Читать книгу War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence - Ronan Farrow, Ronan Farrow - Страница 11

SHORTLY AFTER RICHARD HOLBROOKE left behind the wreckage of Vietnam and resigned from the Nixon administration, Robin Raphel departed Cambridge and returned to Iran, taking a job teaching history at Damavand College for women. Before the fall of the shah, Tehran was cosmopolitan and welcoming. Raphel danced and acted in US-backed theater productions, including one of Anything Goes. She fell in love with a handsome, funny Foreign Service officer, Arnold Raphel; “Arnie,” to friends. In 1972, they married on the grounds of the American embassy in an interfaith ceremony bringing together his Judaism, her Christianity, and a lot of 1970s velvet.

When he was posted to Pakistan in 1975, Raphel went with him. Pakistan didn’t faze her any more than Iran had. Islamabad was a sleepy town, lush and green, with a third of its current population. “It was great,” Raphel recalled, lighting up at the memory. “It was up and coming.” She joined the Foreign Service and took a job at USAID. The young American couple cut a glamorous profile, throwing cocktail parties and hosting screenings of American movies. She slipped effortlessly into Pakistani high society, developing a network of connections that would serve—and haunt—her in years to come. For Raphel, like generations of Foreign Service officers before her, advancing American influence was about friendship and conversation. “You need to be engaged and figure out what makes people tick and what motivates them,” she said. “To me that’s blindingly obvious.” She reflected on this for a moment. “But sometimes we forget. And in this post-9/11, more urgent and demanding time, we fell into finger-wagging demanding.”

Just a few years after Raphel’s first, golden days in Islamabad, a transformation swept the region. When the secular, American-backed shah of Iran fell to an Islamist revolution in 1979, it cemented America’s reliance on Pakistan as a military and intelligence partner. The United States had lost important listening stations in Iran used to monitor the Soviets. The CIA approached Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency—the ISI—which agreed to build Pakistani facilities to fill the void.

THE CALL OF ISLAMIC REVOLUTION also sounded from Iran to neighboring Afghanistan, where a Soviet-backed Marxist regime had seized control a year earlier. Under the guidance of the KGB, the Marxists had instituted secular reforms, including mandatory girls’ education. On propaganda posters, women with red babushkas and red lips held open books under Cyrillic screaming: “IF YOU DON’T READ BOOKS, YOU’LL FORGET THE LETTERS.” For conservative Afghans, it was too much. The Afghan army erupted against the communists.

Initially, the Soviets hesitated as the revolt spread. But in Moscow, diplomacy had been sidelined and the KGB’s influence had swelled. KGB chief Yuri Andropov neatly bypassed Soviet diplomats voicing caution. On Christmas Eve, transport planes loaded with Soviet troops landed at Kabul airport. The Carter administration saw the invasion as a chance to embarrass Moscow. Carter green-lit a covert war orchestrated through the United States’ military alliance with Pakistan. “It is essential that Afghanistan’s resistance continues,” National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote. “This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels … To make this possible, we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.”

Pakistan had not been a paragon of virtue in the late 1970s. Its military dictator, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, hanged the civilian leader he had forced out of office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and canceled elections. Pakistan was aggressively pursuing the atom bomb, resisting American calls to stand down. In the name of war with the Soviets, as was the case in the later war on terror, all those concerns were secondary.

Over the course of Reagan’s first term, Congress’s approved funding for the covert war swelled from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Zia insisted that guns purchased with those funds be dispersed entirely on Pakistan’s terms. A Top Secret Presidential Finding at the outset of the war called for the CIA to defer to Pakistan. One Islamabad station chief remembered his orders this way: “Take care of the Pakistanis, and make them do whatever you need them to do.” When Zia visited Reagan, Secretary of State Shultz wrote a memo advising that, “We must remember, without Zia’s support, the Afghan resistance, key to making the Soviets pay a heavy price for their Afghan adventure, is effectively dead.” (When I asked Shultz about his advocacy for the Pakistani regime, he was unapologetic. “Zia and President Reagan, they had a relationship. The whole idea was helping the mujahedeen get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan,” he said, using the Arabic word for Muslim fighters engaged in jihad, like those fighting the Soviets. “And we succeeded.”) And so, as Zia insisted, weapons would be given to Pakistan’s ISI, which would hand-select the mujahedeen who received the spoils. The United States, still stinging from the complexities of managing a proxy war in Vietnam, was happy to leave the details to Pakistan.

