The Duel (22 page)

It’s true that not every general is bursting to seize state power. General Asif Nawaz (chief of staff from 1991 to 1993) resisted the temptation despite advice to the contrary, and his sudden and unexpected death fueled the rumor mills in Islamabad. His widow and many others suspected murder.
*
His successor, General Wahid Kakar (1993–96) was to tell friends that the U.S. ambassador had made it clear that given the crisis, Washington would understand if firm action was taken. Kakar too remained outside politics, though the scale of corruption angered him, and on a famous occasion he is reported to have confronted Benazir Bhutto and complained about her husband’s greed.

“Why don’t you divorce him or have him bumped off?” asked the general.

“If you have any proof, General, sahib,” Benazir purred in response, “please send it to me.”

Kakar retired peacefully and was replaced by General Jehangir Karamat, another professional officer who refused to contemplate a coup.

Several months after dismissing Benazir, Leghari told me that this meeting, the last of many, had been decisive. He could no longer tolerate her excesses: if she continued in office, the army would intervene against democracy for the fourth time in the country’s history. Reluctantly, he said, he decided to invoke the Eighth Amendment—Zia’s gift to the nation—which gives the president powers to dismiss an elected government. New elections have to be held within ninety days.

Corruption was the main charge leveled against Benazir and Zardari. The couple were alleged to have used public office to amass a large private fortune—reckoned to be in the region of $1.5 billion— and transferred their assets abroad. Zardari was arrested, but his business associates remained loyal. One of them, the chairman of Pakistan Steel, committed suicide rather than give evidence against his former patron. Benazir’s closest supporters insist that her political prestige was squandered by her husband, that he was a fraud, a poseur, a wastrel, a philanderer, and much worse. In March 1999, addressing a friendly gathering at an Islamabad seminar, Benazir defended her spouse. He was much misunderstood, she said, but before she could continue, the audience began to shake their heads in disapproval. “No! No! No!” they shouted. She paused and then said with a sigh, “I wonder why I always get the same reaction whenever I mention him.”

Zardari was not the only reason for her unpopularity. The Peoples Party had done little for the poor, who were its natural constituency. Most of her ministers, at the national and provincial levels, were too busy lining their own pockets. Permanently surrounded by sycophants and cronies, she had become isolated from her electorate and oblivious to reality. The country was continuing to rot. A state that has never provided free education or health care and could no longer guarantee subsidized wheat, rice, or sugar rations to the poor or protect innocent lives from random killings in its largest city had created mass despair. In January 1999, a transport worker in Hyderabad who had not been paid for two years went to the Press Club, soaked himself in petrol, and set himself alight. He left behind a letter that read like an extract from an Upton Sinclair novel:

I have lost patience. Me and my fellow workers have been protesting the nonpayment of our salaries for a long time. But nobody takes any notice. My wife and mother are seriously ill and I have no money for their treatment. My family is starving and I am fed up with quarrels. I don’t have the right to live. I am sure the flames of my body will reach the houses of the rich one day.

In the general election that followed Benazir’s removal from power, the Peoples Party suffered a humiliating defeat. The Pakistani electorate may be largely semiliterate, but its political sophistication has never been in doubt. Disillusioned, apathetic, and weary, Benazir’s supporters refused to vote for her, but they could not at that point bring themselves to vote for her enemy. Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League won a giant majority, winning two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly, but 70 percent of the electorate stayed indoors.

The Sharif brothers were returned to power. Once again, Shahbaz, the younger but shrewder sibling, accepted family discipline and Nawaz became the prime minister. In 1998, Sharif made Pervez Musharraf army chief of staff in preference to the more senior general, Ali Kuli Khan. Sharif’s reasoning may have been that Musharraf, from a middle-class, refugee background like himself, would be easier to manipulate than Ali Kuli, who came from a landed Pathan family in the NWFP and was a schoolfellow of President Farooq Leghari, whom Sharif didn’t trust either because of the latter’s PPP origins. Whatever the reasoning, it turned out to be a mistake of similar magnitude to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s when he leapfrogged General Zia over the head of five senior generals. Ali Kuli Khan, highly regarded by most of his colleagues, did not harbor political ambitions and, like his immediate predecessors, would probably have stayed out of politics.

