Descent Into Chaos (31 page)

The mullahs were bewildered and in a state of shock. None could explain to their followers why so many Islamists had died so uselessly in Afghanistan or how the hated Americans and the Northern Alliance had won so easily. Historically the jihadi groups had been committed to a regional strategy enforced by the ISI, which targeted India and supported the Taliban regime. Now the ISI’s regional strategy was in tatters.
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If Musharraf was serious about implementing even half the measures outlined in his January 12 speech, now was the moment to do so—but the chance passed. Instead, the army and the ISI, still obsessed with enemy India, were to resurrect the Islamists from defeat and demoralization. Taliban leaders were given refuge in Pakistan. Militant attacks in Indian Kashmir were encouraged in order to resuscitate morale among the jihadi groups and to show that the army had not abandoned them. By February 2002, the banned extremist groups were quietly encouraged by the ISI to reconstitute themselves with a change of name. Those militants arrested after January 12 were freed. The government abandoned its March 23 deadline for the madrassas to register themselves, and the promised disarming of the jihadi groups was put off indefinitely.

The army did set about implementing the minimalist strategy desired by the Americans—to catch escaping al Qaeda leaders. Working closely with the CIA and U.S. SOF teams now based in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the military arrested hundreds of Arabs, but many were innocent civilians. The army carefully differentiated between Arabs and other foreigners, who were handed over to the United States, and the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani militants, who were left alone. Moreover, the CIA was offering large cash bonuses to any soldiers or police who handed over an Arab. Some four hundred alleged al Qaeda fighters were caught in the tribal agencies and the NWFP. There were several bloody incidents, such as on December 19, when fifteen people were killed after captured al Qaeda fighters overpowered their Pakistani guards while being transported from one town to another in the NWFP.

Pakistani forces had failed to cordon off all the seven tribal agencies that make up the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Afghan border. Troops were deployed in the Kurram agency but not farther south, in South and North Waziristan, from where bin Laden escaped into Pakistan. More al Qaeda escaped northward and crossed into Pakistan’s Dir and Chitral regions, which were also unguarded. Taliban escaping from Kandahar were able to cross into Balochistan province unmolested by any Pakistan army presence. Thousands of Taliban escaped in this direction.

Several U.S. officers in Afghanistan later told me that they suspected that the army had deliberately left the Waziristan and Balochistan door open to allow fighters to escape. The CIA had intercepted communications between Pakistani officers not to harass any foreign fighters entering through Waziristan. Pakistani officials rejected these allegations, insisting that the tensions with India ruled out their having any spare troops to guard Waziristan. Whether the Waziristan door was left open deliberately or unintentionally, it would lead to major repercussions as Waziristan became not only a bolt-hole but a new base of operations for al Qaeda and the Taliban.

It was not until May 2002 that Pakistan moved regular army units into South Waziristan, basing eight thousand troops in the administrative headquarters of Wana, but deploying none on the mountainous border. By now thousands of al Qaeda-linked militants—Central Asians, Chechens, Arabs, Pakistanis, and Afghan Taliban, many with their families—had escaped Afghanistan and were living in South Waziristan under the protection of local tribesmen, who were paid handsomely for the sanctuary they offered. Other al Qaeda leaders were escorted by Pakistani jihadi groups to safe houses in large cities or taken to small ports on the coast, where they escaped by boat to the Arabian Gulf states. Soon, regrouped Arab fighters were crossing the unguarded border of South Waziristan to attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By August 2002, al Qaeda felt confident enough to set up small mobile training camps in South Waziristan, where Pakistani militants could come to learn bomb making and other skills.

