Holbrooke dissented, loudly. During his time in the provinces, he once argued openly with General William Westmoreland, the commander of US forces in Vietnam.
“How old are you?” Westmoreland finally asked, exasperated.
“Twenty-four.”
“What makes you think you know so much?”
“I don’t know,” said Holbrooke, “but I’ve been here two years and I’ve spent all of the time in the field.”
Westmoreland was reporting back to Washington his conviction that he could break the insurgency through increasing levels of force. As Holbrooke ascended to positions at the White House and State Department, he sent vigorous, often unsolicited memos to his bosses. “I have never seen the Americans in such disarray,” he wrote in one when he was just twenty-six. Forty years later, when I was working for him as the military pushed for a troop surge in Afghanistan, Holbrooke unearthed the memo and had me forward it to his Vietnam buddies.
When the Department of Defense launched the top-secret review of Vietnam eventually known as the Pentagon Papers, an official named Leslie Gelb, who went on to become the head of the Council on Foreign Relations and a lifelong friend to Holbrooke, tapped the iconoclastic young diplomat to write one volume. Holbrooke’s contributions were scathing. The counterinsurgency was “faultily conceived and clumsily executed.” The hawks, he argued, had dangerously commandeered policymaking.
When the legendary diplomat Averell Harriman headed a delegation to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, Holbrooke numbed his bosses into submission hustling for a spot on the team. He believed in the power of negotiation to end the war. “Holbrooke wants to always talk with the other side,” said Nicholas Katzenbach, the under secretary of state who was Holbrooke’s boss in the late 1960s. “He always thinks there’s some negotiation, some middle road.” But Paris was an agonizing failure. During a close presidential race, the Nixon campaign, it later emerged, worked to scuttle the talks, encouraging South Vietnam to drag its feet. Famously, the team wasted two months arguing over the shape of the negotiating table, as the war raged.
Shortly after Nixon took office, Holbrooke resigned and left government. “[I]t was neither foreordained nor inevitable that the war should continue, with another twenty-five thousand Americans and countless Vietnamese dead,” he later wrote. “A negotiated end to the war in 1968 was possible; the distance to peace was far smaller than most historians realize.” He’d seen the United States squander one chance to end a war; he wouldn’t let it happen again.
As the war in Afghanistan raged in September 2010, the State Department Historian’s Office released the final volume in the government’s official history of Vietnam. Richard Holbrooke walked from his office to the State Department’s George C. Marshall Conference Center to deliver remarks on the publication, which contained one of his early memos. It was a gray day, and he wore a gray, rumpled suit, and stood in front of a gray drop cloth. The fluorescent lights cast deep shadows under his eyes. He paused a little more often than usual. When an audience member asked about the parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam, Holbrooke managed a wan smile. “I was wondering how long we could avoid that question.”
He spoke carefully. As Holbrooke’s contemporaries slipped from power and a new generation took hold, the word “Vietnam” increasingly registered as an unwelcome history lesson. But privately, I had heard him lay out the comparison. In Vietnam, the United States had been defeated by a country adjacent to the conflict, harboring enemy safe havens across a porous border; by our reliance on a corrupt partner government; and by an embrace of a failing counterinsurgency doctrine at the behest of the military establishment. In Afghanistan, he was witnessing echoes of all three dynamics—including yet another administration favoring military voices and missing opportunities for negotiation. “Dick Holbrooke was, of course, a friend of mine,” Henry Kissinger said. “It was a fair comparison,” he observed of the parallels Holbrooke drew between Vietnam and Afghanistan. In both cases, the United States would find itself applying frameworks that had worked elsewhere in the world with disastrous results. “Vietnam was the attempt to apply the containment principles of Europe to Asia,” Kissinger continued, “But, in Europe, containment was applied to societies that had existed for hundreds of years and whose internal structure was relatively stable except for the impact of the war.” Vietnam had proved to be another matter entirely. Likewise, in Afghanistan, the question after 9/11 was, “Can we turn Afghanistan into a democratic government which no longer supports such efforts?” as Kissinger put it. “That was the wrong question.”
That day at the State Department, Richard Holbrooke was quick to point out that Afghanistan was not Vietnam. The inciting event—an attack on American soil—made the strategic calculus different. “But structurally there are obvious similarities,” he said. “And leafing through these books here, they leap out at you. Many of the programs that are being followed, many of the basic doctrines are the same ones that we were trying to apply in Vietnam.”
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