On Bill Clinton’s urging, Sharif pushed for a rapprochement with India. This accorded with his own business instincts. Travel and trade agreements were negotiated, land borders were opened, flights resumed, but before the next stage—loosening of travel restrictions and regular cross-border train services—could be reached, the Pakistan army began to assemble in the Himalayan foothills.

To put it mildly, the terrain in Kargil and the neighboring region is
inhospitable and for at least half the year also inaccessible. The jagged peaks reach nineteen thousand feet, and winter temperatures average –60 degrees Celsius. When the snows melt, the fierce rocks make all movement extremely difficult. Officers and soldiers serving in the region regard it as a Siberian exile. An unwritten agreement between India and Pakistan from 1977 onward was that neither side would man posts from September 15 to April 15 each year. In 1999, the Pakistan army, hoping to isolate the Indians in Kashmir, decided to bin the agreement and launched a limited war that raised the specter of a nuclear exchange.

T
HE
I
NDIANS, CLEARLY
taken by surprise on discovering Pakistani troops and irregulars occupying heights on the Indian side, suffered serious reverses during the first few weeks of the conflict, but subsequently moved in crack regiments and artillery together with heavy air cover and began to inflict casualties, compelling Pakistan to withdraw from some areas. After three months of fighting from May to July 1999, neither side could claim total victory, but casualties were high (several thousand on both sides). In his memoirs, Musharraf grotesquely exaggerates Pakistan’s “triumph,” claiming his side won. In reality, another stupid idea had backfired on the Pakistani high command. A cease-fire was agreed to and each army returned to its side of the Line of Control that separates Pakistan-occupied Kashmir from that run by India.

There were, however, a few unpleasant reminders of the ideological fanaticism introduced into the Pakistan army during the Zia period. Compulsory prayers and preachers attached to units had begun to affect the soldiery. In December 2000, I was told by a former army officer in Lahore about a disturbing incident after the Kargil cease-fire. The Indians had informed their Pakistani counterparts that one of the peaks in Kargil-Drass was still occupied by Pakistani soldiers, contrary to the cease-fire agreement. A senior officer investigated and ordered the captain in charge of the peak to return to the Pakistani side of the Line of Control. The captain accused his senior officer and the military high command of betraying the Islamist cause and shot the officer
dead. The Islamist officer was finally disarmed, tried by a secret court-martial, and executed.

W
HY DID THE
war take place at all? In private, the Sharif brothers told associates that the army was opposed to their policy of friendship with India and was determined to sabotage the process: the army had acted without clearance from the government. In his memoir, Musharraf insists that the army had kept the prime minister informed in briefings in January and February 1999. This ties in with what my informant (a former senior civil servant) who was present at the briefing told me. The slick video presentation by the GHQ had impressed Sharif. Naturally in the video the good guys won hands down. All Sharif asked at the end was “Can you do it quickly?”

The real reason for the war went back to the defeat in Dhaka. If the Americans could avenge Vietnam in Afghanistan, why not Pakistan in Kashmir? Ever since the 1990 victory in Kabul, the ISI had been infiltrating jihadis across the Line of Control into Indian-held Kashmir, trying to mimic the Afghan operation, but this time working on their own. They succeeded in destabilizing the province, but the Indian government responded with more troops, and ordinary Kashmiris were caught in the ugly crossfire. The Indian troops were undoubtedly brutal, but the jihadis, with their Wahhabi rhetoric, also antagonized important layers of the population. Islam in Kashmir had always been of the soft Sufi variety.

The Kargil war was designed to recapture the initiative. Looking back, it is truly staggering that Pakistan’s military philosophers actually thought they could defeat India. Once the latter realized that this was a full-fledged assault, it recovered and sent in heavy artillery with air and helicopter cover. A naval offensive, prelude to a blockade, was also set in motion. With only six days of fuel left, the Napoléons in Pakistan’s GHQ had no alternative but to accept a cease-fire. Sharif told Washington that he had been bounced into a war he didn’t want, but did not oppose. Soon afterward, the Sharif family decided to get rid of Musharraf. Constitutionally, of course, the prime minister had the power to dismiss the chief of staff and appoint a new one, as Zulfiqar
Ali Bhutto had done in the 1970s when he appointed Zia. But the army then was weak, divided, and had been defeated in a major war; this was certainly not the case in 1999. Here it was only a stupid, if costly, adventure that had gone wrong.

