The 9/11 Wars (122 page)

    2
.
United Nations Development Programme,
Human Development Report
, editions of 2008 and 2009. Available at
http://hdrstats.undp.org/en/countries/country_fact_sheets/cty_fs_PAK.html
.

    3
.
‘The most dangerous nation in the world isn’t Iraq. It’s Pakistan’,
Newsweek
, October 29, 2007.

    4
.
Two excellent recent investigations of these questions include Farzana Shaikh’s academic
Making Sense of Pakistan
, Hurst, 2010, and Owen Bennett-Jones,
Pakistan: The Eye of the Storm
, 3rd edn,Yale, 2003.

    5
.
See Anatol Lieven,
Pakistan: A Hard Country
, Allen Lane, 2011, pp. 65–7.

    6
.
These included the infamous Hudood Ordinances, introduced in 1979, which ruled that the evidence of a woman is worth half that of a man. Under these laws a woman who is raped can end up being convicted of adultery or fornication if she is unable to provide four male Muslim witnesses to the crime against her. The sentence, though rarely or never implemented, is death by stoning. Under the same code alcohol is banned and amputation recommended for convicted thieves.

    7
.
An important point is that Maududi was fiercely anti-clerical and Jamaat Islami kept their distance from organizations representing the clergy, whether moderate or extreme. The writings on Maududi and Jamaat Islami are voluminous. See Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam
; Giles Keppel,
Jihad
. Useful points are made by Philip Jenkins, ‘Clerical terror: The roots of jihad in India’,
The New Republic
, December 24, 2008.

    8
.
On Maududi see also Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, pp. 50–51.

    9
.
Iftikhar Malik,
Pakistan: Democracy, Terror and the Building of a Nation
, New Holland, 2010, p. 35.

  10
.
Bhutto built pragmatic alliances with the Deobandis to bolster a tenuous grip on power.

  11
.
Less well known is the prohibition on foreign aid to Pakistan imposed when the country fell into arrears in servicing its debt to the United States in late 1998.

  12
.
The first major challenge to Musharraf, who seized power with broad popular support though international disapproval, came with the 9/11 attacks. As noted in
Chapter 2
, after some deliberation, the former commando decided he had to agree to almost all American demands for cooperation. This he did not out of any loyalty to the USA, who after all had imposed heavy sanctions on Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons technology, but because he decided that it was in the best interests of his country.

  13
.
Statistics from Karachi town hall, secretary to the mayor, author interview, November 2008.

  14
.
Karachi’s Pashtun population made it the largest single urban Pashtun community in the world.

  15
.
Fewer than 8 per cent of Pakistanis speak Urdu, the national language, as their mother tongue.

  16
.
The Mohajir Quami Movement was founded in 1984 to represent the interests of the descendants of immigrants from India, the Mohajirs. They later converted themselves into the Muttahida Quami Movement and supposedly abandoned both guns and ethnic politics. Their leader, Altaf Hussein, lives in Edgware, London.

  17
.
Though in fact the Bhuttos were not actually among the first-rank families of really major landowners with serious historic heritage.

  18
.
And including a Briton, Omar Saeed Sheikh. Pearl appears to have been first abducted by local militants led by Sheikh, before being passed to a group led by Khaled Sheikh Mohammad.

  19
.
International Crisis Group,
Pakistan: Karachi’s Madrasas and Violent Extremism
, March 29, 2007. The report refers to 1,000 schools and 200,000 students, though these figures are contested. All statistics dealing with
medressas
are highly controversial. For example, between March 2002 and July 2002, figures for
medressa
enrolment cited in the
Washington Post
tripled from 500,000 to 1.5 million. The ICG report put the total of Pakistani children of primary-school age in
medressas
at 33 per cent. This was later adjusted downwards to 3.3 per cent when a calculation error was pointed out. However, the orignal estimate or similar estimates were quoted in President Bush’s remarks on June 24, 2003, President Musharraf’s remarks on November 20, 2003, Colin Powell’s on March 11, 2004, Hillary Clinton’s on February 24, 2004 and the 9/11 Commission Report. See Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Tristan Zajonc, ‘Religious School Enrollment in Pakistan: A Look at the Data’, John F. Kennedy School of Government Working Paper Series, 2005, p. iii.

  20
.
One of these was the attack on French naval technicians in 2002. This was attributed to al-Qaeda or local militants at the time and is still listed as such in many accounts. However, press reports in France in 2010, and a French parliamentary inquiry, found that the strike was probably linked to corruption surrounding a major naval deal between France and Pakistan and the non-payment of bribes. See Guillaume Dasquié, ‘Le Rapport Karachi divise les deputés’,
Libération
, May 13, 2010; Mathieu Delahousse, ‘Karachi: la mission parlementaire sur la piste des commissions’,
Le Figaro
, May 13, 2010.

  21
.
According to the city’s mayor, Kamal Mustafa. Author interview, Karachi, November 2008.

  22
.
See William Dalrymple, ‘On the long road to freedom, finally’,
Tehelka Magazine
, March 8, 2008, for statistics.

  23
.
With a total of 1.8 million registered vehicles on the road in 2008. According to Wajid Ali Khan, Deputy Inspector General Traffic Police Karachi, in a presentation at Urban Resource Centre, Karachi, April 16, 2008.

  24
.
Dalrymple, ‘On the long road to freedom, finally’.

