Imperial Benevolence of USA towards India: Chapter 6.
That Kashmir is a dispute, is a controversial fact. In 1972 India and Pakistan entered into a pact called ‘Simla Agreement’ and decided that it was a mutual difference between the two countries and it shall be resolved mutually by both the parties. That means exclusion of UN and USA. UN could accept but not the USA. What did it do?
Matthew VanDyke was a mercenary from USA. He was caught, named, and publicly charged by India with espionage. He was trying to train an army of insurgents in Manipur and was caught. The United States said nothing on arrest. That silence was itself a message.
Robin Lynn Raphel did something similar for Kashmir. She was never caught. She was never charged. She was never confronted publicly by India or anyone else. She operated behind diplomatic immunity for decades, and when the FBI finally investigated her, the charges were quietly dropped. Her photographs meeting dubious politicians have since disappeared from the internet. Her digital footprint has been systematically reduced to almost nothing.
This is the benevolence of USA on Kashmir and Manipur. India refused to accept the benevolence in Manipur. It is something it did not do on Kashmir even when Robin Raphael was posted as diplomat in India.
The Wife of the Ambassador
Robin Lynn Johnson was born in 1947 in Vancouver, Washington. She began her government career as a CIA analyst. The job is defined as:
“CIA Analysts play a pivotal role in national security by collecting and interpreting information about conditions, events, and developments that pose threats to the security of the United States.”
Robin married Arnold Raphel, who rose to become the United States Ambassador to Pakistan. In August 1988, Arnold Raphel died aboard a Pakistani Air Force plane alongside military dictator Zia-ul-Haq. The cause of that crash has never been officially established. It is widely understood to have been an assassination of Zia. Arnold Raphel was collateral, or just unfortunate.
Robin retained her first husband’s surname through thirty years of subsequent marriages and diplomatic postings. Arnold Raphel died in 1988 but she had divorced him six years earlier. In Pakistani elite society, where relationships are personal and memory is long, the name Raphel opened doors that no other name could. It was not sentiment. It was social intelligence.
1993: The Creation
In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Robin as the first Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs. She arrived in New Delhi during the height of the Kashmir insurgency. Indian intelligence was attempting to contain dozens of fragmented separatist groups in Kashmir, operating with Pakistani support.
Raphel’s solution, offered simultaneously to Washington and to Pakistan, was consolidation. Have one group to reckon with, she advised. It would be easier to manage, easier to negotiate with, easier to present to the world as a political rather than terrorist movement.
The result was the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, founded in 1993.
ISI too had realised that money and not ideology would propel its jihad in Kashmir. It co-opted with Raphel to create the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, which served as Rawalpindi’s proxy in Kashmir and became a handy ISI conduit for funneling illicit funds to sustain terrorism in J&K.
Raphel reportedly welded many disparate secessionist Kashmiri groups together into the All Parties Hurriyat Conference and united them in their conflict with the Indian establishment. She promoted younger Kashmiri separatists Yasin Malik and Mirwaiz Umer Farooq while sidelining elder Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Yasin Malik, at present is serving sentence in Delhi after conviction for murder.
She implicitly rejected Simla Agreement and called Kashmir a disputed territory from an American diplomatic platform. She extended public support to Kashmiri separatists while posted as a diplomat in New Delhi. She took upon herself to strain India-US relations deliberately and systematically while drawing an American government salary and operating behind the protection of diplomatic immunity. In fact immunity was the wheel of her operation. Could she be acting on her own? Is it possible?
The Nuclear Files
In 1995, American spy agencies intercepted communications in which Pakistani officials suggested Raphel had shared sensitive information about what the United States knew of Pakistan’s nuclear programme. The disclosure was classified and unauthorised.
She denied it. Diplomatic Security investigated and found no evidence of wrongdoing. No action was taken.
To protect herself from what she correctly identified as bureaucratic rivals within the intelligence community, she kept the records of her conversations. When she retired from the State Department in 2005, those files went home with her, into a mahogany cabinet in her basement in Washington.
That cabinet became the FBI’s primary exhibit nine years later.
The Return
In 2009, the Obama administration brought her back. She was appointed to manage the Kerry-Lugar-Berman civilian aid programme for Afghanistan and Pakistan, worth billions of dollars. She worked under Richard Holbrooke as his adviser. She drove her own car. She wore local dress. She moved through Islamabad with the ease of someone who had never left.
While other American diplomats lived under strict security protocols, she operated as she always had, through personal relationships built over decades, conversations over tea at private homes, dinners at which Pakistani politicians and military officers spoke freely because they trusted her.
The FBI was watching those conversations on Skype. They had obtained foreign intelligence warrants. She was discussing classified matters which she was not supposed to do. She was too close to a foreign diplomat for the comfort of USA. FBI listened to her calls quietly, checking red boxes till it decided to act.
On the morning of October 21, 2014, as she sat at her desk at the State Department checking her email, the FBI raided her house. She was called from her office and asked about her Mahogany desk. When she admitted that it was under her lock and key, she was made to open it in front of witnesses. FBI took two computers, an iPad, and the files from the mahogany cabinet in the basement. The nuclear files she had kept for nineteen years as her insurance policy became the evidence against her.
She left her purple briefcase in the office. It was bought at the Kohsar Market in Islamabad, at the State Department. She never returned for it.
