The Duel (24 page)

Circumstantial evidence suggested the involvement of the intelligence agencies in Pearl’s death. There was no direct proof, but it was no secret in Pakistan that Omar Saeed Sheikh, the psychopath who set up the kidnapping, had intelligence connections. In 1994, ISI-spawned Islamist groups had infiltrated him into Kashmir. A specialist in kidnapping foreigners and keeping them as hostages, he masterminded an action of this kind in Delhi to secure the release from Tihar jail of Masood Azhar, leader of an Islamist group. The kidnapping succeeded, but so did Indian intelligence: after a shoot-out, Sheikh was captured. He slapped the senior police officer who arrested him and was beaten up in return. Five years later, in December 1999, his colleagues hijacked an Indian airliner on its way to Kandahar and threatened to kill everyone on board unless Sheikh and other “liberation fighters” were freed. They were.

What drove a Sylvester Stallone fan, born in East London in 1973, to become a religious fanatic? His parents had emigrated to Britain in 1968 with enough capital to establish a small garment business. Perfect Fashions did well enough for Omar to be sent to prep school. But his fondness for drink and thuggery worried his parents, who sent him back to the Land of the Pure. He didn’t last long at Aitchison College, a top private school in Lahore: after a couple of years, he was expelled for “bullying.” A contemporary described him to me as having had “strong psychopathic tendencies... even then,” and said he was always threatening to kill other boys. He returned to London and was sent to school at Snaresbrook, where he was a contemporary of Nasser Hussain, the future England cricket captain. Omar was a keen chess player and arm wrestler, ever eager to demonstrate the latter skill in local pubs.

He did well at Snaresbrook and went to study statistics at the London School of Economics. A number of active Islamist groups were on
campus, and Bosnia became their cause. The involvement of Western intellectuals in Bosnia has been well publicized, usually by themselves. Less well documented is that remnants of the Afghan mujahideen, including some of Osama’s men, had been taken in U.S. transport planes to fight the holy war in the Balkans. In 1993, Sheikh went to Bosnia as part of a group of Muslim students from the LSE taking medicines and supplies to victims of the civil war. Here, he first established contact with the armed-struggle Islamist groups who converted him to their version of jihad. General Musharraf later claimed that Sheikh was a double agent who had been recruited by MI6 and sent to Bosnia. By January 2002 he was in Islamabad promising Daniel Pearl a much-sought-after interview with the clerical godfather of the shoe bomber.

Many questions about Pearl’s death remain unanswered. The group that kidnapped and killed Pearl supposedly called itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. One of its demands—the release of the Guantánamo prisoners—was obvious, but the second was extraordinary: the delivery of F-16s, which the United States had been paid for but had not delivered, to Pakistan. A jihadi group that supposedly regards the Musharraf regime as traitorous for selling out the Taliban endorsing a twenty-year-old demand of the military and state bureaucracy? Impossible.

Sheikh surrendered to the provincial home secretary (a former ISI officer) in Lahore on February 5, 2002. Officially he was arrested in Lahore a week later. None of these matters was raised at his trial in a closed court in Hyderabad in July 2002. He was sentenced to death, his fellow conspirators to life imprisonment. Both sides appealed, Sheikh against the death sentence, the state against the sentence of life imprisonment—rather than hanging—for the other three. Sheikh wrote a statement that was read out by his lawyer: “We’ll see who will die first, me or the authorities who have arranged the death sentence for me. Musharraf should know that Almighty Allah is there and can get his revenge.” The three attempts on Musharraf’s life, two of which took place within a fortnight and one of which came close to success, indicated that Sheikh wasn’t making an empty boast.

Heavy traffic often makes the ten-mile journey from Islamabad to Rawalpindi tortuous, unless you’re the president and the highway has
been cleared by a security detail. Even then, carefully orchestrated assassination attempts can play havoc with the schedule. The first happened on December 14, 2003. Moments after the general’s motorcade passed over a bridge, a powerful bomb exploded and badly damaged the bridge, although no one was hurt. The armored limo, fitted with radar and an antibomb device, courtesy of the Pentagon, saved Musharraf’s life. His demeanor at the time surprised observers. He was said to have been calm and cheerful, making jocular allusions to living in perilous times. Unsurprisingly, security had been high—decoys, last-minute route changes, etc.—but this didn’t prevent another attempt a week later, on Christmas Day. This time two men driving cars loaded with explosives came close to success. The president’s car was damaged, guards in cars escorting him were killed, but Musharraf was unhurt. Since his exact route and the time of his departure from Islamabad were heavily guarded secrets, the terrorists must have had inside information. If your security staff includes angry Islamists who see you as a traitor and want to blow you up, then, as the general states in his memoir, Allah alone can protect you. He has certainly been kind to Musharraf.

