Kerry on the job

James Traub has an article in The New York Times about the efforts of John Kerry:

John Kerry surprised a lot of people when he endorsed Barack Obama for president in early 2008. Kerry was a longtime friend of Obama’s chief rival, Hillary Clinton. He had served in the Senate for a quarter-century and had built a reputation as a cautious, incremental figure, like Clinton herself. But for Kerry the time had come for a decisive break with the past. “I felt very strongly we needed a new narrative for the country,” he told me during a long conversation last fall.
In fact, Kerry saw the world very much the way Obama did. As a candidate, Obama distinguished himself, not only from George W. Bush, but also from Clinton by advocating a new foreign policy of “engagement”. He vowed that as president he would meet the leaders of Iran and Syria and other enemies without preconditions, which Clinton deemed “naïve”. Kerry was already practicing engagement: as a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a man who had come within a whisker of being elected president, Kerry had been meeting with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and forming close relationships with autocratic as well as democratic leaders around the world.
When Obama won, Kerry dearly hoped to be named secretary of state, a job for which he felt supremely qualified. But Obama, to almost everyone’s surprise, picked Clinton instead. Kerry is enough of a creature of Washington to understand that no one has a lock on jobs like that, but the setback still stung. Baring your wounds, however, is against Kerry’s nature. “It’s a great job,” he says stoically. “But I already have a great job.”
That actually appears to be true. Kerry now practices his brand of diplomacy as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee but also, remarkably, as a kind of ex-officio member of Obama’s national security team, which has dispatched him to face one crisis after another in danger zones like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Sudan. Kerry’s willingness to go anywhere he is needed, and stay as long as needed, has won him Obama’s gratitude. Clinton has said that she will step down should Obama have a second term. And then Kerry may finally get his wish. “There’s no obvious competition for Number One,” says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution.
John Kerry is ready, willing, and able. And hardworking. And loyal. Hillary Clinton has been, too. Obama is a “transformational” figure who is comfortable surrounding himself with pillars of the foreign-policy establishment. This may explain why he has proved to be less bold than many of his supporters had hoped. Would a Secretary Kerry help Obama make that decisive break with the past? Or would he offer four more years of the same?
In May, I traveled with Kerry to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Afghanistan part was long in the works, but Kerry had tacked on a trip to Islamabad at the last minute in the hope of preventing the relationship with Pakistan from going over a cliff in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Kerry typically travels alone, save for an aide or two; I was the first journalist he had permitted to travel with him. He likes to go places where he can ask questions without being overheard. After arriving in Kabul on the morning of 14 May, he turned around and flew on a military transport to Camp Chapman, the CIA listening post at Khost, near the Pakistan border. He was told, among other things, that Pakistani soldiers were not only letting extremists cross the border unhindered but were also themselves firing on border posts manned by American and Afghan soldiers, information he had every intention of using as ammunition in his coming discussions with the Pakistanis.
Journalists are barred from visiting Chapman, and I met with Kerry later that morning in Mazar-i-Sharif, a relatively peaceful city in Afghanistan’s north. Kerry strode into a hangar at the NATO airfield, delighting a German soldier by greeting her in rudimentary German. Introduced to a group of soldiers from Massachusetts, Kerry went down one row and up the other, asking where each soldier was from*. He seemed to have given a commencement address at everyone’s high school. He smiled— though he did not grin— for pictures. There was much easy banter about his beloved Boston Red Sox. Kerry, who never seemed to enjoy himself very much when he ran for president, appears thoroughly content on his solitary rambles abroad. As a diplomat, he has no public to please, no emotions to counterfeit, no vapid clichés to repeat. It’s liberating. Kerry was there to meet with Atta Muhammad Noor, governor of Balkh province, of which Mazar is the capital. Noor is a former warlord, but a good former warlord. Though he had become vastly rich, he had appointed competent officials and made Balkh into one of Afghanistan’s safer and more prosperous districts. He was also a leading figure in the Northern Alliance, the coalition of ethnic groups that fought the Taliban in the 1990s. Kerry had come to believe that the best chance the U.S. had to extricate itself from Afghanistan was to reach a deal with the Taliban. In any such negotiations, Noor and other northern figures would have to be persuaded that the result would not be a Pashtun-dominated state that left other groups out in the cold (the Taliban consists almost entirely of Pashtuns).
