War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence. Ronan Farrow

      The statute she was referring to—named after its sponsor, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont—banned giving American assistance to foreign military units committing atrocities. I forwarded the exchange to a colleague. “Oh boy, how Rwanda-press-conferences-circa-1994 is this!?”, I wrote, referring to the “semantic twists” US officials undertook to avoid using the word “genocide” in the midst of that crisis.

      Several months later, I pushed a dossier across a conference table toward Melanne Verveer, Hillary Clinton’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. We were both visiting Islamabad and she’d asked what human rights groups were saying. I printed up some of the reporting—nothing classified, just open-source documents. All the same, I stuck to euphemisms.

      “There’s a spike in … gross violations of human rights.”

      “And when you say, ‘gross violations’? …” she said, flipping through the file.

      “Executions.”

      It was June, Islamabad’s hottest month of the year, and the air felt close in the cramped room at the American embassy in Pakistan. Across the table from the two of us, a diplomat stationed at the embassy glared at me. She’d shot me a warning look when the topic came up. Now her lips were pursed, her eyes boring into me. On the table in front of her, her knuckles were marble-white. Ambassador Robin Raphel, the career Foreign Service officer who was overseeing a spike in American assistance to Pakistan that year, was furious.

      LATER THAT WEEK, embassy staff and locals gathered outside the American ambassador’s residence in Islamabad’s secure “red zone.” Nestled at the foot of the densely forested Margalla Hills, the city’s wide avenues are lined with eucalyptus and pine trees. By that June in 2010, its parks and lawns were an explosion of white gladiolus and purple amaranthus. At night, the posh districts hummed with intellectual energy. As the war raged nearby, an international set of diplomats, reporters, and aid workers met for golden-haloed cocktail parties, exchanging whispers of palace intrigue.

      Robin Raphel had been a fixture at such parties for years, since she began working in Pakistan decades earlier. To many locals, she was simply “Robin.”

      That night at the ambassador’s residence, she was in her element, holding forth for a clutch of party-goers. With high cheekbones and ramrod-straight posture, she had an aristocratic quality, her blond hair pulled into a tight French twist. She spoke with a locked jaw and the clipped, mid-Atlantic cadence of a 1940s movie star. Tossed over one shoulder, she wore, as she so often did, an embroidered pashmina shawl that made her dress suit resemble the flowing salwar kameez of the local women.

      Since that day in the conference room, Raphel had done her utmost to kneecap the junior diplomat who had responded to the question about human rights. When she couldn’t keep me out of meetings, she would cut me off in them, with relish. That night at the party she made little secret of her disapproval. “How dare you bring up—” here she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “—EJK in a meeting at this embassy.” Her lip quivered. “You are not of value on that issue.”

      I wondered how much she was frustrated by my criticism of America’s role in Pakistan and how much she just found me personally annoying. I explained, trying to stay deferential, that the State Department had adopted a policy of acknowledging the human rights reporting, even if we didn’t confirm it. “Well, that may be the case in DC,” she sniffed. She fingered the loop of pearls at her neck. “This isn’t DC. And we do not discuss that issue here.”

      It would be three years before the gutting of Mahogany Row, but in national security hot spots like this, you could see the power slipping away from diplomats in real time. Pakistan was the perfect illustration of the trend: for decades, the Pentagon and the CIA had bypassed the United States’ civilian foreign policy systems to do business directly with Pakistan’s military and intelligence leaders. In the years since September 11, 2001, they’d gained more freedom than ever to do so. Standing in the warm Islamabad summer, I wondered at Robin Raphel, so keen to avoid tough questions about a foreign military and its entanglements with our own. What did she understand her role to be, at a time in which so much of that role was being carved away and carted off? When nineteenth-century pundits suggested quarantining diplomats, lest they bring back mixed allegiances, was this what they meant? Was this something old or something new?

      FOR DECADES, ROBIN RAPHEL embodied a tradition of old-school diplomacy. Born Robin Lynn Johnson, she grew up in a sleepy lumber town in Washington State, tearing through the National Geographic magazines her father collected and dreaming of the wider world. At Mark Morris High, she was voted “most likely to succeed.” “She seemed to have a worldly sense about her,” remembered one classmate. In college, she’d leapt at opportunities to travel, spending a summer in Tehran with a church group, before heading to a junior year abroad at the University of London.

      “Are you still religious?” I once asked her. She snorted derisively. This seemed an absurd question to her. “What do you mean, ‘am I still religious’?” she snapped. When pressed, she waved a hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t say one way or another.” If Robin Raphel had time for spirituality, she didn’t have time to share it with me. She was all flinty pragmatism. She prided herself on it.

      After college, she spent a year studying at Cambridge and found a dazzling set of fellow Americans with their own international dreams and yearbook superlatives. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and the dorms of Oxford and Cambridge filled with debate about an American proxy war gone wrong. There were eerie parallels to another war that would, decades later, have a cataclysmic impact on Robin Raphel’s life: another new administration faced with a fatigued public, an uncooperative partner force, and an elusive insurgency with safe havens across a tactically challenging border.

      Raphel, then still Johnson, started dating