ALIENATING ALLIES
In my role as a senior CIA operations officer, I personally witnessed the damage that the United States’ heavy-handed approach to its dealings with allies did to its international relationships. When the agency pursued al Qaeda in Pakistan, it often had to do so without the help of officials in Islamabad—despite American threats. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president from 2001 to 2008, claimed in a 2006 CBS interview that Richard Armitage, the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, had warned Pakistan’s government after 9/11 that if it did not cooperate with the United States, it should be prepared to be bombed “back to the Stone Age.” (Although Armitage denied having threatened military force, he acknowledged in an interview with NBC that he had told Pakistani officials that they “would need to be with us or against us” in the U.S.-led effort to confront al Qaeda. But given my own experiences working with American and Pakistani officials during the war on terror, I suspect that Musharraf had the right takeaway.)
In the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when I served as CIA Director George Tenet’s back-channel emissary to Libya, I was ordered to issue a similarly explicit warning to Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s intelligence chief. In a small hotel room in the European city that provided neutral ground for our meeting, I told Qaddafi’s underling that the United States was preparing to invade Iraq. “Libya will have to decide if it is with us or against us when we do,” I said. Qaddafi, who already feared he would be Washington’s next target, spurned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s calls for Arab unity, moved quickly to cooperate with the United States on counterterrorism, and effectively ended Libya’s nuclear and chemical weapons programs.
This example would seem to demonstrate the effectiveness of an aggressive approach, but there is a reason the CIA and its partner intelligence services don’t rely on coercion: it doesn’t work. Any wins tend to be short-lived, and in the longer term, such an approach undermines partnerships and sows lasting resentments. I found in my dealings with foreign interlocutors that the sympathy the United States enjoyed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 decreased steadily in the years that followed. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force—which Bush signed into law exactly a week after 9/11 and which authorized the use of the U.S. military to pursue those responsible for the attacks—made the entire world an arena for combat operations and eroded the goodwill of once staunch American allies. By 2016, when I was appointed to lead the agency’s counterterrorist operations in the war zones of South and Southwest Asia, the foreign officials whose cooperation I sought openly expressed their sense of offense at being pushed around.