“Is anyone reading the newspaper?” Hillary Clinton asked incredulously. “Is anyone watching television?”
Her colleagues assembled around the conference table in the Situation Room squirmed in their chairs. They had just been praising a classified report about the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan, which the agency had presented to the NSC’s Principals Committee in the spring of 2012. The report was part of a high-level review Barack Obama had ordered of the covert policy of targeted killings, the cornerstone of his counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda. “Mr. President,” it began, “under your leadership, we have conducted…” The headline numbers looked promising: the number of accidental civilian casualties from drone strikes in the rugged frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan had dropped markedly as a percentage of the total casualties; the Hellfire missiles fired from Predator drones were hitting the bad guys with greater precision, the report claimed.
“Oh, that’s great,” said one senior official.
“Good data,” said another.
“It shows that this is not the picture everyone paints,” chipped in a third.
Clinton, as was her habit, had asked the national security adviser, Tom Donilon, who was chairing the meeting, to let her speak last. She proceeded to shred the whole exercise. “It doesn’t matter what our analysts are saying,” Clinton told her startled colleagues. The numbers didn’t begin to capture the damage the drone program was doing to America’s image abroad. “First of all, the narrative is out there,” she said. “The bigger question, folks, is, ‘What the heck are we doing with drones? What is our policy? Do we have an answer for the American public? Do we have an answer for the left? Do we have an answer for our international allies, who want to know under what criteria, under what conditions, under what international law, are we using them?’ ”
There were no good answers to Clinton’s questions that day, just as there had been no answers at any of the other White House meetings held to discuss this new type of war, which had, like it or not, become America’s calling card in some of the world’s most dangerous places.
Hillary Clinton did not, and does not, oppose Obama’s use of covert operations in fighting terrorism. She endorsed the CIA plan to dispatch a team of Navy SEALs to raid Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan—albeit in a heavily hedged calculation, with a list of pros and cons long enough to fill a yellow legal pad. She backed the firing of Tomahawk cruise missiles from American ships to hit terrorist targets in Yemen, a quasi-secret program to help the Yemenis combat the al-Qaeda franchise that had taken root there. She favored sending drones from a secret CIA base in Afghanistan to strike terrorists in Pakistan, even if the Pakistanis seethed at the intrusion into their territory. “She was supportive of what we had to do to deal with al-Qaeda,” Leon Panetta, the CIA director at the time, said. “Both of us knew very well that the key was to ensure that Pakistan, regardless of their concerns, would stand back and allow us to continue those operations.”
But Clinton was deeply frustrated by the lack of coordination between the CIA and the State Department about the timing of drone strikes; they sabotaged the work of her diplomats on a regular basis. She fought for her ambassador in Islamabad to have the right to veto what he judged to be ill-chosen strikes, and for the White House to be more open about the program, which it never publicly acknowledged, so that she and other officials could defend it, particularly when they traveled to the countries where drones were being used.
Clinton got a taste of the damage these strikes inflicted on America’s reputation and image abroad in a way that Obama did not. The president carried out his drone war within a tight circle of counterterrorism advisers who compiled a list of targets to be killed or captured and had the boss sign off on them. They were driven by a single overriding goal—to prevent another act of terrorism on American soil without committing more American ground troops—and not overly concerned about how their tactics might bruise feelings abroad. Obama never visited Pakistan as president; Clinton went three times as secretary of state. Each time she did, she got bombarded with questions about the strikes—What about civilian casualties? Why not let the Pakistanis do it themselves? Why was this any different from what the terrorists are doing?—none of which she was allowed to answer because of the program’s covert nature.
Her firsthand exposure gave Clinton a more jaundiced perspective than Obama on targeted killings as an instrument of foreign policy: how they could turn public opinion against the United States; how they could be exploited by foreign governments to create a negative, sometimes false, narrative; how they could undercut the diplomatic outreach of the State Department or the development work of USAID; how they could radicalize societies, even as they “removed fighters from the battlefield,” to use the White House’s preferred euphemism. By 2009, the CIA’s insistence on not confirming the existence of the program was a charade because the strikes were routinely reported in the Pakistani press. It was a charade that came at a high cost, Clinton believed: Because no government official could publicly talk about the program, the United States could not articulate a persuasive moral or legal case for why it needed to be in the killing business.
“She was fine with the lawful use of drones as a tool, but very uncomfortable with using drones as a strategy,” said Harold Koh, who served as the State Department’s legal adviser from 2009 to 2013. “She doesn’t believe they are a strategy.”
An eminent legal scholar and ardent political supporter of Clinton, Koh knows better than anyone the ethical and legal conundrum posed by these weapons. As a Yale Law professor with a deep interest in human rights, Koh had been a fierce critic of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 counterterrorism policies, from the waterboarding of suspected terrorists to their indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay. In his role at the State Department, he worked hard to reconcile Obama’s targeted killings with international law, opening himself up to charges of hypocrisy in the process. After leaving the government in 2013, Koh went to Oxford University in England, where he had studied as a Marshall Scholar, to square that circle. Obama’s failure, he told the Oxford Union in a speech titled “How to End the Forever War?,” was not the drone strikes themselves, but the president’s opacity about them: refusing to talk about drones made it impossible to explain their utility or to defend their legality.
