Closing America's Consulate in Peshawar: A Further Erosion of US Soft Power

Part One of a Three Part Global Geneva Series on the Retreat of US and Western Diplomatic Engagement

The Trump administration's decision to close one of South Asia's most important consulates represents yet another failure to grasp the importance of being in touch with on-the-ground realities.

GENEVA -- As an impetuous young foreign correspondent based in Paris in the late summer of 1979, I had decided it was time to find myself a war. While covering everything from the Cannes Film Festival to Eurocommunism, I was finding my French reporting beat all a bit too comfortable and hardly razor edge. One of my friends, a veteran reporter for TIME magazine who had done Vietnam, suggested I try Afghanistan. As he pointed out, the country was fast emerging as a critical but largely unreported civil conflict that could "turn into something big."

This was several months prior to one of the Cold War's most momentous developments: the December 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, whose ultimate failure contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Afghanistan was not new to me. I had travelled there as a teenager on the Hippie Trail in the early 1970s and remembered it with romantic nostalgia. Taking my friend's advice, I flew out to Pakistan, making my way by road to Peshawar, a former British colonial administrative outpost on the edge of the Khyber Pass bordering Afghanistan, which I had also visited during my overland days.

Part of my background reading was a book given to me by a colleague who had formerly roamed the Indian subcontinent - a very worn copy of The Way of the Pathan, written by James Spain, a US Vice Consul in Karachi during the early 1950s. The book ranked as the best primer available on the Pushtun tribes of the Northwest Frontier. "They sound like the sort of people you might enjoy," my journalist colleague noted wryly. "Determined, independent, and incapable of being controlled."

For the next six weeks I reported from Pakistan and then Kabul on Afghanistan's new war. Within days of the Red Army invasion, I was back in Peshawar as a special correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, covering the Soviet-Afghan conflict and Pakistan's frontier regions for the next decade. (See Edward Girardet's article in Global Geneva magazine on reporting Afghanistan.)

The Quiet American Who Understood the Frontier

It was in Peshawar that I encountered Doug Archard, America's consul from 1978 to 1982. For the next two years, Archard became an exceptional contact for journalists such as me. Not only did he help us better grasp what was happening behind the scenes, but he introduced us to a remarkable array of sources, some of them not necessarily pro-American.

A former carpenter from New England who had joined the US State Department late in life, Archard was a quiet, unassuming man, strikingly different from Graham Greene's The Quiet American, with an exceptional and pragmatic knowledge of the region. His library was lined with volumes such as The Tribes of Baluchistan and The Birds of Prey of the Northwest Frontier. He regularly hosted dinners and informal receptions at the consulate, a gardened villa located just off the Grand Trunk Road leading up to the Afghan border. In those days the consulate sported little more than a foot-high garden wall, a butler, and several sleepy guards armed with First World War British Enfields. Security was clearly not an issue. The whisky, beer, and wine proved key attractions for some guests in an Islamically dry Pakistan, but Archard also held weekly movie nights open to all, a welcome respite from the heat and dust of Peshawar.

For Archard, this was his way of networking and keeping in touch. He was constantly introducing people to one another: local Pakistani government officials, ISI intelligence officers, Afghan intellectuals, visiting academics, fellow journalists, aid workers, traders…Whenever he met someone, a French doctor just back from operating clandestinely deep inside Afghanistan, or a UN refugee representative working in the border areas, his questions were pertinent, often disarmingly so. How did guerrilla commanders collaborate with foreign medics? What colour and design were the clothes of Afghan women fleeing the Soviet bombing in a specific mountainous area in the north?

Volunteer French medics working in Afghanistan during the 1980s

Archard was at pains to assure me that he was not intelligence. Such outreach, he told me, was crucial to his job as a professional diplomat, alongside his other role helping wayward American tourists or students in need of assistance. "You need to understand the country in which you are working," he said, carefully enunciating his words as he always did. "Otherwise there is no point." At the same time, he envied our ability as reporters to slip in and out of Afghanistan surreptitiously. "I should have been born British in the 19th century," he once lamented, referring to those clandestine colonial adventurers and agents who sometimes disguised themselves as travelling merchants or Afghan tribesmen. "I could have then disappeared for months without anyone asking questions."

An ardent trekker, Archard explored much of what was then the Northwest Frontier Province - now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa - whether tribal villages growing opium poppies or the remaining haunts of the endangered snow leopard. He once invited me on a two-week trek through the Hindu Raj, Pakistan's extension of the Himalayas, with a disparate group of fellow outdoorsmen: an exceptionally fit 73-year-old former Maharaja and his two servants, a German forester with extraordinary knowledge of trees and wildlife, a polo-playing Pakistani scion of one of the country's ruling families, the American consul from Hong Kong, and a fellow journalist from The Economist. I took leave of absence from the Monitor and agreed with Archard that whatever was discussed during our conversations would be under Chatham House rules: no direct quoting without permission. We had a good working relationship.

