Magnificent Delusions (50 page)

Except for Pakistani Islamists, who organized violent demonstrations, most Indians and Pakistanis supported Vajpayee's “Bus Diplomacy.” The Indian leader belonged to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was seen in Pakistan as virulently anti-Pakistan. On Pakistani soil he affirmed India's respect for Pakistan as a neighbor; this was meant to reassure Pakistanis who still believed in an existential threat from India. Finally, a Hindu nationalist
stood under the Pakistani flag at the site where the demand for partition of India was first made. The dispute over Pakistan's right to exist had ended.

Sharif, as head of the Muslim League, represented the hard-line anti-India position. His willingness to negotiate with India symbolized Pakistan's desire for finally moving beyond the arguments of the partition in 1947. He reiterated Jinnah's desire for Pakistan and India to live as neighbors like Canada and the United States. The two leaders agreed on an elaborate peace process: there would be a “composite dialogue” on all differences between the two countries, including the Kashmir issue. But they would not wait to ease travel restrictions and do business with one another until all issues were resolved.

The détente had just begun when, in spring of 1999, the Indians discovered a Pakistani force occupying mountains on their side of Kashmir. Initially Pakistan denied that it had crossed the Line of Control in Kashmir. Those occupying the mountains in Kargil, said Islamabad, were Kashmiri Mujahideen. The Indians, however, saw the occupation as a major escalation. The new Pakistani positions put India's major highway in Kashmir within shelling range. In response, India deployed its army as well as air force to evict the intruders.

The architect of the military operation in Kargil was General Pervez Musharraf, a flamboyant officer who had replaced the mild-mannered Karamat as Pakistan's army chief a few months earlier. Musharraf had sent in troops drawn from Pakistan's Northern Light Infantry Division to occupy difficult mountainous terrain, hoping to force the Indians to negotiate a Kashmir settlement more quickly than the civilian peace process could achieve. However, he did not anticipate India's resolve to recover fifty-one square miles of barren, snow-capped territory.

By June the Indian forces had fought to recover most of the territory. India released a tape-recorded conversation between Musharraf and his deputy, Lieutenant General Aziz Khan, which left no doubt about Pakistan's actions in Kargil. Aziz was the same officer who, while serving at the ISI, had supported the Taliban and
expressed disappointment at Bhutto's lack of fervor for Islam. The conversation between Musharraf and Aziz Khan took place while Musharraf was in Beijing and Aziz Khan at army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

The international community, including China and the United States, unanimously demanded Pakistan's withdrawal from Kargil. Thus, Musharraf and his fellow generals had managed to unite the international community against Pakistan. How the Indians got hold of the Musharraf-Aziz tape recording remains a mystery to this day. General Ehsan-ul-Haq, who served as head of military intelligence at the time, later told me what Pakistani generals suspected: the Americans had taped the conversation. It had been given to the Indians to embarrass Pakistan and force its withdrawal from the Kargil heights. The tape was just the first of a series of embarrassments that eventually forced Pakistan's retreat.

Musharraf's blunder had created a South Asian version of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vajpayee felt betrayed, whereas Sharif worried about a full-blown war. The Americans were concerned about reports that Pakistan's generals might use nuclear weapons to reverse defeat in conventional fighting. Sharif wanted to end the crisis, but he wanted to do so with a face-saver. He called Clinton on July 2 and “appealed for American intervention immediately to stop the fighting and to resolve the Kashmir issue.”
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A more desperate call followed the next day. Clinton felt that Sharif “had gotten himself into a bind with no easy way out.” The US president agreed to see him in Washington, but Sharif had to know that Clinton “would not agree to intervene in the Kashmir dispute, especially under circumstances that appeared to reward Pakistan's wrongful incursion.”
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When they met at Blair House on American Independence Day, Sharif told Clinton that he wanted desperately to find a solution that would allow Pakistan to withdraw “with some cover.” He found himself in a position similar to that of Ayub before Lyndon Johnson right after the 1965 India-Pakistan war. Pakistan could not win the war, but it would not accept defeat. Sharif told Clinton that the fundamentalists in Pakistan would move against him if he did not por
tray at least some success in moving Pakistan's case for Kashmir forward. Clinton spoke angrily about Pakistan's irresponsible behavior as it moved to the brink of nuclear war. He then took up the subject of terrorism.
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Bruce Riedel, who was present at the meeting, quoted Clinton as saying that “the ISI worked with bin Laden and the Taliban to foment terrorism.” Clinton said he had a draft statement that would also mention Pakistan's role in supporting terrorists in Afghanistan and India. Was that what Sharif wanted? Clinton asked. “You've put me in the middle today, set the U.S. up to fail and I won't let it happen,” he said. “Pakistan is messing with nuclear war.”

Clinton's own account of the meeting says that he told Sharif: “I would have to announce that Pakistan was in effect supporting terrorism in Afghanistan” unless Pakistan did more to help find bin Laden. On the day he met with Sharif, Clinton also signed an executive order placing economic sanctions on the Taliban—freezing its assets and prohibiting commercial exchanges. Clinton realized that “the Pakistani military was full of Taliban and al Qaeda sympathizers” and that Sharif did not have full control. “But I thought we had nothing to lose by exploring every option,” Clinton observed.
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At the end of that meeting Sharif agreed to announce a Pakistani withdrawal from Kargil. Pakistan would restore “the sanctity of the Line of Control.” Clinton promised to take a personal interest in resuming the India-Pakistan dialogue. On returning to Pakistan, Sharif asked the army to proceed against those responsible for the military fiasco. Musharraf knew that his would be the first head to roll, so he went on a tour of Pakistan's garrisons to galvanize support for his position as their commander.

