The secure videoconference room in the basement of the West Wing fell silent. Next to me, Secretary Bob Gates sat in his shirtsleeves with his arms folded and his eyes fixed intently on the screen. The image was fuzzy, but unmistakable. One of two Black Hawk helicopters had clipped the top of the stone wall surrounding the compound and crashed to the ground. Our worst fears were coming true.
Although President Obama sat stoically watching the screen, we were all thinking the same thing: Iran 1980, when a hostage-rescue mission ended in a fiery helicopter crash in the desert, leaving eight Americans dead and badly scarring our nation and our military. Would this end the same way? Bob had been a senior official at the CIA then. The memory surely was weighing on him, and on the man across the table, President Obama. He had given the final order, directly staking the lives of a team of Navy SEALs and Special Operations helicopter pilots and perhaps the fate of his presidency on the success of this operation. Now all he could do was watch the grainy images beamed back to us.
It was May 1, 2011. Outside the White House, Washington was enjoying a spring Sunday afternoon. Inside, the tension had been building since the helicopters took off from a base in eastern Afghanistan about an hour earlier. Their target was a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, which the CIA believed might be sheltering the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden. Years of painstaking work by the intelligence community, followed by months of soul-searching debate at the highest levels of the Obama Administration, had brought us to this day. Now it all rested on the pilots of those state-of-the-art helicopters and the Navy SEALs they carried.
The first test had been crossing the Pakistani border. These Black Hawks were equipped with advanced technology designed to allow them to operate undetected by radar, but would it work? Our relationship with Pakistan, America’s nominal ally in the fight against terrorism, was already very troubled. If the Pakistani military, always on a hair trigger out of fear of a surprise attack from India, discovered a secret incursion into their airspace, it was possible they’d respond with force.
We had debated whether to inform Pakistan about the raid ahead of time in order to avoid this scenario and the complete breakdown in relations that could follow. After all, as Bob Gates often reminded us, Pakistani cooperation would continue to be needed to resupply our troops in Afghanistan and pursue other terrorists in the border region. I had invested considerable time and energy in the Pakistan relationship over the years, and I knew how offended they would be if we did not share this information with them. But I also knew that elements in the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, maintained ties to the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other extremists. We had been burned by leaks before. The risks of blowing the whole operation were just too great.
At one point another senior administration official asked if we needed to worry about irreparably wounding Pakistani national honor. Maybe it was the pent-up frustration from dealing with too much double-talk and deception from certain quarters in Pakistan, or the still-searing memories of the smoking pile in Lower Manhattan, but there was no way I was going to let the United States miss our best chance at bin Laden since we lost him at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in 2001. “What about our national honor?” I said, in exasperation. “What about our losses? What about going after a man who killed three thousand innocent people?”
The road to Abbottabad ran from the mountain passes of Afghanistan through the smoking ruins of our embassies in East Africa and the shattered hull of the USS Cole, through the devastation of 9/11 and the dogged determination of a handful of U.S. intelligence officers who never gave up the hunt. The bin Laden operation did not end the threat of terrorism or defeat the hateful ideology that fuels it. That struggle goes on. But it was a signal moment in America’s long battle against al Qaeda.
September 11, 2001, is indelibly etched in my mind, just as it is for every American. I was horrified by what I saw that day, and as New York’s Senator, I felt an intense responsibility to stand with the people of our wounded city. After a long, sleepless night in Washington, I flew to New York with Chuck Schumer, my partner in the Senate, on a special plane operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The city was in lockdown, and we were the only ones in the sky that day, except for the Air Force fighters patrolling overhead. At La Guardia Airport we boarded a helicopter and flew toward Lower Manhattan.
Smoke was still rising from the smoldering wreckage where the World Trade Center once stood. As we circled above Ground Zero, I could see twisted girders and shattered beams looming above the first responders and construction workers searching desperately through the rubble for survivors. The TV images I’d seen the night before didn’t capture the full horror. It was like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.
Our helicopter set down on the West Side near the Hudson River. Chuck and I met up with Governor George Pataki, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and other officials and started walking toward the site. The air was acrid, and the thick smoke made it hard to breathe or see. I was wearing a surgical mask, but the air burned my throat and lungs and made my eyes tear up. Occasionally a firefighter would emerge out of the dust and gloom and trudge toward us, exhausted, dragging an axe, covered in soot. Some of them had been on duty nonstop since the planes hit the Towers, and they had all lost friends and comrades. Hundreds of brave emergency responders lost their lives while trying to save others, and more would suffer painful health effects for years to come. I wanted to embrace them, thank them, and tell them everything was going to be all right. But I wasn’t sure yet that it was.
In the makeshift command center at the Police Academy on Twentieth Street, Chuck and I were briefed on the damage. It was crushing. New Yorkers were going to need a lot of help to recover, and it was now our job to make sure they got it. That night I caught the last train south before they closed Penn Station. First thing in the morning in Washington I went to see Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the legendary chairman of the Appropriations Committee, to make the case for emergency relief funding. He heard me out and said, “Think of me as the third Senator from New York.” In the days ahead he was as good as his word.
That afternoon Chuck and I headed to the White House, and in the Oval Office we told President Bush that our state would need $20 billion. He quickly agreed. He too stood by us through all the political maneuvering that was required to deliver that emergency aid.
Back at my office the phones were ringing with callers asking for help to track down missing family members or to seek aid. My extraordinary Chief of Staff, Tamera Luzzatto, and my Senate teams in D.C. and New York were working around the clock, and other Senators began sending aides to help out.
The next day Chuck and I accompanied President Bush on Air Force One back to New York, where we listened as he stood on a pile of rubble and told a crowd of firefighters, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
In the days that followed, Bill, Chelsea, and I visited a makeshift missing persons center at the 69th Regiment Armory and a family assistance center on Pier 94. We met with families cradling photos of their missing loved ones, hoping and praying that they might still be found. I visited wounded survivors at St. Vincent’s Hospital and at a rehabilitation center in Westchester County where a number of the burn victims had been taken. I met a woman named Lauren Manning; although more than 82 percent of her body was terribly burned, giving her a less than 20 percent chance of survival, through fierce willpower and intense effort she fought her way back and reclaimed her life. Lauren and her husband, Greg, who are raising two sons, became vocal advocates on behalf of other 9/11 families. Another amazing survivor is Debbie Mardenfeld, who was brought to New York University Downtown Hospital as an unidentified Jane Doe after falling debris from the second plane crushed her legs and caused extensive injuries. I visited her several times and got to know her fiancé, Gregory St. John. Debbie told me that she wanted to be able to dance at her wedding, but the doctors doubted that she’d survive, let alone walk. After nearly thirty surgeries and fifteen months in the hospital, Debbie confounded all expectations. She lived, she walked, and, miraculously, she even danced at her wedding. Debbie had asked me to do a reading at the ceremony, and I will always remember the joy on her face as she walked down the aisle.
With equal measures of outrage and determination, I spent my years in the Senate fighting to fund health care for first responders harmed by their time near Ground Zero. I helped create the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund and the 9/11 Commission, and supported the implementation of their recommendations. I did all I could to urge the pursuit of bin Laden and al Qaeda and improve our nation’s efforts against terrorism.