Kerry arrived in congressman-on-the-road mufti: blue blazer, open-necked oxford shirt, khakis, athletic footwear. He took one look at Noor, in a natty blue pinstripe suit, obviously not of domestic design, and blurted out: “I apologize for not wearing a tie.” A gentleman, after all, does not wish to give offense by dressing too casually, even in Mazar. Kerry and Noor then had a private conversation that continued through what was meant to be a public lunch. Noor had backed a rival of President Hamid Karzai in the 2009 election, and, as I was told in a subsequent briefing, he talked about how Karzai and “the palace” had essentially cut off relations thereafter. He worried that a deal with the Taliban would not be “inclusive”. He said that the security situation would collapse if American soldiers left, and he pressed Kerry for reassurances that the United States would stay in significant numbers through 2014, the date that Obama and his NATO allies have set for final withdrawal. Kerry promised him that American troops would not withdraw “precipitately”.
Kerry went from Noor’s gaudy palace to Balkh University, where he conducted the sort of town-hall meeting beloved by traveling American statesmen. Kerry has had both of his hips replaced, but he hopped nimbly down from the stage in order to address the students in the sweltering auditorium. The giant Western presence in Afghanistan has had the perverse effect of turning the country into a dependency. With NATO leaving in three years, Kerry was broadcasting a message to every Afghan he spoke to: you have to take responsibility for yourself. He offered the students a homily. “You have a unique historical moment,” he said in his solemn, declamatory way. “You have democracy. It isn’t perfect yet; ours isn’t perfect yet.” And then he reminisced at length about his early days as an environmental activist. “People went out and made the system work, young people just like you. You think you don’t have any power. Not true; you’ve got a lot of power.” It seemed a little bit absurd to compare Earth Day to the desperate struggle to bring modernity to a largely medieval society, but Kerry was perfectly sincere.
That night, when he returned to Kabul, Kerry had a long dinner with Karzai. Afghanistan’s erratic president has worn out the patience of some of America’s most senior statesman, including Vice President Joe Biden and Richard Holbrooke, the late envoy to the region. But Kerry’s roots run deep in the New England gentry, and his fine sense of social codes may be better suited to the courts of Central Asia and the Middle East than to presidential debates. Kerry denies that he is quite so genteel as all that. “There’s a time to blow your top and walk out of the room,” he told me, “and a time to be totally in quiet listening mode when somebody else’s mind is open to you.”
Kerry was on one of his visits to the region in October of 2009 when a crisis blew up. Karzai had declared himself the winner of a transparently fraudulent election and was refusing to listen to independent monitors who insisted that Afghanistan’s election be done over. Once Kerry arrived in Kabul, the U.S. ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, asked him to stage what turned out to be an emergency intervention. According to a U.S. official who was present, Kerry went to the palace and drank endless cups of tea while Karzai vented about his fears that the international community would drive him from office. Kerry was in quiet listening mode. He put his long arm around the president during walks on the palace grounds. “You’re going to win a new election,” he assured Karzai. “You have a chance to be a legitimately elected leader. All you have to do is accept the results.” Kerry left for a planned trip to Islamabad believing he had made progress. But he hadn’t. He reached Islamabad at 3 in the morning, and at breakfast, General David Petraeus, the head of Central Command, urged him to go back. That afternoon Kerry flew back to Kabul and began meeting with Karzai once again. The Afghan leader was also under growing pressure from members of his own cabinet. But it was Kerry who almost physically walked him out on to the stage to announce the run-off election. “He is,” Ambassador Eikenberry says, “an extraordinarily patient man.”
