The Secretary (14 page)

“Maybe your answer should be ‘maybe’ until you’ve checked on the ground,” she snapped.

The planning had been shrouded in secrecy, and our printed schedules were stamped
all over with “CLOSE HOLD—CONFIDENTIAL.” We were going to spend two nights in Islamabad,
maybe three, then would end up in Marrakesh in Morocco, by the weekend, but there
was a gap in the middle. Where were we going? On the plane ride out of the United
States, the traveling press corps speculated endlessly. Next door to Afghanistan?
Perhaps back to Iraq? Someone heard Addis Ababa. Or was that Abu Dhabi? The Palestinian
president was apparently touring the Gulf. Maybe Clinton was about to announce major
progress between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Oblivious to the building anticipation, Jake couldn’t think beyond Islamabad. He was
exhausted from the preparations for the high-stakes trip and from finally moving his
life in boxes from Minnesota into his new apartment in Washington, D.C., just a couple
of weeks before our departure.

From my seat, I could see incessant activity behind the Line of Death. Thanks to communication
equipment on SAM, officials were calling both “post”—the embassy in Islamabad—and
the Building in Washington to tee up last-minute details. The printer was overheating,
pieces of paper were going around, and Paul Narain, the solo line officer on the plane
for this trip, was typing away furiously on his laptop. Vali, Paul, Jake, Holbrooke—they
were all defining and refining policy on the fly. Literally. Sitting in Beirut or
Islamabad, it was easy to forget that the foreign policy of the world’s superpower
was being devised not by superhumans but by real people, tired, fallible human beings
working in imperfect conditions, faced with imperfect choices, who didn’t have all
the answers. They didn’t even have a finished Book.

Jake was excited about the possibilities and nervous about the diplomatic dangers
on this trip. His job was to focus on the substance: what the secretary had to say,
what she needed to know, how her message was being received, how it had to be fine-tuned
for the next appearance. Engrossed in his thoughts, his papers, his e-mails, he generally
paid scant attention to his surroundings and followed people in front of him off the
plane, into the motorcade, into buildings, and out of rooms. His awareness of his
surroundings had never been as low as on this trip: he didn’t notice Fred and his
agents putting on bulletproof vests before getting off the plane, didn’t feel the
searing heat that greeted us on the tarmac of Chaklala military air base outside Islamabad
on Wednesday morning, didn’t lift his head from his BlackBerry in the staff van to
see the security officers posted along the wide streets as Clinton’s motorcade made
its way into Islamabad.

Now that we had arrived and the veil of secrecy had been lifted, I called my mother
in Beirut to tell her I was in Pakistan. She was not pleased.

“Why do you have to go to all these dangerous places? What if someone tries to kill
her or bring down her plane? She’s a target, and you’ll be in the middle of it. I’m
not sure this is such a good idea.”

The thought had crossed my mind before. Back in Beirut when American embassy convoys
drove through the streets, we didn’t simply roll our eyes. We also stayed far behind:
you didn’t want to be too close in case someone tried to blow them up. But my mother
even worried about me living in Washington, D.C. Years ago, she had heard it was the
crime capital of the United States, and when I first moved there, she asked whether
I would be safe. I’m not sure she realized the irony of her question. After living
through the war in Lebanon, surely I could fend for myself in a country where tanks
weren’t part of the urban landscape. When I once told her I was going on a beach holiday
to Mexico, she called me every morning until my departure to tell me I was crazy and
that I should come on holiday to Lebanon where we had the best sun and sea and no
violent drug cartels. No, we didn’t have drug cartels, just wars.