“Because the administration has been so opaque, a left-right coalition running from Code Pink to Rand Paul has now spoken out against the drone program,” he said. This fueled “a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary, and out of control. The administration must take responsibility for this failure, because its persistent and counterproductive lack of transparency has led to the release of necessary pieces of its public legal defense too little and too late.”
In a vaulted hall at Oxford, Koh was echoing what Clinton had said a year earlier in the windowless confines of the Sit Room.
It took Obama three years to offer his first candid defense of drones, and when he did, it wasn’t in a speech at West Point or a press conference at the White House. Instead, he chose a Google Hangout, a live video chat carried on YouTube. Obama’s press staff liked these social media channels as a way to reach young people, and when he sat down for the group video chat on January 30, 2012, his audience asked a typical mix of trivial and tough questions. By then, outside investigators estimated, the United States had carried out 257 strikes in Pakistan, killing up to 2,500 people (of which 15 percent to 22 percent were believed to be civilians). Amid the requests for Obama to show off his dance moves or tell how he and Michelle planned to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary came this from Evan in Brooklyn, New York: “Mr. President,” the young man asked, “you’ve ordered more drone attacks in your first year than your predecessor did in his entire term. These drone attacks cause a lot of civilian casualties. I’m curious to know how you feel they help the nation, and whether you think they are worth it.”
Drones don’t kill a lot of civilians, Obama replied. They are precision tools, aimed at enemies whose names are on a list, not, he said, “a bunch of strikes, willy-nilly.” Paras Patel, a medical student from Detroit, wasn’t satisfied. But don’t these incursions, he asked, send a message that the United States is too ready to interfere in other countries? Obama conceded the risk, but said that drones allowed the U.S. government to go after terrorists in places that were beyond the reach of local troops and would otherwise require a much more intrusive and dangerous military intervention. Most of the strikes he had ordered, he said, were in a part of northwest Pakistan along the Afghan border. It was the first time Obama confirmed what everyone knew. This remote, mountainous, and violent place—a safe haven for al-Qaeda since 9/11—was in America’s crosshairs.
“It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash,” he said. “It’s not a bunch of folks in a room somewhere, just making decisions.”
Except, to a great extent, that’s what it was.
From the moment Obama took office, he made it clear he would continue the targeted killing program he inherited from George W. Bush. His resolve was hardened at the end of his first year when a Nigerian man nearly blew apart a Northwest Airlines plane bound for Detroit by igniting explosives hidden in his underwear. The Christmas Day plot failed and the 290 passengers on board arrived safely. But Obama viewed it as a political near-death experience for his administration—one that erased his early ambivalence about many of the counterterrorism methods used by his predecessor. Not only was he sure that targeted killings were the smart way to fight terrorism, he was determined to run the program from the West Wing.
Obama entrusted the grim business of selecting targets to John Brennan, his chief counterterrorism adviser. The sixty-year-old spymaster had lost his initial shot at being CIA director in the first term because of comments he made that were viewed as soft on the Bush administration’s use of rendition and torture, and ran counter to Obama’s pledge to end both practices. Assigned a claustrophobic, bunker-like office in the White House basement, Brennan oversaw a group of more than one hundred people across the government whose job was to compile what the press dubbed the “kill list.” He arguably wielded more power than he would have in the wood-paneled suite at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (He ended up as the agency’s director in the second term.)
The son of Irish immigrants from County Roscommon, Brennan has the hulking physique, rough-hewn features, and bristle-cut hair of a New York City police captain, circa 1940. Jesuit educated and a workaholic, he studied Arabic during a junior year abroad in Cairo and served as the CIA’s station chief in Saudi Arabia in the mid-1990s, when nineteen American servicemen were killed in a truck bombing at the Khobar Towers. He was one of a trio of national security aides, along with Denis McDonough and Tom Donilon, whom Obama called “the grim Irishmen.” When the Irishmen were waiting for him in the Oval Office, the president could be sure they weren’t there to chat about last night’s game or which pop star was going to perform that evening in the East Room. Brennan was on hand for the hardest conversations of all: whether Obama should approve a drone strike that would kill a person, sometimes many people, in a distant land. Inevitably, given his Irish Catholic roots and image of rectitude, some began to think of him as the president’s confessor.
Obama leaned heavily on Brennan’s knowledge of Islamic extremism, of Saudi Arabia, and of Yemen, where he had forged close ties to President Ali Abdullah Saleh. “The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats,” Brennan told my colleagues Scott Shane and Jo Becker in 2012. “It is the option of last recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, don’t like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: the infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.”
Brennan wasn’t the only official who amassed uncommon authority to wage this hidden war. Leon Panetta, Obama’s first CIA director, asked the president in the fall of 2009 to expand the agency’s fleet of armed drones and to petition the Pakistanis to widen the territory over which they were allowed to fly. Neither decision was straightforward. “The politics in Pakistan,” he told me, “were very complicated.” But Panetta got both. It was a tribute to his bureaucratic agility—Clinton described him as a “shrewd, blunt, and colorful Washington operator”—and to Obama’s broader reflex in the first term, which was to give the agency whatever it wanted.
