War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence

“I remember Colin Powell once said that there was a reason the occupation of Japan was not carried out by a Foreign Service officer but by a general,” Rice remembered. “In those circumstances, you have to tilt more to the Pentagon.” But just as the occupation of Japan being carried out by a Foreign Service officer registered as an absurdity, the negotiation of treaties and reconstruction of economies being carried out by uniformed officers was a contradiction, and one with a dubious track record.

THE POINT IS NOT that the old institutions of traditional diplomacy can solve today’s crises. The point is that we are witnessing the destruction of those institutions, with little thought to engineering modern replacements. Past secretaries of state diverged on how to solve the problem of America’s crumbling diplomatic enterprise. Kissinger, ever the hawk, acknowledged the decline of the State Department but greeted it with a shrug. “I’m certainly uncomfortable with the fact that one can walk through the State Department now and find so many offices empty,” he said. Kissinger was ninety-four when we spoke. He slouched on a royal blue couch in his New York office, staring at me from under a brow creased with worry lines. He appeared to regard the problems of the present from immense distance. Even his voice, that deep Bavarian rasp, seemed to echo across the decades, as if recorded in Nixon’s Oval Office. “It is true that the State Department is inadequately staffed. It is true that the State Department has not been given what it thought was its due. But that is partly due to the fact that new institutions have arisen.” But by the time I interviewed Kissinger, during the Trump administration, there were no new institutions emerging to take the place of the kind of thoughtful, holistic foreign policy analysis, unshackled from military exigencies, that diplomacy had once provided America.

Hillary Clinton, sounding weary about a year after she lost her 2016 presidential campaign, told me she’d seen that shift coming for years. When she took office as secretary of state at the beginning of the Obama administration, “I began calling leaders around the world who I had known in my previous lives as a senator and a first lady, and so many of them were distressed by what they saw as the militarization of foreign policy in the Bush administration and the very narrow focus on the important issues of terrorism and of course the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think now the balance has tipped even further toward militarization across the board on every kind of issue,” she said. “Diplomacy,” she added, expressing a common sentiment among former secretaries of state, both Republican and Democrat, “is under the gun.”

These are not problems of principle. The changes described here are, in real time, producing results that make the world less safe and prosperous. Already, they have plunged the United States deeper into military engagements that might have been avoided. Already, they have exacted a heavy cost in American lives and influence around the world. What follows is an account of a crisis. It tells the story of a life-saving discipline torn apart by political cowardice. It describes my own years as a State Department official in Afghanistan and elsewhere, watching the decline play out, with disastrous results for America, and in the lives of the last, great defenders of the profession. And it looks to modern alliances in every corner of the earth, forged by soldiers and spies, and to the costs of those relationships for the United States.

In short, this is the story of a transformation in the role of the United States among the nations of our world—and of the outmatched public servants inside creaking institutions desperately striving to keep an alternative alive.

PART I

THE LAST DIPLOMATS

PAKISTAN, 2010

If you ain’t speakin’ money language I can’t hang

You know your conversation is weak, so it’s senseless to speak

—DR. DRE, EVERYDAY THING (WITH NAS AND NATURE)

1

AMERICAN MYTHS

THE DIPLOMAT WAS NOT always an endangered species. Those who hold the profession in reverence point out that it once flourished, upheld by larger-than-life, world-striding figures whose accomplishments still form the bedrock of the modern international order. Stories of diplomacy are a part of the American creation myth. Without Benjamin Franklin’s negotiations with the French, there would have been no Treaty of Alliance and no naval support to secure American independence. Without Franklin, John Adams and John Jay brokering the Treaty of Paris, there would have been no formal end to war with the British. Had Adams, a Massachusetts Yankee of modest upbringing, not traveled to England and presented his credentials as our first diplomat in the Court of King George III, the new United States might have never stabilized relations with the British after the war. Even in the nineteenth century, when diplomats barely made living wages and Congress saddled the State Department with a slew of domestic responsibilities from maintaining the mint to notarizing official documents, the Department defined the modern map of the United States, brokering the Louisiana Purchase and settling disputes with Britain over the border with Canada. Even after the First World War, as the nation turned inward and grappled with the Great Depression, American secretaries of state orchestrated the Washington Naval Conference on disarmament and the Pact of Paris, renouncing war—forging bonds that were later integral in rallying the allies against the Axis powers.