The culprits were discovered and tortured till they revealed details of the plot. Some junior military officers were also implicated. The key plotters were tried in secret and hanged. Amjad Farooqi, the supposed mastermind and a jihadi extremist, was shot dead by security forces. Two questions haunt both Washington and Musharraf’s colleagues: How many of those involved remained undetected, and would the command structure of the army survive if a terrorist succeeded next time around? Musharraf didn’t seem worried and adopted a jaunty, even boastful tone. Before 9/11 he was treated like a pariah abroad and beset by problems at home. How to fortify the will of a high command weakened by piety and corruption? How to deal with the corruption and embezzlement that had been a dominant feature of both the Sharif and Bhutto governments? Benazir Bhutto was already in self-exile in Dubai; the Sharif brothers had been arrested and Nawaz was charged with high treason. Washington rapidly organized an offer of asylum from Saudi Arabia, a state whose ruling family has institutionalized the theft of public funds. These questions soon disappeared from the
agenda as the Chief Executive of Pakistan, a title more in keeping with the spirit of the age and preferable to the old-fashioned Chief Martial Law Administrator, began to settle down, adjust to the realities of elite existence, and prepare to make himself president.

As for Omar Saeed Sheikh, who could certainly reveal a great deal, he continues to live in a death cell in a Pakistani prison, chatting amiably to his guards and e-mailing newspaper editors in Pakistan to tell them that if he is executed, papers he has left behind will be published exposing the complicity of others. Perhaps this is a bluff, or perhaps he was a triple agent and was working for the ISI as well.

What the Pearl killing revealed was that Musharraf had not yet succeeded in establishing total control over the intelligence agencies. He would only do so after the attempts on his own life. General Ashfaq Kayani, another senior officer trained in the United States, was appointed director general of the ISI. He supervised the gathering of information that led to the capture of those in the army who had helped Musharraf’s would-be assassins. Kayani was promoted to chief of army staff, replacing Musharraf in November 2007. In a dispatch from Carlotta Gall on January 7, 2008, the
New York Times
reflected the tremor of excitement felt in Washington:

“He’s loyal to Musharraf to the point where Musharraf is a liability and no longer an asset to the corporate body of the Pakistani military,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. and White House official who is an expert on Pakistan. “They will say: ‘Thank you very much for your interest in security affairs. Here is your ticket out of the country.’”

As he has risen through the military, General Kayani has impressed American military and intelligence officials as a professional, pro-Western moderate with few political ambitions.

Musharraf had been described in similar language ten years previously, but now his allies were not pleased. The foreign policy half of the apple was beginning to shrivel, but what of the other half? The Chaudhrys were permanently reaping the harvest of power. Musharraf’s favorite prime minister, Shaukat “Shortcut” Aziz, formerly a senior
executive of Citibank with close ties to the eighth-richest man in the world, the Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal, was spouting a great deal of nonsense. The model preferred by some Western commentators on permanent military rule with technocrats running the Finance Ministry has proved a total failure. Watching Aziz flattering the Chaudhrys with wild assertions of their genius in what passes for a parliament in Islamabad reminded one of a paid piper rather than an “impartial technocrat.” One wondered what had recommended him in the first place. Whose choice was he? As it became clear that nothing much was going to change, a wave of cynicism engulfed the country.

The score-settling with perceived enemies at home was crude, and for that reason Musharraf’s book,
In the Line of Fire,
caused a commotion in Pakistan, demonstrating that the title, at least, was accurate. A spirited controversy erupted in the media, something that could never have happened during previous periods of military rule. Scathing criticism came from ex-generals (Ali Kuli Khan’s detailed rejoinder was published in most newspapers), opposition politicians, and pundits of every sort. In fact there was more state interference in the media during Nawaz Sharif’s tenure than under Musharraf prior to the desperate state of emergency imposed in the fall of 2007. The level of debate in the Pakistani media is much higher than that in neighboring India, once greatly admired for its vigorous and critical press, but now taken over by a middle-class obsession with shopping and celebrity that has led to widespread trivialization of TV and most of the print media.

