Sunday, Mar. 12, 2006

Can Khalilzad Make Peace Bloom?

By Bobby Ghosh/Baghdad

"Everyone wants me to solve their problems,"

Zalmay Khalilzad says as he adjusts his bulletproof vest and settles into the back seat of his armored SUV. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq has just emerged from a meeting at the sprawling riverside home of Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who heads the coalition of Shi'ite parties that controls Iraq's incoming parliament. It didn't go well. For more than an hour, Khalilzad tried to persuade al-Hakim to help revive the Iraqi political process, stalled in part because the Shi'ites refuse to bend to demands by secular, Kurdish and Sunni parties that Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari not be given a second term. Al-Hakim didn't want to confront his fellow Shi'ite. But he had another idea: Couldn't Khalilzad nudge al-Jaafari aside? Khalilzad kept a straight face at the suggestion. But as his convoy speeds through the streets of Baghdad toward the relative safety of the highly fortified green zone, Khalilzad chuckles wearily, knowing that for the U.S., al-Hakim's proposal is not a solution but a trap. "Whether it works or not," he says, "they will blame it on me."

That's a familiar situation for Khalilzad these days. As Iraq's political parties squabble over the nature and composition of a new government, sectarian violence has pushed the country closer than ever to full-bore civil war. U.S. commanders believe that Sunni-Shi'ite violence is surpassing jihadi terrorism as the biggest threat to the country's long-term stability. And yet the prospect of a deeper, more vicious war has so far failed to prod the country's leaders into setting aside their rivalries and forming a broadly representative government, which may be the U.S.'s best hope for subduing the insurgency. The task of bringing together Iraqis torn by bloodshed and ill will has fallen to Khalilzad, the gregarious, glad-handing Afghan-born diplomat, who says he enjoys "getting my hands dirty in the grubby aspects of politics and policymaking." But the dilemma for Khalilzad is the one facing the Bush Administration as it tries to find an honorable way out of Iraq: Once you get your hands dirty, how do you avoid being held responsible for cleaning up the mess?

Khalilzad is searching for answers. TIME accompanied him last week on a whirlwind round of parleys with the key political players, providing a glimpse into how he navigates through the complexities of Iraqi politics. He revealed plans to hold a conference at which he hopes to press Iraq's political leaders to reach agreement on a new, pluralistic government of national unity. "We'll work together day and night until we finish the job," he says. Khalilzad told TIME that if the conference succeeds and the parties settle other disputed issues, the U.S. may be able to pull out some troops this year. "If we get--when we get--the national-unity government, when we have ministries that are run by competent ministers, and as we get into the next phase of our Sunni outreach ... I see a set of circumstances, frankly, that would allow for a significant withdrawal of our forces."

But none of that is assured. In the eight months since taking over as U.S. envoy in Baghdad, Khalilzad, 54, has earned the respect of both his Iraqi counterparts and his bosses in Washington for the enthusiasm and savvy he brings to the world's toughest job. "Right place, right guy, at the right time," says a U.S. official involved in Iraq policy. And yet the burden of trying to find a political solution to an increasingly brutal, costly and unpopular war is straining even Khalilzad's relentless optimism. He says he believes Iraq is "heading in the right direction," but those who know him say he is aware that he may be powerless to stop Iraq's unraveling. A recent visitor to Iraq who saw Khalilzad says he privately complained that he needs more help from Washington to apply international pressure on Iraq's warring parties. (He tells TIME he's happy with the support he's getting from the Administration.) "What is exasperating for him," says his wife Cheryl Benard, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corp., "is to find himself dealing with ... agendas at play in Iraq on the part of some leading Iraqis that have nothing whatsoever to do with the good or advancement of stability in their own country."

KHALILZAD DIDN'T PLAN TO BE there. He became ambassador to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and built a close friendship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, helping negotiate deals with ethnic and sectarian groups so numerous it would make an Iraqi's head spin. "Zal had definitively been promised that if he agreed to go to Kabul, he would be given a more relaxed and family-friendly assignment thereafter," says Benard. But last June, with the U.S. struggling to contain the insurgency in Iraq, President Bush sent Khalilzad to Baghdad. It made sense: Khalilzad was an early proponent of regime change and had worked with Iraqi exiles in the run-up to the U.S. invasion. "He was already on first-name terms with many of the key players," says a senior diplomat at a European embassy in Baghdad. "There was no time wasted in measuring each other up. He could get to work directly off the plane."