AMID THE URGENCY of battle with the Soviets, the partnership’s less pleasant realities were easy to overlook. Pakistani officers sold their CIA-supplied weapons on the black market—once, they even sold them back to the CIA. Pakistan continued to brazenly flaunt its nuclear development. In 1985, the Senate passed the so-called Pressler Amendment, requiring the president to certify, on an annual basis, that Pakistan didn’t possess nukes. The rule was strict: no certification, no assistance. Zia lied to President Reagan about the Pakistani nuclear program. “There is no question that we had an intelligence basis for not certifying from 1987 on,” said one veteran CIA official. But Reagan continued to certify that Pakistan was nonnuclear anyway. Ohio senator John Glenn argued that nuclear proliferation was “a far greater danger to the world than being afraid to cut off the flow of aid to Afghanistan … It’s the short-term versus the long-term.” But he was a rare voice of dissent.

The covert war also required that the Americans turn a blind eye to the brutality of the jihad being armed across the border. The Pakistanis passed the American arms to the most ruthless of the Islamist hard-liners: radicals like Abdul Sayyaf and Burhanuddin Rabbani and Jalaluddin Haqqani, all with strong ties to terrorist networks. One of the ISI’s favored sons was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a vicious fundamentalist who reputedly specialized in skinning captured soldiers alive and whose men indiscriminately murdered civilians. A pugnacious CIA agent named Milt Bearden took over the program in the latter half of the 1980s. By his estimate, the Pakistanis gave nearly a quarter of the American spoils to Hekmatyar. “Hekmatyar was a favorite of the Pakistanis, but he certainly wasn’t a favorite of mine,” he told me. He added flatly: “I really should have shot him when I had the chance.”

International Islamists were attracted like moths to the fires of extremism stoked by the Pakistanis and Americans. A wealthy Saudi patron named Osama bin Laden moved to Pakistan in the mid-1980s and drew close to some of the ISI’s favored jihadis, including Hekmatyar and Sayyaf. He offered cash stipends to fighters from the ISI’s training camps, and eventually established his own, modeled closely after the ISI’s.

And it worked. Within a few years, the CIA declared the covert war cost-effective. The true costs became apparent later.

ROBIN AND ARNOLD RAPHEL had moved to Washington, DC, just before the war with the Soviets broke out and “a lot of stuff went south,” as she would later put it. This was an accurate description of events in both the US-Pakistani relationship and her own. She wanted children; Arnold didn’t. They divorced in the early 1980s. Raphel would have two subsequent marriages, and two daughters. But friends described Arnold as the love of Robin Raphel’s life. One sensed she’d sooner jump out of a window than cop to such sentimentality.

Arnold, still a rising star in the Foreign Service, returned to Pakistan as US ambassador. On a hot afternoon in August 1988, he joined President Zia in a stretch of desert near the provincial city of Bahawalpur for a demonstration of the American Abrams tank—the latest offering to be purchased with Pakistan’s still-ongoing flood of assistance—and then accepted a last-minute invitation to join Zia in his American-made C-130 Hercules, for the commute back to Islamabad. They were joined by Zia’s chief of staff and ISI chief General Akhtar, who had hand-selected the mujahedeen supported by America’s covert war, along with General Herbert M. Wassom, who oversaw US military assistance to Pakistan. Exactly five minutes after they took off, the plane plunged into the desert and exploded into a massive fireball. All thirty souls aboard were dead, including Zia-ul-Haq and Arnold Raphel.

The incident is, to this day, one of the great unsolved mysteries of Pakistani history. Although an American ambassador had been killed and the FBI had statutory authority to investigate, Secretary of State Shultz ordered FBI investigators to stay away. Milt Bearden, likewise, kept the CIA away. The only Americans allowed on the site, seven Air Force investigators, ruled out mechanical failure in a secret report. The only possibility was sabotage. A canister containing VX nerve gas or a similar agent could have wiped out the plane, perhaps. A long-standing conspiracy theory held that nerve gas was secreted in a case of mangoes, loaded onboard before takeoff.

For Pakistan, the crash deepened mistrust of the Americans. General Beg, who seized power afterwards, was as committed as Zia to Pakistan’s nuclear development and support for terrorist proxies—but less friendly to the United States. For Robin Raphel, the tragedy severed her from those early, hopeful days in Tehran. When I asked about losing Arnold, she gave a small, brittle laugh. “It would be difficult for anyone. But life goes on.”

