Hard Choices

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

  The next day Richard drove out to Dulles Airport to meet Ruggiero’s plane. He couldn’t wait to get a firsthand report, which he would then relay to me. The two sat down at Harry’s Tap Room in the airport, and Ruggiero talked while Richard tore into a cheeseburger.

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  A few days after Ruggiero’s return from Munich, on December 11, 2010, he and Richard came up to my office on the seventh floor of the State Department to meet with Jake Sullivan and me about how to proceed. We were also in the final stages of the one-year policy review that President Obama had promised when he approved the troop surge. No one would say that things were going well in Afghanistan, but there was some encouraging progress to report. The extra troops were helping blunt the Taliban’s momentum. Security was improving in Kabul and in key provinces like Helmand and Kandahar. Our development efforts were starting to make a difference in the economy, and our diplomacy with the region and the international community was picking up steam.

  In November I had gone with President Obama to a summit of NATO leaders in Lisbon, Portugal. The summit reaffirmed the shared mission in Afghanistan and agreed to a trajectory for transitioning responsibility for security to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, along with an enduring NATO commitment to the country’s security and stability. Most important, the summit sent a strong message that the international community was united behind the strategy President Obama had announced at West Point. The increase in American forces, supplemented by those from our NATO and Coalition partners, was helping create conditions for political and economic transitions, as well as a security handoff and the basis for a diplomatic offensive. There was a clear road map for the end of U.S. combat operations and the continuing support that we knew would be necessary for Afghan democracy to survive. Now we had a secret channel to the Taliban leadership that appeared genuine and might one day lead to real peace talks among Afghans. (My spokeswoman Toria Nuland, with her talent for quotable lines, started short-handing our three mutually reinforcing lines of effort as “Fight, talk, build,” which I thought summed it up nicely.)

  Richard was excited about our momentum coming out of Lisbon, and throughout the policy review process he repeatedly made his case to all who would listen that diplomacy needed to be a central element of our strategy going forward. On December 11, he was late to the meeting in my office, explaining that he had been tied up first with the Pakistani Ambassador and then at the White House. As usual, he was full of ideas and opinions. But as we talked, he grew quiet and his face suddenly turned an alarming bright red. “Richard, what’s the matter?” I asked. I knew immediately it was serious. He looked back at me and said, “Something horrible is happening.” He was in such physical distress that I insisted he go see the State Department medical staff, located on the building’s lower level. Reluctantly he agreed, and Jake, Frank, and Claire Coleman, my executive assistant, helped him get there.

  The medical staff quickly sent Richard to nearby George Washington University Hospital. He took the elevator down to the garage and got into an ambulance for the short drive. Dan Feldman, one of Richard’s closest aides, rode over with him. When they got to the emergency room, doctors found a tear in his aorta and sent him directly to surgery, which lasted twenty-one hours. The damage was severe and his prognosis was not good, but Richard’s doctors would not give up.

  I was at the hospital when the surgery ended. The doctors were “cautiously optimistic” and said that the next few hours would be crucial. Richard’s wife, Kati, their children, and his many friends were keeping vigil at the hospital. His State Department team volunteered to take shifts in the lobby to help manage the flow of visitors and run interference for Kati. Even as the hours stretched on, none of them would leave the hospital. The Operations Center was fielding lots of incoming calls from foreign leaders concerned about Richard. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari was particularly anxious to speak to Kati to express his concern. He reported that people all over Pakistan were praying for her husband.

  The next morning, with Richard still clinging to life, the doctors decided another surgery was necessary to try to stop the continued bleeding. We were all praying. I was staying close to the hospital, as were so many others who loved Richard. Around 11 A.M. President Karzai telephoned from Kabul and spoke to Kati. “Please tell your husband that we need him back in Afghanistan,” he said. As they talked, Kati’s call waiting chimed. It was President Zardari, who promised to call right back. Richard would have been delighted that so many illustrious people were spending hour after hour talking about nothing but him. He would hate to have missed it.

  By late afternoon Richard’s surgeon, who by coincidence was from Lahore, Pakistan, reported that Richard was “inching in the right direction,” although he remained in critical condition. The doctors were impressed by his resilience and marveled at the fight he was putting up. For those of us who knew and loved him, that was no surprise at all.

  By Monday afternoon, with the situation much the same, Kati and the family decided to join me and President Obama at the State Department for a long-scheduled holiday reception for the diplomatic corps. I welcomed everyone to the Benjamin Franklin Room on the eighth floor and began with a few words about our friend, who was fighting for his life only a few blocks away. I said that the doctors were “learning what diplomats and dictators around the world have long known: There’s nobody tougher than Richard Holbrooke.”

  Just a few hours later things took a turn for the worse. Around 8 P.M. on December 13, 2010, Richard Holbrooke died. He was just sixty-nine years old. His doctors were visibly upset that they had not been able to save his life, but remarked that Richard had entered the hospital with uncommon dignity for someone who had suffered such a traumatic event. I visited quietly with the family—Kati; Richard’s sons, David and Anthony; his stepchildren, Elizabeth and Chris; and his daughter-in-law, Sarah—and then went to be with the crowd of friends and colleagues downstairs. Teary-eyed people held hands and talked about the need to celebrate Richard’s life, while also continuing the work to which he was so devoted.