The Charges That Were Not
The FBI investigation continued for two years. Robin hired lawyers and was nearly bankrupted as she narrated in an interview later. The FBI investigated her as a suspected Pakistani asset.
In 2016, prosecutors dropped all charges without explanation. No conviction. No public statement. No accountability. The case closed as quietly as it had opened, and Robin Raphel disappeared from public view.
By then Donald Trump was elected as President. Raphel quietly made a comeback after investigators closed her case without filing any charges. She became one of the few back-channel key players who played a crucial role in facilitating the talks between the US and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Her services for mediation were sought by the Trump administration in view of her long history of being pro-Pakistan and pro-Taliban.
Since Trump wanted to exit Afghanistan, she fit the bill perfectly. The woman investigated for being a Pakistani asset was rehabilitated by the same administration now posting Sergio Gor to New Delhi as its ambassador. However, the deal with Taliban could not be finalised for next 4 years. India however removed the special status of Kashmir and integrated it into India as Union Territory. No strike, no, agitation, and no whisper of any separatism took place.
The entire operation in Kashmir was too clean and too surgical. A large number of Hurriyat leaders were placed under house arrest. Malik, as stated above, was tried for various offences. Geelani died in 2020. Hurriyat itself has become an extinct entity by 2026. Who provided the intelligence about the entire network of separatist leaders and overground workers and sympathizers of Pakistan? What did Robin Raphel do? We can only wonder?
The pattern holds.
In 2022, the Government of Pakistan announced the Hilal-e-Pakistan, its second highest civilian honour, for Robin Raphel. President Arif Alvi personally presented it on March 23, 2023, Pakistan Day. The woman the FBI investigated as a suspected Pakistani asset received Pakistan’s formal gratitude six years after the charges were dropped. Pakistan does not give its second highest civilian honour out of sentiment. The award was Pakistan’s public receipt for services rendered.
The service for which she was decorated was not ambiguous. After retirement she joined Cassidy and Associates and lobbied for the Government of Pakistan under a 1.2 million dollar contract from Musharraf’s administration. She then returned to government managing 1.5 billion dollars annually in civilian aid to Pakistan.
The benevolence was mutual.
The Harvest
In April 2025, twenty-six tourists were killed in Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam in Kashmir. The attackers were from Lashkar-e-Taiba. The operational front was called The Resistance Front. It was the first terrorist attack after removal of special status of Kashmir in 2019.
The role of Robin Raphel in creating the Hurriyat Conference, billions of dollars worth of US military aid for Pakistan, and an intellectual validation for religious secessionism were all immediate fallouts of the withdrawal of Soviet Union from Afghanistan.
The Hurriyat that Raphel built in 1993 normalised separatism as a political position. It gave Pakistani-directed violence a respectable political face that could attend conferences, receive foreign diplomats, and claim democratic legitimacy. That legitimacy became the thirty-year cover story under which the infrastructure of terrorism in Kashmir was funded, organised, and sustained.
However, 2025 was different. India retaliated with Operation Sindoor killing hundreds of terrorists in their own camps in Pakistan. Brahmos missiles and loitering drones with fighter planes created a havoc which Pakistan could not retaliate. It sought cease fire on 14 May and it was granted after talk by DGMO on both sides.
The Scrubbing
Search for Robin Raphel today. Her photographs are gone. The image results return almost nothing except her service photograph.
A diplomat who served thirty years, who was supposed to be photographed at hundreds of official functions across six countries on four continents, who appeared at congressional hearings and diplomatic receptions and press briefings, has been rendered visually invisible.
This does not happen by accident. It happens by design.
VanDyke was caught and his name is in Indian court records. Raphel was never caught and her face has been removed from the internet. The mercenary is visible. The architect is not.
Raphel was not an ideologue. She was a banker. The Kerry-Lugar billions she managed, the Brown Amendment military equipment she lobbied to release, the Musharraf lobbying contract she executed, together these made her the financial architecture of thirty years of American benevolence toward Pakistan. The Hurriyat needed political cover. The ISI needed funding. She provided the institutional credibility that kept both flowing. In Casino Royale the most dangerous character in the room is not the one holding the gun. It is the one holding the account.
Rubio’s Meeting with Doval
When Marco Rubio sat across from Ajit Doval at the National Security Adviser’s office in May 2026, VanDyke was on the table. India had publicly announced the espionage charges. America had said nothing.
But Raphel was also in that room, invisibly. Thirty years of American diplomatic cover for Pakistani terrorism in Kashmir, a Hurriyat architecture standing till 2019, an FBI investigation that produced no charges and a quiet rehabilitation, and a current administration that used the same asset to broker Taliban talks. Doval knows this history in granular detail. It is his professional life’s work.
The cold welcome Rubio received everywhere was not about tariffs or H1B visas or Munich speeches, though those mattered too. It was about a much longer account that India has been keeping but slipped through American amnesia.
In the next chapter we shall go back into history as see humane face of USA in East Pakistan when millions were killed and raped and it chose to become Bangladesh.
References:
Duties and Responsibilities of CIA analyst.
India’s War on Terrorism Ecosystem
Washington Post. “Who is Robin Raphel? The State Department veteran caught up in Pakistan intrigue.” (2014).
Economic Times. “Veteran US diplomat Robin L Raphel encouraged creation of Hurriyat Conference in Kashmir.” (2014).
Wall Street Journal. “The Last Diplomat” by Adam Entous and Devlin Barrett. (2016).