Facing a Trial by Fire

Two anecdotes, both from her college days as a spirited student teacher in South America, reveal a lot about Wendy Chamberlin, America’s ambassador in front-line Pakistan.

In the first, she jumped from the top of a steamboat into a fast-moving river in Brazil on a dare. Only later did she learn that the waters were home to flesh-eating piranhas.

In the second, she chased down a pickpocket in Peru. Only afterward, when the villain was in police custody, did she discover that he carried a knife.

Both episodes ended well, with the strong-swimming, fleet-footed future diplomat recognized and rewarded for her daring. But after the Sept. 11 attacks--which elevated the post of U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, filled by Chamberlin only a few weeks before, to one of the most sensitive diplomatic assignments in the world--they seem especially portentous.

Interviewed in her split-level residence inside the walled and heavily guarded U.S. compound here, Chamberlin, a 53-year-old divorced mother of two adolescent daughters, claims she has mellowed some since those early South American exploits.

“I still feel like I’m 23 years old,” said the athletically built Chamberlin, who swam butterfly competitively at Northwestern University. “But I am a mother now, and I’m first a mother.” These days, though, she is far from her daughters: Chyna, 14, and Jade, 12, who were sent back to the U.S. to stay with their father, a former diplomat, for security reasons.

Over the years, as a teacher and diplomat in Laos, Morocco, Zaire (now Congo) and Malaysia, Chamberlin said she has learned “not to act impulsively but to act strategically.”

In Washington, where she served with the National Security Council under President George Bush, father of her current boss, she developed expertise in combating international drug trafficking and in counter-terrorism. As ambassador to Laos from 1996 to 1999, she earned a reputation as someone who could deal effectively with the Communist military dictators who run that country. Longtime friends describe Chamberlin as “fearless.”

“She’s an American woman and a strong one; a little bit in your face, for sure, but very well spoken and empathetic,” said Karen Howell, a middle school teacher in Greenwich, Conn., and one of Chamberlin’s companions during her 1970 summer in South America.

In the months ahead, Chamberlin will need to draw on all those traits to compensate for her limited on-the-ground experience in this extremely volatile region, with its maze of religious, tribal and ethnic issues.

Chamberlin’s previous international work on drugs and terrorism often involved Pakistan and Afghanistan. She served briefly in Washington as a special assistant on South Asia in the State Department’s Office of Political Affairs. But until she arrived here Aug. 13, she had made only two trips to Pakistan.

“I admit to daydreaming of the day that I could return to serve in such a fascinating country,” Chamberlin said at her Senate confirmation hearing in June, “but I never dreamed it would be in the capacity of ambassador, nor that it would be during a period of such daunting problems.”

Having been vaulted into prominence by the events of Sept. 11, Chamberlin found that her first crucial assignment was to quickly win support for the coalition against terrorism from the general who rules Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf.

Despite considerable domestic political risk, Musharraf decisively committed his nation to the U.S. effort on Sept. 13 at a meeting with Chamberlin, during which she also presented her credentials as the new American ambassador. Musharraf offered to share intelligence, allow the use of Pakistani airspace and provide air bases for logistical operations. Chamberlin was able to tell reporters waiting outside the president’s office that Musharraf was on board.

Since then, Chamberlin has been charged with overseeing the billions of dollars in economic incentives designed to keep the Musharraf regime stable in the face of challenges from Islamic militants and others opposed to the U.S. military campaign in neighboring Afghanistan. These include direct foreign aid, reimbursement for the costs of Pakistan’s participation in the coalition and restructuring of the country’s $3-billion debt to the United States.

Finally--and Chamberlin sees this as her most important mission--she wants to rescue and rehabilitate Afghanistan from its fallen state after more than 20 years of conflict and five years of fundamentalist theocratic rule.

“The next phase is going to be nation-building in Afghanistan,” she said during the interview. “I can envision a huge and critically important effort in Afghanistan to assure the Afghans that they can build a political process there that will lead to a government and then economic reconstruction and development.”

U.S. Policy Reversed Since Her Confirmation

All this reflects an about-face in U.S. policy.

At Chamberlin’s confirmation hearing June 26, Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) said Pakistan needed “tough love” to help restore democracy and curb its development of nuclear weapons. Pakistan already had been slapped with U.S. economic sanctions for its nuclear program and military dictatorship.

But Sept. 11 turned most of that on its head. Suddenly, the U.S. needed a sure ally in Pakistan. Musharraf, a clear-talking career military man with secular leanings who seized power in a 1999 coup d’etat, suddenly seemed the perfect man for the job.

Instead of a democracy-usurping dictator, Musharraf became a man of strength and vision. The burdensome U.S. sanctions were quickly dropped or circumvented by the Bush administration.

“Now there is a whole new mood about Pakistan in Congress,” said Chamberlin, who jokes that she had given herself three years to improve U.S.-Pakistani relations but “it only took three weeks.”

