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THE POWER WENT OUT, as it often did in Islamabad, and the room went dark. But the laptop had juice, so the human rights activist I had come to see swung the screen around and told me to watch. A video flickered on screen. It was shaky, surreptitiously captured from a distance. Six young men stumbled through a wooded area, blindfolded, hands bound behind their backs. In typical civilian kurtas, they did not look like fighters. Soldiers in Pakistani Army uniforms led the young men to a clearing and lined them up against a stonework wall.

An older, bearded officer, a commander perhaps, approached the young men, one by one. “Do you know the Kalimas?” he asked, referring to the Islamic religious phrases sometimes uttered before death. He rejoined more than half a dozen soldiers at the other end of the clearing. They were lining up in the style of an execution squad. “One by one, or together?” asked one. “Together,” said the commander. The soldiers raised their rifles—G3s, standard issue equipment in the Pakistani military—took aim, and fired.

The men crumpled to the ground. Several survived, wailing and writhing on the ground. A soldier approached and fired into each body, silencing the men one by one.

For a moment after the video ended, no one said anything. Street traffic rattled through a nearby window. Finally, the human rights activist asked: “What will you do now?”

THE VIDEO WAS SHOCKING, but its existence was no surprise. It was 2010 in Pakistan, home to America’s most important counterterrorism partnership. Al-Qaeda’s leadership had fled American military operations in Afghanistan, evaporating into the thin mountain air of Pakistan’s untamed border country. This was the heart of the war on terror and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. As a rookie recruit to the State Department’s Afghanistan and Pakistan team, charged with talking to development and human rights groups, I found that diplomacy in the region had a quality of pantomime. Every conversation, whether about building dams or reforming education, was in fact about counterterrorism: keeping Pakistan happy enough to join the fight and allow our supplies to pass through its borders to American troops in Afghanistan. But often, the Pakistanis were unwilling (according to the Americans) or unable (by their own account) to move against their country’s terrorist strongholds.

The previous fall, there had been a rare success—Pakistani forces had staged an offensive in the rural Swat valley, seizing control and capturing Taliban militants. But it wasn’t long before rumors began to circulate about what exactly that success had entailed. Public reports were emerging of a new wave of executions in the wake of military operations in Swat. By that summer, Human Rights Watch had investigated 238 alleged executions and found at least 50 were heavily corroborated. As with everything in government, the executions even had an acronym: EJK, for “extrajudicial killings.” The issue was complex. In rural Pakistan, courtrooms and prisons were more the stuff of aspiration than reality. Some Pakistani military units viewed summary executions as the only practical way of dealing with extremists they apprehended. But the tactic was also proving useful in disposing of a growing number of dissidents, lawyers, and journalists. Pakistani military personnel, when they could be enticed to acknowledge the issue at all, bitterly pointed out that the United States pressed them to target some bad guys, then complained when they took out others.

The killings were a point of extraordinary sensitivity in the relationship between Pakistan and the United States. For the Pakistanis, they were an embarrassment. For the Americans, they were a fly in the ointment. American taxpayers had bankrolled Pakistan to the tune of $19.7 billion in military and civilian assistance since September 11, 2001. Revelations about the murders raised the specter of unwanted scrutiny.

Inside the State Department, I circulated news of the video, and of mounting calls for a response from human rights watchdogs. The results were Kafkaesque. Officials set to work quashing meetings with the groups behind the reporting. When they acquiesced to a single briefing, in Washington, with Human Rights Watch, it was with the understanding that we would allow no questions of the US government, and that our comments be limited to “very general press guidance.” A career bureaucrat with a prim demeanor and a vacant smile responded to my emails on the subject with a cheerful suggestion:

Sent: Monday, March 08, 2010 4:43 PM

Subject: RE: Extrajudicial Executions/HRW Meeting Request

One suggestion: rather than specifically referencing the term EJK, we’ve been trying to work these issues under the umbrella of “gross violations of human rights” (statutory language lifted from Leahy provisions). One advantage of using the Leahy phrasing is that it covers the broad swath of abuses (including EJK) of concern to the USG; another is that it encompasses abuses committed by insurgents as well as those attributed to government forces and agencies. The bonus is that it helps to insulate “open source” meetings from the sensitive policy discussions on the high side.