  25
.
Author interview with Ijaz Shafi Gilani, Islamabad, December 2008.

  26
.
The first nuclear-related sanctions had been imposed in 1990 and reinforced after Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998. In 2001, the remittances totalled a little more than $1 billion. From 2002 to 2006, Pakistan received around $4 billion in remittances. By 2009, despite the economic crisis, the total had reached $7 billion.

  27
.
Dilawar Hussain, ‘High per capita income not a sign of prosperity’,
Dawn
, May 10, 2009.

  28
.
Property prices went up by up to 1,000 per cent, and rents doubled or tripled. Adnan Adil, ‘Pakistan’s post-9/11 economic boom’, BBC News, September 21, 2006.

  29
.
David Rohde, ‘Pakistani middle class, beneficiary of Musharraf, begins to question rule’,
New York Times
, November 25, 2007. In 2005, international retail industry experts had estimated that the coming years would see the expansion of the upper and upper-middle class, to say nothing of the much more numerous lower middle classes, to around 17 million. Jawaid Abdul Ghani, ‘Constituting a Grocery Market Worth $1.7bn. Consolidation in Pakistan’s Retail Sector’,
Asian Journal of Management Cases
, vol. 2, no. 2, 2005, pp. 137–61.

  30
.
CIA Factbook, 2010. The United Nations estimate is 36 per cent. See United Nations Population Fund,
Life in the City
, June 2007, p. 3. Sher Baz Khan, ‘Pakistan most urban country in S. Asia’,
Dawn
, October 11, 2004.

  31
.
Department for International Development (Dr Emma Hooper and Agha Imran Hamid),
Scoping Study on Social Exclusion in Pakistan: A Summary of Findings
, October 2003, p. 30.

  32
.
In 2003, the country had fewer than 3 million cellphone users; in 2008 there were almost 50 million.

  33
.
I.e. one who can read a newspaper and write a simple letter, in any language. Figures from Unicef,
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/pakistan_pakistan_statistics.html
, and UNESCO (Munir Ahmed Choudhry),
Where and Who Are the World’s Illiterates?
, April 2005. Some other estimates are lower, particularly for recent years.

  34
.
When Makhdoom Shahabuddin, Benazir Bhuttos’s former finance minister and hereditary owner of thousands of hectares of land a few hours’ drive north of the Jatoi’s estates, had told the author in 1998 that he was unable to state with any certainty the scale of his property nor the number of ‘his people’, his ignorance was unfeigned, and the possessive pronoun was entirely justified. The sight of villagers kneeling to touch Makhdoom’s feet in respect was nonetheless a reminder that all such change was relative.

  35
.
Author interviews with Jatoi, Sindh, October 2007.

  36
.
http://www.bahawalpur.gov.pk/area.htm
. Official website for population figures. Accessed August 2010.

  37
.
Author interview with MI6 official, London, November 2007.

  38
.
Pakistani officers armed and organized militia from the local Jamaat Islami, the political Islamist party, and turned them, with bloody consequences, against intellectuals, politicians and pro-independence activists.

  39
.
There were occasional unsubstantiated reports of some kind of Pakistani assistance to Baluchi rebels in the south-eastern corner of Iran too.

  40
.
HUM deputy chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil was one of the signatories to bin Laden’s 1998
fatwa
declaring it a Muslim duty to kill Americans and Jews. There was a steady stream of recruits from the UK going to fight in Kashmir. Of the thousands who did so, only a handful returned to the UK and went on to become involved in further militancy.

  41
.
The author saw HUM fighters on the frontline and spoke to the trainers in mountain skills who had been responsible for coaching them on how to survive at altitude.

  42
.
Author interviews, Peshawar, October 2001. JeM had been set up by one of three militant leaders freed following the hijacking of an Indian airlines jet in 1999.

  43
.
Events in Iraq and Afghanistan helped too, as they had done elsewhere, providing examples of resistance to the otherwise all-powerful America and the Jews.

  44
.
LeT’s parent body was allowed to change its name to Jamaat-ul-Dawa and to remain operative.

  45
.
In one of those classic examples of how geopolitical forces interact with microfactors on the ground, the Punjab had become a centre of appalling Sunni versus Shia sectarian violence. This was in part also a legacy of British rule, as colonial administrators had effectively created – or at the very least maintained and co-opted – a class of predominantly Shia landowners. The vast bulk of poor immigrants arriving in the Punjab after Partition were Sunnis. In the 1980s, firebrand clerics and politicians looking to undermine the Shia landowners’ wealth and hold on to political power began working to exploit the longstanding resentments this generated, backed by Zia. The sectarian groups, such as the Sipa e Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), that resulted were backed, indirectly, both by the Pakistani security services and, as Tehran began subsidizing Shia self-protection groups, by a Saudi Arabian government fearful of the Shia renaissance sparked by the 1979 Iranian Revolution. A bloodbath ensued. Khalid Ahmed, ‘Fundamental Flaws’, in
On the Abyss
, HarperCollins (India), 2000, p. 94. Owen Bennett-Jones,
Pakistan: Eye of the Storm
, Yale University Press, 2003, p. 22. Amir Mir, ‘Faith that kills’,
Newsline
, October 1998, ‘The Jihad within’,
Newsline
, May 2002. Also Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, Chapter 7.