In the end, though, this kind of eleventh-hour diplomacy can’t do much more than avert catastrophes; the underlying problems tend to reassert themselves soon enough. And the underlying problem in Afghanistan was that Karzai had no interest in practicing the good governance required to make Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy work. (The run-off election was ultimately canceled when Karzai’s opponent withdrew.) Karzai cared about staying in power, and lavishly rewarding his friends and cronies seemed to him a wiser strategy than kissing the American ring. And so Kerry found himself back in Kabul in August of 2010, asked by the Obama administration to admonish Karzai to curb corruption or risk losing American aid. Karzai signed a joint statement, but little came of it.
On the May trip, Kerry had no calamity to confront. He and Karzai talked about the transition, including the need to improve the performance of the Afghan Army and police force in order to take control of even the least violent provinces. But there was no avoiding the perpetual question of governance and corruption. The most recent fiasco was Kabul Bank, which squandered an astonishing nine hundred million dollars on nonperforming loans, while enriching a Karzai brother and other politically connected figures. Kerry did raise the matter with Karzai, and he told me later that “Kabul Bank will be the test” of the president’s commitment to fight corruption. Karzai has failed this test, too, though recently two former executives of the bank were arrested. A Western official with long experience in the country told me that the warlords with whom Karzai has surrounded himself since the 2009 election have come to virtually dominate his decision making. “Can we thread the needle here by 2014?” the official asked. “Yes, but we’re going to need more political will expressed by Karzai.” I asked if he saw any sign of that. At the moment, he said, no.
Why, then, does Kerry bother? Why is he racing back and forth to put out the fires being set by a serial arsonist? I asked him about this on the short flight from Kabul to Islamabad. Kerry tried to put the best possible face on what he had learned. Despite the warlords in Kabul, he said, Karzai had appointed some talented officials at the provincial and district levels. “It’s a mixed bag,” he concluded gamely. Kerry knew Karzai’s failings as well as anyone, but he was not prepared to abandon Afghanistan’s president, because he was not prepared to abandon Afghanistan. But why not? With Bin Laden dead, and with the cost of the war becoming unsustainable at a time of grave financial problems, why not declare victory and go home? A majority of the public, a growing body of congressmen, Republican as well as Democratic, and many leading foreign-policy thinkers and regional experts are calling for the troops to come home as fast as possible.
“The threat is much smaller in terms of al-Qaeda returning,” Kerry said on the plane. But, he added, “in undoing what you’ve done, you do have to be thoughtful about not creating chaos and losing what you’ve gained.” A hasty withdrawal could, as Noor warned, provoke a civil war, which would be a catastrophe for Afghanistan and might also produce a new terrorist threat for the West. An orderly transition to Afghan control could prevent that. But how likely was that? Kerry made it clear that he was far from confident. Of course, if the Taliban agreed to lay down its arms in exchange for a share of power, Afghanistan would no longer need to defend itself. That was a major reason that both Kerry and Obama had begun speaking less about military success in Afghanistan and more about reaching a political deal.
Kerry is a careful, conscientious thinker. While Joe Biden flatly told Obama in 2009 that he should scale back troops in Afghanistan and focus on hunting down terrorists in Pakistan, Kerry took a nuanced position, endorsing the limited counterinsurgency plan that Obama adopted, but stipulating that such a commitment must be “reciprocated by the Afghans themselves in the form of improved governance and increased Afghan capacity, both civilian and military.” Like others, Kerry foresaw many of the dangers of such an effort, including the likelihood that American troops would come to be regarded as occupiers. In effect, he foresaw the possibility of the failure of the plan he endorsed, though he never repudiated it.
It’s still not all that easy to say where Kerry stands on Afghanistan. At times in our conversation he seemed to agree with Biden, and at times with General David Petraeus, the architect of the counterinsurgency policy. I felt as if he were seeking not to differentiate himself from others but to locate himself at the core of a consensus. For all his reputation as a loner, Kerry is constantly calling up friends in the foreign-policy establishment, which in turn defines the boundaries of his views. He will never stray far from Obama administration policy. That may be because he wants to be the next secretary of state. But it may also be that a man who was brave enough to point his Swift Boat into enemy fire is, in intellectual terms, unwilling to break ranks.
