became fed up with al Qaeda’s brutality toward their people and split from the extremists. In what became known as the “Sunni Awakening,” more than 100,000 tribal fighters switched sides and ended up on the American payroll. These events profoundly shifted the trajectory of the war.

  Back at home, domestic politics was certainly part of the backdrop of the debate over the surge. By then it was clear just how wrong we had gotten Iraq. While the war in Iraq divided America from the start, by 2006 the American people were overwhelmingly against the war—as they made clear that November in the midterm elections. As we learned in Vietnam, it’s very difficult to sustain a long and costly war without support from the American people and a spirit of shared sacrifice. I did not think we should escalate America’s commitment in Iraq with such overwhelming opposition at home.

  During my time in the Senate there were several Republicans whose opinion I valued highly. One of them was John Warner of Virginia. Senator Warner previously served as Secretary of the Navy under President Nixon and was the Ranking Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, on which I sat. He voted for the Iraq Resolution in 2002, so when he returned from a visit to Iraq in late 2006 and proclaimed that in his judgment the war was now going “sideways,” it sent tremors through his own party and beyond. While understated, that single word coming from John Warner was both an indictment and a demand for change.

  Wherever I traveled I heard from people who were dead set against the war and, as a result, personally disappointed in me. Many had been opposed from the start; others turned against it over time. Hardest of all were the anguished military families who wanted their loved ones to come home, veterans worried about their buddies still serving tours in Iraq, and Americans of all walks of life who were heartbroken by the losses of our young men and women. They were also frustrated by a war that had weakened our country’s standing in the world, was not being paid for, and set back our strategic interests in the region.

  While many were never going to look past my 2002 vote no matter what I did or said, I should have stated my regret sooner and in the plainest, most direct language possible. I’d gone most of the way there by saying I regretted the way President Bush used his authority and by saying that if we knew then what we later learned, there wouldn’t have been a vote. But I held out against using the word mistake. It wasn’t because of political expediency. After all, primary voters and the press were clamoring for me to say that word. When I voted to authorize force in 2002, I said that it was “probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make.” I thought I had acted in good faith and made the best decision I could with the information I had. And I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.

  In our political culture, saying you made a mistake is often taken as weakness when in fact it can be a sign of strength and growth for people and nations. That’s another lesson I’ve learned personally and experienced as Secretary of State.

  Serving as Secretary also gave me a share of the responsibility for sending Americans into harm’s way to protect our national security. As First Lady I watched Bill grapple with the gravity of these decisions, and as a Senator on the Armed Services Committee I worked closely with my colleagues and military leaders to conduct rigorous oversight. But there’s nothing like sitting at the table in the White House Situation Room where you’re debating questions of war and peace and facing the unintended consequences of every decision. And there’s nothing to prepare you when people sent to serve in a dangerous place will not be coming home.

  As much as I might have wanted to, I could never change my vote on Iraq. But I could try to help us learn the right lessons from that war and apply them to Afghanistan and other challenges where we had fundamental security interests. I was determined to do exactly that when facing future hard choices, with more experience, wisdom, skepticism, and humility.

  * * *

  * * *

  Generals Petraeus and McChrystal were proposing to bring COIN to Afghanistan. To do it, they needed more troops, just as they had in Iraq. But what if there were no equivalent to the Sunni Awakening this time? Was it possible we were learning the wrong lessons from Iraq?

  The most vocal opponent of the Pentagon’s proposals was Vice President Biden. For him, the idea of a surge was a nonstarter. Afghanistan was not Iraq. A large-scale effort at “nation-building” in a place with little infrastructure or governance was doomed to fail. He didn’t think that the Taliban could be defeated, and he believed that sending more U.S. troops was a recipe for another bloody quagmire. Instead the Vice President argued for a smaller military footprint and a focus on counterterrorism. General Jones and Rahm Emanuel raised similar concerns.

  The problem with this argument was that if the Taliban continued to seize more of the country, it would be that much harder to conduct effective counterterrorism operations. We wouldn’t have the same intelligence networks necessary to locate the terrorists or the bases from which to launch strikes inside or outside Afghanistan. Al Qaeda already had safe havens in Pakistan. If we abandoned large parts of Afghanistan to the Taliban, they would again have safe havens there as well.

  Another skeptic on sending more troops was Richard Holbrooke. We had known each other since the 1990s, when he served as my husband’s chief negotiator in the Balkans. In 1996 Holbrooke proposed that I go to Bosnia to visit with religious leaders, civil society groups, and women who had borne the brunt of the violence. This was an unusual assignment for a First Lady, but, as I came to learn, Richard Holbrooke rarely wasted his time with the usual.