At the same time the CIA was building its secret air force, the White House cast around for nonmilitary ways to combat terrorism. Denis McDonough was put in charge of an early effort to diagnose why the United States had such a poor image in Pakistan, and vice versa, and to devise ways to improve each. After the enormity of the task became clear, the project faded. The State Department later developed plans for a center to counter extremist propaganda, which would pool experts from several agencies to try to discredit or preempt the anti-American messages of jihadi groups. But it ran into resistance from Obama’s advisers, who viewed it as encroaching on the NSC’s turf. When Clinton presented the idea at a meeting with the president and his homeland security staff in July 2010, he exploded in frustration. “I don’t know what I have to do to get people around here to listen to me,” he said. “I’ve been asking for this kind of plan for more than a year!” McDonough and Brennan were stung by his reprimand. But rather than leaping into action, they took it out on the State Department, waiting another year to authorize the center.
“Some of us were in the awkward position of working for a guy who said during the campaign that he wanted to do this in a smarter way,” said Daniel Benjamin, who coordinated counterterrorism policy for Clinton at the State Department. “Then the kinetic piece became so dominant that it was hard to get a hearing for all the other stuff.”
The White House, some concluded, was paying lip service to the other stuff. “It was a constant theme from very early on. It was the mantra no one ever did anything about: We can’t solve this by drone strikes alone, we can’t shoot our way out of this,” said Dennis Blair, who had a brief, stormy tenure as Obama’s director of national intelligence in 2009 and 2010.
A blunt, brainy navy admiral who once commanded the Pacific Fleet, Blair came in knowing the Clintons better than he knew Obama. He had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford with Bill. The two were not close, but in the turbulent year of 1968, Blair asked Clinton to deliver a graduation speech in his place at an American military high school in London. (Blair was busy studying for his exams; Clinton had decided to skip his.) It was a risky move—swapping a straight-arrow Naval Academy grad for a bearded anti-Vietnam protester—but Clinton threaded the needle. He paid tribute to those who served while making it clear that he disagreed with the policy. Decades later, when Clinton was president, the Pentagon sent Blair, then a fast-rising navy officer, to the CIA to serve as its liaison to the agency. There, Blair honed his views about the proper role of intelligence agencies in American foreign policy—views that he brought to an Obama war cabinet that included his former classmate’s wife.
Blair and Hillary should have been natural allies. He thought the United States relied too much on covert operations instead of old-fashioned diplomacy. In some countries in the Middle East and South Asia, the CIA station chief had more clout with the local government than the ambassador, a situation that understandably grated on the career diplomats. Nowhere was the tension between diplomats and spies greater than in Pakistan, where the Pakistani spy agency, the ISI, mirrored the CIA’s influence. The conflict led to a shouting match between Clinton and Panetta over who got to sign off on drone strikes there. Blair, in his role atop the intelligence establishment, hoped to right that balance. Early in 2010, he approached officials at the State Department about ways he could help bolster the influence of ambassadors in the region. Had he succeeded, Clinton would have been a big winner. He did not. The admiral’s outsider status and impolitic manner crippled him with Obama and his aides. After a string of clashes with Panetta—the most bitter after he tried to take away the CIA’s traditional right to name the senior American spy in foreign countries—Blair was fired by the president that May.
The first thing to know about America’s relationship with Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke liked to say, is it exists both above the waterline and below the waterline. The visible part consists of the traditional diplomacy and development that the United States conducts with hundreds of countries. The submerged part consists of covert counterterrorism operations—sometimes in conjunction with the Pakistani authorities, sometimes not. The trick was not to let the below-the-line activities swamp the above-the-line ones. With the White House stepping up drone strikes in 2009 and 2010, Holbrooke saw the waters rising fast. “All we’re delivering to these Pakistanis are drones,” he lamented, more than once, to his State Department colleagues.
It wasn’t quite true. On October 28, 2009, the White House delivered Hillary Clinton. Her first visit to Pakistan as a secretary of state was designed to promote diplomacy and development. She may have arrived with the stealth of a Predator; the traveling press was given few advance details of her itinerary for security reasons. But her three days of town-hall meetings and media interviews proved to be the opposite of a drone strike: a conspicuously public display of American outreach. Holbrooke, who had urged Clinton to make the trip and accompanied her at every step, desperately wanted to move the dialogue between the United States and Pakistan beyond security. Clinton had a parallel hope: to lift the debate to new psychological ground—not the sunny uplands of mutual trust and understanding, exactly, but to a place where the two sides could speak more openly about the grievances they nourished in the dark.
The catch was, Clinton couldn’t talk about—let alone defend—the drone program, perhaps the most immediate source of Pakistani suspicion. It was like sending a defense attorney into the courtroom and telling her she couldn’t put one of her key witnesses on the stand.
The extent to which tensions over Islamic extremism overshadowed the relationship became clear right away. A few hours after Clinton’s plane landed, a powerful car bomb ripped through a teeming market in Peshawar, the gateway into Afghanistan, ninety miles northwest of the capital. More than one hundred people were killed. It was Pakistan’s most serious terrorist attack in two years, and the worst ever in Peshawar, an ancient city now on the front lines of a deadly Taliban insurgency. It was also a grim reminder of the rift with Washington: The Americans complained Pakistan wasn’t doing enough to hunt down militants; the Pakistanis griped that the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan had allowed those extremists to export their terror across the border. Pakistani TV played Clinton’s remarks condemning the attack on a split screen: the other half had images of parents carrying the bloodied bodies of their children through a hellish landscape of smoke and fire.