That was the year the last of the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. The CIA station in Islamabad’s cable relating the news read, simply, “we won.” But the lack of broader strategic dialogue between the United States and Pakistan hit hard and fast once the Red Menace subsided.

FOUR MONTHS LATER, when Pakistan’s new prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, made her first official trip to the United States, the cracks were already beginning to show. Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the prime minister over whose hanging Zia had presided, had returned to Pakistan after years of exile. Harvard-educated and just thirty-five years old, she cut a glamorous profile. Wearing a white headscarf, a gold and pink salwar kameez, and literally rose-colored aviator glasses, she stood in front of the American flag at a joint session of Congress and quoted Lincoln, Madison, and Kennedy. “Speaking for Pakistan, I can declare that we do not possess nor do we intend to make a nuclear device,” she said emphatically.

But days beforehand, Bhutto had sat at Blair House, kitty-corner from the White House, and received an alarming briefing from CIA director William H. Webster. According to one person who was present that day, Webster walked in with a soccer ball converted into a mock-up of the kind of nuclear prototype he now knew Pakistan possessed. Webster told Bhutto that if her country continued the process of converting its gaseous uranium into solid “pits”—the cores of atom bombs—there was no way President Bush could certify that Pakistan was non-nuclear later that year. Before the end of the month, the jig was up. The CIA had irrefutable evidence that Pakistan had machined its uranium into several cores. In 1990, just a year after the Soviets’ departure from Afghanistan, George H. W. Bush became the first president to decline to certify that Pakistan remained nonnuclear. Under the terms of the Pressler Amendment, most economic and military assistance was suspended, and F-16 fighter jets ordered and paid for by Pakistan were left to collect dust in Arizona for years. To this day, the F-16s are a point of obsession for every Pakistani military official I’ve met. They symbolize a betrayal America quickly forgot—and Pakistan never did.

When the military relationship came screeching to a halt, there was little by way of meaningful diplomatic context to soften the blow. Even Milt Bearden, maestro of mujahedeen chaos, lamented the lack of dialogue: “The relationship was always shallow,” he remembered. “When the Soviets marched out of Afghanistan in February 1989, within the next year we had sanctioned them and cut off military contacts.” It set the tenor for the relationship in the following decade, with Pakistan in the role of jilted lover. “They love to love us,” reflected Bearden, “but they really deeply believe that every time the chips are down, we screw ’em.”

Absent the urgency of a proxy war, the American foreign policy establishment turned on Pakistan. The country’s support for militant Islam, once a convenience, was now a liability. When the Soviets left, the ISI attempted to install Hekmatyar, its favored extremist, into power. But after he lost a bloody fight for Kabul, the Pakistanis turned to a different solution, arming and funding another conservative movement they hoped would serve as a counterbalance to their regional rival, India: the “students of Islam,” or Taliban.

Stories of the Taliban’s hard-line social policies and brutal repression of women began to reach the Western world. Incoming secretary of state Madeleine Albright was among the ranks of establishment figures who began to rally against the regime for its deepening repression. (“I do not regret not dealing with the Taliban,” she said years later. “I am willing, however, to admit that it was very complex in terms of who really was in charge.”) That outrage gathered steam as the threat of the terrorists Taliban leaders were harboring became apparent. The 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa, and the revelation that their orchestrator, Osama bin Laden, had close ties to the Taliban, sealed the regime’s status as an international pariah. Pakistan, as the Taliban’s benefactor, shared in that reputation.

ROBIN RAPHEL WAS a lone voice of dissent. When Bill Clinton took office as president in 1993, he had tapped Raphel, his old friend from England, to become assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. As relations between Washington and Islamabad chilled over the course of the 1990s, Raphel was a stalwart advocate for the country where she had formed so many relationships earlier in her career. When a senator named Hank Brown introduced legislation to ease restrictions on assistance to Pakistan, she worked with Pakistani diplomats for months lobbying for the bill. Its passage, in 1995, cleared the way for arms exports to Pakistan, despite the country’s growing nuclear arsenal. Raphel was also an ardent defender of Benazir Bhutto, who returned to power during Raphel’s first year as assistant secretary, and who was covertly authorizing assistance to the Taliban—while lying about it to the Americans. Raphel told me she went into the relationship with eyes open. “I didn’t believe Bhutto. I felt we needed to be talking to everyone.” Nevertheless, she argued against sanctions and helped secure assistance for Pakistan.