During the 2008 campaign both Senator Obama and I criticized the Bush Administration for taking its eye off the ball in Afghanistan and losing focus on the hunt for bin Laden. After the election we agreed that aggressively going after al Qaeda was crucial to our national security and that there should be a renewed effort to find bin Laden and bring him to justice.
I thought we needed a new strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and a new approach to counterterrorism around the world, one that used the full range of American power to attack terrorist networks’ finances, recruitment, and safe havens, as well as operatives and commanders. It would take daring military action, careful intelligence gathering, dogged law enforcement, and delicate diplomacy all working together—in short, smart power.
All these memories were in my mind as the SEALs approached the compound in Abbottabad. I thought back to all the families I had known and worked with who had lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks nearly a decade before. They had been denied justice for a decade. Now it might finally be at hand.
Our national security team began grappling with the urgency of the threat posed by terrorists even before President Obama walked into the Oval Office for the first time.
On January 19, 2009, the day before his inauguration, I joined senior national security officials of the outgoing Bush Administration and incoming Obama Administration in the White House Situation Room to think through the unthinkable: What if a bomb goes off on the National Mall during the President’s address? Is the Secret Service going to rush him off the podium with the whole world watching? I could see from the look on the faces of the Bush team that nobody had a good answer. For two hours we discussed how to respond to reports of a credible terrorist threat against the inauguration. The intelligence community believed that Somali extremists associated with Al Shabaab, an al Qaeda affiliate, were trying to sneak across the Canadian border with plans to assassinate the new President.
Should we move the ceremony indoors? Cancel it altogether? There was no way we were going to do either. The inauguration had to go forward as planned; the peaceful transfer of power is too important a symbol of American democracy. But that meant everyone had to redouble efforts to prevent an attack and ensure the safety of the President.
In the end the inauguration went off without incident, and the Somali threat proved to be a false alarm. But the episode served as yet another reminder that even while we were trying to turn the page on many aspects of the Bush era, the specter of terrorism that defined those years required constant vigilance.
Intelligence reports painted a troubling picture. The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had overthrown the Taliban regime in Kabul and dealt a blow to its al Qaeda allies. But the Taliban had regrouped, staging insurgent attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces from safe havens across the border in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas. Al Qaeda’s leaders were likely hiding there as well. The border region had become the epicenter of a global terrorist syndicate. As long as those safe havens remained open, our troops in Afghanistan would be fighting an uphill battle and al Qaeda would have the chance to plan new international attacks. This was my logic for appointing Richard Holbrooke as Special Representative for both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those safe havens were also fueling increasing instability within Pakistan itself. A Pakistani branch of the Taliban was waging its own bloody insurgency against the fragile democratic government in Islamabad. An extremist takeover there would be a nightmare scenario for the region and the world.
In September 2009 the FBI arrested a twenty-four-year-old Afghan immigrant named Najibullah Zazi, who they believed had trained with al Qaeda in Pakistan and was planning a terrorist attack in New York City. He later pled guilty to conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, and providing material support to a terrorist organization. It was yet another reason to be concerned about what was happening in Pakistan.
I looked into the sorrowful eyes of Asif Ali Zardari, the President of Pakistan, and then down at the aging photograph he held out to me. It was fourteen years old, but the memories it evoked were as vivid as the day it was taken in 1995. There was his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, the astute and elegant former Prime Minister of Pakistan, resplendent in a bright red suit and white headscarf, holding the hands of their two young children. Standing next to her was my own teenage daughter, Chelsea, her face full of wonder and excitement about meeting this fascinating woman and exploring her country. And there I was, on my first extended trip overseas as First Lady without Bill. How young I was then, with a different haircut and a different role, but just as proud to be representing my country in a difficult place halfway around the world.
A lot had happened in the years since 1995. Pakistan had endured coups, a military dictatorship, a brutal extremist insurgency, and escalating economic hardship. Most painful of all, Benazir was assassinated while campaigning to restore democracy to Pakistan in 2007. Now, in the fall of 2009, Zardari was the first civilian President in a decade, and he wanted to renew the friendship between us and between our nations. So did I. That’s why I had come to Pakistan as Secretary of State at a time when anti-American sentiments were surging across the country.
Zardari and I were about to go into a formal dinner with many of Pakistan’s elite. But first we reminisced. Back in 1995 the State Department had asked me to go to India and Pakistan to demonstrate that this strategic and volatile part of the world was important to the United States and to support efforts to strengthen democracy, expand free markets, and promote tolerance and human rights, including the rights of women. Pakistan, which split from India in a tumultuous partition in 1947, the year I was born, was a longtime Cold War ally of the United States, but our relationship was rarely warm. Three weeks before I arrived on that 1995 trip, extremists killed two U.S. Consulate workers in Karachi. One of the main plotters in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yousef, was later arrested in Islamabad and extradited to the United States. So the Secret Service was understandably nervous about my intention to leave the safety of official government compounds and visit schools, mosques, and health clinics. But the State Department agreed with me that there was real value in that kind of direct engagement with the Pakistani people.
I was looking forward to meeting Benazir Bhutto, who had been elected Prime Minister in 1988. Her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had served as Prime Minister during the 1970s before being deposed and hanged in a military coup. After years of house arrest, Benazir emerged in the 1980s as the head of his political party. Her autobiography is aptly titled Daughter of Destiny. It tells a riveting story of how determination, hard work, and political smarts enabled her to rise to power in a society where many women still lived in strict isolation, called purdah. They were never seen by men outside their immediate family and left their homes only when fully veiled, if at all. I experienced that firsthand when I paid a call on Begum Nasreen Leghari, the traditionalist wife of President Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari.
Benazir was the only celebrity I ever stood behind a rope line to see. During a family vacation to London in the summer of 1987, Chelsea and I noticed a large crowd gathered outside the Ritz Hotel. We were told that Benazir Bhutto was expected to arrive there shortly. Intrigued, we waited in the crowd for her motorcade to arrive. She emerged from the limousine, elegantly swathed from head to toe in yellow chiffon, and glided into the lobby, looking graceful, composed, and intent.
Just eight years later, in 1995, I was First Lady of the United States and she was Prime Minister of Pakistan. It turned out Benazir and I had mutual friends from her time at Oxford and Harvard. They had told me she had a sparkle about her: bright eyes, a ready smile, and good sense of humor, along with a sharp intellect. All that was true. She talked candidly with me about the political and gender challenges she faced and how committed she was to education for girls, an opportunity then and now limited largely to the wealthy upper class. Benazir wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves. Chelsea and I were so taken with this style that we wore it for a formal dinner in Lahore held in our honor. I wore red silk, and Chelsea chose turquoise green. At the dinner I was seated between Benazir and Zardari. Much has been written and gossiped about their marriage, but I witnessed their affection and banter and watched how happy he made her that night.
