Known and Unknown (75 page)

I was a junior in college when President Truman left office. He was deeply unpopular. Truman was a fierce partisan and rather cantankerous man. But what I have come to understand—and what came back vividly to me during my visit—was how central a role he and his administration had in the international challenges of the second half of the twentieth century.

As World War II ended and America entered the Cold War, it fell to the Truman administration to fashion an entirely new construct for an uncertain era. Largely overlooked and certainly underappreciated at the time, his administration crafted many of the institutions and policies that proved crucial to fighting and prevailing in the long conflict against the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan, for example, provided needed resources to the war-ravaged economies of Western Europe and helped to keep them from sliding into the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The containment strategy was pursued over many decades. Many Truman-era international institutions, designed to buttress the democracies of the world and encourage the rise of others, are still with us today: the World Bank, NATO, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the Organization of American States, among them. At home, the Truman administration created the NSC, the CIA, and the U.S. Information Agency, and merged the Navy and War departments into the Department of Defense. All of that occurred at the inflection point at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations had similar opportunities to fashion new policies and institutions for a new era: The inflection point at the end of the Cold War and the twenty-first-century challenges of the information age.

When I returned to Washington I put these thoughts together in a memorandum for President Bush: “Today the world requires new international organizations tailored to our new circumstances.”
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I noted that many of the most pressing threats we faced were global and transnational in scope—terrorism, proliferation, cybercrime, narcotics, piracy, hostage taking, and criminal gangs. By their nature, they could not be dealt with successfully by any one nation—not even the United States—and, as such, required the cooperation of many nations.

I believed that in important ways, existing international institutions—including some whose origins dated back to the days of FDR and Truman—were proving inadequate to the times. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were working to bring development funds to impoverished countries, but a nontrivial portion failed to reach the intended people because of inefficiency and corruption. I was also thinking of the United Nations, which was heavy on anti-American and anti-Israel diatribes and comparatively light on accomplishments. NATO, too, had its shortcomings. Because it was designed as a European defense organization against the Soviets, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization did not have linkages with some of the world's important democracies outside of Europe, such as Japan, South Korea, Israel, and Australia. NATO also required unanimity among twenty-eight member nations that included some occasionally contrarian members, making it difficult to deal with new challenges. The demographics of Western Europe—with aging populations and declining investments in their militaries—did not promise a robust alliance.

I suggested that new international organizations might be needed to bring competence in areas where existing organizations proved to be less well suited to the twenty-first century—areas such as developing and utilizing quick-reaction forces, assisting in military and military police training in foreign countries, counterproliferation, capacity building for the rule of law, and helping to strengthen domestic government ministries. Too often the United States was called on to do the work alone that other countries could, and should, help with. Because ours was the only military in the world that could deal with a serious crisis rapidly, America relieved the pressure on other countries to step forward, which left our forces burdened with the responsibility.
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I proposed that the President start a national discussion on this subject and offered a few suggestions of initiatives. The list included such things as a peacekeeping and governance corps that would have a standing capability to respond rapidly to problems abroad before they spun out of control. That could have been useful to handle unrest in Liberia and Haiti, possibly heading off civil strife before it began. Civilian teams could also bolster our military's expanding humanitarian efforts, such as when the massive tsunami struck coasts in the Indian Ocean in December 2004, killing 185,000, and when a 7. 6 magnitude earthquake in October 2005 left the Pakistani region of Kashmir devastated, with 80,000 dead and nearly 3 million homeless.

Our humanitarian assistance efforts brought about a noticeable transformation of opinion within those important parts of the Muslim world. We did well for America by doing good. After Defense Department tsunami relief efforts, polls in Indonesia showed that 65 percent of its citizens had a more favorable impression of the United States. Osama bin Laden's approval ratings in Indonesia—the largest Muslim nation in the world—dropped from 58 percent before the disaster to 23 percent Afterward.
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In Pakistan, a country not known for its favorable views toward America, our rescue operations in the wake of their earthquake changed many minds. By November 2005, more than 46 percent of Pakistanis had a favorable view of the United States—more than double the percentage that had held that view six months earlier.
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The favorite toy among Pakistani children quickly became small models of the American Chinook helicopters that had been so visible in delivering American relief supplies to those left homeless. The Chinooks were referred to in the Pashtun dialect as “Angels of Mercy.”

I also recommended some form of maritime organization to which countries with significant naval forces, such as India and Japan, could contribute to combating piracy on the high seas. Because strong and growing economies tended to stem the rise of violent extremism, I suggested that the President consider a new market-oriented institution to provide grants and support to entrepreneurs in developing countries in Africa, Central Asia, and Latin America that would bypass the government level, where waste and corruption in poor countries were often a serious problem. I thought it might be useful to conduct a reassessment of how our country disperses foreign aid—perhaps using microfinance to promote individual entrepreneurship instead of massive block grants to governments, often for large construction projects.