  I read aloud to those gathered the formal statement I had just issued: “Tonight America has lost one of its fiercest champions and most dedicated public servants. Richard Holbrooke served the country he loved for nearly half a century, representing the United States in far-flung war zones and high-level peace talks, always with distinctive brilliance and unmatched determination. He was one of a kind—a true statesman—and that makes his passing all the more painful.” I thanked the medical staff and everyone who had offered their prayers and support over the past few days. “True to form, Richard was a fighter to the end. His doctors marveled at his strength and his willpower, but to his friends, that was just Richard being Richard.”

  Everyone started swapping their favorite Richard stories and reminiscing about this remarkable man. After a while, in a move I think Richard would have approved of, a large group of us headed over to the bar of the nearby Ritz-Carlton Hotel. For the next few hours we held an impromptu wake and celebration of Richard’s life. Everyone had great stories to tell, and we laughed and cried in equal measure, sometimes all at once. Richard had trained an entire generation of diplomats, and many of them spoke movingly about what having him as a mentor meant to their lives and careers. Dan Feldman shared with us that on the way to the hospital, Richard had said that he considered his team at the State Department “the best he had ever worked with.”

  In mid-January, Richard’s many friends and colleagues from across the world gathered at the Kennedy Center in Washington for a memorial service. Among the eulogists were President Obama and my husband. I spoke last. Looking out at the large crowd, a testament to Richard’s genius for friendship, I was reminded how keenly I would miss having him by my side. “There are few people in any time, but certainly in our time, who can say, I stopped a war. I made peace. I saved lives. I helped countries heal. Richard Holbrooke did these things,” I said. “This is a
loss personally and it is a loss for our country. We face huge tasks ahead of us, and it would be better if Richard were here, driving us all crazy about what we needed to be doing.”

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  I couldn’t let Richard’s death derail the work to which he was so committed. His team felt the same way. We had been discussing the idea of a major speech on the prospects for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan. I was sure Richard would want us to go ahead with it. So we put aside our grief and got to work.

  I asked Frank Ruggiero to serve as acting Special Representative and sent him to Kabul and Islamabad in the first week of January 2011 to brief Karzai and Zardari on what I was planning to say. I was about to put a lot of weight and momentum behind the idea of reconciliation with the Taliban, and we wanted them to be prepared. Karzai was in equal measure engaged, encouraging, and suspicious. “What are you really discussing with those Taliban?” he asked. Just like the Pakistanis, he was worried that we would cut a deal without him that might leave him exposed.

  While I worked on the speech with the team in Washington, Ruggiero headed to Qatar for a second meeting with A-Rod, our Taliban contact. We still had concerns about his legitimacy and ability to deliver results, so Ruggiero proposed a test. He asked A-Rod to have the Taliban propaganda arm release a statement with some specific language in it. If they did, we’d know he had real access. In return Ruggiero told A-Rod that in my upcoming speech, I would open the door to reconciliation with stronger language than any American official had yet used. A-Rod agreed and promised to send the message back to his superiors. Later the statement came out with the promised language.

  Before I finalized my speech, I needed to decide on a permanent successor to Holbrooke. It would be impossible to fill his shoes, but we needed another senior diplomat to lead his team and carry the effort forward. I turned to a widely respected retired Ambassador, Marc Grossman, whom I had met when he served in Turkey. Marc is quiet and self-effacing, a dramatic departure from his predecessor, but he brought uncommon skill and subtlety to the job.

  In mid-February I flew to New York and went to the Asia Society, where Richard had once served as chairman of the board, to deliver a memorial lecture in his name, which would in time become an annual tradition. I began by providing an update on the military and civilian surges that President Obama had announced at West Point. Then I explained that we were conducting a third surge, a diplomatic one, aimed at moving the conflict toward a political outcome that would shatter the alliance between the Taliban and al Qaeda, end the insurgency, and help produce a more stable Afghanistan and a more stable region. This had been our vision from the beginning, and it was what I had argued for in President Obama’s strategic review process in 2009. Now it was moving front and center.

  To understand our strategy, it was important for Americans to be clear about the difference between the al Qaeda terrorists, who attacked us on 9/11, and the Taliban, who were Afghan extremists waging an insurgency against the government in Kabul. The Taliban had paid a heavy price for their decision in 2001 to defy the international community and protect al Qaeda. Now the escalating pressure from our military campaign was forcing them to make a similar decision. If the Taliban met our three criteria, they could rejoin Afghan society. “This is the price for reaching a political resolution and bringing an end to the military actions that are targeting their leadership and decimating their ranks,” I said, including a subtle but important shift in language, describing these steps as “necessary outcomes” of any negotiation rather than “preconditions.” It was a nuanced change, but it would clear the way for direct talks.