American politicians have forever exploited a vein of nationalism and isolationism against the work of foreign policy. One late nineteenth-century congressman accused diplomats of “working our ruin by creating a desire for foreign customs and foreign follies. The disease is imported by our returning diplomats and by the foreign ambassadors sent here by monarchs and despots to corrupt and destroy our American ideals.” He suggested confining diplomats on their return from assignments, “as we quarantine foreign rags through fear of cholera.” But great diplomatic accomplishments always cut through that hostility.

This was never more true than during World War II, when the Department adapted to the challenges of the day and gave rise to the most fruitful period of diplomatic accomplishment in American history. The State Department faced an existential crisis then not unlike the one that unraveled in 2017. “The American nation desperately needs and desperately lacks an adequate State Department at this hour of the shaping of its future,” screamed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1943 copy that would splice neatly into coverage of Trump’s secretaries of state generations later. But the response was a world apart: Between 1940 and 1945, the Department modernized and reformed. It tripled its workforce and doubled its budget. It restructured, creating offices to address long-term planning, postwar reconstruction and public information in an age of fast-changing mass media.

That modernized State Department, led by a new generation of hard-charging diplomats, shaped a new international order. Those years saw the forging of a great wartime alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom, brokered by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The same era brought about the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, negotiated between the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan. It produced the “containment” doctrine that came to define US engagement with the Soviets for decades to come. Among the prominent architects of this era were six friends, later celebrated as “the Wise Men.” Two, George Kennan and Charles Bohlen, were members of the Foreign Service, the, at the time, newly formed professional organization for diplomats. In the postwar years, the Wise Men guided President Truman to what would become the Truman Doctrine, committing the United States to support other nations against the Soviets and to the massive Marshall Plan for international assistance to those nations. The same timeframe yielded the creation of NATO, championed by another member of a rejuvenated State Department, Under Secretary Robert Lovett.

The era of the Wise Men was far from perfect. Some of their most celebrated ideas were also fonts of blunder and misery. Despite Kennan’s warnings, for example, containment was appropriated as a rationale for the military escalation and conflict that came to define the Cold War. “As much as I love reading Present at the Creation,” John Kerry said of Dean Acheson’s densely detailed 800-page memoir of his time at the State Department, “Maybe history and some distance tells us that Acheson and Dulles made some mistakes out of a certainty and a view of the world that we paid for a long time, certainly in some places? In my generation, Richard Holbrooke and I both knew that the supposed best and the brightest got plenty of our friends killed in Vietnam.”

But the Wise Men had undeniable success and staying power in stabilizing the world. And diplomats of their stature, and the kind of old-school diplomacy they practiced, seem harder to find today than seventy years ago, or fifty, or twenty. “Is it the person or the role or the times?” Kerry wondered. “I see some really first-rate diplomats who have done great work … Maybe we just don’t celebrate people in government and at State the way we once did?”

Henry Kissinger argued that a broader shift had taken place: that something had changed not simply in the State Department and its relative bureaucratic influence, but in the philosophy of the American people. It was not lost on me that I was sitting across from someone with a more complicated legacy than even the Wise Men: regarded in some circles as an exemplar of the ferocious diplomat, and in others as a war criminal for his bombing of Cambodia. (It wasn’t lost on him either: he attempted to end our interview when I approached subjects of controversy.) This may have been why Kissinger tended towards the general and the philosophical. Tactics, he felt, had triumphed over strategy, and fast reaction over historicized decision-making. “The United States is eternally preoccupied with solving whatever problems emerge at the moment,” Kissinger said. “We have an inadequate number of experienced people in the conduct of foreign policy but even more importantly, an inadequate number of people who can think of foreign policy as a historical process.”

That was how the last standard bearers of the diplomatic profession found themselves, increasingly, at odds with administrations seeking political expedience and military efficiency. Kissinger pointed to the confrontation between the Obama administration and its representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke: a struggle to be heard in a policy process overtaken by generals, and to apply the lessons of Vietnam in an administration fixated on innovation. “They wanted to start something new, and he wanted to apply lessons from the past,” Kissinger said of Holbrooke. Similar battles were lost by other diplomats before, and more have been lost since. But the story of Richard Holbrooke, and the disintegration of his last mission, and the devastating effect that had on the lives of the diplomats around him, provide a window into what was lost when we turned away from a profession that once saved us. “It’s one great American myth,” Kissinger added, speaking slowly, “that you can always try something new.”

2

LADY TALIBAN

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.