Just a semantic twist in service of diplomacy.

The statute she was referring to—named after its sponsor, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont—banned giving American assistance to foreign military units committing atrocities. I forwarded the exchange to a colleague. “Oh boy, how Rwanda-press-conferences-circa-1994 is this!?”, I wrote, referring to the “semantic twists” US officials undertook to avoid using the word “genocide” in the midst of that crisis.

Several months later, I pushed a dossier across a conference table toward Melanne Verveer, Hillary Clinton’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. We were both visiting Islamabad and she’d asked what human rights groups were saying. I printed up some of the reporting—nothing classified, just open-source documents. All the same, I stuck to euphemisms.

“There’s a spike in … gross violations of human rights.”

“And when you say, ‘gross violations’? …” she said, flipping through the file.

“Executions.”

It was June, Islamabad’s hottest month of the year, and the air felt close in the cramped room at the American embassy in Pakistan. Across the table from the two of us, a diplomat stationed at the embassy glared at me. She’d shot me a warning look when the topic came up. Now her lips were pursed, her eyes boring into me. On the table in front of her, her knuckles were marble-white. Ambassador Robin Raphel, the career Foreign Service officer who was overseeing a spike in American assistance to Pakistan that year, was furious.

LATER THAT WEEK, embassy staff and locals gathered outside the American ambassador’s residence in Islamabad’s secure “red zone.” Nestled at the foot of the densely forested Margalla Hills, the city’s wide avenues are lined with eucalyptus and pine trees. By that June in 2010, its parks and lawns were an explosion of white gladiolus and purple amaranthus. At night, the posh districts hummed with intellectual energy. As the war raged nearby, an international set of diplomats, reporters, and aid workers met for golden-haloed cocktail parties, exchanging whispers of palace intrigue.

Robin Raphel had been a fixture at such parties for years, since she began working in Pakistan decades earlier. To many locals, she was simply “Robin.”

That night at the ambassador’s residence, she was in her element, holding forth for a clutch of party-goers. With high cheekbones and ramrod-straight posture, she had an aristocratic quality, her blond hair pulled into a tight French twist. She spoke with a locked jaw and the clipped, mid-Atlantic cadence of a 1940s movie star. Tossed over one shoulder, she wore, as she so often did, an embroidered pashmina shawl that made her dress suit resemble the flowing salwar kameez of the local women.

Since that day in the conference room, Raphel had done her utmost to kneecap the junior diplomat who had responded to the question about human rights. When she couldn’t keep me out of meetings, she would cut me off in them, with relish. That night at the party she made little secret of her disapproval. “How dare you bring up—” here she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “—EJK in a meeting at this embassy.” Her lip quivered. “You are not of value on that issue.”

I wondered how much she was frustrated by my criticism of America’s role in Pakistan and how much she just found me personally annoying. I explained, trying to stay deferential, that the State Department had adopted a policy of acknowledging the human rights reporting, even if we didn’t confirm it. “Well, that may be the case in DC,” she sniffed. She fingered the loop of pearls at her neck. “This isn’t DC. And we do not discuss that issue here.”

It would be three years before the gutting of Mahogany Row, but in national security hot spots like this, you could see the power slipping away from diplomats in real time. Pakistan was the perfect illustration of the trend: for decades, the Pentagon and the CIA had bypassed the United States’ civilian foreign policy systems to do business directly with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders. In the years since September 11, 2001, they’d gained more freedom than ever to do so. Standing in the warm Islamabad summer, I wondered at Robin Raphel, so keen to avoid tough questions about a foreign military and its entanglements with our own. What did she understand her role to be, at a time in which so much of that role was being carved away and carted off? When nineteenth-century pundits suggested quarantining diplomats, lest they bring back mixed allegiances, was this what they meant? Was this something old or something new?

