War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. Ronan Farrow
one computer science geek I knew—a programmer named Jillian Kozyra, who was snapped up by Google soon after—and we pulled all-nighters in my tiny basement studio on U Street as I designed and she coded. Using the programming language Ruby, she built a scraping application—an automated tool that extracts data from internet sources—married to Google Maps and basic analysis tools that could, for instance, break out a pie chart of different types of civil society activity in a given area. At the end of the process, we had a map of Afghanistan and Pakistan populated with more than a hundred thousand local groups. We put it up on an open, nongovernment URL that I purchased. Holbrooke was delighted by the technology and asked me to present it at the White House, the Pentagon, and our embassies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But the project also illustrated, in miniature, the pitfalls of his bull-in-a-china-shop approach. The American contractors were incensed by Holbrooke’s push away from them. They began lobbying for his firing and complaining about the focus on local NGOs in the press. And, as in all of Holbrooke’s endeavors, the military was an overpowering and not always friendly counterpart. Within two years of the first demonstrations of the NGO tracking technology, both Pentagon and CIA lawyers descended on my office. Where had this mysterious technology come from, they wanted to know? Where was I getting my data? Who was funding it? The answer was, of course, that this was a jury-rigged solution using open-source data and tools, at the cost of a single domain name. Both agencies asserted ownership of the work product, but did nothing with it. When I left government after nearly four years, the United States still lacked the basic database of civil society entities Holbrooke had sought.
Later, I received a large manila envelope from an anonymous P.O. box in Virginia. Inside was an application form for a job interview process to be conducted under a strict veil of secrecy. A timed online test and a series of meetings at hotel bars with unnamed officials followed. They had little interest in my work at State. Would I be willing to depart to work as a lawyer or journalist under nonofficial cover, they asked? “Come on,” said one interviewer. “What you’re all doing over there is a side show. This is the real work.”
Like most things Holbrooke, SRAP was ambitious and exciting and, for many, alienating. Prioritizing outsiders over career Foreign Service officers made the office hated inside the State Department bureaucracy. The interagency convening role he had taken upon himself was the traditional domain of the White House—and this was a particularly controlling White House. These were original sins for which Holbrooke would never fully atone. From the moment we started, the system went to work expelling this peculiar creation, like a body rejecting a transplanted organ. It would cost Holbrooke, and, some would later argue, the country, dearly.
A WEEK AFTER the ceremony in the Ben Franklin Room announcing Richard Holbrooke’s role in January 2009, Holbrooke and Husain Haqqani sat in the Hay-Adams hotel’s Lafayette dining room—an airy, light-filled hall with cream-colored walls and wide views of the White House. The property was once home to career diplomat and Secretary of State John Hay, and the legendary salons he and neighbor and political scion Henry Adams hosted for DC’s intellectual elites. In the 1920s, their homes had been razed to make way for the elegant, Italian Renaissance complex where Haqqani and Holbrooke now lunched. Holbrooke had passing encounters with Haqqani over the course of their overlapping diplomatic careers. The two had struck up a rapport in 2008, when Haqqani became ambassador to the US and Holbrooke, who was at the time chairman of the Asia Society, began making trips to build up his bona fides in the region. The day his new role was formally announced, he had called Haqqani and suggested they have lunch. Someplace where they’d be seen, he’d said wryly but pointedly. The Hay-Adams was hard to top for visibility. Yet such a consideration also captured Holbrooke as a creature of another era, when being seen at a prominent locale sent a signal, and when there was a clique of interested power brokers and observers ready to receive such a transmission. The truth is, nobody was paying attention.
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