In February 2002, when Musharraf visited Washington, he received another ringing endorsement from Bush and more aid. “President Musharraf is a leader with great courage and vision . . . I am proud to call him my friend,” Bush told a beaming Musharraf.
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The Pakistani leader certainly had reason to feel the glow of U.S. friendship. Since September 11 Pakistan had received $600 million in emergency aid and a moratorium on its debts to the United States. The military had received $500 million for its logistical support to U.S. forces, including the provision of fuel, food, and water. Finance minister Shaukat Aziz told the Americans that because of lost export orders after 9/11, Pakistan had suffered losses of $2 billion, rendering fifty thousand people jobless. Bush announced a further assistance package—canceling $1.0 billion of Pakistan’s $2.8 billion debt to the United States, rescheduling the remainder, and offering $100 million for educational reform. Musharraf again insisted that the Americans sell Pakistan F-16 aircraft, but with Indo-Pakistan tensions so high, Washington wisely declined.

No one raised the issue of democracy with Musharraf. Officials at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council told me that Musharraf was indispensable and that the United States had no desire to see the return of civilian politicians. If Musharraf was slow in disarming the militants or reforming the madrassas, that was acceptable to Washington for the time being. In fact, Musharraf’s aides had adamantly told U.S. officials that any American criticism of Musharraf would undermine his position in the army and make it more difficult for him to help Washington.

The army’s apparent willingness to go after al Qaeda yielded its first big catch at the end of March: Abu Zubaydah, the head of al Qaeda’s overseas operations, was captured in the industrial city of Faislabad. He was to provide the CIA with its best information to date about al Qaeda membership and operations in Western countries. Then, on the first anniversary of 9 /11, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the leaders of the Hamburg cell that had planned the 9 /11 attacks, was arrested in Karachi. (I deal with these arrests in a later chapter.) These successes only further convinced Bush and Cheney that Musharraf should not be criticized for lapses on other fronts. There would therefore be no substantial U.S. pressure placed on him to carry out the reforms he was promising.

Buoyed by the free hand Washington had given them, Musharraf and his generals chalked out their future political game plan. The army’s nine corps commanders, who together with the army chief collectively made all strategic decisions, held lengthy discussions. They knew that at this moment Musharraf and the army had the political power, popularity, and moral authority at home, plus massive international support, to do whatever they wished. For years the army’s alliance with the Islamic fundamentalist parties, dubbed the military-mullah alliance, which provided militants to fight the army’s wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir, had prevailed. Now would have been the time to break with the mullahs, work out a political consensus with the opposition parties, and hold elections, thus moving the country toward greater democracy. Some of Musharraf’s closest aides were later to admit that he should have implemented a power-sharing agreement with the exiled Benazir Bhutto and her PPP, still the most popular party in the country and one that was strongly anti-mullah.

Instead, Musharraf and his aides worked on an altogether different strategy—determining how to legitimize his role as president and army chief, and introducing a new political system that would ensure the permanent dominance of the military. Musharraf first consolidated his grip on the army by promoting twenty-seven officers to the rank of major-general, the largest number ever appointed in the army’s history. In April 2002 he declared that he would hold a national referendum asking the people to give him five more years as president. “I am not power hungry but I don’t believe in power sharing,” he told the nation in a TV address on April 5. “I believe in unity of command because I am an army man. That’s the way democracy in Pakistan will function.”
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He lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen in the belief that young people would vote for him. He set about putting together a new “king’s party,” persuading feudal and co-opted politicians to join the Pakistan Muslim League Party, which would support continued military rule. He promised that elections would be held in October. All the country’s major political parties, as well as lawyers’ groups, trade unions, and human rights organizations, condemned the referendum as unconstitutional, since, under law, only the national and four provincial assemblies could elect the president. Musharraf ignored the criticism and, convinced that millions of people would turn out to see him, began a barnstorming referendum campaign around the country, addressing political rallies organized by the ISI and the bureaucracy—even though there was no candidate standing against him.

He began his campaign from Lahore on April 9, where generals crowded a stage bedecked with balloons and colored paper streamers. Dressed in his commando uniform and wreathed in garlands of roses, Musharraf addressed the crowd, promising food for the hungry and jobs for the jobless. There was a pitifully low public turnout, with the first dozen rows filled with soldiers from the Lahore garrison wearing civilian clothes. Thousands of peasants had been forcibly bused in from outside the city.