I suggested consideration of a Middle East security initiative to bolster moderate states in the region and to help shield them from threats posed by nations like Iran, as well as consideration of an Asian security organization—in a sense, an organization with some of the attributes of NATO—to engage the United States in building stronger partnerships with our friends and allies in that region. I thought we needed to expand free trade agreements beyond our immediate neighbors to friends and allies around the world.

Here at home, I proposed a review of the executive and legislative branch institutions that were organized and arranged for an earlier era. We needed adjustments so that agencies and departments could function with the speed and agility the new century and the information age demanded. The compartmentalized organization of the executive branch, with its separate elements and the lack of a coordination mechanism, was equally true in Congress, with its separate committees and subcommittees. It was and remains exceedingly difficult to pull all the strands of American power through a single needle eye to create coherent national policy.

I suggested consideration of a new U.S. agency for global communication that could serve as a channel to inform, educate, and compete worldwide in the battle for ideas. We found ourselves engaged in the first protracted war in an era of e-mail, Twitter, blogs, phone cameras, a global internet with no inhibitions, cell phones, handheld video cameras, talk radio, twenty-four-hour news broadcasts, and satellite television.
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By 2006, it was clear that our government's efforts to counter extremist ideology through public diplomacy and strategic communications were proving an abject failure. We didn't have global communications agencies to engage in a strategic effort to counter the ideology and propaganda of Islamists, as institutions such as the U.S. Information Agency and Radio Free Europe had combated Communist ideology.

Meanwhile, our enemies were successfully hammering home their messages via the internet and satellite television. With media relations committees that met to discuss ways to achieve their violent objectives, terrorist groups such as al-Qaida had proven effective at persuading many credulous observers—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—that they were the exasperated victims of Western oppression rather than the stormtroopers of a totalitarian political movement with a brutal will to power. Our enemies had skillfully adapted to fighting wars in the twenty-first-century media age. But the U.S. government and the West remained—and still remains—pitifully far behind.
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As I wrote my memo, I realized that the many suggestions I was proposing to President Bush were long-term strategic ideas that would require deliberation and discussion, perhaps even trial and error. They would take political capital, which by 2006 was in short supply. What I was proposing transcended any one department. To examine some of these recommendations and conduct a wholesale review of our government's organization, I proposed a bipartisan presidential commission of distinguished officials modeled on the Hoover Commission of 1947. After I handed the President my memorandum, he told me the ideas were worth discussing. However, to my knowledge, there was never a high-level meeting on my proposals. That was not surprising in an administration that at that point was fighting two wars and was under siege by the Congress and the press. Nonetheless, I believed we missed a significant opportunity. Perhaps they were ideas whose time had not yet come.

W
hile Afghanistan and Iraq commanded the focus of national security officials, there were 190 other countries that also needed monitoring and attention. Some of those nations, of course, were friendly to the United States, some less so, but all had daily interaction with our government at some level. Even officials from international pariahs such as Iran and North Korea were meeting with lower-level American diplomatic and intelligence officials and our intermediaries.

With our various economic and trade relationships and diplomatic and military reach, America does not have the luxury of pursuing policies of isolationism or neglect. We had to keep our attention on the world's many significant activities, meeting constantly with foreign leaders, forging diplomatic and trade agreements, and standing firm and responding as necessary when unfriendly nations provoked our country. George Shultz referred to this kind of daily maintenance with foreign governments as “gardening.”
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Throughout the Bush administration, while waging two wars and being on guard for another attack on our shores, many in the administration worked hard to be effective “gardeners”—with varying degrees of success.

When it came to personal diplomacy, George W. Bush was an active and productive, if publicly underestimated, asset. His decidedly informal brand of diplomacy was novel for some foreign leaders. What he chose to dispense with in polish, he made up for in persistence and reliability. In meeting After meeting, I saw the President put his foreign interlocutors at ease. This personal rapport paid dividends with leaders as diverse as Spain's Prime Minister José María Aznar, Jordan's King Abdullah, and Australia's John Howard. His relationships translated into closer ties between our countries and tangible support for initiatives like the ninety-country Proliferation Security Initiative and on-the-ground assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

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ne of the administration's important strategic successes was in our own hemisphere: helping to keep a democracy of forty-five million people from succumbing to the longest-running, best-financed, and most violent insurgency in Latin America. For more than a decade, the United States had been waging a war against drugs in Colombia. I thought that stopping the flow of drugs into our country, while important, was fated to be unsuccessful as long as the powerful demand for illegal drugs persisted. The Colombian government could spray coca fields and interdict drug runners, but as long as there were millions addicted to drugs around the world, people would find a way to produce and sell what the market demanded. Since the late 1990s, the Clinton administration's $5 billion Plan Colombia had been a bipartisan antidrug initiative demonstrating that our government was doing something about the drug problem.