The following years were marked by pain and conflict. General Pervez Musharraf seized power in a military coup in 1999, forcing Benazir into exile and Zardari into prison. She and I stayed in touch, and she sought my help to obtain her husband’s release. He was never tried on the assortment of charges against him and finally was released in 2004. After 9/11, under heavy pressure from the Bush Administration, Musharraf allied with the United States in the war in Afghanistan. Yet he had to know that elements of Pakistan’s intelligence and security services maintained ties to the Taliban and other extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan that dated back to the struggle against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. As I often told my Pakistani counterparts, this was asking for trouble, like keeping poisonous snakes in your backyard and expecting them to bite only your neighbors. Sure enough, instability, violence, and extremism swelled, and the economy crumbled. Pakistani friends I’d met in the 1990s told me, “You can’t imagine what it’s like now. It’s so different. We’re scared to go to some of the most beautiful parts of our country.”
In December 2007, after returning from eight years of exile, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated at a campaign rally in Rawalpindi, not far from the headquarters of the Pakistani military. After her murder, Musharraf was forced out by public protests and Zardari swept into office as President on a wave of national grief. But his civilian government struggled to manage Pakistan’s escalating security and economic challenges, and the Pakistani Taliban began expanding their reach from the remote border region into the more heavily populated Swat Valley, just a hundred miles from Islamabad. Hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes as the Pakistani military moved in to beat back the extremists. A cease-fire agreement between President Zardari’s government and the Taliban in February 2009 fell apart after only a few months.
As their country’s problems worsened, many Pakistanis directed their anger at the United States, fueled by a rambunctious media that trafficked in wild conspiracy theories. They blamed us for stirring up trouble with the Taliban, exploiting Pakistan for our own strategic ends, and showing favoritism toward their traditional rival, India. And those were the most rational claims. In some polls, approval of America fell below 10 percent, despite the billions of dollars in aid that we had contributed over the years. In fact, a massive new assistance package passed by Congress became a lightning rod for criticism in Pakistan because it was seen as having too many strings attached. It was maddening. All the public anger made it harder for the Pakistani government to cooperate with us in counterterrorism operations and easier for the extremists to find shelter and recruits. But Zardari proved more politically adept than expected. He worked out a modus vivendi with the military, and his was the first democratically elected government to complete its full term in the history of Pakistan.
In the fall of 2009 I decided to go to Pakistan and take on the anti-American sentiments. I told my staff to plan a trip heavy on town halls, media roundtables, and other forms of public engagement. They warned, “You’ll be a punching bag.” I smiled and replied, “Punch away.”
I have faced my share of hostile public opinion over the years and have learned it can’t be wished away or papered over with happy talk. There will always be substantive disagreements between peoples and nations, and we shouldn’t be surprised about that. It makes sense to engage directly with people, hear them out, and offer a respectful exchange of views. That might not change many minds, but it’s the only way to move toward constructive dialogue. In today’s hyperconnected world our ability to communicate with publics as well as governments has to be part of our national security strategy.
My years in politics prepared me for this phase of my life. I’m often asked how I take the criticism directed my way. I have three answers: First, if you choose to be in public life, remember Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice and grow skin as thick as a rhinoceros. Second, learn to take criticism seriously but not personally. Your critics can actually teach you lessons your friends can’t or won’t. I try to sort out the motivation for criticism, whether partisan, ideological, commercial, or sexist, analyze it to see what I might learn from it, and discard the rest. Third, there is a persistent double standard applied to women in politics—regarding clothes, body types, and of course hairstyles—that you can’t let derail you. Smile and keep going. Granted, these words of advice result from years of trial and error and mistakes galore, but they helped me around the world as much as they did at home.
To help us better tell America’s story and take on the critics, I turned to one of the country’s smartest media executives, Judith McHale, to come on board as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. She had helped found and lead MTV and the Discovery Channel, and is the daughter of a career Foreign Service officer. In that capacity she helped us explain our policies to a skeptical world, push back against extremist propaganda and recruiting, and integrate our global communications strategy with the rest of our smart power agenda. She also was my representative to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America and other U.S.-funded media around the world. During the Cold War, this was an important part of our outreach, giving people locked behind the Iron Curtain access to uncensored news and information. But we had not kept up with the changing technological and market landscape. Judith and I agreed we needed to overhaul and update our capabilities, but it proved to be an uphill struggle to convince either Congress or the White House to make this a priority.
I saw my job as pushing Pakistan to be more committed and cooperative in the fight against terrorists and helping its government strengthen democracy and deliver economic and social reforms that offered citizens a viable alternative to radicalism. I had to pressure and criticize without losing Pakistan’s help in the struggle that was critical to both our futures.
Shortly after I arrived in Islamabad in late October 2009, a car bomb exploded in a busy marketplace in Peshawar, a city just ninety miles northwest of us. More than a hundred people were dead, many of them women and children. Local extremists had demanded that women be banned from shopping in the market, and the blast seemed designed to target those who had refused to be intimidated. Pictures of badly burned bodies and smoking ruins filled television screens across Pakistan. Was the timing coincidental, or were the extremists sending a message? Either way, the stakes had just been raised on an already delicate trip.
The first stop on my itinerary was a meeting with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, a short drive away from the U.S. Embassy through Islamabad’s well-manicured diplomatic quarter. Islamabad is a planned city of wide avenues rimmed by low green mountains, built in the 1960s to move the government away from the commercial hub in Karachi and closer to the military headquarters in Rawalpindi. Even when a civilian government is nominally in charge, the influence of the Army remains pervasive. One of our traveling journalists asked me on the plane ride over, Was I convinced that the Pakistani military and intelligence services had cut off all ties with terrorists? No, I said, I was not.
For years most Pakistanis had regarded the unrest on their northwest frontier as distant. The region had never been under the full control of the national government, and they had been much more concerned with the practical and immediate problems of electricity shortages and unemployment. But now that the violence was spreading, attitudes were starting to change.
At the press conference following our meeting, Qureshi was distressed by the bombing and directed his words to the extremists. “We will not buckle. We will fight you,” he said. “You think by attacking innocent people and lives, you will shake our determination? No, sir, you will not.” I joined him in condemning the bombing in strong terms and said, “I want you to know that this fight is not Pakistan’s alone.” I also announced a major new assistance project to help with the chronic energy shortages bedeviling the Pakistani economy.
Later that evening I sat down with a group of Pakistani television reporters to continue the discussion. From the first minute, their questions were suspicious and hostile. Like many other people I met that week, they pressed me on the conditions attached to the large new aid package approved by Congress. One might have thought, given the generosity of the package, especially at a time of economic hardship of our own, that there would have been statements of appreciation. Instead all I heard was anger and suspicion about why the money came with “strings attached.” The bill tripled our assistance, yet many Pakistanis took issue with its requirement that military aid be tied to the country’s efforts to fight the Taliban. That seemed a reasonable request, but the Pakistani military reacted negatively to being told what it could and could not do with our money. The condition was seen by many Pakistanis as an insult to their sovereignty and pride. I was surprised at the degree of vitriol and misunderstanding generated around this issue, and how many people seemed to be scrutinizing every word of the legislation for possible slights. Very few Americans ever read our own laws so carefully. “I think your PR and charm offensive is fine, explaining your position is fine,” one of the journalists said, but “we believe that the bill had a sort of hidden agenda.” I tried to stay patient and calm. This was aid meant to help people, nothing more. “I am very sorry you believe that, because that was not the intention,” I replied. “Let me be very clear: You do not have to take this money. You do not have to take any aid from us.”