Clinton had brought with her $125 million in aid to help Pakistan repair and upgrade its aging power plants to cut down on power failures. It was part of an effort by Holbrooke to cull the hundreds of U.S. projects in Pakistan and funnel money into a few high-profile programs that would tangibly improve the lives of Pakistanis. “For months,” she said, “families have endured sweltering heat and evenings spent in the dark, without appliances or televisions or computers”—not to mention the petty crime that spikes when the lights go out. It was all true, but it was lost on a day when Pakistanis were convulsed by a crime wave of a totally different magnitude.
Pakistan’s news media—a noisy babel of newspapers, cable news channels, and websites—relentlessly fed the narrative of America’s cynical motives. Exuberant, gossipy, and conspiratorial, they pandered to the conviction of many Pakistanis that the United States was a faithless partner that sent drones to violate their airspace, CIA assassins to roam their streets, and was only biding its time until it abandoned them again, just as it had after Pakistan helped it fight the Russians in Afghanistan. All this made the news media a prime target for Clinton’s charm offensive; Philippe Reines, her communications guru, told the public affairs staff in the embassy to “bring ’em on.”
Clinton prepped exhaustively for the questions and was plainly worried about land mines. Drones were the obvious one. But two days before the trip, she emailed Jake Sullivan to ask about a related issue: reports in the Pakistani press that Blackwater, the private security contractor with a notorious history in Iraq, had agents in Karachi, masquerading as aid workers, who were planning assassinations of Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders for the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command. “Do we have good answers for the Blackwater allegations? What exactly are they? And what’s been said before?” Sullivan emailed back to assure Clinton that Vali Nasr, Holbrooke’s adviser on Pakistan, was drafting talking points.
Clinton’s swordplay with Pakistani journalists over the next three days was as combative as she expected. It made her fencing with the political press in Iowa and New Hampshire look dainty by comparison. On her first afternoon, seven TV anchors arrived to interrogate her at the American embassy, a sprawling compound that was fortified in 1979—after being burned to the ground by a mob—and reinforced again after 9/11. Interrupting Clinton and speaking over one another, they peppered her on the strings Congress had attached to a $7.5 billion aid program for Pakistan (“We believe the bill had a sort of hidden agenda”) and allegations that American contractors were illegally carrying weapons on the streets of Pakistani cities (“Will you allow Pakistani soldiers to patrol like this, carrying illegal weapons in their hands in the streets of Washington?”). Drones figured high on the list.
“If the United States government is so sincere in helping Pakistan through its problems,” one asked, “why is it that you are constantly using drone attacks inside Pakistan? Why not transfer that technology to the Pakistani military that you have praised yourself?”
“I don’t really talk about that,” she replied. “I think that’s something the military-to-military relationship has to deal with.”
Why, she was asked, had the United States disregarded a resolution against drone strikes by the Pakistani parliament? (The strikes were governed by an unwritten agreement between the ISI and the CIA.)
“Well, I think on all of these issues, there has to be a recognition that we’re in the middle of a war,” she said.
The next day, Clinton faced the Pakistani public in Lahore. Security was extraordinary: The Pakistani police and military had turned the densely populated Punjabi city of ten million, one of the most dynamic, culturally sophisticated in South Asia, into a ghost town. Clinton’s motorcade hurried along deserted boulevards, past Mughal and Victorian buildings that looked shuttered. Even the side streets had been cleared, vast black curtains hung between the buildings to deprive the curious of a glimpse of her convoy of armored vehicles. Clinton’s security detail was on edge; this was one of the most dangerous places she had visited. At the Government College University, a public institution established during the British Raj, Clinton faced a carefully screened audience of students. But as soon as she took her seat on the stage, the pounding resumed.
“The drone attacks are being carried out in our country on our people,” said a young woman from King Edward Medical University. “They are causing so much collateral damage at the same time.” Why, she asked, wouldn’t the United States share intelligence on targets with the Pakistani military and let Pakistan carry out the strikes itself?
“Well, I will not talk about that specifically,” Clinton replied. “But generally, let me say that there’s a war going on.”
At another town-hall interview back in Islamabad, this one with Pakistani women, the moderator, Saima Mohsin, noted that a United Nations committee had raised questions about whether drones violated international law because they were a form of extrajudicial killing. “Yet they continue,” she said to applause, “and the Pakistani people have begun to resent them and associate them with U.S. policy toward Pakistan as a whole.”
“What’s important here is that there’s a war going on,” Clinton responded, “and I won’t comment on that specific matter.”
“Do you think, and does the Obama administration feel, that the loss of life and how people feel about them in Pakistan is worth the minimal successes you get?” another questioner asked.
“Well, again,” Clinton said, “I’m not going to comment on any particular tactic or technology.”