But that was a danger we had grown to understand instinctively in Lebanon: we knew
where the sniper bullets might be coming from, where to take shelter if bombs were
coming toward us from the east or the west. More recently, we knew where to be safe
if there was an Israeli air raid, and we knew to stay away from motorcades of Lebanese
politicians who were also being targeted for assassination. In Washington, Pakistan,
or Mexico, my mother worried I would lose my bearings and lack the adequate survival
reflexes. My senses were certainly dulled by the hours on the plane, the heavy air
force food, the jetlag, and the baking heat. I was starting to learn to trust Diplomatic
Security and Fred. His task wasn’t to protect us journalists but to protect the whole
package in which the secretary traveled, and that included me. There had never been
an assassination attempt on foreign soil against an American secretary of state or
even the president as far as I could tell, so I was probably safer inside the Bubble
than outside. There was still plenty of violence to greet us.

A few hours before we landed in Pakistan that Wednesday morning, a bomb had exploded
in Peshawar, a two-hour drive from the capital. The bomb tore through a women’s market,
killing more than a hundred people. It was the kind of attack that often stupefied
American diplomats—there were no demands, no clear agenda. The violence barely cast
a shadow over the country, which seemed to simply pause for a second and move on.
The logic of it all escaped Hillary’s team: What good did it do to anyone? What goals
did it advance? But the perpetrators had their own logic defined by spite and obstructionism.

On Pakistani television, split screens showed the aftermath of the bombing and Clinton’s
arrival side by side, as if the two were linked. In the minds of many Pakistanis,
they were. They saw the violence as a result of American pressure on their country
to tackle militants. Hundreds of soldiers had died in the fighting and scores of civilians
killed in bomb attacks. Pakistanis felt they were fighting America’s war and paying
a heavy price for it. And Pakistan’s sensationalist media fed that narrative.

In the Middle East, the devising of conspiracy theories is an art form, but rarely
before had I seen this level of unsubstantiated reporting. Even by Middle East standards,
the Pakistani media were shameless. The
Nation
, Pakistan’s leading daily, published a front-page article claiming that America funded
and supported the Pakistani Taliban in a bid to weaken Pakistan and bolster India.
The article offered no proof, no supporting documents, no logic; it was seemingly
just speculation by one author. But there it was, in black and white for millions
of readers to see. Clearly, it must have been “the Truth.” The article was a fairly
typical example of Pakistani sensationalist journalism—little care for the facts,
no attribution to sources, and often focused on stoking anti-American sentiments.
At its best, the Pakistani media were rambunctious and feisty; reporters asked the
most unexpected questions. At Clinton’s press conference with the foreign minister,
one earnest journalist asked whether President Obama would return his Nobel Peace
Prize if he didn’t bring peace to Afghanistan. Hillary couldn’t resist laughing.

Pakistani journalists were a key target of her public diplomacy. On all her trips,
Clinton gave a couple of interviews to local journalists, and in Pakistan, she wanted
to take over the airwaves and fill the newspapers. She started with two television
interviews with Pakistani journalists based in Washington that were to be aired the
day of her arrival. In Pakistan over the course of three days, she was going to hold
four separate group interviews, with seven television presenters, eight radio journalists,
and six newspaper editors. She was also planning a town hall with five women journalists.

The questions they all asked were really just a long recitation of their grievances.

The wording of the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill was humiliating, they said, and there was
a hidden agenda. Why wasn’t the money completely unconditional? They claimed American
diplomats were breaking the law, walking around with arms in Islamabad at three in
the morning. They said there was a secret marine barracks being built inside the embassy.
Why wasn’t the United States helping Pakistan regain the territory of Kashmir? The
Pakistani parliament had voted unanimously to condemn U.S. drone attacks against Pakistan,
and yet the attacks only intensified. Obviously, the United States did not respect
the Pakistani parliament.

Over and over, the journalists mentioned the Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill and used the
words “respect” and “trust.” Hillary smiled and patiently answered question after
question. Every now and then, she whipped out her plain talk.

“Pakistan doesn’t have to take this money,” she said. The group of television journalists
who had sat down with her for this interview in the U.S. ambassador’s residence were
startled. Not take the money? It hadn’t even occurred to them.

“Let me be very clear: You do not have to take this money. You do not have to take
any aid from us. Nobody is saying you must take this money so that we can help you
rebuild your energy sector or put more kids in school or provide better maternal and
child health. You don’t have to take the money.”

