Descent Into Chaos (14 page)

CHAPTER THREE

The Chief Executive’s Schizophrenia
Pakistan, the United Nations, and the United States Before 9 /11

When Musharraf was asked just after the 1999 coup why he had decided to call himself chief executive—an odd title for a military dictator—he gave a surprising reply: “For your [the media’s] consumption—might I say it’s a very palatable name instead of chief martial law administrator, which is draconian in concept and name. I want to give it a civilian façade.”
¹
Blunt, frank, always in a hurry, sometimes outrageous, but ever defensive of the military’s role, Musharraf was obsessed with his image when he seized power. He wanted to be palatable to everyone, from Islamic fundamentalists to liberals but most of all to the international community. He thought that a title that sounded as though he were the head of a multinational company would hide the reality of his military rule. Whatever he called himself, though, abroad he was treated as an unreliable pariah and a dictator who had nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.

Musharraf was born in New Delhi in August 1943, the second of three sons. His family moved to Pakistan after Partition in 1947—the trauma of which he describes movingly in his otherwise unreliable autobiography.
²
Both his parents were well educated and liberal, a working couple long before such things became the norm. His father joined Pakistan’s foreign service and in 1949 was posted to Turkey, where his mother worked for the United Nations and the entire family learned to speak Turkish. The young Musharraf’s hero was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), the secular founding father of the Turkish republic, and for a time after the coup, Musharraf tried to emulate him.

He was educated in Christian missionary schools in Karachi and Lahore, where he made lasting friends—some of whom were later to become his advisers. His friends nicknamed him “Gola,” which means “round” or “ball,” because of his pudgy physique. According to his contemporaries, the young Musharraf was not particularly bright—a poor student who never read books—but he loved sports, dancing, dressing up, seeing girls, and riding around on his motorbike.

At a loss with what to do with himself, he entered the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul in 1961 and was commissioned in the field artillery three years later. “I joined the army because of the glamour,” he said.
³
A happy-go-lucky junior officer who partied a lot, he was frequently hauled in for disciplinary charges. He fought in the 1965 war with India and then joined the Special Service Group (SSG), the commando force of the Pakistan army. In the 1971 war, he commanded an SSG unit that went behind Indian lines, and he later became the head of the SSG. He often alluded to his commando training and, after the coup, always met the press in the camouflage uniform and beret of a commando. “He has brilliant tactics but no strategy, and that is what you learn as a commando,” a retired army chief told me. Musharraf later described how he had launched the coup. “I took a fast decision. I keep to Napoleon’s view that two thirds of the decision making process is based on analysis and information and one third is always a leap in the dark.”
⁴

Musharraf trained at Fort Bragg in the United States and led the SSG in joint exercises with U.S. Special Forces. He later attended a military course in Britain. When Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif appointed him army chief in October 1998, he considered Musharraf a safe bet because as a Muhajir—an Urdu-speaking refugee from India—he did not have the breadth of support in the officer corps, which was dominated by Punjabis and Pashtuns, to become too powerful. Sharif thought Musharraf would do as he was told. Yet within the next twelve months, the impetuous Musharraf was to launch a war in Kargil and mount a coup.

After the coup, Musharraf held three posts, chief executive of Pakistan, chief of army staff, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. In his first press conference he showed both strength and vulnerability, which initially made him very appealing to the domestic media. “My work and appointments I have made are transparent, my judgments may be wrong but not my intentions. This is not martial law. We will be honest and dynamic so give us a chance,” he appealed to the press.
⁵
He appeared to be personable, charming, and a great talker, as he rarely spoke in public with a text. George Polk, a European technology entrepreneur who sat down to breakfast with Musharraf in 2006, later described him as “a tightly coiled spring” whose chest any moment “would begin to swell, like the Hulk.”
⁶