“What is actually terrorism in U.S. eyes?” a female student from Peshawar University asked moments later. “Is it the killing of innocent people in, let’s say, drone attacks? Or is it, again, the killing of—a vengeful killing of innocent in different parts of Pakistan, like the bomb blast two days ago in Peshawar? Which one is terrorism, do you think?”
In case Clinton missed the point, the moderator added, “Do you perceive both victims as victims of terrorism?”
“No, I do not,” she said. “I do not.”
Clinton’s silence on drones was all the more awkward because she was so outspoken about other touchy issues. On the Pakistani complaints about the strings attached to U.S. aid: “Pakistan doesn’t have to take this money,” she said. “Let me be very clear: You do not have to take this money.” On a claim that the aid was puny compared to the $700 million that the United States supposedly paid Kyrgyzstan for access to a single military base: “That’s wrong. We negotiated the contract,” she said. On reports the United States was secretly building a barracks for one thousand marines on the embassy grounds in Islamabad: “Untrue. Totally untrue,” she said. “That is the kind of thing that sort of poisons the well.” Above all, Clinton was unsparing about the double game Pakistan had long played with Muslim extremists: publicly condemning and fighting them, while quietly giving certain groups sanctuary and succor, either through the military or the ISI. “Al-Qaeda has had a safe haven in Pakistan since 2002,” she told a roundtable of Pakistani newspaper editors in Lahore. “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. And maybe that’s the case. Maybe they’re not getable. I don’t know.”
Clinton’s remarks were widely broadcast in Pakistan and drew starchy, if unconvincing, denials from the government. “If we knew where al-Qaeda’s leaders were, or if we had meaningful intelligence on their whereabouts shared with us, we would act against them,” a senior Pakistani official told me that day (then he asked me not to use his name). Other Pakistanis praised her candor. “Right on the target,” Anwar Iqbal, a correspondent for the Pakistani paper Dawn, emailed Huma Abedin. “It was much needed. I think it will have a positive impact. Let her be more open, more forthcoming.”
At home, her bluntness was cheered by the White House, which was fed up with the prevarications of the Pakistani government. Her performance earned her some of the best press clips of her tenure at the State Department. “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first trip to Pakistan was never going to be easy,” The New York Times said in an editorial. “Mrs. Clinton challenged Pakistan’s government to do more to shut down Al Qaeda, but she was, rightly, determined to use this visit to also broaden the relationship.”
For Clinton, the truth telling on al-Qaeda was cathartic (“I was just tired of the BS,” she later told a senior Pakistani official), but she hated not being able to answer any of the questions about drones. Had she done so, she probably would have articulated a case not unlike the one Obama made to the bloggers on Google. “Reports of civilian casualties from drone strikes—often, but not always, untrue—fueled anger and anti-American sentiments,” she wrote four years later in her memoir. “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.”
Clinton returned from that trip determined to advance her argument that the White House needed to be more transparent about drones. She had some allies, even in the intelligence community. Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, also favored more openness. “Because we were keeping things covert,” he told me, “it was making it tougher to do counter-messaging, and it was giving the Pakistanis a free pass.” But Clinton was elbowed aside by the CIA, which warned Obama that if the government ever publicly acknowledged the program, it would lose its legal authority and have to be shut down. The reality was that the State Department had little say. America’s relationship with Pakistan was driven by security, and thus firmly anchored in the realm of soldiers and spies.
Coordination between the CIA and the State Department was so poor that the agency sometimes carried out drone strikes just hours after the departure of a senior American official from Pakistan. One strike occurred while John Kerry, then a senator, was on a plane returning from sensitive meetings with Pakistani leaders, in which he had been negotiating the return of the tail section of a Black Hawk helicopter that had been left behind after the aircraft crash-landed during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. “I hit the effing roof,” Kerry recalled in an interview. “I was incensed. We were making an agreement to try to get something done. And kaboom! We do this thing that just drove people nuts.” From Dubai, where he was changing planes, Kerry called Tom Donilon to lodge a furious complaint. Some at the State Department began to suspect deliberate sabotage. “It became a joke,” said one former senior official. “How many hours after a principal went there would there be a drone strike?”
The silence from the United States allowed the Pakistani government to weave a narrative on drones that suited its own interests. Its story changed over time. The truth is, Pakistan’s military and intelligence always had a more complex view of drones than they liked to admit publicly. The strikes began under Bush with the assent of Pervez Musharraf, the general-turned-president, and included agreements on what targets were out of bounds. At times, Musharraf even took credit for the strikes. But when Obama stepped up the program, it became a political headache for the Pakistani government. And when the CIA stopped consulting the ISI about targets, it began hitting people whom the Pakistanis wanted to protect. Suddenly, the Pakistani intelligence establishment viewed the strikes as a threat rather than a benefit. The ISI began mobilizing street protests against the United States.
“The issue was always: Who are the drone strikes killing?” said Husain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the United States. “When the drone strikes killed people that Pakistan didn’t want killed, there were protests. When the drone strikes killed people that Pakistan didn’t mind being killed, there were no protests.”
