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.
THE DAY AFTER PRESIDENT CLINTON announced Robin Raphel’s nomination as assistant secretary of state in 1993, she’d boarded a flight to Sri Lanka, en route to the funeral of the country’s recently assassinated president. Seated near her were Pakistan’s prime minister Nawaz Sharif and a thirty-six-year-old Pakistani diplomat named Husain Haqqani. In the years that followed, Haqqani would become a fixture of US-Pakistani relations. His critics would come to know him by some of the same labels ascribed later to Robin Raphel: turncoat, traitor, spy.
Haqqani was urbane and charming and a flatterer. “As you know well,” he often said with a feline smile. “As a man of your experience of course understands.” He grew up in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Pakistan’s commercial hub, Karachi. His parents were Indian migrants: his mother, a schoolteacher; his father, a lawyer, who arrived in Pakistan with few professional contacts and turned to representing the poor and needy. The Haqqanis lived in a barracks for families uprooted by Pakistan’s partition from India. Young Husain was fourteen before he lived in a real house. Like Holbrooke, he wasn’t born among elites—he clawed his way up.
He received both a traditional Islamic education and a secular modern one. A quintessentially Pakistani fault line ran through him: between church and state, old and new, East and West. When he enrolled at Karachi University, he became a student leader associated with the Jamaat-e-Islami party, joining a new generation of Muslims sparking change around the region. But he was torn. He spent hours at the American Center in Karachi’s US consulate, devouring the books in its library. He soaked in Western perspectives and grew disenchanted with his peers’ rising anti-Americanism. When an angry mob enflamed by anti-American sentiment burned down the US embassy in Islamabad in 1979, student leaders in nearby Karachi approached Haqqani and asked him to lead the charge. As he tells the story, he gave a dramatic speech, citing the Quran to dissuade them from further violence. One ulterior motive he didn’t tell the angry students about: he wanted to protect his beloved library inside the consulate, and the Western books on its shelves.
Like Holbrooke, Haqqani was drawn to journalism and diplomacy. He wrote for the Far Eastern Economic Review, and later worked with Pakistani state-run television, sometimes burnishing the legacy of Zia-ul-Haq’s military regime. By his early thirties, Haqqani had built a reputation as a silver-tongued communicator with a knack for moving between Western and Pakistani audiences.
AFTER BENAZIR BHUTTO became prime minister on a progressive, secular platform in 1988, the conservative opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, tapped Haqqani to develop his media strategy. By Haqqani’s own admission, Sharif was exploiting xenophobia and anti-Americanism, but Haqqani felt Sharif “might be able to bring some balance to the country, after almost a decade of military rule.”
It wasn’t long after Sharif took power (and after, in the conventional cycle of Pakistani politics, Bhutto was ousted on corruption charges) that Haqqani found himself at loggerheads with his boss. In 1992, as the Soviet war faded and the United States became more brazen in its misgivings about Pakistan, the State Department asked Haqqani to help deliver a message to Sharif: The United States knew that Pakistan was providing “material support to groups that have engaged in terrorism” and lying about it. It had to stop, or the US would add Pakistan to its official list of state sponsors of terrorism, triggering crushing sanctions. Sharif gathered his cabinet for a conversation that pitted Islamist generals against progressives like Haqqani. The ISI chief at the time, Lieutenant General Javed Nasir, reflected a traditional Pakistani outlook: the letter was the fault of an “Indo-Zionist” lobby and a Jewish ambassador (that the ambassador, Nicholas Platt, was, in fact, a Protestant was the least of Haqqani’s concerns).
As Haqqani told the story, he made the case that Pakistan should reconsider its use of proxy relationships in favor of a greater emphasis on diplomacy. When Sharif sided with the intelligence and military voices, Haqqani threatened to quit. Sharif made him take the ambassadorship to Sri Lanka instead—a way of neutralizing him without negative press. It was the Pakistani equivalent of exile to Siberia. A year later, he resigned.
BUT HAQQANI WAS NOTHING if not resilient. After new elections brought Bhutto back into power, he became her spokesperson. He stood by her after she was, like clockwork, ousted again on corruption charges, and grew more public in his criticism of Pakistan’s military and its vice grip on power as civilian leaders came and went.
It won him few fans. In 1999, Pakistani intelligence agents pulled him off a crowded street, threw a blanket over his head, and pushed him into a waiting car. On a cell phone secreted in his pocket, he dialed a friend, who alerted the media. He credits the call with saving his life, though he remained jailed for two and a half months on trumped-up corruption charges. When General Pervez Musharraf seized power, Haqqani realized he couldn’t live safely in his homeland during its frequent