Jared Cohen, the CEO of Jigsaw, surveyed the craggy valley from the back of a gray SUV as it wound toward the Khyber Pass, the mountainous roadway connecting Afghanistan and Pakistan that had become a hotbed of Islamic extremism. The arid landscape was beautiful, but Cohen, who is Jewish and was raised in an affluent Connecticut suburb, knew the excursion was risky. This was his fourth visit to Pakistan. Colleagues had told Cohen he was insane for going—his ransom insurance wouldn’t protect him against the frequent roadside bombs in the area—but he’d still decided to take a 12-hour flight to Dubai, where he caught a connection to Lahore and drove to Islamabad and then on to Peshawar, in the north of Pakistan. At the direction of Pakistan’s former foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar, Cohen’s host, they rode in one car, with a security detail following a short distance behind to avoid attracting undo attention.
Around noon, they pulled into a village compound, where Cohen, 35, donned a robe and turban, and for the next four hours immersed himself in Pashtun issues. Through Rabbani Khar’s connections, he was able to meet with tribal leaders, clerics, smugglers, survivors of drone strikes—anyone who could help him better grasp the challenges crippling the region.
A Rhodes Scholar and former State Department policy wonk who worked under Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, Cohen is fluent in Swahili and has journeyed to 103 countries, often amid turmoil. Once, according to Cohen, he snuck into eastern Congo by hiding in a truck under a pile of bananas during the Great War of Africa. He tells me he’s been kicked out of Syria twice, and mentions he can’t go back to Cairo after conspiracy theories arose suggesting that he had a hand in the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
A self-described “investigative anthropological researcher,” Cohen was in Pakistan acting as an attaché for Jigsaw, the Alphabet subsidiary that defines itself as an incubator building “tools to make the world safer.” It evolved out of Google Ideas, an internal think tank Cohen cofounded in 2010 with Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and current Alphabet executive chairman, to address geopolitical challenges with technology. Facebook and Twitter helped spread free expression during the Arab Spring, and yet social media is also being used to disseminate messages of hate, with terrorist attacks coordinated on WhatsApp and beheadings aired on YouTube.
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