Undaunted, the journalist now argued that the $7.5 billion promised in the bill was
but a pittance. Half defiant, half mocking, Talat Hussain from Aaj TV set out to prove
the United States was not serious with its aid to Pakistan.

“Let me give you numbers. You talked about the civilian aid and the military aid [for
Pakistan]. Your one base in Kyrgyzstan—you know how much Kyrgyzstan charges you? Seven
hundred million U.S. dollars!” Wagging his finger, Hussain was referring to the Manas
Air Base, opened in 2001 to support the transit of American military personnel in
and out of Afghanistan.

Eyebrows arched, her head tilting to the right, Hillary smiled calmly.

“That is wrong.”

“Seven hundred!”

“That’s wrong. We negotiated the contract. I’m sorry, that is not right.”

“You negotiated it down.”

“No, no.”

The question was turning into a ping-pong match. Sitting in the back of the room,
Vali couldn’t believe that the Pakistani journalist was trying to correct Hillary’s
facts.

“They are charging you seven hundred million U.S. dollars. Give us a figure on that,”
Hussain demanded, his hand raised, wielding a pen.

“Fifty million dollars.”

“Just one air base! Do you know how many air bases the U.S.uses in Pakistan?”

“And do you know how many billions of dollars we’ve provided to Pakistan?” Hillary
asked with the faintest of scoffs but still smiling.

Hussain now complained that the aid to Pakistan during Pervez Musharraf’s seven-year
rule had been all swallowed up by the military and American contracting agencies.

“Well, okay, but let me just stop you here,” Hillary interjected, leaning forward
in her dark-emerald pantsuit and holding out her arm. “The United States did not install
Musharraf.”

“You backed him. You supported him. George W. Bush lionized him.”

“Well, George Bush is not my president right now.”

“But he did it with the U.S.”

“Musharraf and Bush are gone. I’m very happy about Bush being gone. You’re apparently
happy about Musharraf being gone.”

“But Musharraf is lecturing around in your country about democracy. Okay, let’s—”
Hussain wanted the last word, but Hillary cut him off.

“Look, we can either argue about the past—which is always fun to do, but can’t be
changed—or we can decide we’re going to shape a different future. Now, I vote that
we shape a different future. And I cannot take responsibility for everything that
was done in your country, just like you can’t take responsibility for everything that’s
done in our country. But we can certainly try to chart a different course.”

*   *   *

Driving from one interview to the next, to meetings with officials, we watched Islamabad
roll past our windows, a colorless administrative city on a grid system that appeared
under siege. There were military checkpoints every few blocks, barricades surrounded
official buildings, even people’s homes seemed to have unusually high walls topped
with barbed wire.

When we finally made our way to the presidential palace for Clinton’s final meeting
of the day, the sun had long set over the Margalla Hills that rim the northwest of
the capital. The tiered palace looked like a wedding cake and, like all government
buildings in Pakistan, gave off the air of a country much more well-off and stable
than it had been for a while. Clinton walked through the lobby with her retinue, past
glass displays of gifts given to the country’s rulers from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and
the United Arab Emirates. The golden doors of the elevator closed, and up they went
to meet President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. We had been
told to wait on the bus.

A Pakistani guard boarded and asked to check our IDs. Our State Department media handler
pushed back. We were part of a “secure package.” There was no reason to screen us.
The guard didn’t speak English, and the handler didn’t speak Urdu. They stood there,
facing off tensely. The rest of us were too tired to argue, but these were the moments
when American might and arrogance came face to face with the defiance of smaller powers.
I could almost hear their silent thoughts.

We are here with the American secretary of state, she represents the world’s top superpower,
we give you billions of dollars, without us you would be nothing. Who do you think
you are?

I am guarding the Pakistani president, Pakistan is a great country with an ancient
civilization, we developed our own nukes, we’ve tricked you for years into giving
us money, and we don’t even really like you, who do you think YOU are?