Clearly our approach to development aid in Pakistan was not working. Either the toxic politics of our relationship had infected the aid, or the aid wasn’t being allocated and spent in a way that made a positive impression on the Pakistani people, or both.
When I became Secretary, the United States was funding over a hundred projects in Pakistan, most of them relatively small and targeted. Some were run directly by USAID, but most were outsourced for implementation to for-profit contractors, as well as nonprofits, including private NGOs, faith-based charities, and research institutes. The contractors were paid whether or not their programs produced verifiable results or furthered our country’s interests and values. There were so many American-funded projects that our embassy couldn’t determine the total number. It was no wonder Pakistanis were telling me they could not see the impact of American efforts.
Both before and after my trip, I worked with Richard Holbrooke on a strategy to address these concerns. We agreed that the entire effort needed to be streamlined. USAID needed to consolidate programs into signature projects with support among Pakistanis and measurable impacts for both our countries. Since we were spending ten times more money in Pakistan than all other countries combined, it seemed an easily achievable objective.
Nothing moved quickly enough for my taste, but USAID announced in April 2012 that it had developed a more focused and strategic plan for Pakistan that centered on a reduction in the number of programs, from 140 in 2009 to thirty-five in September 2012, emphasizing energy, economic growth, stabilization, health, and education. That was at least a step in the right direction.
Throughout my October 2009 visit, Pakistanis emphasized the human and financial costs they were bearing in the fight against terrorism, which many viewed as America’s war that had been unfairly imposed on them. Was it worth the lives of their thirty thousand civilian and military victims? Couldn’t they just make a separate peace with the extremists and live in peace? “You had one 9/11, and we are having daily 9/11s in Pakistan,” one woman in Lahore said to me. I recognized their feelings, and everywhere I went I paid tribute to the sacrifices of the Pakistani people. I also tried to explain why this struggle was as important to Pakistan’s future as to our own, especially now that the extremists were expanding their reach beyond the border region. “I don’t know any country that can stand by and look at a force of terrorists intimidating people and taking over large parts of your territory,” I told the students. I asked them to imagine how the United States would react if terrorists crossed the border from Canada and took control of Montana. Would we accept it because Montana is remote and sparsely populated? Of course not. We would never allow such a scenario anywhere in our country, and neither should Pakistan.
I also heard a lot of questions about drones. The use of remotely piloted aircraft was fast becoming one of the most effective and controversial elements of the Obama Administration’s strategy against al Qaeda and like-minded terrorists in hard-to-reach areas. President Obama would eventually declassify many of the details of the program and explain his policies to the world, but in 2009 all I could say was “No comment” whenever the subject came up. Yet it was widely known that dozens of senior terrorists had been taken off the battlefield, and we later learned that bin Laden himself worried about the heavy losses that drones were inflicting.
Within the administration we intensely debated the legal, ethical, and strategic implications of drone strikes and worked hard to establish clear guidelines, oversight, and accountability. Congress provided a domestic legal basis for counterterrorism operations when it authorized the use of military force against al Qaeda after 9/11, and we had an international legal basis under the laws of war and self-defense. The administration began briefing all strikes occurring outside of Iraq and Afghanistan to the appropriate committees of Congress. The preference remained to detain, interrogate, and prosecute terrorists when those options were available. But when there was not the ability to capture individual terrorists who posed a real threat to the American people, drones provided an important alternative.
I agreed with the President when he said that “this new technology raises profound questions—about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under U.S. and international law; about accountability and morality.” I spent time talking about the complexities of these issues with Harold Koh, the State Department Legal Advisor, a former Dean of Yale Law School, and a renowned expert on international law. Harold argued that, as with any new weapon, we needed to put in place transparent processes and standards governing their use, in accordance with domestic and international law and the interests of U.S. national security. That America is a nation of laws is one of our great strengths, and the Supreme Court has been clear that the fight against terrorism cannot occur in a “legal black hole.”
Every individual decision to carry out a strike was subjected to a rigorous legal and policy review. There were times when I supported a particular strike because I believed it was important to the national security of the United States and met the criteria the President set out. There were other times when I dissented; my good friend Leon Panetta, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and I had a shouting match over one proposed strike. But in every case I thought it was crucial that these strikes be part of a larger smart power counterterrorism strategy that included diplomacy, law enforcement, sanctions, and other tools.
The administration did everything it could to achieve near certainty that civilians would not be killed or injured. Despite those efforts, reports of civilian casualties from drone strikes—often, but not always, untrue—fueled anger and anti-American sentiments. Because the program remained classified, I could not confirm or deny the accuracy of these reports. Nor was I free to express America’s sympathies for the loss of any innocent life, or explain that our course of action was the one least likely to harm civilians, especially when compared to more conventional military action, such as missiles or bombers—or the costs of leaving terrorists in place.
Another common question in Pakistan was how, after backing Musharraf for so long, America expected to be taken seriously about wanting to promote development and democracy. One TV journalist called our behavior “rolling out the red carpet for a dictator.” He and I went back and forth a bit about George Bush, Musharraf, and who was responsible for what. Finally I said, “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.” I’m not sure I convinced him, but by the end of the session the steam seemed to have come out of the group’s anger, at least a bit.
After I wrapped up with the journalists, it was time for meetings and dinner with President Zardari. That’s when, in a quiet moment before we went into the formal dining room in the Presidential Palace, he produced the fourteen-year-old photo of me and Chelsea with Benazir and their children.
The next day I flew to Lahore, an ancient city full of fantastic Mogul architecture. Thousands of police lined the road as we sped into town. I saw some welcome banners hanging along the streets, but we also passed crowds of young men who held signs with messages like “Hillory go back” and “Drone attack is terror.”
At a meeting with university students, I fielded more questions: Why does America always support India instead of Pakistan? What can America do to help with energy shortages and poor education in Pakistan, and why, again, does the aid package come with so many strings attached? Why are Pakistani exchange students in America stereotyped as terrorists? How can we trust America when you’ve let us down so many times before? I tried to provide full and respectful answers. “It is difficult to go forward if we’re always looking in the rearview mirror,” I pointed out. The mood in the room was sullen and aggrieved, with little of the positive energy I had encountered in other university visits around the world.
Then a young woman stood up. She was a medical student and a member of Seeds of Peace, an organization I have long supported that is dedicated to bringing young people together across cultural divides and conflicts. She generously thanked me for serving as an inspiration to young women around the world. Then she pivoted to a sharp-edged question about the use of drones. She noted the collateral damage inflicted on Pakistani civilians and asked why, if these strikes were so important, the United States couldn’t just share the necessary technology and intelligence with the Pakistani military and let them handle it. I was a little taken aback by the shift in tone. But looking at her, I thought back to my own days as a student who was quick to question authority figures. Young people often fearlessly say what the rest of us are thinking but are too cautious to speak out loud. If I had been born in Pakistan, who knows, perhaps I would be standing where she was now.