Raphel also campaigned for talks with Taliban leaders. A cable summarizing one of her visits to Kabul in 1996 conveyed a rosy view of the regime, quoting one leader who told Raphel, “We are not bad people,” and optimistically describing the Taliban’s “growing awareness, previously absent, of their own limitations.” Shortly after the Taliban took control of Kabul that year, Raphel called on other countries to embrace the regime at a closed-door session at the United Nations. “They are Afghan, they are indigenous, they have demonstrated staying power,” she said. “It is not in the interests of Afghanistan or any of us here that the Taliban be isolated.” As one veteran Pakistani diplomat who worked with Raphel for many years put it: “If Robin had lasted another year as assistant secretary, there would be a Taliban embassy in Washington, DC.”

Raphel, with her fringe embrace of the Pakistanis and the Taliban, aroused suspicion, both in Washington and in the region. This was the point at which the Indian press began tarring her as “Lady Taliban,” a moniker that would stick for decades. “It was silly,” she said. “Because I did go and talk to these people. That was my job. But, because I wasn’t horrified and didn’t want to treat them like pariahs … people found it absolutely shocking that I thought it was perfectly normal to talk to them.” She sighed. “It was a mistake to demonize the Taliban. That might well have contributed to how they got totally out of hand. Nobody would listen to them … we blew them off and thought they were complete Neanderthal ragheads.” It was, in her view, the worst kind of mistake: “emotionally driven.”

Many in the foreign policy establishment later embraced those same arguments for talking to the Taliban, including Richard Holbrooke. Did Raphel have any regrets about her more isolating and controversial positions, I asked? “No,” she told me, with a laugh. “I was ahead of my time!”

At the height of Raphel’s efforts to warm relations with Pakistan in 1995, an aide from then–Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott’s team knocked on her office door and told her about a troubling development. While surveilling Pakistani officials, intelligence agents had picked up what they took to be an illicit exchange. Raphel, they claimed, was leaking classified information to the Pakistanis, revealing the sensitive details of American intelligence on their nuclear program. Raphel was shaken. She met with the State Department’s internal police, the Diplomatic Security Service, whose agents grilled her. Their investigation came up empty. Raphel wasn’t cited for any infraction, and the matter was quickly forgotten—though, it would later come to pass, not for good.

RAPHEL ROTATED THROUGH several other roles, serving as ambassador in Tunisia, and vice president of the National Defense University, and coordinating assistance in the early days of the Iraq War. But her story always arced back to Pakistan. When she left Iraq, tired, in 2005, she joined Cassidy & Associates, the glossy K-Street lobbying firm whose client list included the Egyptian intelligence services, and, on occasion, Pakistan. During Raphel’s time there, the firm had two Pakistani contracts, prompting the press—especially the Indian press—to call her a “Pakistan lobbyist.” (“Lobbyist who tormented New Delhi in the 1990s,” screamed the Times of India. “Brazenly pro-Pakistan partisan in Washington.”) Raphel laughed at this, saying she only worked on one contract “for three weeks” before the deal was canceled when Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf suspended the country’s constitution in November 2007.

At a cocktail party in 2009, Raphel ran into fellow career Foreign Service officer and then-sitting US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson. Patterson was a small, steely woman from Fort Smith, Arkansas, who spoke in a quiet Southern drawl and didn’t mince words. She was a diplomat in the classic tradition, with decades of service from Latin America to the Middle East. In Pakistan, she was confronting a new era in one of the world’s most difficult relationships—an era in which Pakistan had once again become essential to the United States. But Americans with deep contacts within Pakistani society were hard to come by. In the modern era, tough posts like Pakistan had become in-and-out assignments for junior officers looking to check a box and get a year or two of hazard pay (a 30 percent premium in Islamabad at the time). Someone with Raphel’s grasp of the Gordian knot of Pakistani politics could be indispensable. Patterson asked Raphel if she’d come back for one more assignment, helping to manage assistance in Islamabad.

Raphel had turned sixty-one by then. She’d been married three times—most recently to a British diplomat, a union that lasted just a few years and ended in 2004. She’d raised her two college-age daughters, Anna and Alexandra, mostly by herself. Lobbying had given her a chance to spend more time with them, and with her friends. But her mind, one sensed, was quick to turn back to public service.

She told Anne Patterson that she’d think about it.