By 2001, Colombia was teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state, a refuge for drugs and terrorists. The instability was fueled by the narcotics trade and Marxist guerrillas known as the FARC. The guerrillas controlled an area of Colombia larger than Switzerland. It was a safe haven for coca cultivation, kidnapping, murder, extortion, and Communist-inspired terrorism. Many had written off the Colombian government's war against the insurgency as a doomed effort. Some 60 percent of Colombians believed that the FARC would win. If that proved true, a stalwart democracy to our south would be replaced by a narco-terrorist dictatorship.

As part of the response to 9/11, I recommended to President Bush that, in addition to authorizing strikes in Afghanistan, he consider a plan to provide military assistance to Colombia's efforts against the insurgents—not just the drug traffickers. Visibly assisting Colombia, I argued, would reflect the truth that the campaign against terrorists was global, and that we were not targeting only Islamist extremists.

There was, however, an Islamist terrorist element even in Latin America. Islamist extremists, many affiliated with Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, were taking advantage of ungoverned areas in several locations in the region to operate and raise money. If a government would not or could not govern its own territory, that was an invitation for adventurers of various types—terrorists, political revolutionaries, drug dealers, and other criminals—to enter and take advantage of the vacuum. Such weeds thrive where the atmosphere of authority is thin, and they can spread aggressively.

President Bush was eager to assist Colombia. Our efforts received an unexpected boost in 2002, when Alvaro Uribe was elected president. FARC rebels had killed his father and attempted to kill Uribe on no less than fifteen different occasions over his political career. As a presidential candidate he campaigned fearlessly against the FARC and vowed to reclaim Colombian territory from the drug lords. After his election he kept track of what he considered the key measures of his war's success, including the numbers of monthly kidnappings, homicides, acres of land taken back from the FARC, and even the number of kilometers Colombians traveled on their holidays, since for many years traveling on some roads was a death sentence. When I met with Uribe, he would invariably have a yellow note card in his jacket pocket, listing his benchmarks.

In our first visit in June 2002, weeks After the Colombian elections, I told Uribe we might be willing to lend a hand by offering assistance in an integrated counterinsurgency campaign that strategically combined American and Colombian political, intelligence, economic, and military assets. If we were going to do more than just focus on trying to intercept drug shipments and spraying coca fields, there was one major hurdle: the U.S. Congress. Fearing direct American involvement in a guerrilla war in Latin America, Congress had imposed strict limits on intelligence sharing and military activities with the Colombians. The only authorized missions were those designed to reduce drug production, and there was even a congressionally imposed limit on the number of American military personnel to be allowed in Colombia at any given time.

Working with policy officials Doug Feith, Peter Rodman, and Roger Pardo-Maurer, we were able to reorient our assistance to Colombia toward counterterrorism and targeting the FARC guerrillas. The Congress agreed to change our authorities to allow for more than just the narrow focus on drugs. Our goal was to help the government of Colombia assert control—effective sovereignty, as we called it—over its entire territory.

In President Alvaro Uribe, we had the most skillful partner we could have hoped for. Unassuming and slight in build, Uribe was unafraid to take on the FARC and reclaim Colombian territory (he also commanded the overwhelming support of the Colombian people, reaching a 91 percent approval rating at one point).
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With expanded authorities and intelligence cooperation, we could take the fight to the enemy. An energetic Army Reserve Special Forces noncommissioned officer who had fought alongside the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, Pardo-Maurer aggressively sought interagency and bipartisan support. Without adding a dollar to our budget, we made our aid far more effective than it had been before. Drug production decreased, and hundreds of thousands of acres of land were taken back from the FARC. The campaign to win back Colombia from the terrorists proved to be a major success.

 

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nother significant success involved one of the most worrisome nations in the world—the Libya of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The State Department had long listed Libya as a leading sponsor of international terrorism. Libya was also notorious for its multiyear pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The Gaddafiregime was responsible for the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.