Musharraf was better than Zia and Ayub in many ways, but the more unpopular he became, the more he began to resort to the time-honored style of dictators. Human rights groups noticed a sharp rise in the number of political activists who were being “disappeared”: four hundred in 2007 alone, including Sindhi nationalists and a total of twelve hundred in the province of Baluchistan, where the army has become trigger-happy once again. The war on terror has provided many leaders with the chance to sort out their domestic opponents, but that doesn’t make it any better.

And then there is Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, where the only thing that endures is violence and the heroin trade. Despite the fake optimism sometimes evinced in the Western media, it
is hardly a secret that it is a total mess. A revived Taliban is winning popularity by resisting the occupation. NATO helicopters and soldiers are killing hundreds of civilians and describing them as “Taliban fighters.” Hamid Karzai, the man with the nice shawls, is seen as a hopeless puppet, totally dependent on NATO troops. He has antagonized both the Pashtuns, who are turning to the Taliban once again in large numbers, and the warlords of the Northern Alliance, who openly denounce him and suggest it’s time he was sent back to the States. In western Afghanistan, only Iranian influence has preserved a degree of stability. If Ahmadinejad is provoked into withdrawing his support, Karzai will not last more than a week. Islamabad waits and watches. Military strategists are convinced that the United States has lost interest and NATO will soon leave. If that happens, Pakistan is unlikely to permit the Northern Alliance to take Kabul. Its army will move in again. A Pakistan veteran of the Afghan wars joked with me, “Last time we sent in the beards, but times have changed. This time, inshallah, we’ll dress them all in Armani suits so it looks good on U.S. television.”

The region remains fogbound. Pakistan’s first military leader was seen off by a popular insurrection. The second was assassinated. What will happen to Musharraf? Once he took off his uniform and handed over the army to General Ashfaq Kayani, he left himself totally dependent on the goodwill of his successor and Washington. General Kayani’s decision some weeks before the elections to withdraw all military personnel from civilian duties (army officers were running public utilities and numerous other nonmilitary institutions) may or may not have been a broad hint to his predecessor to follow suit, but its result was to stop the “election cell” of the ISI from “intervening” in the elections. The “mother of all election victories” that Musharraf had predicted could only have been achieved with the connivance of military intelligence. In previous years it was never a surprise when captains and majors accosted local or national politicians and civil servants to inform them what was required. Their absence meant that the Chaudhrys of Gujrat received a heavy blow, and senior ministers in Musharraf’s cabinet were defeated in the Punjab. I received a euphoric e-mail from an old friend: “The people know that the mouths of military dictators are the home of lies.”

The February 2008 elections were viewed as a referendum on Musharraf’s rule. Despite the low turnout, he lost badly. The PPP emerged as the largest party with eighty-seven seats, with the Sharif brothers’ Muslim League winning sixty-six. The two old rivals between them had an overall majority. The Chaudhrys of Gujrat slumped to thirty-eight seats in the National Assembly, with serious allegations that at least ten of these were won through large-scale manipulation. The Islamists lost control of the Frontier Province to the secular PPP and ANP. Musharraf should have offered to resign as soon as the new parliament was in session, giving the newly elected national and provincial assemblies the opportunity to elect a new president.

His supporters insist that the Bush administration wanted him to continue in office, and U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson summoned the widower Bhutto to the embassy in Islamabad to remind him of the deal that had been agreed to by his late wife, that she was to become Musharraf’s junior partner and not bargain with the Sharif brothers, whose Islamist sympathies made them suspect. The scale of the general’s defeat, however, made such a prospect suicidal. Except for the most slavish pro-Bush Pakams (Pakistani-Americans), whose dross regularly pollutes the blogosphere, the serious advice Zardari received was that the days of the Republicans were numbered. Far better, in these conditions, to help Musharraf become a private citizen voluntarily before the Democrats got rid of him.