Holbrooke was a brilliant strategic thinker in the same league as such giants of American diplomacy as Averell Harriman and Henry Kissinger. He looked at a problem from every angle and then planned how best to tackle it. He knew what bureaucrats would say, how politicians would react, what headline would lead in the media, what the public reaction would be, and how history would render its judgment. He was a doer; that was his ambition—to do, not to be.
Holbrooke held fast to American values. He was an idealist in the garb of a pragmatic operator. I never ceased to be astounded by his energy and drive; he was tireless in pursuit of his goals and relentless in standing up for American interests and values. In the words of his close friend and veteran diplomat Strobe Talbott, he was the “unquiet American,” who believed that America was a force for good in the world.1
Fixing America’s broken foreign policy and correcting its jaded view of the Muslim world were the most important foreign policy tasks before the new president. Holbrooke told me that government is the sum of its people. “If you want to change things, you have to get involved. If you want your voice to be heard, then get inside.” He was telling me to “put your money where your mouth is.” He knew I preferred to work on the Middle East, and in particular on Iran. But he had different ideas. “This [Afghanistan and Pakistan] matters more. This is what the president is focused on. This is where you want to be.”
Holbrooke was persuasive, and I knew deep down that we were at a fork in the road. Regardless of what promises candidate Obama made on his way to the White House, Afghanistan now held the future, his and America’s, in the balance. Holbrooke was seeing clearly into the future, well beyond where the rest of the administration was looking.
The first months in the office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP) were a period of creativity and hope. Holbrooke had carved out a little autonomous principality on the first floor of the State Department, filling it with young diplomats, civil servants, and outside experts. Daily, scholars, journalists, foreign ambassadors and dignitaries, members of Congress, and administration officials walked in to get their fill of how “AfPak” strategy was shaping up. Even Hollywood got in on SRAP. Angelina Jolie lent a hand to help refugees in Pakistan, and the usually low-key State Department cafeteria was abuzz when Holbrooke sat down for coffee with Natalie Portman to talk Afghanistan.
SRAP was an experiment in what Holbrooke called the “whole of government approach to solving big problems,” by which he meant doing the job of the government inside the government but despite the government—an idea that for obvious reasons did not sit well with the bureaucracy.
But Secretary Clinton liked the idea and embraced SRAP. Had she become president she would have likely given Holbrooke the same kind of broad purview in the White House or as secretary of state. Rumor had it that she favored Holbrooke as her deputy secretary of state, but the White House said no. Creating a new office that cut across government agencies to formulate effective policy was the next-best option. The office worked very closely with her during my two years there. We met with her frequently, briefed her on the latest developments or what we were planning, got her input, and wrote memos and white papers that represented the State Department’s position in White House debates. She came to rely on SRAP, trust its judgment, and appreciate its work—SRAP came through for the State Department time and again at critical junctures. Clinton spent more time with SRAP than with any other bureau in the State Department, getting to know more of its people well.
The idea of coordinating AfPak policies across government was also popular around the world. At a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Finland’s foreign minister teased Holbrooke, telling him, “Nowadays everywhere I go someone comes up to me and introduces himself as ‘some country’s Holbrooke.’ ” And soon there were many such Holbrooke equivalents, some three dozen by the time Holbrooke died. He started getting them together regularly, every six months, for consultations and to coordinate their activities—it was key to managing allies around the world. Hamid Karzai was impressed with the concept, and told Holbrooke that every Muslim country he could bring on board was worth ten NATO ones. And so soon there were Holbrooke counterparts in several Muslim countries. He did not live to attend a gathering of his counterparts in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the spring of 2011, hosted by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
SRAP was then full of energy and ideas. It had an entrepreneurial spirit, a bounce in its step. People started early and worked late into the night, making sure the trains ran on time, so to speak, but also to develop new ideas like how to cut corruption and absenteeism among the Afghan police by using mobile banking and cell phones to pay salaries; or how to use text messaging to raise money to help refugees in Pakistan; or how to stop the Taliban from shutting down cellular phone networks (which they did every night) by putting cell towers on military bases. Many of these ideas were eventually used to address problems in other areas of the world. SRAP then felt more like an Internet start-up than the buttoned-up State Department.
Holbrooke encouraged the creative chaos. Soon after I joined the office he told me, “I want you to learn nothing from government. This place is dead intellectually. It does not produce any ideas; it is all about turf battles and checking the box. Your job is to break through all this. Anyone gives you trouble, come to me.” His constant refrain was “Don’t get broken down by government routine, forget about hierarchy; this is a team. You are as good as the job SRAP does.” On his first visit to SRAP, General David Petraeus, then commander of CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command), mused, “This is the flattest organization I have ever seen. I guess it works for you.”
Holbrooke knew then that Afghanistan was not going to be easy. There were too many players and too many unknowns, and Obama had not given him enough authority (and would give him almost no support) to get the job done. It is an open secret that, oddly enough, after he took office, the president never met with Holbrooke outside large meetings, never gave him time and heard him out. The president’s advisers in the White House were dead set against Holbrooke. Some, like General Douglas Lute, were holdovers from the Bush era who thought they knew Afghanistan better and did not want to relinquish control to Holbrooke. Others (those closest to the president) wanted to settle scores for Holbrooke’s tenacious support for Hillary Clinton (who was herself eyed with suspicion by the Obama insiders) during the campaign; and still others begrudged Holbrooke’s storied past and wanted to end his run of successes then and there. There were times when it appeared that the White House was more interested in bringing Holbrooke down than getting the policy right. The sight of the White House undermining its own special representative hardly inspired confidence in Kabul or Islamabad.
But still Holbrooke kept attacking the problem the president had assigned him from all angles. It was as if he was trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube; to get all its colored rows and columns into perfect order. In his mind he was constantly turning the cube, trying to bring into alignment what Congress, the military, the media, the Afghan government, and our allies wanted and how politicians, generals, and bureaucrats were likely to react. Just before he died, in December 2010, he told his wife, Kati Marton, that he thought he had finally got it; he had found a way out that might just work. But he wouldn’t say what he had come up with, “not until he told the president first”—the president who did not have time to listen.