The last time most Americans saw John Kerry, he was tying himself in knots trying to rebut the charge that he was for the war in Iraq before he was against it. That was unfair, like a great deal that happened during the 2004 campaign, but politics are unfair. Kerry seemed to be the latest in a long line of decent, serious, honorable Democratic presidential candidates cut to ribbons by the Republican attack machine and bested by GOP contenders whom voters would much rather have a beer with. Kerry didn’t grow a beard, but he did have a wandering-in-the-wilderness phase. And then, four years later, events reshaped his life: Joe Biden, chairman of foreign relations, became vice president; Chris Dodd, next in seniority, moved to Banking; and Kerry, having been passed over for secretary of state, looked up and found that he was committee chairman. Suddenly he was one of the leaders of the Senate. And then he was Massachusetts’ senior senator as well: Ted Kennedy’s death in 2009 removed both a cherished adviser and a giant shadow. Just about everyone who knows Kerry notes how much happier he is now than he was before. When he talks about his own feelings, which he does somewhat dutifully, as a political veteran who understands his end of a journalistic bargain, the word Kerry uses is “clarity”.
Kerry was on friendly terms with practically everyone who runs the world. He was also a peer, and in some cases a confidant, of the members of Obama’s national security team. Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, says that he can barely recall a time he didn’t know Kerry. Hillary Clinton says that she sometimes talks to her former colleague “three or four times in a day.” Joe Biden offers a slightly more Bidencentric view of Kerry’s status. “I don’t think there’s ever been a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who’s had as close a relationship with the vice president who’s also had as close a relationship with the president,” Biden told me. “John can see the president any time he wants, but we have all three found that the best interlocutor is me.” Biden also noted, “I have an unusual relationship with John— I really am John’s friend.” Kerry, who has a reputation for chilliness among his colleagues, might not want to parse that sentence too closely.
The combination of his new job and his relationships made Kerry a perfect ex-officio ambassador for a White House soon engulfed by a series of foreign-policy crises. “From the outset,” Donilon says, “he made clear and we welcomed that he would be available to work a number of issues, which he has done with great intensity and effectiveness.” In 2008, Kerry and Senator Chuck Hagel argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Syria that “our policy of nonengagement has isolated us more than the Syrians”. President Bashar al-Assad complained that “positive steps have not been rewarded”; the time had come to test his bona fides and see if he was prepared to move closer to the West and to make peace with Israel. The Bush administration argued that talking to Syria, which maintained close relations with Iran and sponsored the terrorist organization Hezbollah, would legitimize its conduct. But Obama, like Kerry, viewed Syria as an important example of the new policy of engagement. Kerry visited Syria four times, in 2009 and 2010. On the first trip, Assad and his English-educated wife drove him to dinner in Damascus; afterward, they went to a mosque. Over the course of that evening, Assad spoke of his hope for a religiously moderate and prosperous Syria. Kerry later received from the administration a list of modest confidence-building steps that Assad could take, and he says that Assad made good in each case.
Kerry became Assad’s most important booster in Washington, endorsing his commitment to peace with Israel. Some experts thought that Kerry was being taken for a ride. Andrew Tabler, a former journalist in Syria now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says: “Despite all the things that have happened over the last two years, Syria’s behavior”— transferring arms to Hezbollah and cracking down on domestic dissent— “has gotten markedly worse. Engagement is not working.” And that was before Assad’s security forces killed hundreds of peaceful protestors in cities across the country, a brutal response that made Kerry’s praise look naïve.