Archard knew his stuff. And he knew people. While hiking, he briefed us in intricate detail on this vaulting mountainous region, its tribes, agriculture, and traditions. When half a dozen dour-looking Gujjars - highland nomads - suddenly emerged from the dusk with ancient rifles to share our campfire, Archard immediately offered us a quiet lecture on their customs. Clutching their cups of tea, our unexpected callers shruggingly explained that they were hunting a man who had stolen from them. He was a dead man, one of them spat. None of this put off Archard, although he did show me a pathetically small "just in case" pistol hidden in the folds of his sleeping bag. At the crack of dawn, the Gujjars shook our hands before jogging off into the mountain mist. It was all very wild west.

From Garden Wall to Fortress - and Now to Nothing

Archard's combination of deep knowledge and human connection is precisely what the best American diplomacy, as a form of soft power, can offer the world, something the current Trump administration appears to have forgotten, or perhaps never knew. Such individuals not only represent their country's interests, as does the current Peshawar Consul General Thomas Eckert, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service; they make the sustained effort to understand local people, promote US interests whether in business or education, and assess what is actually happening in the field. Under Trump, this capacity is being systematically dismantled as unnecessary, wasteful, dispensable.

By the mid-1980s, with the CIA steadily expanding its covert military support for the mujahideen in what became its largest such operation ever, the once-quiet Peshawar consulate had expanded massively; not only in consular officials and intelligence operatives, but in physical stature. High barbed-wire concrete barriers and iron gates replaced the innocuous garden wall, transforming the mission into a fortified compound. No longer readily open to the public, it had become a bastion of security.

Nevertheless, the consulate continued to serve a social and informational role by helping establish the American Club, a former USAID guest house, as a replacement gathering point for the expatriate community. The Club quickly became the equivalent of Rick's Bar in Casablanca: the hangout for international journalists, aid workers, spies, diplomats, drug-enforcement agents, and adventurers of every stripe. With music, films, Western food, and above all alcohol, it functioned as an open information-exchange for all and sundry. Over steaks and drinks at the bar, you could meet informally with diplomats, visiting congressional delegations, human rights activists, and humanitarian workers operating across the lines.

When the Soviets pulled out in February 1989, Peshawar began to lose some of its prominence, even if Washington did not necessarily heed what this still-crucial outpost was reporting. The United States was already making a massive strategic blunder by ignoring what informed on-the-ground diplomats, aid workers, and journalists were saying. As they repeatedly pointed out, one cannot massively arm a disparate guerrilla force with a heavy emphasis on ISI-backed Islamist hardliners, such as Hezb-e-Islami’s murderous Hekmatyar Gulbuddin, and then simply walk away.

Less than three years after the Red Army's retreat, Washington had dropped the ball entirely. With the collapse of the Afghan communist PDPA regime in April 1992, rivalry among the guerrilla factions produced a horrendous civil war with over 50,000 casualties. This in turn led to the first Taliban takeover of Kabul in November 1996 and the rise of foreign Islamist extremism, most notably Al Qaeda, and eventually Islamic State, all of which the United States, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, had inadvertently helped create. It was a failure that Trump, and then President Joe Biden, would repeat three decades later with the West's chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in August 2021. (See Global Geneva's analysis of the Trump-Biden debacle in Afghanistan.)

American Consulate General in Peshawar, Pakistan - From gardened villa to a weaponised compound

US State Department

Frontline Peshawar: A Role to Represent - and to Inform

Throughout this entire period, the US consulate in Peshawar remained a vital observation post, assuming an even more crucial role following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. It has never stopped being relevant.

As with diplomatic missions located in sensitive parts of the world, the Peshawar consulate has had its fair share of attacks. At least seven people were killed and several injured on 5 April 2010 when Talib militants, some wearing suicide vests, launched an assault on the compound. Pakistani security forces managed to repel the attack, even if one assailant reportedly blew himself up close to the gate. More recently, the Trump-Netanyahu war against Iran triggered massive demonstrations outside the US consulate in Karachi. Such are the risks that come with the territory.

Today, with Taliban-run Afghanistan and Pakistan engaged in armed conflict, the Baluch insurgency intensifying, and the wider regional order under severe strain from Washington's military misadventure in the Gulf, the Peshawar consulate's strategic importance is greater than ever. And yet this is the moment Washington has chosen to close it.

The Reagan Precedent - and Trump's Acceleration

The dismantling of American soft power is nothing new. It was during the Reagan administration that Washington first began closing or "reformulating" vital cultural institutions, such the American libraries and information centres in cities such as Mogadishu, Dar-es-Salaam, and across the developing world. These had served as crucial cultural, scientific, and educational institutes for information-hungry local populations, offering access to everything from Scientific American and Newsweek to the Atlantic Monthly and even anti-establishment journals such as Mother Jones. When Washington converted them into sanitised "US Resource Centers", they lost their soul.