  I acknowledged, as I had many times before, that opening the door to negotiations with the Taliban would be hard to swallow for many Americans after so many years of war. Reintegrating low-level fighters was odious enough; negotiating directly with top commanders was something else entirely. But diplomacy would be easy if we had to talk only to our friends. That’s not how peace is made. Presidents throughout the Cold War understood that when they negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviets. As President Kennedy put it, “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” Richard Holbrooke had made this his life’s work, negotiating with an ugly tyrant like Milošević because that was the best way to end a war.

  I closed the speech by urging Pakistan, India, and other nations in the region to support a process of peace and reconciliation that would isolate al Qaeda and give everyone a new sense of security. If Afghanistan’s neighbors kept viewing Afghanistan as an arena for playing out their own rivalries, peace would never succeed. It was going to take a lot of painstaking diplomacy, but we needed to play an inside game with the Afghans and an outside game with the region.

  The speech made a few headlines at home, but its real impact was in foreign capitals, especially Kabul and Islamabad. All sides now knew we were serious about pursuing a peace process with the Taliban. One diplomat in Kabul described the effect as a “seismic shift” that would encourage all sides to more actively pursue peace.

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  The successful U.S. Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011, was a major victory in the battle against al Qaeda and another low point in our already badly strained relationship with Pakistan. But I thought it might also provide us some new leverage with the Taliban. Five days after the raid, Ruggiero met for a third time with A-Rod, this time back in Munich. I told him to pass along a direct message from me: bin Laden was dead; this was the time for the Taliban to break from al Qaeda once and for all, save themselves, and make peace. A-Rod did not seem distressed about losing bin Laden, and he remained interested in negotiating with us.

  We began discussing confidence-building measures that both sides could take. We wanted the Taliban to make public statements disassociating themselves from al Qaeda and international terrorism and committing to participate in a peace process with Karzai and his government. The Taliban wanted to be allowed to open a political office in Qatar that would provide a safe place for future negotiations and engagement. We were open to this idea, but it raised a number of challenges. Many Taliban leaders were considered terrorists by the international community and could not appear in the open without facing legal jeopardy. Pakistan also had to agree to allow them to come and go openly. And there was a good chance Karzai would see a Taliban outpost in Qatar as a direct threat to his legitimacy and authority. All these concerns seemed manageable, but they would require careful diplomacy.

  As a first step, we agreed to begin working with the United Nations to remove a few key Taliban members from the terrorist sanctions list, which imposed a travel ban. Soon the UN Security Council agreed to split the Taliban and al Qaeda lists and treat them separately—a direct manifestation of the distinction drawn in my speech—which gave us considerably more flexibility. The Taliban still wanted their fighters released from Guantánamo, but that was not a step we were willing to take yet.

  In mid-May Afghan officials in Kabul leaked word of our secret talks and named Agha as our Taliban contact to the Washington Post and Der Spiegel, a German newsweekly. Privately the Taliban understood that the leak was not from us, but publicly they expressed outrage and suspended future talks. Pakistani authorities, already outraged over the bin Laden raid, were livid that they had been left out of our discussions with the Taliban. We had to scramble to pick up the pieces. I went to Islamabad and talked to the Pakistanis for the first time about the extent of our contacts and requested that there be no retribution against A-Rod. I also asked Ruggiero to fly to Doha and pass a message through the Qataris to the Taliban urging them to return to the table. In early July the Qataris reported that Agha was willing to return.

  Talks resumed in Doha in August. A-Rod presented Ruggiero with a letter for President Obama that he said was from Mullah Omar himself. There was some debate inside the administration about whether Mullah Omar was sti
ll alive, let alone in charge of the Taliban and directing the insurgency. But whether it was from Omar or from other senior leaders, its tone and content were encouraging. The letter said that now was the time for both sides to make tough choices on reconciliation and work to end the war.

  There were constructive discussions about an office in Doha and possible prisoner swaps. Marc Grossman joined the talks for the first time, and his personal touch helped move things along.

  In October, on a visit to Kabul, Karzai told me and our highly regarded and experienced Ambassador Ryan Crocker, with whom he had a good relationship, that he was enthusiastic about what we were doing. “Go faster,” he said. In Washington serious discussions began about the viability of limited prisoner releases, although the Pentagon was not supportive and I was unsure whether we could secure the conditions necessary to agree to a Taliban office in Qatar. By late fall, however, the pieces seemed finally in place. A major international conference on Afghanistan was scheduled to take place in Bonn, Germany, in the first week of December. Our goal was to announce the opening of the office following the conference. It would be the most tangible sign yet that a real peace process was under way.

  Bonn was part of the diplomatic offensive I had described in my Asia Society speech, aimed at mobilizing the broader international community to help Afghanistan take responsibility for meeting its many challenges. Grossman and his team helped organize a series of summits and conferences in Istanbul, Bonn, Kabul, Chicago, and Tokyo. In Tokyo, in 2012, the international community committed $16 billion in economic assistance through 2015 to help Afghanistan prepare for a “decade of transformation” marked less by aid and more by trade. Starting in 2015, estimated financing for the Afghan National Security Forces would be more than $4 billion per year. The Afghans’ ability to take responsibility for their own security was and remains a prerequisite for everything else they hope to achieve in the future.