Kerry bridled when I raised the issue with him. “I never said to anybody this guy is a domestic reformer,” he said. “This was an external opportunity.” The first statement appears to be literally true, though the distinction was scarcely obvious at the time. But the second point is the key to Kerry’s view. Geopolitical thinkers going back to Henry Kissinger have had visions of Syria as the linchpin of a transformed Middle East. Kerry shared this hope, and he tried to persuade Assad to make sufficient concessions for Israel to agree to restart indirect talks that had faltered in late 2008. Kerry says that he did, indeed, succeed in moving Assad further than he had before. Perhaps he did, but Syria is a kind of shimmering mirage that beckons to, and then disappoints, ambitious strategists. What’s more, Kerry’s diplomatic craftsmanship may have blinded him to the upheaval that would topple some of the dictators he had long cultivated and discredit others. In this case, that is, “engagement” may have been the status quo policy, not the breakthrough one.
When I suggested that Assad may not have deserved all that attention, Kerry gave me a little lecture. “Countries and people and leaders of countries act out of self-interest,” he said. “Foreign policy is the art of finding those interests and seeing what serves your nation, and trying to marry them.” That is a crisp summation of the pragmatic calculus that lies beneath the policy of engagement. Such a policy is surely preferable to histrionic declarations about the axis of evil. And yet even hard-headed realism can conceal naïveté. Kerry insists that Assad’s true interests require him to shift to the West, which in turn require him to make peace with Israel. But was Assad really prepared to pursue his interests if they required a break with Iran and an acceptance of Israel? The fact that he never did so, and that he ultimately turned on his own people rather than permitting measured dissent, may show that he lives in a more Darwinian world than do those who seek to entice him out of it. Kerry also maintains that Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared to make real sacrifices for peace. But there’s scant evidence that this is so. Relationships are very important to diplomacy, but it’s possible to set too much store by them.
Kerry engages in meticulous preparation for his diplomatic campaigns. He speaks constantly to officials in the State Department and on the National Security Council before, during and after his trips, often summarizing his experiences in lengthy memos to the White House. He took several extra steps before the all-important trip to Pakistan in May. He invited Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States and an important confidant, over to his house to ask him: “What would it take for me to convince the leadership in Pakistan that the U.S. wants to work together?” And he sent a private emissary to the military leadership to convey that he hoped to repair relations, not deliver an ultimatum.
Nevertheless, as he flew from Kabul to Islamabad, Kerry knew that if he couldn’t get real concessions from the Pakistanis, then Congress, outraged that Bin Laden had been hiding in plain sight in Abbottabad, about 75 miles from Islamabad, might cut off funding. But the Pakistani leadership was even angrier about the Navy SEAL raid, which it viewed as a gross violation of sovereignty. The Pakistani press was full of rumors that the military and civilian leaders were prepared to break relations with the United States, no matter what the cost. As the Pentagon’s Gulfstream III prepared to land in Islamabad, Kerry wondered how he was going to explain the decision to keep the raid a secret, which of course sprang from a well-founded fear that extremist sympathizers inside the security apparatus would have tipped off Bin Laden. In less than an hour he would be having dinner at military headquarters with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief, and Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, head of Pakistani intelligence.
Kerry told me later what happened. Kayani asked him to go first, and Kerry began by warning them that his colleagues were “overwhelmingly negative about aspects of the relationship” and “needed to see which way Pakistan was really going to go”. Then he added that he felt the two nations had many shared interests and needed to pursue them in a spirit of cooperation. The conversation lasted four and a half hours and touched on virtually every source of friction between the two countries: Pakistani support of terrorist organizations, American clandestine intelligence operations, NATO incursions on Pakistani airspace, the cross-border firing he had heard about in Khost and, of course, the Navy SEAL raid. Kayani and Pasha said that the American drone strikes must stop, and Kerry countered that such a demand “would be near-fatal with respect to any efforts to try to get back together”. There was, Kerry said, “no finger-pointing”.