“Well, I will not talk about that specifically,” I responded, mindful of the limits of what I could legally say at that point about drones, “but generally, let me say that there’s a war going on. And thankfully, there is a very professional and successful military effort that has been undertaken by the Pakistani military. And I’m hoping that the support that the United States provides and the courage of the Pakistani military will bring much of this to a conclusion. Now, there will, unfortunately, always be those who seek to inflict terror, but eventually they can be eliminated and they can be deterred if society just abruptly turns against them. So I think that the war that your government and your military is waging right now is a very important one for the future of Pakistan, and we are going to continue to assist the government and the military to be successful in that war.”
I doubt that satisfied her. It was true, but I couldn’t say what else was in my head: Yes, Pakistanis had borne a terrible price in this fight against extremism, civilians and soldiers alike. Those sacrifices should never be forgotten. And thankfully the Pakistani Army was finally moving into contested areas like the Swat Valley. But too many leaders of the Pakistani military and intelligence services were obsessed with India and either turning a blind eye to the Taliban insurgency and other terrorist groups or, worse, aiding and abetting them. Al Qaeda was operating from Pakistani soil with seeming impunity. So Pakistanis had some hard choices to make about what kind of country they wanted to live in and what they were willing to do to secure it.
I answered all the questions I could. Even if they didn’t like what I had to say, I wanted to be sure everyone understood that America was listening and responding to their concerns.
Next it was on to another sit-down with local journalists, and once again I was playing the role of punching bag. I heard all the same questions about America’s lack of respect for Pakistani sovereignty, and I engaged as honestly and respectfully as I could. As the press described it, I “sounded less like a diplomat than a marriage counselor.” Trust and respect are two-way streets, I reminded my questioners. I was prepared to take an honest view of America’s record in the region and to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. For example, the United States had been too quick to walk away from Afghanistan after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. Pakistanis also had to take responsibility and apply the same scrutiny to their own leaders that they applied to us. “I don’t believe in dancing around difficult issues, because I don’t think that benefits anybody,” I said.
After answering a question about why we were forcing Pakistan to fight America’s war without enough help, I looked around at these journalists, many of whom were so quick to blame the United States for all their troubles. “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Al Qaeda has had safe haven in Pakistan since 2002. I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to. . . . The world has an interest in seeing the capture and killing of the people who are the masterminds of this terrorist syndicate, but so far as we know, they’re in Pakistan.”
For a moment the room was completely silent. I had just said what every American official believed to be true but never uttered out loud. Bin Laden and his key lieutenants, in all likelihood, were hiding in Pakistan. Somebody had to know where. That evening my statement was repeated endlessly on Pakistani television, and government officials in Islamabad hurried to deny that they knew anything at all. Back in Washington, Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary, was asked, “Does the White House think it was appropriate for Secretary Clinton to be as blunt as she was towards Pakistan in the comments she made about Pakistan’s unwillingness to find terrorists within their borders?” Gibbs responded, “Completely appropriate.”
The next day, in yet another round with the Pakistani press, I made the point again: “Somebody, somewhere in Pakistan, must know where these people are.”
A few months after I returned from Pakistan, Leon Panetta invited me to visit him at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. I had known Leon and his wife, Sylvia, for decades. As Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton Administration, Leon played a big role in crafting and passing Bill’s successful economic plan. Then, as Chief of Staff, he helped steer the Clinton White House through the difficult period between the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and Bill’s reelection in 1996. A proud Italian American, Leon is a shrewd, blunt, and colorful Washington operator with fantastic instincts and judgment. I was delighted when President Obama asked him to return to government as CIA Director and later as Secretary of Defense. Now Leon was reaching out to strategize about our fight against al Qaeda. The administration’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence operations against the terrorist network were showing results, but he and I both thought we needed to do a better job of combating extremist propaganda and cutting off al Qaeda’s access to finances, recruits, and safe havens.
I drove out to Langley in early February 2010. The storied lobby in the headquarters, re-created in countless spy thrillers, contains a solemn memorial. Nearly one hundred small stars are carved into the marble, each one memorializing a CIA officer who died in the line of duty, including many whose identities remain classified. I thought back to my first visit to Langley, representing my husband at a memorial service in early 1993 for two CIA officers shot and killed at a traffic light just down the street. The murderer was a Pakistani immigrant named Mir Aimal Kansi, who fled the country but was later caught in Pakistan, extradited, convicted, and executed. I had been First Lady just a few weeks, and the service at Langley left a lasting impression on me of the quiet dedication of those who serve in the CIA.
Now, seventeen years later, the CIA was grieving again. On December 30, 2009, seven officers were killed in a suicide bombing at a base in eastern Afghanistan. Security and Intelligence officers at the compound were about to meet with a potentially high-value al Qaeda informant when he detonated concealed explosives. The attack was a terrible blow for the tight-knit Agency and for Leon himself, who met the flag-draped caskets of the fallen at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Leon published an op-ed in the Washington Post defending his people against unwarranted criticisms of “poor tradecraft” and explaining, “Our officers were engaged in an important mission in a dangerous part of the world. They brought to that mission their skills, expertise and willingness to take risks. That’s how we succeed at what we do. And sometimes in a war, that comes at a very high price.” Leon was right, both about the importance of serving our country in dangerous places and the reality of the risks involved. Most Americans understand that our troops often must be in harm’s way. But the same is also true for our intelligence officers, diplomats, and development experts, as we were tragically reminded during my years at State.
When I arrived at Langley for our meeting, Leon brought me to his seventh-floor office, which looked out over the woods and sprawl of suburban Virginia and the Potomac.
Soon we were joined by analysts from the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center for a briefing on the fight against al Qaeda. We discussed how the State Department could work more closely with the intelligence community to counter violent extremism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hotspots around the world. The CIA team was especially eager for our help in the information wars online and in the airwaves. I agreed. I still had the angry complaints of Pakistanis ringing in my ears. And it drove me crazy that, as Richard Holbrooke once said, we were losing the communications battle to extremists living in caves. Most important, we had to find ways to slow the spread of radicalization or more terrorists would spring up to replace those we were taking off the battlefield. We also needed to bring more countries into the fight against al Qaeda, especially Muslim-majority nations who could help counter extremist propaganda and recruiting. Leon and I directed our teams to work together to draw up concrete proposals that we could bring to the President. Over the next few months, thanks to the leadership of my counterterrorism advisor Danny Benjamin, we developed a four-pronged strategy.
First, to do a better job contesting the online space, including media websites and chat rooms where al Qaeda and its affiliates spread their propaganda and recruited followers, we wanted to create a new Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications housed at the State Department but drawing on experts from across the government. This nerve center in Washington would link with military and civilian teams around the world and serve as a force multiplier for our embassies’ communications efforts to preempt, discredit, and outmaneuver extremist propagandists. We would expand our small “digital outreach team” into a battalion of communications specialists fluent in Urdu, Arabic, Somali, and other languages who could do battle with extremists online and answer anti-American misinformation.
Second, the State Department would lead a diplomatic offensive to better coordinate with partners and allies around the world who shared our interest in combating violent extremism. Remarkably, nearly a decade after 9/11 there was still no dedicated international venue to regularly convene key counterterrorism policymakers and practitioners. So we envisioned a Global Counterterrorism Forum that would bring together dozens of countries, including many from the Muslim world, to share best practices and address common challenges, such as how to strengthen porous borders and respond to ransom demands from kidnappers.