  Holbrooke was a large and imposing figure, bursting with talent and ambition. After joining the Foreign Service in 1962 at age twenty-one, full of Kennedy-era idealism, he came of age in Vietnam. That was where he learned firsthand about the difficulties of counterinsurgency. Richard rose fast through the ranks. In the Carter Administration, when he was still in his mid-thirties, he became Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, helping to normalize relations with China. He secured his place in history by going toe-to-toe with the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević in 1995 and negotiating the Dayton Peace Accords to end the war in Bosnia.

  My relationship with Richard deepened over t
he years. When he was Ambassador to the UN in the last couple years of the Clinton Administration, we worked together on AIDS and global health issues. I also became close with his wife, Kati Marton, a journalist and author. Richard and Kati threw wonderful dinner parties. You never knew who you were going to meet—a Nobel laureate, a movie star, maybe even a Queen. One evening he planned an unusual surprise for me. He had once heard me make a favorable comment about the Salvation Army so, in the middle of dinner, he gave a signal, the doors swung open, and in marched members of the Salvation Army Band, singing and blowing trumpets. Richard beamed from ear to ear.

  When I became Secretary of State, I knew he was eager to return to service, so I asked him to take on the Afghanistan-Pakistan portfolio, which seemed in need of his outsized talents and personality. Richard had visited Afghanistan for the first time in 1971. It was the beginning of a lifelong fascination. After trips to the region in 2006 and 2008 as a private citizen, he wrote several articles urging the Bush Administration to develop a new strategy for the war, with an increased emphasis on Pakistan. I agreed with his analysis and tasked him with assembling a dedicated team made up of the best minds he could find from in and outside of government to try to put his ideas into practice. He quickly enlisted academics, experts from nongovernmental organizations, up-and-coming talent from nine federal agencies and departments, even representatives from allied governments. It was an eclectic band of quirky, bright, and very dedicated people—most of them quite young—with whom I became close, especially after Richard died.

  Richard’s bulldozer style took some getting used to. When he had an idea, he would pitch it relentlessly, phoning again and again, waiting outside my office, walking into meetings uninvited, even once following me into a ladies’ restroom just so he could finish making his point—in Pakistan no less. If I rejected his suggestion, he would wait a few days, pretend it never happened, and then try again. Finally I would exclaim, “Richard, I’ve said no. Why do you keep asking me?” He would look at me innocently and reply, “I just assumed at some point you would recognize that you were wrong and I was right.” To be fair, sometimes that did happen. It was exactly this tenacity that made him the best choice for this urgent mission.

  Early in 2009 I invited Richard and Dave Petraeus for an evening at my home in Washington so they could get to know each other. They were men with endless energy and ideas, and I thought they would click. They dove right into the thorniest policy problems, feeding off each other. At the end of the evening they both said, “Let’s do this again tomorrow night.”

  Richard shared Dave’s interest in an aggressive counterinsurgency strategy that focused on bolstering the credibility of the government in Kabul and weakening the appeal of the Taliban as an alternative. But he wasn’t sure that tens of thousands of additional troops were necessary to do it. He worried that more troops and more fighting would alienate Afghan civilians and undermine any goodwill achieved by expanded economic development and improved governance.

  Drawing on his experiences in the Balkans, Richard believed that diplomacy and politics were the keys to ending the war. He wanted to lead a diplomatic offensive to change the regional dynamics that continued to fuel the conflict, especially the toxic relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan and Pakistan and India. He also pushed us to consider reconciliation among the warring Afghan combatants as a top priority.

  Richard started visiting regional capitals, looking for any diplomatic opening, no matter how small, that might lead to a political solution, while also urging Afghanistan’s neighbors to increase trade and contacts across their borders. He encouraged many of our allies and partners to appoint Special Representatives of their own, so he would have direct counterparts with whom to negotiate.

  In February 2009, just a few weeks into our tenure, he organized an international “contact group” on Afghanistan that brought together about fifty countries, along with representatives from the UN, NATO, the European Union, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. He wanted every nation and group that contributed troops, donated funds, or wielded influence inside Afghanistan to share the responsibility by meeting frequently to coordinate. A month later Holbrooke and his team helped the United Nations plan a major international conference on Afghanistan at The Hague in the Netherlands. I even consented to inviting Iran in order to test the possibility of cooperating on shared interests in Afghanistan, such as improving border security and curbing drug trafficking. At lunch Holbrooke encountered the senior Iranian diplomat there in a brief exchange, one of the highest-level direct contacts between our countries since immediately after 9/11.

