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.