href="#litres_trial_promo">agreement untenable. A few years later, he continued his aggressions in Kosovo and finally provoked NATO airstrikes and his removal from power, to face trial at The Hague. The night before the strikes, Miloševic´ had a final conversation with Holbrooke. “Don’t you have anything more to say to me?” he pleaded. To which Holbrooke replied: “Hasta la vista, baby.” (Being menaced by a tired Schwarzenegger catchphrase was not the greatest indignity Miloševic´ faced that week.)
But the agreement succeeded in ending three and a half years of bloody war. In a sense, Holbrooke had been preparing for it since his days witnessing the Paris talks with the Vietnamese fall apart, and he worked hard to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Crucial to the success of the talks was his broad grant of power from Washington, free of micromanagement and insulated from domestic political whims. And with NATO strikes authorized, military force was at the ready to back up his diplomacy—not the other way around. Those were elements he would grasp at, and fail to put in place, in his next and final mission.
Dayton made Holbrooke a bona fide foreign policy celebrity. The next year, he received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination. A Time magazine political cartoon envisioned him as Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, dangling on a wire over the region, sweating bullets. But just a year after Dayton, he was passed over as secretary of state in favor of Madeleine Albright. Holbrooke, devastated, accepted a post as US Ambassador to the UN instead. “I know he wanted to be Secretary of State,” Albright said. “But I was. It was kind of a surprise to many people but I think [especially] to him.” Al Gore later said Holbrooke would have been “first in line” to be secretary of state in a Gore administration in 2000. Circumstance always just managed to snatch away the job he wanted most.
WHEN RICHARD HOLBROOKE PRESIDED over the signing of the Dayton Agreement in 1995, the United States had only just begun slashing away at diplomatic spending and the shift to military and intelligence dominance that took place after 9/11 was years away. In the years between that triumph in Bosnia and Holbrooke’s next attempt to end a war, the United States’ place in the world would change dramatically. Afghanistan and Pakistan were at the epicenter of those changes.
Before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA had already collaborated with Pakistan in efforts to capture Osama bin Laden. And so it was little surprise that, afterwards, the United States took a narrow, tactical approach, working through Pakistan’s military and intelligence agency. By the morning of September 12, 2001, deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage was meeting with General Mehmood Ahmad, the director-general of the ISI, attempting to lock down Pakistan’s support for American retaliation in Afghanistan. Mehmood pledged that support—and an end to Pakistani collaboration with the Taliban—to Armitage. Musharraf did the same to Colin Powell. Just like that, Pakistan went from foe to friend again. Sanctions that had accumulated over Pakistan’s nuclear program and Musharraf’s coup evaporated. “I called President Musharraf after we suggested it was time to make a strategic decision to move away from” support for the Taliban, Powell later said. “And he reversed the direction in which Pakistan was moving.”
This was wishful, if not magical, thinking. The ISI had spent the years leading up to 9/11 pumping money, arms, and advisers into Afghanistan to prop up the Taliban and vanquish its enemies—including the coalition of warlords known as the Northern Alliance, which received support from India. When the United States’ demands for cooperation rolled in after 9/11, Musharraf assembled his war room—stacked with generals notorious for championing the Taliban and other Islamist militant groups—and decided to “unequivocally accept all US demands, but then later … not necessarily agree with all the details,” as one attendee recalled. Pakistan was playing a double game, as it had in the past. As had been the case in the midst of cooperation against the Soviets, the United States looked the other way.
The other half of the American response involved arming the Northern Alliance, and the consequences of backing the two opposing factions became apparent almost immediately. As US-backed Northern Alliance fighters toppled the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz, Musharraf made a frantic call to President Bush and asked for a favor: a break in the bombing, and permission to land in Kunduz and airlift out Pakistanis. A series of flights collected men and ferried them into Pakistan, where they promptly disappeared. The operation was kept secret, and American officials lied to conceal it. “Neither Pakistan nor any other country flew planes into Afghanistan to evacuate anybody,” then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted. Those evacuated were, by most accounts, not innocent bystanders: among them were numerous al-Qaeda loyalists. A CIA agent who worked with the Northern Alliance at the time told me flatly of the incident: “it was a mistake.”
The extremists who escaped set up shop in Pakistan, where organized terrorist structures flourished in two safe havens. In Quetta, Mullah Omar built a new Taliban council or shura and appointed commanders to lead an insurgency in Afghanistan’s southern provinces. In the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA) in Northwest Pakistan, Jalaluddin Haqqani (no relation to Husain, the ambassador) and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—both former operatives used by the ISI and CIA against the Soviets—ran their own Taliban-allied movements. The ISI also continued to directly fund and arm the Taliban inside Afghanistan. Pakistan’s military and intelligence leadership allowed the extremists to function openly, while brazenly lying to the Americans and denying anything was amiss. This was one of the great ironies of the war on terror—as the United States drew closer to Pakistan to fight the Taliban, it was in effect also ensuring the survival of the Taliban.
Husain Haqqani, who had become ambassador in the final year of the Bush administration, said Pakistani military and intelligence brass repeatedly asked him to lie about the support for terrorists. When Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a group based out of Pakistan and heavily sponsored by the ISI, executed a series of bombings and shootings in Mumbai, India that killed 164 people, ISI director Ahmed Shuja Pasha told Haqqani to inform the Americans that “nobody in Pakistan had any knowledge” of the attack and that none of the perpetrators were Pakistani. “I said, ‘But you know, that’s an outright lie.’ The reason why America and Pakistan have this huge trust deficit is because we tell them bold-faced lies,” Haqqani said. “Diplomacy is never 100 percent truth, but it’s never 100 percent lies either. I wanted it to be …” he paused, a half-smile turning the edges of his lips. “Truth well told.”
The Bush administration knew Pakistan was playing a double game but, as a general rule, publicly denied it. CIA director Michael Hayden even said at the time that the United States had “not had a better partner in the war on terrorism than the Pakistanis.” Hayden, a retired four-star general, was a compact, energetic man with an affable manner. He spoke quickly, his eyebrows darting up and down over the ovals of his small rimless glasses. When I pressed him on the Bush administration’s rosy characterizations of the relationship with Pakistan, he was frank. “If I said that about the Pakistanis,” he told me, “it was to balance that which then followed. Which was, this is the ally from hell because, actually, they have made a deal with the devil.” He had seen strong cooperation from some divisions of the ISI. But there were others, like the infamously pro–al-Qaeda Directorate S, “whose sole purpose in life was to actually sustain groups who we would identify as terrorist groups,” Hayden said. General Pasha, likewise, had been “duplicitous.” Pasha declined to respond. “I can not tell half truth,” he wrote in an email, “and I do not think I should tell the whole truth!!” (General Pasha corresponded with courtly