The following day, after talks with Kayani, President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, Kerry surprised the doomsayers by issuing a joint statement stipulating an enhanced Pakistani commitment to fighting terrorism and sharing intelligence in exchange for an American commitment to work more “jointly” on operations inside the country. Acutely aware of Pakistani sensitivities, Kerry insisted to a group of Pakistani journalists that the decision not to inform Pakistani leaders of the raid in advance had to do with operational secrecy, not mistrust. “In Tora Bora,” he said, “we outsourced the job, and it didn’t work.” U.S. Special Forces could have killed or captured Bin Laden at the battle of Tora Bora in late 2001, but they had left the job to Afghans, and Bin Laden and his men had escaped. The raid in Abbottabad was Tora Bora Two. “No American president could have outsourced the job again.” Of such quaint face-saving evasions is diplomacy made.
More important, Kerry had earned goodwill as one of the backers of the legislation authorizing $7.5 billion in civilian assistance to Pakistan over five years and also as an emissary during the floods in the summer of 2010. And Pakistanis appreciate Kerry’s humility. Haqqani told me that Kerry is one of the very few senior American officials who doesn’t approach Pakistan like “a viceroy”.
It was a happy John Kerry who left Islamabad that night. Once on the plane to Dubai, though he had about three hours of sleep in him and had just emerged from grueling talks, he made a goofy get-rolling motion with his wrists, like a cheerleader, and said, “We got a beer on board?” A whole cooler’s worth, it turned out. Ducking in the confined space, Kerry played flight attendant with his worn-out staff: “Anybody want a beer?” I was witnessing the John Kerry version of euphoria. Kerry popped open a beer for himself, but then set it aside as he called an aide whose father had just died.
Then, when we touched down in Dubai, a strange thing happened. Kerry’s BlackBerry started buzzing with angry messages from Kayani and Zardari. Both demanded that Kerry call right away, but first he called the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter. I heard Kerry shouting into his phone: “That is incredibly arrogant! That is stupid, insulting, and arrogant!” I was even more taken aback by Kerry’s anger than I had been by his jubilation; the man obviously has a much wider emotional range than he shows in public. It turned out that a drone strike had been launched an hour after Kerry’s plane took off, thus making his promises of enhanced cooperation sound preposterous. This was not the way you treat your host.
The package that Kerry had so laboriously tied together in Islamabad unraveled in the ensuing weeks. Pakistani military leaders have said they will not send soldiers after the Afghan Taliban, who attack NATO troops from their Pakistani sanctuaries. According to news reports, Pakistani military intelligence arrested five men who had helped the CIA track down Bin Laden. Kerry’s colleagues became even more negative as Pakistan appeared to be deciding which way it wanted to go. Preserving the $1.5 billion a year in civilian aid for Pakistan will be, Kerry conceded, “a very uphill battle.” This is a polite way of saying impossible.
Practically everything is an uphill battle in Congress these days. The Foreign Relations Committee has attracted some of the most wild-eyed members of the GOP; during the immensely protracted, though ultimately successful, negotiations over the treaty with Russia on nuclear reductions last fall, Kerry needed even more forbearance than he had lavished on Karzai. While Senator Richard G. Lugar, the committee’s senior Republican, lashed out at his colleagues for obstructionism, Kerry kept mum. This could come in handy should Kerry ever need Senate confirmation.
Kerry has big plans for himself, whatever job he holds. Perhaps as a secretary of state he would be a highly professional status quo figure like Hillary Clinton, but with a deeper grasp of the opportunities available in the world. In our last conversation, in his Senate office, he talked about his faith that Middle East peace was still possible. “You have to be steady,” he said. “It’s going to take some very careful, mostly secret negotiating.”
That sounded like a job for Secretary Kerry. I asked if he was interested. “It would depend on what the job was,” Kerry said. Meaning? He wouldn’t say. But the real point was: He didn’t need it. “I feel,” Kerry said, “as much energy and a sort of quiet— that’s a good word, a calm and confidence— about what I’m doing and how I’m approaching things as I ever have. I like where I am.”

Rico says he can only see Kerry doing Donald Sutherland in MASH: Where you from, soldier?