Third, we wanted to step up training of foreign law enforcement and counterterrorism forces. The State Department already worked with nearly seven thousand officials from more than sixty countries each year, and we had experience building counterterrorism capacity in Yemen, Pakistan, and other frontline states. We wanted to do even more.
Fourth, we wanted to use targeted development programs and partnerships with local civil society to try to tip the balance away from extremism in specific terrorist-recruiting hotspots. Over time we had found that recruits tended to come in clusters, influenced by family and social networks. We might not be able to end poverty or bring democracy to every country in the world, but by focusing on specific neighborhoods, villages, prisons, and schools, we might be able to break the cycle of radicalization and disrupt the recruiting chains.
I thought that these four initiatives, along with aggressive efforts by the Treasury Department to disrupt terrorist-financing networks, added up to a coherent, smart power approach to counterterrorism that would complement what the intelligence community and the military were doing. I asked Danny Benjamin to brief the White House staff on our plans and to find a time for me to present our strategy to the President and the rest of the National Security Council.
Some of the White House national security aides supported our plan, but others were concerned. They wanted to be sure that State wasn’t trying to usurp the White House’s role as the primary coordinator of activity across the various agencies, especially when it came to communications. Danny patiently explained that this was intended to be a highly targeted initiative to combat extremist propaganda. To clear the air, as had already been necessary a number of times, I decided to present it directly to the President.
In early July, at a regularly scheduled meeting with President Obama and his full homeland security and counterterrorism teams, I presented our strategy. Danny brought a detailed PowerPoint presentation that described the four initiatives and the resources and authorities we’d need to execute them. Panetta immediately backed me up, telling the President that this was exactly what was needed. Secretary Gates agreed. Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano also spoke in favor. Then we turned to the President. I could see he was a little upset. “I don’t know what I have to do around here to get people to listen to me,” he said, with exasperation. Not a good start. “I’ve been asking for this kind of plan for more than a year!” That was a green light from the top. “We have everything we need,” I told Danny afterward. “Let’s get started.”
It was early March 2011, and Leon Panetta and I were having lunch in a private dining room on the eighth floor of the State Department.
Not long before, he had taken me aside after a meeting in the Situation Room and said he had something important to talk about privately. No staff, no notes. I had offered to pay another visit to his office at Langley, but this time he insisted on coming to the State Department. So here we were at lunch. I was eager to hear what was on his mind.
Leon leaned in and said that the CIA had been tracking the best lead they’d had in years about the possible whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. The Agency had been quietly working this for some time. Leon had slowly started telling senior administration officials, starting at the White House. He went and saw Bob Gates at the Pentagon in December. In February, he brought in the Joint Chiefs and Admiral Bill McRaven, commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, whose troops might be called upon to lead a raid if the intelligence was strong enough. Now he was telling me, because he wanted me to join a small group at the White House to discuss what to do.
I knew that President Obama had told Leon shortly after the inauguration that he wanted the CIA to refocus its efforts on al Qaeda and finding bin Laden. Agents and analysts worked triple-time in Langley and out in the field, and now it seemed their efforts were yielding results. It had been nearly a decade since I stood at the smoldering pile at Ground Zero, and Americans still wanted justice. But I also knew that intelligence is an uncertain business and that previous leads had failed to pan out.
I couldn’t tell anyone at the State Department—or anywhere, for that matter—what was happening, which created some awkward moments with my staff. It has been more than twenty years since I’ve been able to do much of anything without at least a dozen people noticing, but with a little misdirection, I pulled it off.
Our small group met at the White House multiple times in March and April. Leon and his team presented the case that led them to suspect that a “high-value target,” possibly bin Laden, was living in a walled compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, not far from the country’s premier military training academy, the equivalent of our West Point. Some of the intelligence analysts were highly confident they finally had their man. Others were far less confident, especially those who had lived through the failed intelligence process that concluded that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. We sifted through the reports, listened to the experts, and weighed the probabilities on both sides.
We also debated our options. One was sharing intelligence with the Pakistanis and conducting a joint raid, but I and others thought we could not trust Pakistan. The President immediately took that option off the table. Another was to bomb the compound from the air. That would pose little risk to U.S. personnel but was likely to cause significant collateral damage in a densely populated neighborhood, and there would be no way to determine with absolute certainty if bin Laden had really been there at all. Using a targeted missile fired from a drone or other platform might limit the damage, but there would still be no way to recover and identify the body or to collect any other useful intelligence on the premises. Worse yet, it could miss, or not do the trick. The only way to be certain he was there, and equally certain that he would be captured or killed, would be to insert Special Operations forces deep into Pakistan to raid the compound. Admiral McRaven’s special operators were highly skilled and experienced, but there was no doubt that this option posed by far the greatest risk, especially if our men ended up in conflict with Pakistani security forces, hundreds of miles from a safe haven.
The President’s top advisors were split on the wisdom of a raid. Leon and Tom Donilon, by then National Security Advisor, ultimately recommended launching the operation. Bob Gates, who had spent decades as a CIA analyst, wasn’t sold. He thought the intelligence was circumstantial, and he worried that a blowup with the Pakistanis would jeopardize the war effort in Afghanistan. Bob also carried painful memories of Operation Eagle Claw, the disastrous botched rescue attempt of hostages in Iran in 1980 that left eight U.S. servicemen dead when a helicopter collided with a transport aircraft. That was a nightmare scenario that nobody wanted to see repeated. He thought the risks of a raid were just too high and preferred a strike from the air, although he would eventually change his mind. Vice President Biden remained skeptical.
These were difficult and emotional discussions. Unlike most matters I handled as Secretary of State, because of the extreme secrecy of this case there was no trusted advisor I could turn to or expert I could call.
I took that seriously, as President Obama found out when, after the raid was over but before he went on television to inform the country, he called all four living ex-Presidents to tell them personally. When he reached Bill, he began, “I assume Hillary’s already told you . . .” Bill had no idea what he was talking about. They told me not to tell anyone, so I didn’t tell anyone. Bill later joked with me, “No one will ever doubt you can keep a secret!”
I respected Bob and Joe’s concerns about the risks of a raid, but I came to the conclusion that the intelligence was convincing and the risks were outweighed by the benefits of success. We just had to make sure it worked.
That would be the job of Admiral McRaven. He was a Navy man who had come up through the ranks, including a stint leading an underwater demolition SEAL team. The more I got to know him and watch him plan this mission, the more confident I felt. When I asked about the dangers of the raid on the compound, Admiral McRaven assured me that his Special Operations forces had conducted hundreds of similar missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes two, three, or more in a single night. Operation Eagle Claw had been a disaster, but the Special Operations forces learned from it. The complicated part would be reaching Abbottabad without triggering Pakistani radar and a response from its security forces stationed nearby. Once his Navy SEALs were on the ground, they would get the job done.
The SEALs and the Night Stalkers, the pilots of the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, trained extensively for the mission, including two rehearsals on full-sized replicas of the compound conducted at two different secret locations in the United States. There was also a specially trained Belgian Malinois dog named Cairo who worked alongside the SEALs.
