Hard Choices - cloaked in diplomacy

By Neha Ansari

Published: August 10, 2014

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Author Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The American press usually uses the word ‘polarising’ to describe Hillary Rodham Clinton — people either love her or hate her. The conservatives think she’s cold and calculating. Even during her campaign for the Democratic Party presidential primary against now US President Barack Obama, she was deemed ‘power-hungry’ and ‘ruthless’.

In her memoir Hard Choices, however, Clinton is not reserved, defensive or haughty. The diction and voice of the book was expected to be stern, formal — and boring. But it isn’t. Hillary Clinton, with simple language and an insouciant tone, earnestly narrates her time as the US Secretary of State.

Available at The Liberty Books for Rs1,795

And it is surprisingly filled with quips and references to popular television shows such as The West Wing and Mad Men.

Another surprise is that the title and the theme of the entire book refer to the hard choices she made during her stint as Secretary of State and nothing about her personal life, which she artfully tucks away even while divulging the most vital and previously hidden diplomatic incident or anecdote. Of course, many of the hard choices she describes are personal conflicts and deliberations, but even those were related to her profession and work. The only times she recounts something personal is the beginning of her life with husband Bill Clinton in the four-page ‘Author’s Note’ and her daughter Chelsea’s wedding, which she helped plan while she was Secretary of State.

Chronologically, the book begins with the hard choice that leads to rest of the pages: the choice of taking up Obama’s offer to make Clinton his top diplomat.

After she lost the cutthroat Democrat presidential primary to him, she was prepared and looking forward to returning to the New York Senate. But the then president-elect wanted to see her soon after she had lost and he had won. “We stared at each other like teenagers on an awkward first date,” she describes her first meeting with Obama after she conceded. And that’s when their partnership really began — they moved past their bitter opposition and “from a team of rivals” they became “an unrivalled team”. It took prolonged persuasion from Obama, sound advice from those surrounding Clinton, long deliberations, sleepless nights and more importantly, she writes, her realisation of the challenges the United States faced for her to agree to the new role on offer.

And so began her journey as America’s representative around the world. Clinton spent 87 full days in the air during her four years (2009-2013) at State — she is known as the most travelled secretary as she visited 112 countries.

She also did something no one had stepped up to do in the US National Security Council — stressed the importance of the State Department and USAID in conflict zones. Clinton describes the institutional tug-of-war between the State and Defense departments, lamenting how the US government had been making the mistake of finding military solutions to political conflicts. Moreover, she elucidates her concept of “smart power”, which she claims to have employed during her tenure. “For decades, foreign policy tools had been categorised as either ‘hard power’ of military force or ‘soft power’ of diplomacy. I wanted to break the hold of this outdated paradigm and think broadly about where and how we could use all the elements of American foreign policy in concert,” she explains. Therefore, she also coins the “3Ds: defence, diplomacy and development”. One also learns that she was the brains behind the significant foreign policy strategy of America’s pivot to the Asia Pacific. She recognises that it was difficult to persuade policy circles and the international community that the change in strategy or the pivot to Asia did not mean pivoting away from other regions, namely South Asia and the Middle East.

Hard Choices is divided into chapters named after regions and countries, which broadly cover the entire world. She has dedicated three chapters to Afghanistan and Pakistan and two chapters to Libya, of which one chapter is on Benghazi, the horrific tragedy and Ambassador Chris Stevens’ death.

One expects the book to be more about her as a woman and the challenges she faced because of that, or an examination of whether being a woman made her choices harder. But that is barely featured, apart from a few mentions about how she usually was the only woman in the room when major diplomatic and foreign policy decisions were being taken around the world.

But what is appreciated is her mention of all the women around her. From former secretaries of state — Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright — and leaders such as Benazir Bhutto and Aung San Suu Kyi, to her support staff, including Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills and Capricia Marshall, everyone is mentioned and lauded.

The highlights of the book include emotional accounts of late Richard Holbrooke’s work and dedication, her diplomatic prowess vis-à-vis Afghan President Hamid Karzai and her pragmatism and vision for governance, diplomacy and national security “in a hyper connected world”.

However, the book can be a tough read because it lacks a smooth flow, jumping from incident to incident and topic to topic. And since it is a memoir, one has to read it with a pinch of salt as it seems like Clinton wants to take credit for all diplomatic successes and historic events, including the Osama bin Laden raid in Abbottabad.

Neha Ansari is a senior subeditor at the National desk. She tweets at @NhaAnsari 

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, August 10^th,  2014.

A Charismatic Leader - Jinnah Revisited

The book is available at the Oxford University Press for Rs1,500.

One might question why we need another book on Jinnah. But the distinct format and approach in Sikandar Hayat’s latest addition to the subject, A Charismatic Leader: Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Creation of Pakistan is reason enough to revisit the subject.

The general pattern of Indian history leading to Partition is rooted in an evolutionary framework of analysis of the constitutional debates. It typically draws on a relatively unbroken line of events as well as initiatives taken by the three protagonists — the British government in India, the Congress and the Muslim League — that seem to move to an inevitable endgame in the form of Partition. In contrast, the present book deals with certain deeply endemic crises that solve the grand riddle of social, cultural, political and constitutional life of Muslims in British India. The author elaborates on this theme by focusing on the ‘Muslim crisis’ spread over half a century, which provides the structural context for the emergence of Muslim nationalism. However, as electoral politics took root in India, there was a dire need for a shift in emphasis from ‘structure’ to ‘agency’. Muslim leaders at this point failed to consolidate their hold over the community and there was a dearth of leadership. Hayat makes a convincing argument about the nature and characteristic of Jinnah’s leadership beyond traditional explanations and shows how Jinnah’s role seems to be carved out by history itself when seen in the broad context of structure-agency dichotomy.

In the transition from the first to the second edition of his book on Jinnah, Hayat has expanded both theoretical and empirical findings of his research on the creator of Pakistan. Not only has he refocused his study on Jinnah’s charisma from the first edition but he has also consciously and conscientiously placed himself firmly within the discourse of Partition in general and Jinnah in particular.

In the second edition of his book, Hayat specifically seeks to address Jinnah’s new profile based on some historians’ portrayal of him — for example Jaswant Singh, Ajeet Javeed and Saleena Karim — as a secular person par excellence. The author revisits the controversy over Ayesha Jalal’s thesis about the Pakistan demand being a bargaining counter, from which she has distanced herself in recent writings. The author finds enough ground in Jalal and her critics’ positions to put aside this so-called ‘revisionist’ thesis. The new edition of the book explores the theme of nation-making with reference to some of the famous theorists of nationalism such as Ernest Gellner and Paul Brass, especially in the context of shaping an ethnic variety of nationalism based on Islam.

In the current edition, the author engages himself in a dialogue with more recent writers on the subject, agreeing or disagreeing with their arguments as the case may be. In the former case, he endorses the view about not mixing Partition as the finale of a long process of development of Muslim nationalism with communal violence that accompanied it, in as much as these were two separate phenomena. In the latter case, the author confronts a writer on the controversial role of the NWFP governor Olaf Caroe in such matters as the 1947 referendum, and later Pakistan’s entry into the Western military alliances. The author’s willingness to expand and update his findings in the light of newer insights on Partition and Jinnah is commendable. In the matter of production of the book, one cannot overemphasise the fact that this is a high quality publication worth reading for anyone interested in the history of the subcontinent.

Mohammad Waseem is a professor of political scienceat the Lahore University of Management Sciences. 

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, September 28^th, 2014.