S
HARIF’S CANDIDATE TO
succeed Musharraf was General Ziauddin Butt, head of the ISI, who was widely regarded as weak and incompetent. He was bundled off to Washington for vetting and while there is said to have pledged bin Laden’s head on a platter. If Sharif had simply dismissed Musharraf, he might have had a better chance of success, but what he lacked in good sense his overclever brother tried to make up for in guile. Were the Sharif brothers really so foolish as to believe that the army was unaware of their intrigues, or were they misled by their belief in U.S. omnipotence? Clinton duly warned the Pakistan army that Washington would not tolerate a military coup in Pakistan. I remember chuckling at the time that this was a first in U.S.-Pakistan relations. Sharif relied too heavily on Clinton’s warning. He should have checked with the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.

The tragicomic episode that followed is described accurately enough in Musharraf’s memoir,
In the Line of Fire,
a book intended largely for Western eyes.
*
Musharraf describes how on October 11, 1999, he and his wife were flying back from Sri Lanka on a normal passenger flight when the pilot received instructions not to land. While the plane was still circling over Karachi, Nawaz Sharif summoned General Ziauddin Butt and in front of a TV crew swore him in as the new chief of staff. Meanwhile there was panic on Musharraf’s plane, by now low on fuel. He contacted the commander of the Karachi garrison, the army took control of the airport, and the plane landed safely.
Simultaneously, military units surrounded the prime minister’s house in Islamabad and arrested Nawaz Sharif. General Zia had been assassinated on a military flight; Musharraf took power on board a passenger plane.

So began the third extended period of military rule in Pakistan, initially welcomed by all Nawaz Sharif’s political opponents (including Benazir Bhutto, long before her consecration as the Mother of Democracy) and some of his former colleagues. Musharraf was initially popular in Pakistan, and if he had pushed through reforms to provide an education for all children, with English as a compulsory second language (as in Malaysia) to break the elite’s monopoly on higher education abroad, instituted land reforms to end the stranglehold of the gentry on large swathes of the countryside, tackled corruption in the armed forces and everywhere else, and ended the jihadi escapades in Kashmir and Pakistan as a prelude to a long-term deal with India, he might have left behind a positive legacy. Sadly and predictably, none of this was even attempted. Musharraf did, however, implement one important shift by permitting the emergence of independent TV stations and thus breaking the deadly stranglehold of state TV. This undoubtedly enhanced media freedom in the country. A number of the networks were challenging, critical, and not at all worried about offending those in authority. Musharraf lived to regret this concession.

In the political realm, he mimicked his military predecessors. Like them, he took off his uniform, went to a landlord-organized gathering in Sind, and entered politics. His party? The ever-
khaki,
ever-available courtesan known to the country as the Muslim League. His supporters? Chips off the old corrupt block he had denounced so vigorously on taking office and whose leaders he was prosecuting for large-scale corruption. The inevitable had happened. The Chaudhrys of Gujrat had split from the Sharif family and done a deal with the general. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the minister of the interior and narcotic control in Nawaz Sharif’s government, had decided that becoming a broker for the military was a far more rewarding occupation than a spell in opposition. The only surprise was that anyone was surprised.

•   •   •

T
HE FIRST MAJOR
crisis to hit the Musharraf regime occurred on September 11, 2001. By pure chance, that very week the long-bearded General Mahmud Ahmad, director general of the ISI, was in Washington as a guest of the Pentagon. While the 9/11 attacks were occuring, General Ahmad was enjoying a relaxed breakfast at the Capitol with the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, Senator Bob Graham (D) and Representative Porter Goss (R). The latter had worked for the CIA black-ops (clandestine operations) section for over ten years. In a discussion of terrorism, reference was made to Osama bin Laden’s base in Afghanistan. In the interval between the two attacks on the World Trade Center, General Ahmad tried to convince his hosts that Mullah Omar was totally trustworthy and could be persuaded to disgorge Osama bin Laden. The meeting carried on in this vein until the second plane hit the WTC and everyone left. It is not known if Graham questioned his guest regarding information that, it was later revealed, his staff had received from an ISI operative in August that year, warning that the Twin Towers would soon be attacked.