The political parties all boycotted the referendum. There was total silence from the international community—only the European Union parliament spoke out, condemning the referendum and postponing ratification of a trade agreement with Pakistan.
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On April 30, some eighty-seven thousand polling stations—double the normal number for an election—were set up in every corner of the country. There were no polling lists, however, no need for voters to show identity cards, and no independent monitors— making it easier for people to cast multiple votes. Sixty-two million voters were expected to go to the polls, but hardly anyone turned up. The government declared that 42.8 million people voted for Musharraf, while eight hundred thousand had voted against him—resulting in a massive 70 percent turnout. However, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which had sent out thousands of monitors across the country, and other groups declared that the turnout was actually less than 10 percent. In Lahore, I toured empty polling stations that had registered only a handful of votes during the entire day and then shut down early. The five-hundred-thousand -strong army and three million government employees were ordered to vote for Musharraf—many times over.

The damage to Musharraf’s credibility was catastrophic. “A much-liked general has emerged from this test a diminished man,” said Shafqat Mehmood, who had served in Musharraf’s first cabinet in 1999. “A sincere man who convinced almost everybody that he was above all this, has appeared as shallow and opportunistic as other politicians,” said Najam Sethi, editor of
The Friday Times.
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Musharraf had severely miscalculated, and public resentment against him, and the Bush administration for its studied silence, skyrocketed.

Meanwhile, the world was gripped by the murder of an innocent American journalist. On January 23, 2002, Daniel Pearl, an American correspondent for
The Wall Street Journal,
disappeared in Karachi. Pearl, thirty-eight, was chasing a story about Richard Reid, who in December had been arrested while trying to detonate explosives in his shoes while flying from Paris to Miami. Reid had been inspired by a small Pakistani extremist group whom Pearl was now trying to track down. Instead, Pearl was lured into a trap by one of his contacts, who turned out to be the terrorist Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who had been rescued from an Indian jail after the 1999 Kandahar hijacking. Sheikh had cleverly befriended Pearl using an assumed name.

Four days after his disappearance, Pearl’s pregnant wife, Mariane, and several newspaper offices received e-mail messages that showed photographs of Pearl crouching in chains with a gun to his head. An unknown group called the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty threatened to kill Pearl unless Pakistanis held at Guantánamo Bay prison were freed. They accused Pearl of working for the CIA and Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.
The Wall Street Journal,
the U.S. government, and Pearl’s family strongly denied the accusations.

Musharraf appeared at a loss to condemn the kidnapping strongly enough. He first said the kidnappers were linked to Indian intelligence, an allegation that was quickly derided by the media. He then said that the kidnapping was a backlash by extremist groups. On February 12, while Musharraf was at the Davos World Economic Forum in New York, the Pakistani government announced the arrest of Omar Sheikh. Musharraf said he was “reasonably sure” that Pearl was still alive, and then insinuated that the kidnapped journalist had been too intrusive. “I wonder whether it was because of his overinvolvement that he landed himself into this kind of a problem,” Musharraf told reporters.
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The accusation that Pearl was “over-intrusive” was repeated by other Pakistani officials.
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Musharraf’s contradictory statements led the FBI and the Karachi police to believe that perhaps the Pakistani president was not being fully briefed by the ISI. In fact, Daniel Pearl was already dead.

Omar Sheikh had given himself up a week earlier, on February 5, to a former ISI officer, retired brigadier Ejaz Shah, who was now the home secretary of Punjab. The Karachi police were not even informed of Sheikh’s surrender until he was handed over to them a week later. Sheikh told the police that he had been involved in the Daniel Pearl kidnapping and that Pearl was already dead. That missing week remains the darkest hole of the entire affair. It has never been explained, nor is it known, what transpired between Sheikh and the ISI.
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Mariane Pearl later asked several pertinent questions, which many Pakistanis also asked, but which the government never answered satisfactorily: “Was there information they [the ISI] didn’t want revealed? Were they making some kind of deal with him—‘go to jail for a bit and we’ll make sure you are set free’? Or are they just taking their time to erase any clues leading back to them?”
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