Few people understand the murky links between the Pakistani authorities and Islamic extremism better than Haqqani, a journalist who was once kidnapped and roughed up by Pakistani intelligence agents. As ambassador, he had regular access to Holbrooke and Clinton. To Clinton’s credit, Haqqani said, she saw that the United States was losing the PR war. “This was Hillary being a politician. Hillary’s greatest achievement was that she was a politician as secretary of state.” But it wasn’t enough just to recognize the problem. “I used to say, ‘You guys need to have a narrative on drones,’ ” he recalled. “The problem was, the CIA didn’t want to talk about it.”
Cameron Munter is a diplomat of the old school, an affable sixty-two-year-old Cornell grad who studied in Freiburg and Marburg and got a PhD in modern European history at Johns Hopkins. He likes a beer at lunch and sprinkles his conversation with German phrases. Like many Foreign Service officers of his generation, he is an admirer of Richard Holbrooke, who pushed him for ambassador to Pakistan at the recommendation of Chris Hill, after Holbrooke could not find other candidates for the job. Munter had been a deputy to Hill, another Holbrooke acolyte, in Baghdad, where he earned a reputation for getting along with men in uniform. That would be important in a country where the generals called the shots. When Obama had a ceremonial hail and farewell with Munter just before he left for Islamabad in October 2010, he took him by the arm as he was walking out of the Oval Office and told his envoy what he wanted out of America’s relationship with Pakistan.
“No terrorist attacks,” the president said.
Munter arrived in Pakistan just as that relationship was about to go into a death spiral—“an elevator that had no bottom floor,” as Dan Benjamin put it. In January 2011, a CIA contractor named Raymond Davis was arrested in Lahore after fatally shooting two Pakistani men on a motorbike who had pulled up next to him in a traffic circle. Davis radioed for help and a Toyota Land Cruiser sent by his colleagues hit and killed a motorcyclist while trying to reach the scene. To enraged Pakistanis, the killings confirmed what they had complained about to Clinton when she visited fifteen months earlier: American intelligence contractors, shielded by diplomatic immunity, were roaming the streets with illegal weapons. Pakistani authorities knew Davis worked for the CIA and were in no mood to give him special treatment. He was charged with murder and tossed in jail. The White House sent John Kerry to help Munter negotiate his release. Two months later, Munter and the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, struck a novel agreement. The families of Davis’s victims would be paid $2.3 million in “blood money,” a recognized form of compensation under sharia law, and Davis was released.
Since the United States was sticking to Davis’s cover as a diplomat, even in private conversations with Pakistani officials, it fell to Clinton as secretary of state to thank the Pakistani authorities for releasing the CIA contractor and to Ambassador Munter to meet him on the tarmac at the Lahore airport for his flight to Afghanistan and freedom.
On March 17, two days after Davis was released, the CIA carried out one of its deadliest drone attacks yet. It fired missiles into a meeting of tribal elders in a village in a frontier region known as North Waziristan. As many as forty-four people were killed, and though one was a well-known Taliban militant, the reaction in Pakistan was immediate and sulfurous. The military condemned the strike, viewing it, with some justification, as CIA retribution for the jailing of Davis. Anti-American protesters poured into the streets of Lahore, Karachi, and Peshawar. The attack had been a so-called signature strike, in which the CIA targeted people involved in suspicious patterns of behavior rather than suspects it had identified. To Munter, this definition of a combatant was dangerously elastic. “My feeling is, one man’s combatant is another man’s—well, a chump who went to a meeting,” he said to a reporter in 2012.
The biggest shock was yet to come with the May 2, 2011, commando raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, a spectacular violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty that left the country’s leaders angry and humiliated. But even without bin Laden, the situation had become untenable for Munter. Drones were a major bugbear in the relationship. “It’s all everyone wants to talk about,” he told a colleague. The ambassador clashed with the CIA station chief in Islamabad, demanding the right to call off strikes—particularly signature strikes—if he judged they would be too damaging. Back at Langley, CIA officials viewed Munter as weak-kneed and emotional, a stark contrast to his predecessor, Anne Patterson. Steely and discreet, Patterson kept whatever disputes she had with the CIA within the embassy. She never uttered the d-word. Munter, on the other hand, spoke openly about drones with his staff and took his case to higher authorities. In June 2011, a month after the bin Laden raid, he was speaking via a secure video link to an NSC meeting that included Clinton and Leon Panetta. Again, he asserted his right as the ambassador to have final say over drone strikes. As my colleague Mark Mazzetti reported, Panetta cut him off in midsentence; “I don’t work for you,” he said.
Even some of Clinton’s aides were impatient with Munter. They thought he was being absolutist in a situation that required flexibility. His complaints were getting in the way of Clinton’s effort to maintain relations with the CIA. But when he clashed publicly with Panetta, she had little choice but to stand up for her ambassador. Turning to Panetta, she said he was wrong to assert that the agency could carry out drone strikes in Pakistan over the objections of the ambassador. Under Title 22 of the United States Code, Munter was the president’s representative in the country and therefore outranked any other American official on the ground.
“No, Hillary, it’s you who are flat wrong,” Panetta replied.