Whereas his predecessors Paul Bremer and John Negroponte often seemed remote to Iraqi politicians, Khalilzad, a secular Muslim who speaks Farsi and some Arabic, is informal and chatty. In meetings with Iraqi leaders, he sips sweetened black tea and indulges their speechifying without asking for translation. Iraqi leaders say they see him as one of their own, crediting his Afghan upbringing for his accommodating manner. Says Humam Hamoodi, a leading politician of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI): "The way he sits, the way he eats, we feel he's no stranger to us."

It helps too that he has powerful backers in Washington. A protege of Vice President Dick Cheney, Khalilzad speaks frequently to Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "He certainly has a freedom of action that others do not," says a U.S. diplomat involved in Middle East issues. During last summer's negotiations over a new constitution, Khalilzad took cell-phone calls from Rice in the presence of Iraqi leaders, giving her updates and assessments, according to a U.S. consultant who observed him. It showed Iraqis he had a direct line to Washington and enhanced trust that he had no hidden agenda. Hamoodi says agreement on the constitution "would have been impossible without him."

But Khalilzad hasn't been able to make the good feelings last. Each side wants him to go to bat for it but suspects him of secretly playing for the other team. "They see everything very much in a zero-sum way," Khalilzad says. That he is of mixed parentage--his late father was a Sunni, his late mother a Shi'ite--doesn't automatically make him a neutral in the eyes of Iraqi politicians. As a representative of the country that smashed the Sunnis' stranglehold on power, he worked hard to overcome their suspicion, only to find himself in the doghouse with the Shi'ites."He wants to be the hero," says Hamoodi. "He paid more attention to Sunni demands than he did to the Shi'ite demands. So he was no longer the middleman. He was just on the Sunni side."

Shi'ite disgruntlement with Khalilzad reached a peak in late February, when he complained about sectarian abuses by al-Jaafari's Shi'ite government. His thinly disguised target was the Interior Ministry, which Sunnis say employs Shi'ite death squads. Shi'ites interpreted Khalilzad's comments as a threat to their influence. "They thought I was trying to give [the ministry] to the Sunnis," Khalilzad says. And justified or not, some Shi'ites say Khalilzad's slapdown contributed to the rage that erupted after the Feb. 22 terrorist bombing of the sacred Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, which left hundreds dead. "I see what happened in the immediate aftermath of Samarra as a strategic warning to Iraqi society and the Iraqi leadership," Khalilzad says. "If they didn't have a feeling that there was a concerted effort at provoking civil war by the enemies of Iraq, they cannot have any doubts in the aftermath of Samarra."

There's little doubt that the bombing has galvanized Khalilzad's diplomatic efforts, giving him in his meetings with Iraqi leaders an urgent, compelling talking point: the prospect of civil war. But a day spent with the ambassador as he shuttles across Baghdad reveals just how hard it will be for him to forge compromise. At his meeting with al-Hakim, the SCIRI leader's aides nod when Khalilzad says the political deadlock is creating a vacuum that encourages sectarian impulses. But al-Hakim wants to talk instead about the discovery last week of a bus containing the corpses of 18 men, many of them clearly garroted. News reports said the men were Sunnis; al-Hakim says they were Shi'ites. Khalilzad is caught off guard. "The BBC said the men were Sunnis," he says. But al-Hakim angrily insists the victims were Shi'ites, pilgrims returning from a tour of the holy city of Najaf. (Five days after the massacre, the bodies had not yet been identified.) When Khalilzad and al-Hakim leave the room for a private conversation, the aides say the ambassador's appeals are sincere--but too simplistic. "Khalilzad cannot reach the people who are pushing the country toward a civil war," says an aide, asking not to be identified by name. "These are people who won't be bought off or frightened off by the U.S. They have to be defeated, jailed or killed."