FOR DECADES, ROBIN RAPHEL embodied a tradition of old-school diplomacy. Born Robin Lynn Johnson, she grew up in a sleepy lumber town in Washington State, tearing through the National Geographic magazines her father collected and dreaming of the wider world. At Mark Morris High, she was voted “most likely to succeed.” “She seemed to have a worldly sense about her,” remembered one classmate. In college, she’d leapt at opportunities to travel, spending a summer in Tehran with a church group, before heading to a junior year abroad at the University of London.

“Are you still religious?” I once asked her. She snorted derisively. This seemed an absurd question to her. “What do you mean, ‘am I still religious’?” she snapped. When pressed, she waved a hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t say one way or another.” If Robin Raphel had time for spirituality, she didn’t have time to share it with me. She was all flinty pragmatism. She prided herself on it.

After college, she spent a year studying at Cambridge and found a dazzling set of fellow Americans with their own international dreams and yearbook superlatives. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and the dorms of Oxford and Cambridge filled with debate about an American proxy war gone wrong. There were eerie parallels to another war that would, decades later, have a cataclysmic impact on Robin Raphel’s life: another new administration faced with a fatigued public, an uncooperative partner force, and an elusive insurgency with safe havens across a tactically challenging border.

Raphel, then still Johnson, started dating a young Rhodes Scholar and fellow University of Washington graduate, Frank Aller, and befriended his roommates: Strobe Talbott, who would go on to become a journalist and deputy secretary of state, and an aspiring politician named Bill Clinton. In their modest house at 46 Leckford Road in North Oxford, the friends spent hours agonizing over the threat of the draft. Clinton and Aller were both classified as “1-A”—available to be drafted—and both opposed the war. Clinton considered various strategies for avoiding the draft but ultimately decided against them, as he put it, “to maintain my political viability within the system.” Aller, on the other hand, stayed in England, on the run from the draft and agonized by the resulting stigma. A year later, he went home to Spokane, put a .22-caliber Smith & Wesson in his mouth, and blew his brains out.

I asked Raphel how Aller’s death, so soon after they dated, affected her. “Oh,” she said, as if I’d asked her about a fender bender. “I was very upset, needless to say!” She paused, realizing how she’d sounded. “As you’ve no doubt noticed, I’m passionate about being dispassionate.” Robin Raphel wasn’t about to let emotion be an obstacle to the life on the world stage she was, even then, beginning to craft. In the following years, her path would wind from Tehran to Islamabad to Tunisia.

OVER THE COURSE of that journey, Raphel’s critics would not share her dispassion. By the end of her career, she would be called a traitor, a turncoat, and a terrorist sympathizer. In the Indian press, she was called, with delight, “Lady Taliban.” The astonishing nadir would come during the Obama administration. Four years after our run-in in Islamabad, Raphel arrived at her desk on the first floor of the State Department, in a sea of cubicles not far from the cafeteria. She checked her email and took a few routine meetings. It was early afternoon when she saw the missed calls. The first was from Slomin’s Home Security; someone had been trying to get into Raphel’s house. The next call was from her daughter Alexandra, who was panicked. Raphel had to get home immediately, Alexandra said. Raphel got into her Ford Focus and drove the twenty-minute route to her home in Northwest Washington, DC.

What she arrived, she saw a dozen FBI agents crawling over her modest two-story Cape Cod–style house. Two earnest-looking agents in plainclothes approached her and showed her their badges. Next they handed her a warrant.

It specified that Robin Raphel was being investigated under 18 U.S.C. Section 793(e), a criminal statute that covers the illegal gathering or transmission of national security information:

Espionage.