The other people in the Situation Room were aghast. The spectacle of two cabinet members shouting at each other at an NSC meeting was unheard of in the Obama administration, where such public feuding was discouraged. Like a parent rushing to change the TV channel when something lurid comes on, Tom Donilon hushed Clinton and Panetta. He worked out what was billed as a compromise between the CIA and the State Department, but in fact was a major defeat for State. If Munter vetoed a strike, the agency could appeal to either the deputy secretary of state or to Clinton herself. If both upheld him, the CIA could have State overruled by the White House. Looking back four years later, Munter said he had no quarrel with Clinton. “I think she backed me,” he said, “but State just lost the fight.
“I’m not a pacifist,” Munter insisted. “There’s a case to be made for drones. But you need to make every effort to use them judiciously. Even the perception of indiscriminate use can take its toll.”
Exhausted and disillusioned, Munter resigned in May 2012 after only eighteen months on the job.
Clinton and Panetta, by contrast, quickly made up. Their relationship, after all, dated back to her husband’s White House, when Panetta was the budget director, looking for spending cuts, and Hillary was the First Lady, looking to expand healthcare. Compared to that war, a turf battle over who got to sign off on drone strikes was small beer. “My good friend Leon Panetta,” she gushed in her memoir, heaping praise on him. In Panetta’s book, which was hard on Obama, he described Clinton as “a luminous representative for the United States in every foreign capital.” In the cold calculus of Washington, the mutual admiration society made sense: Clinton was the cabinet’s superstar; Panetta, the author of what would be its most sensational triumph.
Clinton had neatly listed her points in two columns on a yellow legal pad. She was being asked to give her judgment on Panetta’s proposal to send Navy SEALs on a nighttime mission to kill or capture Osama bin Laden deep in the heart of Pakistan. It was the ultimate black op, a covert mission that posed far graver risks to Obama’s presidency than any of the drone strikes he had authorized. Though it was a gut decision, that didn’t mean Clinton shouldn’t approach it like a lawyer—anticipating all the liabilities, taking into account all the pros and cons. She had qualms about the intelligence suggesting that bin Laden was hiding in the walled compound in Abbottabad. Moreover, she feared a military incursion like this would wipe out whatever progress she and other American officials had made with the Pakistanis over the previous two and a half years.
“Much of her analysis was about Pakistan and the relationship,” Bill Daley, the White House chief of staff, recalled of the two months of taut deliberations. “That would end it.”
For Clinton, there was a broader, if unspoken, irony to finding herself in this debate at all. Back in the 2008 campaign, she and Obama had clashed over a scenario not all that different from the one under consideration. He declared that if the United States had “actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan, and the Pakistanis refused to act on it, then the United States should go in by itself. Clinton had ridiculed his threat as the posturing of a foreign policy naïf. “He basically threatened to bomb Pakistan,” she scoffed during a Democratic debate in February 2008, “which I don’t think was a particularly wise position to take.”
In the spring of 2011, the high-value target was bin Laden, and the intel, if not airtight, was certainly actionable. For a few tense weeks, Clinton was one of a small circle of officials who filed down to the Situation Room twice a week to study satellite photos of the compound in Abbottabad, where a mysterious solitary figure paced the courtyard. Should they send in helicopters with a team of Special Forces soldiers? Should they use a drone strike? Or should they bomb the site into oblivion with a B-2 bomber?
In thirty-six years of deliberating military operations, Bob Gates told the group, he had learned the essential truth of Murphy’s Law: If something can go wrong, it will. Bombing the house rather than sending in a SEAL team, he said, would at least mitigate those risks. Joe Biden was more adamant. He amplified Gates’s doubts and echoed Clinton’s prediction that it would wreck the relationship with Pakistan. Michael Morell, the CIA’s deputy director, was cautious—he spoke for those in the agency who had been burned by the erroneous reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—but he thought the weight of the evidence suggested bin Laden was in the house.
Michael Leiter had been brought into the debate at the beginning of April. As he absorbed the magnitude of the risks, he became convinced that the White House needed one more critical scrub of the CIA’s evidence—a so-called red team composed of people who were not part of the original planning. He sold Donilon and Brennan on the idea and put together a three-person team: two from the National Counterterrorism Center, including his lead analyst on al-Qaeda, and one from the CIA. After poring over the data, each came back with their own estimate of the odds bin Laden was in the compound: 40 percent, 60 percent, and 75 percent.
“What do you think the odds are?” the president asked Leiter, after he presented the red team’s findings.
“I think it’s probably fifty-fifty,” Leiter replied. “But even if I accepted the lowest number, forty percent, that’s thirty-eight percent higher than we’ve had for the last decade.”
On April 28, Obama asked for a final show of hands. Panetta recommended going ahead, as did Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who expressed confidence in the training of the SEALs. Donilon, Brennan, and McDonough, the “grim Irishmen” who were the top three officials in the NSC, all came out in favor. So did Daley, in part because he thought that if it ever emerged that the White House had information on the whereabouts of bin Laden and failed to act on it, Obama would be crucified. Gates remained reluctant. When it was Clinton’s turn to speak, she recited the pluses and minuses on her legal pad before throwing in with the yes camp.
“I concluded the chance to get bin Laden was worth it,” she wrote. “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.”
