Is Ambassador Robin Lynn Raphel a modern-day female counterpart of Harry St John Philby, who converted to the cause of those she had been assigned to engage with diplomatically?
In November 1917, a British political agent, Harry St John Philby presented his credentials to Emir Ibne Saud of Nejd. Ibne Saud was to revive and/or found the present-day Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In his book God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad, Charles Allen notes, “Initially Philby toed the British line, but in the months that followed there grew within him an admiration for the Emir, coupled with a growing affinity for the culture to which he belonged, that developed into a state bordering on infatuation, and eventually led to a transfer of loyalties.” Allen describes Philby as “convert to the cause” who adopted Wahhabism, took on the title Sheikh Abdullah and believed that through the efforts of the “prince and the priest”, i.e. Ibne Saud and his Wahhabi cleric cohorts, “the true faith was purged of the dross ecclesiastical pedantry and the salient features of a moribund creed were made to shine forth again as beacons.”
Fast-forward to November 6, 2014 when The Washington Post reported that former US Ambassador Robin Raphel, “a veteran state department diplomat and longtime Pakistan expert, is under federal investigation as part of a counterintelligence probe and has had her security clearances withdrawn.” The New York Times subsequently wrote that Ms Raphel is “suspected of taking classified information home from the state department” and her residence had been searched. While no country had been named as the potential beneficiary of the alleged information transfer, certain Pakistani analysts and two former Pakistani ambassadors jumped to the ex-US diplomat’s defence. The lame and premature — Ms Raphel is yet to be charged with any wrongdoing — defence ranged from paeans to her diplomatic professionalism and prowess, an all-weather friendship with Pakistan, to her being a relatively small fish in the Washington DC pond to be of any material value to Pakistan. We have no reason to speculate about an ongoing investigation but what is known is that Ms Robin Raphel did help lay the foundations of death and destruction in Afghanistan by supporting the barbaric Taliban regime that was imposed by the Pakistani security establishment on the ill-fated Afghans.
If and when the probe proceeds further and broadens in scope, it may also shed light on whether Ms Raphel’s Pakistani interlocutors had anything to do with the positions she took in support of the Taliban in the 1990s. Is Ambassador Robin Lynn Raphel a modern-day female counterpart of Harry St John Philby, who converted to the cause of those she had been assigned to engage with diplomatically? We may never know. However, a look back at her stint as the US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs from August 1993 to June 1997 clearly shows that her stance vis-à-vis Afghanistan and India was perilously close to the Pakistani security establishment’s standpoint. Whereas a diplomat’s job is to create a win-win situation between their home and the host country, Ms Raphel left behind a trail of lose-lose conditions in South Asia and Afghanistan. She pleaded within then President Bill Clinton’s administration for engagement with the savage hordes of Mullah Omar. But even more sinister was her advocacy for the Taliban regime at the United Nations.
Steve Coll accurately noted in his monumental work Ghost Wars that just three weeks after US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright had condemned the Taliban’s inhuman decrees as “impossible to justify or defend”, “Robin Raphel outlined the Taliban’s claims to legitimacy before the UN Security Council and pleaded that they not be isolated.” The fact is that Ms Raphel was sacrificing the human rights of Afghans, especially women’s rights, at the altar of an oil pipeline that the Union Oil Company of California, aka Unocal, had planned from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. According to Steve Coll, Unocal’s Marty Miller had “asked Robin Raphel, Sheila Heslin and other Clinton administration officials for help in Islamabad. They agreed to pitch in.” That pipeline never materialised but yet another generation of Afghans was destroyed thanks to the machinations of Ms Raphel and her Pakistani counterparts who tried to portray the Taliban gangs as legitimate representatives of the Pashtun Afghans. The US suffered the tragic blowback from that disastrous policy on 9/11 while Pakistan continues to reap the jihadist whirlwind from the poisonous winds it sowed in Afghanistan along with Ms Raphel’s ilk. The latter’s shenanigans in the Kashmir imbroglio are another story that must be told in detail another time.
Ambassador Robin Raphel was not the last US diplomat eating out of the palm of their Pakistani interlocutors’ hand. The late Ambassador Richard Holbrook’s team, of which Ms Raphel was also a part, bent over backwards to accommodate the most ludicrous Pakistani position about Afghanistan. More recently, former Ambassador Cameron Munter parroted the Pakistani establishment’s line on the US drone attacks against terrorists and, by some accounts, was eased out due to that. Hospitality, including lavish meals and booze, English language skills and the liberal facade of the Islamabad-based coterie of analysts and the spooks who prop them up, has duped many a US diplomat. Even former CIA Director Leon Panetta wrote that he was impressed with then Director General Inter-Services Intelligence General Ahmad Shuja Pasha’s “moderation, sense of history and worldliness”. Mr Panetta writes in his recent book that General Pasha “inveighed against the number of madrassas (seminaries) in which poor Pakistani youth were being molded, and yearned to draw his country into the future. Yet for all of Pasha’s charm and sincerity [sic], what I did not know was how much he was willing to take on the militants within his own country.”
To gauge the willingness of the Pakistani security establishment to turn back the jihadist clock, US officials need not look farther than the Pentagon’s report ‘Progress towards security and stability in Afghanistan’, submitted to the US Congress last month. The report, which covers the period from April through September 2014, squarely blames the jihadist sanctuaries inside Pakistan for the resilience of insurgents in Afghanistan. It also charges that Pakistan continues to deploy jihadist proxies against India. The US has had limited success in containing the jihadist threat emanating from and to Pakistan itself. The US administration must candidly introspect whether it is the St John Philby type converts in its policymaking circles, sheer naiveté and skin-deep understanding of the regional dynamics or pure political expediency that the mother load of jihadists still survive and thrive in Pakistan. What the era after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan portends for that country and South Asia will depend a lot upon such soul searching.
The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki
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