What Trump is doing in 2025 and 2026 is far worse. The shuttering of US missions abroad, the dismantling of USAID, the silencing of the Voice of America - recently ordered reinstated by a federal judge - and the political revamping of the US Institute of Peace, arrogantly renamed the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, represent not mere penny-pinching but a deliberate stripping away of largely credible instruments through which the United States engaged, informed, and influenced the world without resort to force.

The Peshawar consulate is the first US overseas diplomatic mission to be closed entirely as a result of the Trump administration's State Department reorganisation, supposedly saving USD 7.5 million a year. The department has further argued that the move will not "adversely affect its ability to advance US national interests in Pakistan", a claim grounded less in strategic analysis than in political convenience and a striking absence of historical awareness. The consulate has been America's closest diplomatic mission to the Afghan border, a primary operations and logistics hub before, during, and after the 2001 invasion, and a critical monitoring post for developments in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and increasingly China, which borders Pakistan to the north, ever since the Soviets crossed the Oxus in December 1979.

A Cost That Cannot Be Calculated in Dollars

The assertion that closing Peshawar saves money is embarrassing in its shortsightedness, particularly at a moment when the Trump-Netanyahu military campaign against Iran is burning through billions of dollars a day in the Gulf. Three US Navy jets recently lost to friendly fire were valued at approximately USD 100 million each, for a combined loss of some USD 300 million in a matter of days. Washington is prepared to lose in a single afternoon of military misadventure what it would cost to run the Peshawar consulate for forty years.

This is not an argument against military preparedness. It is an argument for proportion and strategic coherence, but also for recognising that the quiet, often unglamorous work of consular diplomacy, the patient decades-long building of trust and networks that men like Doug Archard embodied, is not a luxury to be slashed without consequence. As a component of America's soft power arsenal, it remains one of the cheapest and most effective instruments of national security that any great power possesses.

The Gulf, Iran, and the Price of Ignorance

Nor could the timing be worse. The Trump administration's confusing military entanglement alongside Israel's far-right government has already severely destabilised a region whose fault lines run not only through Iran and the Strait of Hormuz but directly through Pakistan and Afghanistan toward China, with reverberations felt well beyond.

Shutting down the one American institution specifically positioned to monitor, report on, and maintain contacts across this combustible frontier is a strategic act of self-blinding at precisely the moment when clear vision is most needed. Like Archard before them, the men and women staffing the Peshawar consulate have continued to talk to tribal leaders, border officials, entrepreneurs, and Pakistani security contacts, in other words that full range of actors patient diplomacy has been cultivating over years. Those perceptions, and the relationships behind them, will simply no longer exist. While foreign correspondents also seek to report what is happening on the ground, professional diplomacy plays a distinct and irreplaceable role.

For a journalist who has reported on Afghanistan, and on wars and humanitarian crises worldwide, across nearly five decades, this is a chronicle of unlearned lessons. The Soviet occupation failed. America's own nearly 20-year intervention failed, undone, in no small part, by Trump's first major foreign policy blunder: the poorly negotiated 2020 deal with the Taliban that his successor Joe Biden refused to reverse, enabling the Taliban to take Kabul in August 2021 almost without a shot. The West's catastrophic withdrawal rendered pointless the deaths of nearly 3,700 US and Coalition soldiers, not to mention several hundred thousand Afghans on all sides.

An administration that has distinguished itself through staggering conflicts of interest, the pursuit of private enrichment alongside public duty, and a pattern of contradictory and self-defeating decisions now adds to that record the closure of one of America's most strategically situated diplomatic outposts at the very moment its region is on fire. It appears to believe that ignorance and firepower are an adequate substitute for knowledge and presence.

Part Two of this series will examine the broader dismantling of US and European soft power institutions - from USAID and the CDC to the humanitarian agencies of International Geneva - and the human cost of that retreat.

Part Three will explore what rebuilding soft power might look like, and why it remains the West's most undervalued strategic asset.

Geneva-based Edward Girardet is a journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and editor of Global Geneva magazine, has reported wars and humanitarian crises for over 40 years.

Girardet's books include: “The Soviet War” (1985); “Somalia, Rwanda and Beyond – The Role of the International Media in Wars and Humanitarian Crises” (1995); “Killing the Cranes: A Reporter’s Journey Through Three Decades of War in Afghanistan (2011/2012); and as editor and writer: “The Essential Field Guide to Afghanistan” – Four fully-revised editions 1998 – 2014).

Girardet has just completed a new book provisionally titled: “The War that Followed Me: From the Hippie Trail to Afghanistan’s Frontlines”to be published in 2027. Girardet has also reported various documentary films such as BBC2’s “Frontline Doctors” (Interscope) on Médecins sans Frontières and various reports from Angola to Haiti for the PBS NewsHour.