On April 28, 2011, President Obama convened our group for one last meeting in the White House Situation Room. He went around the table and asked everyone for their final recommendation. The President and I are both lawyers, and I had learned over time how to appeal to his highly analytical mind. So I methodically laid out the case, including the potential damage to our relationship with Pakistan and the risks of a blown operation. But, I concluded, the chance to get bin Laden was worth it. As I had experienced firsthand, our relationship with Pakistan was strictly transactional, based on mutual interest, not trust. It would survive. I thought we should go for it.
There was also the question of timing and logistics. Because the raid had to be conducted under cover of darkness, Admiral McRaven recommended launching on the soonest moonless night, which would be Saturday, April 30, just two days away. Some officials raised an unexpected concern. The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a high-profile black-tie event at which the President usually tells jokes in front of a room full of reporters and celebrities, was scheduled for Saturday night. These officials worried about how it would look to have the President doing a stand-up routine in case he was needed while the mission was under way. And if he canceled or left early, it would look suspicious and might jeopardize the secrecy of the operation. Admiral McRaven, always the good soldier, gamely promised to make Sunday work if that was the final decision, although any further delays would be a major problem.
I’ve sat through a lot of absurd conversations, but this was just too much. We were talking about one of the most important national security calls the President would ever make. The mission was already complicated and dangerous enough. If the commander of Special Operations wanted to move on Saturday, then that’s what we should do. While I don’t remember exactly what I said, some in the media have quoted me using a four-letter word to dismiss the Correspondents’ Dinner as a concern. I have not sought a correction.
The President agreed. He said that if worst came to worst and he had to bow out in the middle of the dinner, they could just blame a stomachache. In the end, fog was predicted for Abbottabad on Saturday night, and the mission had to be postponed to Sunday anyway. But at least it wasn’t for a Washington party.
After the final meeting the President took time to think it over. The team was still divided. It was a decision only he could make. Then he gave the order. The operation, code-named Neptune Spear, was a go.
I spent Saturday night at the wedding of a close friend of my daughter’s. The bride, a bright young military strategist fluent in Mandarin who studies the Chinese military, and her friends are all smart and engaging young people. It was a cool spring night, and at the reception on a rooftop overlooking the Potomac, I stood off to the side looking at the river and thinking about what the next day would bring. Guests kept coming up and talking to me, and soon I had about a dozen clustered around. One of them asked, “Secretary Clinton, do you think we’ll ever get bin Laden?” I barely suppressed a double take, startled that he had asked me that question on this night of all nights. I responded, “Well, I sure hope so.”
At 12:30 P.M. the next day, Sunday, May 1, I took the fifteen-minute drive from my home to the White House and joined other senior members of the national security team in the Situation Room. White House staff had brought in food from a local deli, and everyone was dressed informally. Two of the CIA officers who had chased bin Laden for more than a decade joined us; it was hard to believe their hunt might soon be over. We reviewed the details of the operation again, including the calls we would make afterward.
At 2:30 P.M. Washington time, two Black Hawk helicopters carrying Navy SEALs took off from a base in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, where it was 11 P.M. Once they crossed into Pakistan, three large Chinook transport helicopters followed with reinforcements ready to deploy if needed.
The whir of the Black Hawks’ rotors cut into the silence of the Abbottabad night about two minutes before they swooped in over the compound. Their approach was visible, fast and low, on the video screen in a small conference room where we had gathered, across from the larger Situation Room. Then, instead of hovering in the air while the SEALs “fast-roped” to the ground, as the plan had called for, one of the Black Hawks quickly began to lose lift. The pilot “landed hard,” and the helicopter’s tail hit the compound wall. (Later the military was able to pinpoint the problem: the full-scale practice model of the compound had a chain-link fence instead of a stone wall, which changed the airflow dynamics enough to compromise the Black Hawk’s operability.) As if this were not alarming enough, a second helicopter, which was supposed to land and drop SEALs on the roof of the compound, had to improvise, flew past without stopping, and landed instead on the ground outside the compound.
That was as tense a moment as any I can remember. It conjured up ghosts, not just of the tragic accident in Iran that Bob had presciently feared from the outset, but also the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia in 1993, in which eighteen American soldiers were killed in Mogadishu. Were we about to witness another disaster for the United States? I thought about the men risking their lives out there in the middle of the night on the other side of the world, and I held my breath. There is a famous photograph of that day that shows me holding my hand over my mouth as we all stared at the screen. I can’t say for sure at what moment that picture was taken, but it does capture how I felt.
Finally we could exhale: the damaged Black Hawk landed and the SEALs jumped out, ready to begin the assault. It was the first of many heroic acts that night. Admiral McRaven was right: his team knew how to handle every bump in the road. The operation was still a go.
We watched on the video feed as the SEALs improvised, sweeping through the courtyard of the compound and heading inside to look for bin Laden. Contrary to some news reports and what you see in the movies, we had no means to see what was happening inside the building itself. All we could do was wait for an update from the team on the ground. I looked at the President. He was calm. Rarely have I been prouder to serve by his side as I was that day.
After what seemed like an eternity, but was actually about fifteen minutes, word came from McRaven that the team had found bin Laden and he was “E-KIA,” enemy killed in action. Osama bin Laden was dead.
One of the backup helicopters had arrived to help ferry the SEALs to safety, along with bin Laden’s body and a treasure trove of captured intelligence. But first they had to blow up the disabled helicopter they were leaving behind so none of its advanced technology could be recovered and studied. While some of the team planted explosives, others gathered up all the women and children who were living in the compound—the families of bin Laden and the others—and led them to safety behind a wall so they would be shielded from the blast. Amid all the dangers and pressures of the day, this humane gesture by our military spoke volumes about America’s values.
Once he knew the SEALs were back in Afghanistan and the body had been confirmed as bin Laden’s, it was time for the President to address the nation. I walked with him, Biden, Panetta, Donilon, Mike Mullen, and Jim Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to the East Room, a place I had been countless times for announcements, musical performances, and state dinners. Now I was in a small audience watching the President deliver historic remarks. I was drained from the emotions and unrelenting tension of the day, not to mention the weeks and months that had led up to it. Listening to the President describe the successful operation made me both proud and grateful. As we walked back through the colonnade that borders the Rose Garden, we heard an unexpected roar coming from beyond the gates. Then I saw a huge crowd of young people, many of them students from nearby universities, gathered outside the White House in a spontaneous celebration, waving American flags, chanting, “USA! USA!” Most had been children when al Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11. They had grown up in the shadow of the War on Terror; it had been part of their consciousness for as long as they could remember. Now they were expressing the emotional release our entire country felt after so many years waiting for justice.
I stood still and let the shouts and cheers wash over me. I thought about the families I knew back in New York who still grieved for their loved ones lost on that terrible day. Would they find some measure of solace tonight? Would survivors like Lauren Manning and Debbie Mardenfeld, who had been so badly injured, face the future with renewed optimism and confidence? I also thought about the CIA officers who never gave up the hunt, even when the trail went cold, and about the SEALs and pilots who performed even better than Admiral McRaven had promised. And every one of them came home.