Three days later, the same group gathered again on a Sunday to watch the raid unfold. After the surviving helicopter landed at its base in Afghanistan, the tense vigil in the Situation Room gave way to frantic activity. Clinton and her colleagues had each been assigned a list of counterparts to call to inform them of the raid before it was made public. Leiter, standing at a glassed-in phone booth next to the operations center, heard one of the watch officers trying to find a phone number for Bill Clinton, so Obama could call him. “You don’t have his number?” the officer said to one of Clinton’s former staffers. “I’m sorry, I thought you still worked for President Clinton.”
That problem, at least, was easy to solve, Leiter thought. He went to find Hillary to ask her if she could provide her husband’s number. It’s in my BlackBerry, she said with a chuckle. Together, they walked to a lead-lined cabinet next to the entrance to the Situation Room, where the officials had to stash their cellphones before entering the inner sanctum of national security.
In the years since the bin Laden raid, the Situation Room debate has been mythologized almost as much as the heroics of the SEALs—the actions of every player subject to interpretation and reinterpretation. In the White House’s telling, Clinton played a cautious role. “She wasn’t in any way, shape, or form a cowboy about it,” Daley said. “Bin Laden was a forty-nine to fifty-one percent call,” another official said. “She happened to be fifty-one percent.” At a retreat with Democratic lawmakers six months later, the vice president lumped Clinton in with those who had given Obama an equivocal go-ahead.
“Every single person in that room hedged their bet, except Leon Panetta,” he recalled. “Leon said go. Everyone else said, forty-nine, fifty-one.”
“He got to me,” Biden said. “He said, ‘Joe, what do you think?’ ”
“I said, ‘You know, I didn’t know we had so many economists around the table,’ ” the vice president continued. “I said, ‘We owe the man a direct answer. Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.’ ”
The dig at Clinton was unmistakable.
Biden later changed his story. After he and Obama left the Situation Room, the vice president said in October 2015, he privately told the president “he should go, but to follow his own instincts.” Biden’s protean memory does not change the fact that Clinton spoke out in favor of the raid while he did not. Just as Gates valued her support during the debate over sending troops to Afghanistan, Panetta valued her vote that day. “She ultimately had the same confidence that I did,” he told me. “It was the confidence of the SEALs to conduct that operation.”
By the spring of 2012, when Clinton asked her colleagues in the Situation Room if they read the papers or watched TV, Obama was doing his own hard thinking about how America was conducting the drone wars. He had ordered the review to develop new policies governing the use of drones and expanding the ability of officials to talk about them. Part of this was driven by Obama’s conviction that he needed to take the United States off the perpetual war footing that had followed the 9/11 attacks. Part of it was his weariness with the relentless criticism from the left.
“It’s enough,” he told John Brennan in the middle of 2012. “I don’t want to be just remembered as the drone president.”
As was often the case with Obama, the review culminated in a speech. In this case, he aimed to do nothing less than chart a vision for how the United States should combat terrorism in the post-9/11 era. The address, which Obama delivered at the National Defense University on May 23, 2013, was larded with the lawyerly arguments and rhetorical flourishes typical of him. It was obvious the president had grappled with the legal and moral issues raised by drones, but it was equally obvious that he remained wedded to their efficacy and was determined to keep using them. “To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance,” Obama observed. But drones were still a lower-cost alternative to the military adventurism of George W. Bush. “Invasions of these territories,” he said, “lead us to be viewed as occupying armies, unleash a torrent of unintended consequences, are difficult to contain, result in large numbers of civilian casualties and ultimately empower those who thrive on violent conflict.”
Most telling was what was missing from the speech: any mention of drones in Pakistan. Even when Obama was urging Americans to exorcise their post-9/11 demons, he refused to lift the veil on this part of the shadow war, thus protecting its legal standing. The president also needed Pakistan if there was to be any solution to Afghanistan. “You would think that over the course of seven years, given how much controversy it has engendered, he might abandon that faith,” said Ben Rhodes, who drafted the speech. “He never has. He’s seen it produce significant results. He really does see it as preventing the use of larger-scale force. In his mind, the justification is both the success as a counterterrorism tool and also, frankly, the preference as an alternative to different types of military force.”
There is an undeniable logic to that argument. And yet, to those who tried to preserve the remnants of a relationship between the United States and Pakistan during the Obama years, his single-minded reliance on drones came to symbolize a broader refusal to project American power in more direct ways. Vali Nasr, the Holbrooke aide who wrote Clinton’s talking points for her interviews with the Pakistani journalists, left the State Department in 2011, discouraged because he felt she and Richard Holbrooke had been drowned out by the CIA in the debate about how to balance diplomacy with counterterrorism. Targeted killings became the go-to mode of American engagement. The primacy of the drone, Nasr said, was the key to understanding Obama’s foreign policy, as well as where it diverged from Clinton’s.
“It’s not like they had a disagreement about al-Qaeda’s threat,” he said. “But Hillary was of the belief that regional stability, engagement, and the U.S. military is more important to this.” For Obama, drones not only opened the door to withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq; they were a way to avoid getting drawn into future entanglements, military or diplomatic, which would sap the nation and distract from his domestic agenda. “It allows you to be disengaged,” Nasr said. “We don’t need to be in Iraq, we don’t need to invest in the Arab Spring. We don’t need to worry about any of this; all we need to do is to kill the terrorists. It’s a different philosophy of foreign policy. It’s surgical, it’s clinical, it’s clean.”