Eight Years On

The 8 a.m. US Airways shuttle from Washington to New York City took off pretty much on time. The mid-September sky was clear, the air still, and most of the flight was perfectly uneventful. My State Department colleague David Pearce and I read the papers and looked over our notes as the plane began its descent toward LaGuardia. (Article continued below...)

"Look!" somebody said, and a rumble of alarmed voices spread through the cabin. One of the towers of the World Trade Center was on fire, and smoke churned over the upper stories like a thunderhead over lower Manhattan. We craned our necks to see through one window, then another as our plane banked and made its approach to the runway. Then, just as we landed, we saw in the distant skyline the second tower erupt in flames. Cell phones rang out, and random, frightened voices tried to make sense of what was happening.

For a diplomat, I have seen a lot of violence in my career. I survived the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut that was, until that day in September 2001, among the most infamous attacks on Americans in the history of terrorism. David is as experienced in the Middle East as anyone we have at State. But you didn't need our expertise to know, when that plane hit the second tower, that this was the work of terrorists.

In the taxi on the way into Manhattan, traffic slowed to a crawl and then stopped altogether in the middle of the Queensboro Bridge. As we looked down the East River we could see the burning towers now very clearly. Suddenly they imploded amid enormous clouds of dust and smoke, and the spectacle seemed impossible, almost dreamlike. Our cabdriver, an immigrant from South Asia—a Pakistani, I think—was shattered. And who was not that day?

I was born amid the wheat fields of eastern Washington state, and I live there again now. But for four decades, starting with a backpacking trip at age 21 from Amsterdam to Kabul to Calcutta, then in a State Department career with postings mostly in the greater Middle East, I spent my adult life abroad, as a student and diplomat. By September 11, I knew the world from which those 19 hijackers came almost better than I knew my own country. And what I knew most of all was that the two were bound together—even, perhaps especially, when the connections seemed too ephemeral for most Americans to bother with.

Americans tend to want to identify a problem, fix it, and then move on. Sometimes this works. Often it does not. Of course, imposing ourselves on hostile or chaotic societies is no solution either. The perceived arrogance and ignorance of overbearing powers can create new narratives of humiliation that will feed calls for vengeance centuries from now. What's needed in dealing with this world is a combination of understanding, persistence, and strategic patience to a degree that Americans, traditionally, have found hard to muster.

We have learned much since September 11, 2001, but we are still learning this lesson. As the war in Afghanistan enters its ninth year, with U.S. casualties rising and the Taliban revived, public opinion is turning against what was always, compared with Iraq, our "good war." No one, least of all me, has an easy fix to propose. But over the last eight years I was intimately involved with our country's effort to manage its relationship with the Middle East and South Asia. I know that success only comes from a solid, sustained commitment of resources and attention.

Back in D.C. a few days after the attacks on New York and Washington, I found the boarding pass for that US Airways shuttle among my things. Since then it has traveled with me in a little frame—to Kabul when I reopened the long-shuttered, partially bombed-out American Embassy there; to Islamabad, when I was appointed ambassador in 2004; and then to Baghdad, when Gen. David Petraeus and I got the job of trying to turn the Iraq War around in 2007. The pass was and is a reminder of how fast our world can change, especially when we Americans lose sight of the way other people in other parts of the globe think, and act, and remember.

The next flights I took, a little more than a week after 9/11, were to Paris, then Geneva. The shock of the attacks had pushed Washington to reengage with all sorts of unlikely partners as it prepared for war in Afghanistan, and as the deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq, Iran, and the Gulf, I had been dispatched to deal with emissaries from Tehran.

At the beginning of my career in the early 1970s, I learned Persian and served in provincial Iran. But that was before the Islamic Revolution, and by 2001 the United States had had almost no direct dealings with the Iranian government for more than 20 years. The Geneva talks—under the aegis of a United Nations working group of countries that hosted large numbers of Afghan exiles—were not a secret. Still, we met in the cavernous conference rooms of the U.N. building in Geneva on Saturdays, when nobody else was around. Our conversations about the future of Afghanistan went on for hours and into the night, and occasionally adjourned to hotel suites. We ordered a lot of room service, and sometimes watched the sun rise from behind the Alps.