But hunting terrorists was unpopular in Pakistan, and drone strikes in particular angered Pakistanis. In public the authorities denied making any deal with the United States, but it was obvious to citizens that the drones flew with the authorities' knowledge and even cooperation. The anger would only get worse as the number of drone attacks grew. But drones were a deeply classified topic in the U.S. government. You could not talk about them in public, much less discuss whom they were hitting and with what results. Embassy staffers took to calling drones "Voldemorts," after the villain in the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort: "he who must not be named."
We knew from early 2009 that the drone problem meant the crucial intelligence relationship with Pakistan was headed for trouble. During my early days working with Holbrooke, when we were crafting a new Pakistan policy, one of Holbrooke's deputies asked him, "If we are going to seriously engage, shouldn't we make some changes to the drone policy, perhaps back off a bit?" Holbrooke replied, "Don't even go there. Nothing is going to change."
To create a new narrative, Holbrooke started by calling together a meeting in Tokyo of the newly created Friends of Democratic Pakistan, an international gathering to help Pakistan rebuild its economy and strengthen democratic politics. He got $5 billion in pledges to assist Pakistan. "That is a respectable IPO," Holbrooke would brag, hoping that the opening would garner even more by way of capital investment in Pakistan's future. But if we wanted to change Pakistan, Holbrooke thought, we had to think even bigger -- in terms of a Marshall Plan. After a journalist asked him whether the $5 billion in aid was too much for Pakistan, Holbrooke answered, "Pakistan needs $50 billion, not $5 billion." The White House did not want to hear that -- it meant a fight with Congress and spending political capital to convince the American people. Above all else, it required an audacious foreign-policy gambit for which the Obama administration was simply not ready.
Yet in reality we were spending much more than that on Afghanistan. For every dollar we gave Pakistan in aid, we gave $20 to Afghanistan. That money did not go very far; it was like pouring water into sand. Even General Petraeus understood this. I recall him saying at a Pakistan meeting: "You get what you pay for. We have not paid much for much of anything in Pakistan." In the end, we settled for far more modest assistance: The 2009 Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation earmarked $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over five years -- the first long-term civilian aid package. It was no Marshall Plan.
Holbrooke also believed we needed more aggressive diplomacy: America had to talk to Pakistan frequently and not just about security issues that concerned the United States, but also about economic and social issues the Pakistanis cared about. So Holbrooke convinced Clinton that America had to offer a strategic partnership to Pakistan, built around a formal "strategic dialogue" -- the kind of forum that America holds with a number of countries, including China and India.
In one of Clinton's first meetings with Pakistan's military and intelligence chiefs, she asked them point blank to tell her what their vision for Pakistan was: "Would Pakistan become like North Korea? I am just curious. I would like to hear where you see your country going." The generals were at a loss for words. So was a group of senior journalists when, during a 2009 interview in Lahore, she pushed back against their incessant criticism of U.S. policy, saying: "I can't believe that there isn't anybody in the Pakistani government who knows where bin Laden is." She was tough. But she was just as serious about engaging Pakistanis on issues that mattered to them.
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