Another example was when Donilon's predecessor as national security advisor, James Jones, traveled to Pakistan for high-level meetings without Holbrooke (not even informing the State Department of his travel plans until he was virtually in the air). Again, the message was "ignore Holbrooke." It was no surprise that our AfPak policy took one step forward and two steps back.
During one trip, Jones went completely off script and promised Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Pakistan's top military man, a civilian nuclear deal in exchange for Pakistan's cooperation. Panic struck the White House. It took a good deal of diplomatic tap-dancing to take that offer off the table. In the end, one of Kayani's advisors told me that the general did not take Jones seriously, anyway; he knew it was a slip-up. The NSC wanted to do the State Department's job but was not up to the task.
Afghans and Pakistanis were not alone in being confused and occasionally amused by the White House's maneuvers. People in Washington were also baffled. The White House encouraged the U.S. ambassadors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to go around the State Department and work with the White House directly, undermining their own agency. Those ambassadors quickly learned how easy it was to manipulate the administration's animus toward Holbrooke to their own advantage. The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, in particular became a handful for the State Department. In November 2010, Obama and Clinton went to Lisbon for a NATO summit, planning to meet with Karzai there. When Eikenberry asked to go as well, Clinton turned down his request and instructed him to stay in Kabul. He ignored her and showed up in Lisbon.
PURSUING RECONCILIATION WAS difficult against the combined resistance of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House. It took a massive toll on Holbrooke. Still, Rubin, his Afghan-affairs advisor, provided the intellectual capital for him, arguing in ever greater detail that the Taliban would come to the table and that Karzai and many Afghans favored talking to them. Holbrooke and Rubin were sure a deal that would sever ties between the Taliban and al Qaeda and bring peace in Afghanistan was within reach.
Holbrooke asked Rubin to put his ideas into a series of memos that Holbrooke then fanned out across the government. After Holbrooke died, Rubin put those memos in one folder for the White House. In early spring of 2012 at a White House meeting, Clinton would push the idea one more time. Donilon replied that he had yet to see the State Department make a case for reconciliation. So Clinton asked Rubin for every memo he had written going back to his first day on the job. The 3-inch-thick folder spoke for itself.
All told, it took more than a year of lobbying inside the administration to get the White House to take the idea seriously. It was close to 18 months after Rubin wrote his first memo that Clinton could finally publicly endorse diplomacy on behalf of the administration, in a February 2011 speech at the Asia Society.
The Obama administration's approach to reconciliation, however, is not exactly what Holbrooke had in mind for a diplomatic end to the war. Holbrooke thought that the United States would enjoy its strongest leverage if it negotiated with the Taliban when the country had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. He had not favored the Afghanistan surge, but once the troops were there, he thought the president should use the show of force to get to a diplomatic solution.
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