Musharraf had had a liberal upbringing, but while training young officers, the army inculcates in them a powerful bias that includes hatred for India, distrust of the United States, contempt for all civilian politicians, and a heightened religiosity and respect for Islamic militants fighting the army’s foreign wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Musharraf and his generals were personally liberal, but their worldview and politics remained extremely reactionary. Thus Musharraf could dance at parties and rarely enter a mosque but, at the same time, strongly defend jihad, the Taliban worldview, and the right for militants to cross into Indian Kashmir. After the coup, he stepped up support for Kashmiri militants and the Taliban to show that he was not soft on India. After 9/11, his gregarious nature and bluntness appealed to Western leaders, but they soon realized that he spoke too much, made more commitments than he could realize, and was arrogant.
⁷

Despite Musharraf’s allegiance to the Taliban and the Kashmiri militants, the mullahs considered Musharraf too secular as an army chief and quite different from Zia ul-Haq. They were appalled when he compared himself to Atatürk, who, in the 1920s, drowned hundreds of Turkish mullahs in the Bosporus Sea. “Musharraf’s knowledge on Islam and madrassas is zero, he has no idea even of what a madrassa looks like or any idea about Islamic education,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, of the political party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, told me after the coup.
⁸
Added Amir ul-Azim, of the Jamiat-e-Islami, “Musharraf has no roots in the traditions of this country or of Islam.”
⁹
Even though Musharraf personally disliked the extremism of the mullahs, he had no compunction about using militants as an extension of the state’s foreign policy. Before 9/11 he was a vociferous defender of jihad who tried to convince skeptical Western audiences. “There is no question that terrorism and jihad are absolutely different. You in the West are allergic to the term
jihad,
but jihad is a tolerant concept,” Musharraf said in 2000.
¹⁰

After seizing power, Musharraf declared an emergency but did not impose martial law. He suspended the constitution and legislatures, sacked the heads of all political institutions, and restricted the courts from passing any judgments on his actions. He later forced judges of the Supreme Court to swear a new oath of loyalty to the regime. He gave no timetable for the army’s remaining in power. He announced a seven-point agenda to rebuild Pakistan by reviving the economy, improving law and order, and going after loan defaulters and the corrupt.
¹¹
The ISI vetted a civilian cabinet that included several well-known businessmen, bankers, and liberal politicians. Shaukat Aziz, favorite nominee of the ISI who had dealt with him extensively in the past, was given the daunting task of reviving a virtually bankrupt exchequer.
¹²

Liberal figures who joined the cabinet did so believing that this time around the army would rebuild public faith in civil society and carry out long-needed reforms of the bureaucracy, the police, and the judiciary. They expected the army to sow the seeds of genuine democracy and nation building, but they were to be severely disappointed. Military rule at the tail end of the twentieth century was an outdated model for rebuilding a deeply polarized and fractured society. The army could never carry out a reform agenda as long as it continued to support jihadis and extremist religious groups who carried out the army’s policies toward India and Afghanistan. These same jihadis would become the biggest obstacle to reform and nation building at home.

In January 2000 the army put Nawaz Sharif and six others on trial, charging them with treason and hijacking an aircraft—charges that carried the death sentence. Sharif looked weak and wan but unrepentant as I chatted with him in a Karachi courtroom full of intelligence officers, lawyers, and family members. He accused Musharraf of “preparing a blueprint for the overthrow of my government.”
¹³
The trial could hardly be considered free and impartial.
¹⁴
On April 6, 2000, Sharif was found guilty and given two life sentences, but after a year in jail he was sprung by the Saudi royal family, who took him into exile, promising Musharraf that Sharif would not take part in politics for ten years. The country’s three major political leaders were all now in exile: Sharif, Bhutto, and the muhajir leader Altaf Hussain.

The international community’s main demands from the military regime were to cease support to the Taliban, help deliver bin Laden, and stop aiding Kashmiri militants fighting in Indian Kashmir. There was already deep suspicion running among U.S. congressmen and the media that the regime was a state sponsor of terrorism, suspicion fueled by an effective Indian media campaign that blamed the uprising in Kashmir as entirely a result of Pakistani interference. Thus, in 1999, terrorism was already on the agenda for Musharraf.