After 9/11, the Bush administration had a rare opportunity to persuade Libya—and perhaps some other terrorist-supporting or WMD-pursuing regimes—to choose a different path. I believed that if we put sufficient pressure on Afghanistan and Iraq, other countries might recognize that their interests in self-preservation meant that they too needed to end their support for terrorism and their WMD programs. This was the case with Gaddafi, who, After we invaded Iraq, reportedly told Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that he did not want to become the next Saddam Hussein. It was not mere coincidence that only a few days After Hussein was plucked in such a degraded state from his subterranean spider hole and imprisoned in Iraq, Libya's dictator acknowledged and agreed to dismantle his country's long-running nuclear and chemical weapons programs.
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Though our activities elsewhere in the Middle East were gaining few headlines—we wanted it that way—the United States and its partners were also capturing and killing terrorists outside of Afghanistan and Iraq. Sensitive operations involving the CIA and U.S. special operations forces were ongoing in the Horn of Africa, Northern Africa, Pakistan, and Yemen, where terrorists had fled After we put pressure on them in their former sanctuaries in Afghanistan and Iraq. By developing relationships and establishing a presence in those countries beforehand, we made it harder for fleeing terrorists to find refuge there.
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Since 9/11 we had made manhunting and the skills needed to track (find), isolate (fix), and capture or kill (finish) individuals a priority for our military. By 2006, we had become quite successful using highly classified intelligence operations to track down our enemies in countries around the world. These counterterrorism efforts in ungoverned areas required not only careful military preparation and training, but skillful diplomatic support.

 

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ur administration's gardening record was not perfect, however. Certainly my “old Europe” comment was not a model of deft alliance management. And in other cases too, our stewardship in foreign affairs left something to be desired, especially in Bush's second term.

Shortly After his reelection, President Bush rearranged his national security team. Colin Powell departed as secretary of state. National Security Adviser Condi Rice took over Powell's post. Her longtime deputy, Steve Hadley, moved up to become national security adviser. CIA Director George Tenet had departed the administration several months earlier and had been replaced by Florida Congressman Porter Goss.

I hoped that these changes might improve the way interagency meetings were planned and run and the way decisions were summarized and implemented. I also hoped that State's new leadership would make the department more supportive of the President's policies. I thought the quiet competence of Steve Hadley might help the interagency process by providing Bush with clear options and ensuring his decisions were carried out. If so, Hadley would be less inclined to seek the forced consensus or bridging approach that I found ineffective in the first term. I hoped he would be more willing to move contentious issues up to the President for decision, where they belonged. I was particularly encouraged by his choice of a deputy, J. D. Crouch, who had served in the Defense Department before becoming the ambassador to Romania.

I thought Rice could be a good secretary of state in that she was close and loyal to the President. To get the benefit of the skills and resources of the State Department, a president needs someone to lead it who is intent on having that often independent-minded agency follow his strategic guidance. I was confident Rice would be inclined and might even be able to do just that; she had an opportunity to become a secretary of state in the mold of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz by bringing the President's agenda to the State Department rather than the world's agenda, as reflected through our diplomats, to the President. Yet despite the realignment inside the Bush administration, 2005 and 2006 witnessed some diplomatic failures.

On the steps of the U.S. Capitol at his second inauguration, President Bush proclaimed an ambitious goal for the nation: “ending tyranny in our world.” The State Department's interpretation of the President's conviction about the benefits of democracy led to complications with nations we needed as friends and partners. Promoting democracy and human rights in closed societies is laudable, and often serves U.S. interests. But sometimes the rhetoric came across as lecturing, and it could on occasion hurt our friends without actually improving human rights. I made a practice of asking whether the United States had any real leverage that might persuade foreign rulers to follow a different course to establish freer political and economic systems. Sometimes berating countries feels good to the beraters and wins domestic political points, but scolding them can often come at the expense of losing critical cooperation and alienating foreigners who see the United States as a bully.

Instead of labeling countries as good or bad—democratic or nondemocratic, pro–human rights or anti–human rights—I thought a better way of categorizing countries was to consider the direction in which they were heading. If a country that had been a longtime abuser of human rights and a foe of democracy was making steps toward freer political and economic systems, I believed we should calculate whether continued progress in the right direction was likelier to be achieved by encouraging rather than publicly chiding its leadership. I recognized the U.S. interest—practical as well as moral—in having other countries respect basic human rights and function democratically. But I saw that interest of ours as one of several that needed to be considered in the making of U.S. policy. It was not the sole interest, and it did not necessarily trump all others.

After Rice became secretary of state in 2005, she made it a priority to push Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf toward more democratic practices. Rice publicly called for Musharraf, the senior army officer, to seek democratic elections and relinquish his military uniform—a symbolic step designed to promote civilian rather than military leadership in Pakistan.
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Musharraf was trying to hold together a weak government, filled with elements that did not share his affinity for the United States. We were dependent on Pakistan's logistic support for our efforts in Afghanistan; the country also had a formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons that could fall into the wrong hands if Musharraf's government fell to a radical Islamist element. I questioned whether it was for U.S. officials to dictate what clothes Musharraf wore to work. I was disappointed but not surprised when only months After he complied with Rice's request, he could no longer assert control over the military and was forced by various political forces to step down. The alternatives to Musharraf were, in my view, not likely to be better, and that has proven to be the case.