"SHI'ITES ALWAYS SEE THEMSELVES AS THE victims," Khalilzad says as his convoy pulls up to the U.S. embassy, temporarily housed in what used to be Saddam Hussein's main palace. But Sunnis too are adept at the politics of victimhood. Later in the day, the ambassador holds a closed-door meeting in his small office with two representatives of the Sunni parties. One of them, Iyad al-Samarrai, then told TIME they asked Khalilzad to have U.S. forces stop the killing of Sunnis by Shi'ite death squads.

Such a request only highlights that Khalilzad has little influence on the forces driving the war. For all his success at bringing Sunni political groups into the mainstream, the insurgency rages on. U.S. efforts to exploit splits between foreign jihadist groups and secular, homegrown insurgents have had only limited success. Equally frustrating is the U.S.'s inability to rein in excesses by the Mahdi Army, the Shi'ite militia loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Khalilzad concedes that al-Sadr is "a challenge that has to be dealt with." The preferred option would be for Iraqi security forces to take on al-Sadr's militias. But since the support of al-Sadr's faction is critical to al-Jaafari's hold on power, the Prime Minister is unlikely to authorize a crackdown. "Al-Sadr is possibly the greatest source of frustration for the U.S.," says a European diplomat. "Khalilzad knows he is potentially the most destabilizing force in Iraqi politics, but the Americans have zero leverage with him."

Khalilzad's latest idea is to get the Iraqis to decide on a Prime Minister, then hold the equivalent of an off-site meeting, at which they would come up with a framework for multisectarian governance. The plan is clearly based on the 2002 London conference of exiled leaders that Khalilzad presided over. "Sometimes meetings went on until 3 or 4 in the morning," he says as his SUV roars to his next appointment. "That may be what's required to get this job done at a faster pace." A major impediment is the current Prime Minister. Al-Jaafari is clinging to control despite widespread dissatisfaction with his tenure. But Khalilzad is not about to tell him to quit--that, he says, would be interfering in Iraq's politics. "We used to make those decisions--run the place," he says. "But now [the Iraqis] have to take responsibility for their decisions." At 6 p.m., Khalilzad meets al-Jaafari behind closed doors in the Prime Minister's residence and tells him that the political process needs to be started up again and that an all-party coalition government is vital to Iraq's interests. An al-Jaafari aide says the Prime Minister listened politely but made no commitment.

It has been a trying day, and Khalilzad looks exhausted. He may be the most homesick man in U.S. government, having spent the past five years away from Benard and their two sons, now 22 and 14. (It doesn't help that he says he may spend an upcoming break from Baghdad in Afghanistan.) He talks every day to Benard, who describes their communications as "very frustrating--satellite phones and terrible connections and as I have been assured, many fellow listeners in various countries' security agencies." Because of safety concerns, Khalilzad is unable to see much of the country he is trying to save. "What I would like to do is go off on the street," he says. "I don't do that, but I talk to a lot of people."

With so much riding on his words and actions, Khalilzad knows no conversations with Iraqis can be entirely casual. But there are some moments when he can let his diplomatic guard down. Earlier in the day, he visits the palatial home of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd and a longtime U.S. ally. Here, Khalilzad is among friends. Talabani calls him Zal, and offers flattering compliments instead of angry complaints. They make jokes in Farsi and enjoy a Kurdish meal that includes several kinds of breads, pomegranate-infused rice and heaping plates of lamb. The ambassador blushes when the President likens him to the British viceroys of Iraq's past. But he beams as Talabani talks about how Iraqi Kurdistan is prospering in the post-Saddam era. "See," Talabani says to a guest, "occupation is good." After an awkward pause, Khalilzad corrects him. "Liberation, Mr. President," he says. "I think you mean liberation." It says something about the magnitude of Khalilzad's task that even America's friends don't get it right the first time.

To read more of TIME's interview with Ambassador Khalilzad, visit time.com

With reporting by Christopher Allbritton/ Baghdad, Matthew Cooper, Elaine Shannon, Michael Weisskopf/ Washington