Her brash American style is sometimes off-putting to Pakistanis not accustomed to an outspoken woman as head of the American mission here. As a former athlete who still swims laps in the residence pool, Chamberlin is not prim. Pakistanis trade stories about her casual, self-confident demeanor.

But she has been affectionately adopted on a first-name basis by the usually hostile Pakistani media. “Wendy, Daud discuss trade relations,” read a recent headline, referring to talks with Pakistani Commerce Minister Abdul Razzaq Daud.

Chamberlin has presented a very high profile in recent days, appearing with a photo in a front-page interview in the country’s leading Urdu- and English-language newspapers.

In the Saturday interview in Jang, the Urdu newspaper, Chamberlin pledged: “We are making a 50-year economic plan for Pakistan.”

“I can assure you,” Chamberlin said, “that every informed American is grateful with warm heart and appreciation to the Pakistani people. Every American is aware of the pressure Pakistan people are facing in supporting the [anti-terrorism] action.”

Colonel’s Daughter Recalls ‘a Lot of Sport’

Chamberlin was born Oct. 12, 1948, in Bethesda, Md. The daughter of the late William Chamberlin, a Marine colonel, she grew up mostly in the Washington area but also lived in Camp Pendleton, Quantico, Va., Texas and Hawaii.

She describes her father as a soldier-scholar who held a law degree as well as a PhD in economics and who, after his retirement, became an assistant dean at the Northwestern University School of Law. Friends say her mother, Beverly, had a more artistic bent and encouraged the kids to think independently.

But as the only girl sandwiched between two athletic brothers, Chamberlin remembers her childhood as being “not very much academics but a lot of sport and macho.” Chamberlin remains close to her brothers; the older served as a Marine in Vietnam and the younger is an Army doctor.

As an undergraduate at Northwestern, where she obtained a degree in education, Chamberlin was athletics and social director for her sorority, Alpha Omicron Pi.

College roommate Susan Bradley, now a sixth-grade teacher in Londonderry, N.H., recalls Chamberlin finishing second in a pancake eating contest, throwing long johns out the window of a dorm during a panty raid and tooling around the Evanston, Ill., campus in a distinctive yellow and black Plymouth Barracuda.

Other classmates remember her keen interest in faraway events. “Her world was bigger than our world,” said Carolyn Whittington, now a county judge in St. Louis. “She was a citizen of the world . . . better versed in things that were happening in the world than any of us.”

In the summer of 1970, Chamberlin and her friend Howell were student teachers in Colombia and spent a good deal of time traveling around South America carrying, Chamberlin recalls with a smile, “pink Samsonite suitcases.”

The Amazon riverboat escapade resulted in free passage and a round of drinks from the crew for Chamberlin and two American pals down the treacherous Rio Negro.

“They were pulling a little boat behind,” Chamberlin said. “I said I could jump in and swim and grab the boat and get into it while we were steaming down the river. Sure, I did it.”

The intrepid chase scene in the Lima barrio allowed her to recover her wallet, which Chamberlin said contained all of $20.

“He snatched the wallet right out of my purse,” she recalled, summoning up some of her outrage of 31 years ago. “I chased him. We ran down the street, deep in the barrios and the mud was splashing. The crowd started chasing him. We ran up some stairs but, thank God, a policeman had gotten there before me and taken this big knife from him.”

In her diplomatic career, Chamberlin’s conservative military upbringing has helped her hold her own with Musharraf and Laotian generals. “I like men,” Chamberlin said. “I like men’s men, and I know how to talk to them.”

But the military lineage that includes an admiral grandfather and an uncle who was a four-star general did not keep Chamberlin from questioning the U.S. role in Vietnam.

As it was for many at the time, the Vietnam conflict represented a turning point. “I was searching,” she recalled, “I never really participated in street demonstrations but I certainly had my doubts about the war.” Family dinners, she recalled, were marked by “vibrant, vigorous discussions.”

In the end, it was the Vietnam War that led Chamberlin to seek an international career, first as an exchange instructor at National Teachers College in Laos and, since 1975, as a diplomat.

But friends say the war also provides a key to Chamberlin’s humanitarian concerns.

Howell recalled that as an exchange teacher in Laos, Chamberlin frequently visited neighboring Cambodia and was horrified by the effects of the American bombing campaign there. “She’d write letters begging me to get the word out about what’s taking place there,” Howell said.

This experience helps explain Chamberlin’s insistence that whatever comes after the current bombing campaign include reconstruction of Afghanistan.

Reminded that U.S. attempts at “nation building” have not always worked, Chamberlin is undaunted.

“I believe that at the end of it all,” she said, “we will have brought something to the 25 million people of Afghanistan that didn’t exist two months ago. That is hope for the future.”

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Tempest reported from Islamabad and Boudreaux from Rome.