In October, when Sharif tried to remove Musharraf from his position as army chief, Musharraf loyalists in the army, led by Aziz and Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed, overthrew the civilian government in a military coup. Sharif was arrested, and Musharraf assumed power first as chief executive and later as president. Most Americans saw the coup as “cause for alarm in South Asia and the rest of the world,” but there were some voices advocating the Pakistan army's case.
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An editorial in the
Wall Street Journal
summed up the concerns of US officials about the direction Pakistan was taking. “The first order of business for Washington should be to demand Islamabad's full cooperation in the anti-terror campaign,” it said. The paper cautioned, “Pakistan's generals may assume that having nukes will let them, like Russia, get away with murder. Any wobbling in Washington that confirms that impression makes murder almost guaranteed.”
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Steven Weisman, who had spent years in South Asia as a reporter asked, “If Pakistanis are not capable of governing themselves, why would Pakistanis wearing uniforms be any different?” Michael Krepon, a scholar, pointed to a different problem. “The Pakistani army generals are trying to convince themselves that defeat in Kashmir was snatched from the jaw of victory by Sharif and his stupid diplomats,” he said. “This theory recurs in Pakistani history and it is very dangerous.”
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American conservatives embraced an alternative view. The front-runner for the Republican nomination for the presidency, Texas governor George W. Bush, could not name Musharraf in an interview for a Boston television station, but he nonetheless spoke positively of “The new Pakistani general.” Bush said, “It appears this guy is going to bring stability to the country and I think that's good news for the subcontinent.”
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In an article titled “Pakistan: Democracy Is Not Everything,” Richard N. Haass, who had served as a member of the national security council and special assistant when Bush's father was president, made the same argument in greater detail.
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Robert “Bud” McFarlane, who, as a Reagan adviser, had worked closely with Zia during the war against the Soviets, also publicly defended the coup. He described Pakistani democracy as “a feudal cabal” and Pakistan's periods of military rule as “more stable and prosperous.” McFarlane claimed that “military control is inevitable and in Pakistan's interest” in the short term. But Pakistan's long-term stability would be possible only if the superpowers helped Pakistan secure a settlement of the Kashmir dispute as the Pakistan army demanded.
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This reflected the opinion of Pakistan's generals who had for years put much else on hold in pursuit of an elusive victory over India.
Musharraf, who was apprehensive about international isolation, was heartened by the support of those in the United States who cherished memories of Pakistan's Cold War alliance with the United States. He appointed Maleeha Lodhi, who had served as ambassador to the United States before, as his representative in Washington. Pakistan's policies on nuclear proliferation and terrorism, however, had not changed. But by changing faces, Pakistan hoped to win over the Americans once again.

The Clinton administration did not trust Musharraf's new military regime. Musharraf spoke about changing Pakistan as it also continued to support the Taliban and Pakistani terrorist groups. Within a couple of months into his coup an Indian Airlines passenger jet traveling from Kathmandu, Nepal, to Delhi was hijacked to Kandahar, Afghanistan. India released three prominent Kashmiri terrorists to secure the release of 155 hostages. Although there was no direct evidence of official Pakistani involvement, the released terrorists returned to heroes' welcomes in Pakistan.

In January 2000 Clinton sent Inderfurth to Islamabad to seek Musharraf's help in capturing Abu Zubaida, one of Osama bin Laden's key lieutenants who was believed to be living in Peshawar. The United States also demanded that Pakistan stop supporting terrorism in India and Kashmir. The Americans saw Musharraf's response as partially conceding the ISI's role in aiding the Kashmiri militants: he attached conditions to his agreement that they would stop. Pakistan, he said, would use its “influence” in Kashmir to calm the situation there if India reduced its own buildup of troops along the border.
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Musharraf promised that he “would not stay in power any longer than required.” Clinton was scheduled to visit the subcontinent in the spring of 2000, but Inderfurth conveyed that it would be difficult for Clinton to visit Pakistan if the country remained a dictatorship and there was no progress on the issues that mattered to the United States. Musharraf warned that a presidential snub would “strengthen
the hand of the extremists,” which was essentially what Sharif had said to Talbott “in seeking American leniency before and after the Pakistani nuclear test.”
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Clinton arrived in Bangladesh on March 18, 2000, for a weeklong visit to the subcontinent. There was considerable debate within his national security team over whether to visit Pakistan. In the end Clinton decided on a five-hour stopover in Islamabad. “I'm going to try to keep us in the play there,” he remarked, “both for what happens inside that country and for getting them to cut out the bad stuff they're doing in the region.” The US Secret Service appealed to Clinton not to go to Pakistan because of the danger of assassination.
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The US president was effectively snubbing Musharraf by stopping in Islamabad for only a few hours. He spent one full day in Bangladesh and five days in five cities of India. Clinton explained in his memoirs that he decided to go to Pakistan “to encourage an early return to civilian rule and a lessening of tensions over Kashmir; to urge General Musharraf not to execute the deposed prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, who was on trial for his life; and to press Musharraf to cooperate with us on bin Laden and al Qaeda.”
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Musharraf had agreed to somewhat humiliating conditions to be able to host Clinton, however briefly. For example, no one in military uniform could receive the president at the airport, and the two presidents would not be photographed shaking hands. Musharraf felt he needed the imprimatur of American engagement, if not US support, for his political longevity. He hoped that he would be able to convince Clinton of his worth—and that of Pakistan—as a US ally.