The hijacking of an Indian aircraft in December 1999 appeared to confirm the world’s worst fears. ISI agents appeared to be involved when Harkat ul-Ansar, a Pakistan-based and ISI-backed Kashmiri extremist group, hijacked an Indian Airlines aircraft and flew it to Kandahar. After days of tense negotiation on the tarmac of Kandahar’s decrepit airport, between UN officials and the Taliban, India was forced to release three Kashmiri militants in exchange for the 160 passengers held hostage. U.S. officials privately said that the hijacking had been backed, if not carried out, by the ISI, while India blamed the ISI publicly. The United States and Britain demanded that Pakistan ban Harkat and other extremist groups. Britain’s chief of the Defence staff, Gen. Charles Guthrie, delivered the first of several tough messages to Musharraf in January 2000. “Everything is now up to General Musharraf to convince us that he is taking steps in the right direction, ” Guthrie told me.
¹⁵

The first official U.S. delegation to visit Islamabad since the coup also arrived in January. The U.S. assistant secretary of state Karl Inderfurth delivered a blunt message urging Pakistan to ban terrorist groups and hand over al Qaeda members known to be operating inside the country.
¹⁶
The ISI had never bothered to rein in al Qaeda’s extensive logistics network in Pakistan because the terrorist group helped train Kashmiri militants willing to fight India. Al Qaeda was now also helping the Taliban, another ally of the military regime. Moreover, the same extremist Pakistani groups the ISI funded and sponsored helped al Qaeda find safe houses and deliver young men for training.

U.S. intelligence had discovered that Abu Zubaydah, a senior al Qaeda recruiter, was operating openly from a house in Peshawar and vetting foreign recruits before sending them on to training camps in Afghanistan. Inderfurth asked Musharraf to hand him over. “The Pakistanis told us they could not find him, even though everyone knew where he was,” William Milam, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, told me. “The ISI just turned a blind eye to his activities,” Milam added.
¹⁷
In fact, Zubaydah played a role in vetting Kashmiri militants on behalf of the ISI before sending them to Afghanistan for training.

Within the U.S. administration there were serious differences of opinion as to how to pressure Musharraf. The Pentagon feared losing its long-standing relationship with the Pakistan military and wanted no punishments, while the State Department called for sanctions and further isolation. State itself was divided as to what to emphasize, with Michael Sheehan, the coordinator of the Office for Counterterrorism, wanting to make terrorism the most important issue with Pakistan. Others, such as Inderfurth and Strobe Talbott, wanted to stress nonproliferation and improving relations with India. The only leverage Washington had was to halt loans from international financial institutions, but it balked at taking such a step because it would only have destabilized Pakistan further. “The only thing we could have done that we didn’t do was cut off their access to IMF loans, which would have collapsed Pakistan,” said National Security Advisor Samuel Berger.
¹⁸

However, the Clinton administration still had no coherent strategy for undermining the Taliban regime, and as long as it delayed shaping one, there was confusion as to what exactly it could demand from Pakistan. Washington’s only clear position for the Taliban and Pakistan was to help deliver bin Laden to the U.S. justice system. There were no hard-and-fast U.S. demands regarding the Taliban or Pakistan’s continued support to the regime.

The U.S. lack of trust regarding Pakistan was self-evident when President Clinton arrived in Islamabad for a five-hour visit on March 25, 2000, after spending five days in India. A marked business jet first landed as a decoy, followed by a second, unmarked jet carrying Clinton. Six bulletproof limos lined up in front of the plane to form a barrier as U.S.-manned helicopters flew overhead. No armed Pakistani security officers were allowed near the U.S. president. It was the first time a foreign airport had been taken over by the U.S. Secret Service for a presidential visit. Clinton made it clear that the visit did not imply an endorsement of Pakistan’s military regime, and he was never photographed shaking hands with Musharraf. The visit should have been a humiliating experience, but Musharraf did not seem to mind. Clinton made a fourteen-minute national television address to the Pakistani people. It was a powerful speech in which he issued a blunt warning that Pakistan had to face a reality in which jihad was not an option.