The die had been cast earlier, and there was not going to be too much out-of-the-box thinking or debate over grand strategy. The generals wanted a military solution to Afghanistan, and the president’s advisers thought the political fallout of going against the military would be too great. Holbrooke thought the impulse to hand over foreign policy to the military was a mistake; there was going to be fighting in Afghanistan, but diplomacy alone could bring that war to a satisfactory end.
Holbrooke was no starry-eyed pacifist. He believed in the use of force: not as an end in itself, of course, but as a means to solving difficult problems. In the Balkans, he had wielded the threat of U.S. air power to compel the recalcitrant Serbian president Milosevic to agree to a deal. On one occasion he walked out of a frustrating meeting with Milosevic and told his military adviser to roll B-52 bombers out onto the tarmac in an airbase in England and make sure CNN showed the footage. Later, at a dinner during the Dayton peace talks that ended the Bosnia war, he asked President Clinton to sit across from Milosevic. Holbrooke said to Clinton, I want Milosevic to hear from you what I told him, that if there is no peace you will send in the bombers. Holbrooke was seasoned in the business of war and diplomacy.
In Afghanistan, too, Holbrooke believed that the U.S. military had a key role to play—a role. But what the president was considering in the fall of 2009 was something altogether different. He was being pushed to sign on to a military solution to the conflict. Holbrooke was convinced then that such an effort would fail, and that in trying to avoid that outcome, America would deepen its military commitment, doubling down on a failing strategy in what might turn into a dangerous repeat of the Vietnam debacle that Holbrooke had witnessed as a young Foreign Service officer. Or we would end up abandoning Afghanistan in strategic defeat.
It is the job of diplomats to end conflicts like Afghanistan, to solve big strategic problems facing America. Military might is supposed to be an instrument in the diplomat’s tool kit. That is how it worked in the Balkans, and that is how it had eventually played out in Vietnam. That war was waged on the battlefield for decades, but it ended around a negotiating table in Paris. Total battlefield victory is rare, and when it has happened, for instance at the end of World War II, it has required a level of commitment that is above and beyond what America was willing to give in Afghanistan. Iraq stands out as a rare case of a quick battlefield victory, an end to a war that did not happen around a negotiating table. But was Iraq really won? That proposition is yet to be tested by the departure of American troops.
But diplomacy was conspicuous by its absence in the 2009 White House strategy review. Diplomacy was then seen narrowly as a useful tool for getting governments around the world to contribute soldiers and money to the Afghan war. It was not a solution to war, but its facilitator.
This, Holbrooke thought, was a fundamental problem. The military was by its nature simply not the institution to define and run America’s foreign policy. I remember his reaction when General David Petraeus affectionately referred to him in an interview as his “wingman.”2 Holbrooke chuckled and said, “Since when have diplomats become generals’ wingmen?” In the same interview Petraeus had dismissed a role for diplomacy in ending the war, saying, “This [the Afghan war] will not end like the Balkans.”3 This imbalance at the heart of American foreign policy was Obama’s to fix, and the strategic review would have been the place to do it.
From the outset, Holbrooke had argued for reconciliation as the path out of Afghanistan. But the military thought talk of reconciliation undermined America’s commitment to fully resourced COIN. On his last trip to Afghanistan, in October 2010, Holbrooke pulled General Petraeus aside and said, “David, I want to talk to you about reconciliation.” Petraeus replied, “That is a fifteen-second conversation. No, not now.” The commanders’ standard response was that they needed two more fighting seasons (two years) to soften up the Taliban. They were hoping to change the president’s mind on his July deadline, and after that convince him to accept a “slow and shallow” (long and gradual) departure schedule. The military feared that Holbrooke’s talk of talking to the Taliban would undermine that strategy. Their line was that we should fight first and talk later. Much later. Holbrooke thought we could talk and fight, and in fact that you should fight in order to make your foe find talking more appealing (not the other way around). Reconciliation should be the ultimate goal, and fighting the means to facilitate it.
The Taliban had been ready for talks as early as April 2009. At that time, Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin, shortly before he joined Holbrooke’s team as his senior Afghan affairs adviser, traveled to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. In Kabul he met with the former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who told Rubin the Taliban were ready to break with al-Qaeda and talk to America. He laid out in detail a strategy for talks: where to start, what to discuss, and the shape of the settlement that the United States and the Taliban could agree on. Zaeef said the Taliban needed concessions on prisoners America held in Guantánamo and wanted the removal of some Taliban names from so-called black lists developed by the U.S. government and the United Nations sanctioning terrorists. Rubin went to Riyadh from Kabul, and there he met with Prince Muqrin, the Saudi intelligence minister, whose account of conversations with Taliban go-betweens lined up with what Zaeef had told Rubin.
Back in Washington—on the day he was sworn into government service—Rubin wrote a memo regarding this trip for Holbrooke. That afternoon the two sat next to each other on the US Air shuttle back to New York. Holbrooke read the memo, then turned to Rubin and said: “If this thing works, it may be the only way we will get out.” That was the beginning of a two-year campaign to sell the idea of talking to the Taliban to Washington: first to Secretary Clinton, then to the White House and President Obama.
Reconciliation meant a peace deal between Karzai and the Taliban that would end the insurgency and allow American troops to go home. The military had opposed the idea from the outset. The Pentagon thought that talking to the Taliban—and even talking about talking to the Taliban—was a form of capitulation to terrorism. The CIA, too, was not enthusiastic, believing that the Taliban were not ready to talk. Reconciliation, for them, was a Pakistani ploy to slow down the American offensive in Afghanistan and reduce American pressure on Pakistan.
Those attitudes scared the White House, ever afraid that the young Democratic president would be seen as “soft.” The White House did not want to try anything new, nothing as audacious as diplomacy. It was an art lost on America’s top decision makers in the White House. They had no experience with it and were daunted by the idea of it.
While running for president Obama promised a new chapter in American foreign policy, especially when it came to managing thorny issues in the Muslim world. America would move away from Bush’s militarized foreign policy and take engagement and diplomacy seriously. Talking and extending a hand would be his priority. But when it came down to brass tacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hillary Clinton was the lone voice making the case for diplomacy. The White House had decided early on to walk in lockstep with the military. Clinton elevated the State Department’s profile, but without the White House’s backing its influence was no match for that of the Pentagon and CIA.
During the 2009 strategic review Clinton held her cards close to her chest. In the many meetings I attended with her on various aspects of the war she asked a lot of questions, and on one occasion said she did not believe in cut and run. So it was not a surprise that in the end she supported sending more troops to Afghanistan. However, she was not on board with the deadline Obama imposed on the surge, nor was she for hasty troop withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clinton thought those decisions looked a lot like cut and run and would damage America’s standing in the world. Add this to where she came out on a host of other national security issues, including pushing Obama to go ahead with the Abbottabad operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and breaking with the Pentagon to advocate using American air power in Libya, and it is safe to say she was, and remains, tough on national security issues.