pressured, because it was military rule again. So I left. I came to the US.” Husain Haqqani Americanized. He took an associate professorship at Boston University, decrying Pakistan’s military leadership from a safe distance.
Haqqani and Benazir Bhutto, in the midst of her own exile in Dubai, often talked about the future of Pakistan. She had him draft a paper outlining a new vision for Pakistani foreign policy, should she return to power. He argued that the military-to-military relationship had reinforced Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism. Pakistan had become a “rentier state: it lived off payments from a superpower for its strategic location and intelligence cooperation” rather than its aligned interests. The flow of easy cash from the United States fueled the disproportionate power of Pakistan’s army and intelligence services and blunted the potential for reform. Bhutto liked the paper, and “the idea of a new relationship with the United States that would be strategic rather than tactical.”
FOR ONE MOMENT, it looked like she might get a chance to make that vision a reality. After years of diplomatic pressure from the Americans and the British, Musharraf allowed Bhutto to return to seek election. There were plenty of people who wanted her dead, and she asked for more security after narrowly escaping one bombing. Musharraf granted only some of the requested reinforcements. If anything were to happen, she emailed her lobbyist, Mark Siegel, “I wld hold Musharaf responsible.”
On December 27, 2007, as shadows lengthened in the late afternoon, Bhutto left Liaqat National Park in Rawalpindi, less than two miles from the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, after a stump speech calling for democracy. Supporters swarmed her white Toyota Land Cruiser. Bhutto, wearing her trademark white headscarf and a purple kameez over simple white cotton pants and black flats, climbed onto the backseat, poked her head out of the sunroof, and waved, like Eva Peron on the balcony. Gunfire cracked through the air, accompanied by the deafening explosion of a suicide bomber detonating his payload. A Getty photographer, John Moore, activated his camera’s high-speed motor drive, capturing the out-of-focus chaos: an orange fireball; frightened faces, surging through sparks and smoke; survivors staggering among bodies.
Bhutto was dead. Her will passed leadership of her political party to her widower, Asif Ali Zardari, known by critics as “Mr. Ten Percent” as a result of long-standing corruption allegations. Her grieving supporters swept him into the presidency.
During Bhutto’s exile, Haqqani had grown almost as close to Zardari as to her. When Zardari and his prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, were looking for a new ambassador to the United States after the election, they asked their old party spokesperson, Husain Haqqani.
He accepted. In June 2008, he headed to Washington and presented his credentials to George W. Bush.
Haqqani was back in power, but many Pakistanis regarded him with suspicion. His switching sides to work for Bhutto—a woman he once campaigned against—was a mark against his loyalty. And some viewed his flight to America as a Rubicon. Days after Bhutto’s assassination, Musharraf had anatomized what he viewed as her failure. One all-important rule she broke: “Don’t be seen as an extension of the United States.” Haqqani, fresh from years of American exile, was picked for the ambassadorship for precisely that unforgivable quality.
Years later, Pakistan’s Express Tribune opened a profile of Haqqani with George Orwell’s description of Squealer in Animal Farm: “a brilliant talker, and when he was arguing some difficult point, he had a way of skipping from side to side.”
“None of this, of course, is to draw a comparison to the esteemed Mr. Husain Haqqani,” the profile continued, “after all, Squealer remained loyal to the pigs throughout.”
RICHARD HOLBROOKE had been a prodigiously young assistant secretary of state for East Asia during the Carter administration before departing to Lehman Brothers during the years of Republican leadership between his diplomatic posts. As in all his roles, he grew close to the journalists around him while working on East Asia. As luck would have it, that included Strobe Talbott, who had, as predicted at Oxford, gone on to a career in journalism, covering foreign affairs for Time.
Holbrooke’s contacts in the Clinton administration were thin. He had backed Al Gore in the 1988 primary, and sat out the Clinton campaign almost entirely, though not for a lack of trying. He badgered friends from Vietnam with better proximity to Clinton—like Anthony Lake, to whom he sent an unsolicited memo describing the brewing conflict in Bosnia as “the key test of American policy in Europe” and warning of the danger of inaction. Holbrooke watched, frustrated, as plum positions went to Lake and other peers. It was only after lobbying from Talbott, who was appointed deputy secretary of state, that Holbrooke was asked to take the post of ambassador to Germany. And it was only by sheer willpower that he ascended to assistant secretary of state for Europe, and then to the defining role of his career, as the administration’s negotiator in the Bosnia conflict.
The ethnic slaughter sparked by the disintegration of Yugoslavia had, for years, been an intractable problem at the periphery of American interests. By 1995, at least 100,000 people—and upwards of 300,000, according to some estimates—had been killed. Faltering efforts at mediation, including one led by Jimmy Carter, had barely interrupted Serbian forces’ aggressions against the region’s Muslims and Croats. It was only after the massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica drew international outrage that the United States shifted from its conviction that the violence was a “European problem” and green-lit a more aggressive diplomatic push.
Holbrooke had always viewed the conflict in grand terms—as a test of NATO with potentially dramatic consequences for the future of Europe and, by extension, American strategic interests. When the Clinton administration was deciding who would lead the new intervention, Holbrooke campaigned for the position, hard. He was disliked, but some saw his maverick style as a positive. “The very qualities for which he was sometimes criticized—aggressiveness, impolitic interaction with adversaries, a penchant for cultivating the media—were exactly what the situation required,” Secretary of State Warren Christopher said. The parties to the conflict—Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic´, Croatian president Franjo Tud-jman, and Bosnia’s Alija Izetbegovic´—were scrappers with a history of underhanded tactics. Richard Holbrooke was a rare figure who could meet them toe to toe. Years later, President Clinton toasted Holbrooke with a gentle jab: “Everyone in the Balkans is crazy and everyone has a giant ego. Who else could you send?”
Over a three-month period in 1995, Holbrooke alternately cajoled and harangued the parties to the conflict. For one month, he all but imprisoned them at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio—a stage where he could precisely direct the diplomatic theater. At the negotiations’ opening dinner, he seated Miloševic´ under a B-2 bomber—literally in the shadow of Western might. At a low point in the negotiations, he announced that they were over, and had luggage placed outside the Americans’ doors. Miloševic´ saw the bags and asked Holbrooke to extend the talks. The showmanship worked—the parties, several of them mortal enemies, signed the Dayton Agreement.
It was an imperfect document. It ceded almost half of Bosnia to Miloševic´