  Within Afghanistan itself, Holbrooke advocated for a “civilian surge” that would put into practice the Riedel review’s recommendations for a dramatic increase in assistance to improve life for Afghans and strengthen the government in Kabul. He pushed to shift U.S. antinarcotics operations in Afghanistan away from the farmers who eked out a living growing opium and toward the drug traffickers who were getting rich and using their wealth to help fund the insurgency. He tried to reorganize USAID’s development programs in both Afghanistan and Pakistan around signature projects that would make positive impressions on the people, including hydroelectric dams in energy-starved Pakistan. And he became passionate about the propaganda war, which the Taliban was winning despite our vastly superior resources and technology. Insurgents used mobile radio transmitters mounted on donkeys, motorcycles, and pickup trucks to spread fear, intimidate local populations, and avoid detection by Coalition forces. For Richard, it was an infuriating problem.

  This whirlwind of activity came with some collateral damage. At the White House some saw his efforts to coordinate among various government agencies as encroaching on their turf. Younger White House aides rolled their eyes when he invoked lessons learned in Vietnam. Officials working on the military campaign didn’t understand or appreciate his focus on agriculture projects or cell phone towers. Holbrooke’s old-school style of diplomacy—that mix of improvisation, flattery, and bluster that had outmaneuvered Milošević—was a bad fit in a White House intent on running an orderly policy process with as little drama as possible. It was painful to watch such an accomplished diplomat marginalized and undercut. I defended him whenever I could, including from several attempts to force him out of the job.

  At one point White House aides told me point-blank to get rid of Richard. “If the President wants to fire Richard Holbrooke, he needs to tell me himself,” I replied. Then, as was often the case on difficult matters, I spoke directly with President Obama. I explained why I thought Richard was an asset. The President accepted my recommendation and Richard continued his important work.

  I was convinced that Richard was right about the need for both a major diplomatic campaign and a civilian surge, but I pushed back when he argued that additional troops weren’t needed to make it work. “How will we force the Taliban to the peace table if they have all the momentum?” I asked him. “How do you have a civilian surge in Kandahar when the Taliban are controlling it?”

  Over the course of our regular Situation Room meetings, the President seemed to be coming around to the idea of deploying the tens of thousands of additional troops the military sought, along with the new diplomats and development experts Richard and I were recommending. But he still had a lot of questions. Chief among them was how we would avoid an open-ended commitment to an endless war. What was the endgame here?

  We hoped that the Afghan government and Army would eventually be strong enough to take responsibility for providing security for their own country and keeping the insurgency at bay, at which point U.S. help would no longer be needed and our troops could begin coming home. That’s why we and our allies were training Afghan soldiers, modernizing Afghan government ministries, and going after the insurgents—all with the goal of paving the way for transition to Afghan control. But for this scenario to work, we needed a credible partner in Kabul who was prepared to take up these responsibilities. And in th
e fall of 2009 nobody around the table was confident that we had one.

  * * *

  * * *

  Talking to Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan, was often a frustrating exercise. He is charming, erudite, and passionate about his beliefs. He is also proud, stubborn, and quick to bristle at any perceived slight. There was, however, no way to avoid him or to take only those parts of him with which we agreed. Like it or not, Karzai was a linchpin of our mission in Afghanistan.

  Karzai was the scion of a prominent Pashtun family with a long history in Afghan politics. In 2001, he was installed by the United Nations as a transitional leader after the fall of the Taliban and later chosen as interim President by a traditional grand council of tribal elders, a loya jirga. He then won a five-year term in the country’s first Presidential elections in 2004. Responsible for a country riven by ethnic rivalries, devastated by decades of war, and destabilized by an ongoing insurgency, Karzai struggled to provide security and basic services beyond the capital of Kabul. He regularly frustrated his American partners with intemperate outbursts in person and in the press. Yet he was also a real political survivor who successfully played rival Afghan factions off one another and managed to form a strong personal bond with President George W. Bush. Despite his mercurial reputation, Karzai was actually quite consistent when it came to his core priorities of maintaining Afghan sovereignty and unity—and his own power.

  Since 9/11, I had gotten to know Karzai fairly well. In June 2004, I brought him to Fort Drum in upstate New York so he could thank soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division, one of the most deployed divisions in the U.S. Army, for their service in Afghanistan. Over the years I had the privilege of spending time with the men and women of the 10th Mountain Division, both at Fort Drum and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whenever I visited one of those war zones as a Senator, I tried to find time to talk with soldiers from New York about what was actually happening on the ground. I heard harrowing reports about inadequate body armor and vulnerable Humvees, but also stories of bravery and perseverance. When Karzai joined me at Fort Drum, he was gracious and respectful of the sacrifices the troops were making for his country. At other times over the years, however, he seemed to blame Americans more than the Taliban for the violence in his country. That was hard to stomach.