I was not looking forward to the difficult conversations ahead with the Pakistanis. As expected, when news spread, the country was in an uproar. The military was humiliated and the public inflamed by what they viewed as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty. But when I connected with President Zardari, he was more philosophical than hostile. “People think I am weak,” he said, “but I am not weak. I know my country and I have done everything possible. I cannot deny the fact that the most wanted man in the world was in my country. It is everyone’s failure that we did not know.” He emphasized that Pakistan had been a friend to the United States for six decades, and he described the fight against terrorism in deeply personal terms. “I am fighting for my life and for the future life of my children,” he said. “I am fighting the people who killed the mother of my children.”
I commiserated with Zardari and told him that a number of senior American officials were on their way to meet with him in person. I would come myself when the time was right. But I was also firm with him: “Mr. President, I believe strongly that there can be a way forward that meets both our interests. We would both be worse off if our close cooperation ended. But I want to be clear, as a close friend and someone with high regard for you, that finding this path will require you and your country to make choices. We want greater cooperation.”
I would devote intense energy over the coming months to holding together our fragile relationship, as did our Ambassador in Islamabad, Cameron Munter, and his team. We came close to a serious rupture quite a few more times, but the fundamental shared interests that I had described to my colleagues in our White House deliberations continued to bring our two countries back together. Even without bin Laden, terrorism would remain a threat neither nation could ignore. Pakistan still faced a deadly Taliban insurgency and mounting social and economic problems.
In November 2011, six months after the Abbottabad operation, twenty-four Pakistani soldiers were killed by U.S. forces in a tragic accident along the border with Afghanistan. The United States quickly offered condolences, but Pakistani emotions ran high. In response Pakistan’s government closed NATO’s supply lines into Afghanistan, and the Parliament launched a review of relations with the United States. The Pakistanis wanted a direct apology, and the White House was unwilling to give it. Military shipping containers sat idle for months, creating logistical challenges for our troops, adding financial costs for us—$100 million a month—and depriving the Pakistanis of much-needed revenue.
With no progress on reopening the supply lines by the time of the NATO Summit in Chicago in May 2012, I suggested to President Obama that we needed a different approach to resolve the impasse. He agreed, over objections from both the National Security Council and Defense, to let me try. Some of the President’s advisors, keeping their eyes on the reelection campaign, were allergic to the idea of any apology, especially to the country that had harbored bin Laden. But to help supply Coalition troops we needed to sort it out. I told the President I would absorb any incoming political attacks. I met with President Zardari in Chicago and told him I needed his help to get the supply lines open, just as his government needed the payments it received for permitting convoys to traverse Pakistan. I dispatched Deputy Secretary Tom Nides, an experienced negotiator, to sit down in private with Pakistan’s Finance Minister. This was one of those calls where a willingness to recognize error is not a sign of weakness but a pragmatic compromise. So I gave Tom clear instructions: Be discreet, be reasonable, and get a deal done.
The back channel helped soothe Pakistani feelings. When I met with Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, who had replaced Qureshi, in Istanbul in June, I could tell we were close to a resolution. By early July we sealed an agreement. I acknowledged the mistakes that resulted in the loss of Pakistani military lives and again offered our sincere condolences. Both sides were sorry for losses suffered in the struggle against terrorism. The Pakistanis reopened the border, allowing us to conduct the planned drawdown of Coalition forces at a much lower cost than if we had had to take a different route. Tom and the Finance Minister kept their dialogue going and even published a joint op-ed exploring possible areas of cooperation, especially in economic development.
The negotiations and eventual agreement over the supply lines offer lessons for how the United States and Pakistan can work together in the future to pursue shared interests. As U.S. combat troops leave Afghanistan, the nature of our relationship will change. But both countries will still have interests that depend upon the other. So we’ll need to find ways to work together constructively. Future disagreements and distractions are inevitable, but if we want results we have no choice other than to stay focused and pragmatic.
Meanwhile al Qaeda had been dealt a serious blow, though it was not yet defeated. Because of the operation in Abbottabad, the SEALs returned with extensive new intelligence about the inner workings of al Qaeda. It would add to what we already understood about the spread of affiliated organizations: Somalia’s Al Shabaab, North Africa’s al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which were becoming bigger threats every day. The death of bin Laden, and the loss of so many of his top lieutenants, would certainly degrade the capacity of al Qaeda’s core in Afghanistan and Pakistan to stage new attacks against the West. At the same time, however, this would shift influence and momentum to the affiliates, creating a more diffuse and complex threat.
Faced with this evolving challenge, I felt even more certain that we needed to pursue the smart power approach to counterterrorism I had described to the President in 2010. At the State Department we had been quietly working to develop the tools and capabilities we would need, including expanding our counterterrorism office into a full-fledged bureau headed by an Assistant Secretary of State. But working with the rest of the government could be frustratingly slow. We had to fight for every penny of funding, and despite the President’s pointed comments in July 2010, it took more than a year to get the White House to issue an executive order establishing the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications. We finally received it on September 9, 2011. That same day I visited the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and delivered a major speech explaining our strategy to bulk up the civilian side of counterterrorism.
Twelve days later, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, I inaugurated the Global Counterterrorism Forum. Turkey served as cochair, and nearly thirty other nations joined us, including Middle Eastern and other Muslim-majority countries. Early results over the following two years were encouraging. The United Arab Emirates agreed to host an international center focused on countering violent extremism, and a center on justice and the rule of law is set to open in Malta. These institutions will train police, educators, religious and community leaders, and policymakers. They’ll bring together experts on communications who understand how to undermine extremist propaganda, and law enforcement agents who can help governments and communities learn to protect themselves from terrorists. They’ll also work with educators who can devise curricula free of hatred and give teachers the tools to protect at-risk children from recruitment by extremists.
An early focus of the Global Counterterrorism Forum was kidnapping for ransom, which emerged as a top funding tool for al Qaeda affiliates in North Africa and around the world, especially as other financial avenues were closed off to them. With strong U.S. support, the Forum developed a code of conduct that would stop nations from paying ransoms, which only encourages more kidnapping. The United Nations Security Council backed the code, and the African Union set up trainings to help security forces across the region develop alternative tactics.
We made some progress on the communications front as well. For example, as the Arab Spring swept through the Middle East, our new Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications worked hard to show that al Qaeda was on the wrong side of history. One short video clip the team produced and circulated online began with a recording of al Qaeda’s new leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, claiming that peaceful action would never bring about change in the Middle East, followed by footage of peaceful protests in Egypt and celebrations after the fall of Mubarak. The video stirred up a flurry of responses across the region. “Zawahiri has no business with Egypt; we will solve our problems ourselves,” wrote one commentator on the website Egypt Forum.
This kind of ideological battle is slow and incremental but important, because al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates cannot survive without a steady flow of new recruits to replace the terrorists who are killed or captured and because unchecked propaganda can ignite instability and inspire attacks. We saw this in September 2012, when extremists whipped up outrage across the Muslim world over an offensive but obscure internet video about the Prophet Muhammad. U.S. embassies and consulates in many countries were targeted as a result.
If we step back and take a broader view, we can see that violent extremism is bound up with nearly all of today’s complex global problems. It can take root in zones of crisis and poverty, flourish under repression and in the absence of the rule of law, spark hatred between communities that have lived side-by-side for generations, and exploit conflict within and between states. That is an argument for America to be engaged in the hardest places with the toughest challenges around the world.