The Circuit (37 page)

It all appeared very orderly, but as the day wore on the crowd grew in size and intensity. Lawyers dressed in black suits, white shirts and black ties started arriving in groups of twenty and thirty. They had come from all over Pakistan to support the Chief Justice. Opposition groups, some as large as a hundred people, also began descending on the area. Within a few hours, the small clutch of demonstrators had swelled to a slogan-chanting, banner-waving mob of nearly a thousand.

It takes just one person to whip a crowd into a frenzy and when you’ve got hundreds crammed into a small area, the situation can turn dangerous in seconds. Luckily, Susan had agreed to stay back at the hotel so I’d have fewer bodies to look after should a riot break out. I kept reminding Scotty and Nic to please let me know their intentions, be it shooting b-roll, interviewing individuals or trying to report live.

The crowd was energized but still in control as the Chief Justice showed up in a convoy surrounded by black-suited members of his legal team. The protesters’ chants grew deafening as the entourage inched its way past the crowd and through the gates into the main grounds of the Supreme Court complex. The demonstrators began storming the gate, demanding to be allowed in as well. The riot police tried to hold them back, but sticks proved no match for the mob. The gates were flung wide open and the protesters flooded inside. Nic, Scotty and I were right behind them.

CNN didn’t have permission to film inside the Supreme Court building, but there was plenty to keep Scotty and Nic occupied outside in the courtyard. At one point, the lawyers appeared to turn on each other. Several men were beaten with fists and sticks and thrown over the fence to the crowds beyond. The police didn’t intervene. I found out that the men who’d been assaulted were believed to be ISI agents, who, allegedly, had posed as lawyers to spy on the protesters.

The protest peaked without tipping into a full-scale riot. The crowd started to disperse and the situation calmed enough for Nic to file live reports. The Chief Justice made little headway in his case; he was given a ten-day adjournment. For the lawyers and opposition parties who’d turned out to support him, the battle to remove Musharraf from power would go on.

The erosion of moderate support was just one challenge facing Musharraf. The other had been dogging him for some time: the threat from Islamic extremists. Since 11 September 2001, fundamentalist activity in Pakistan had been largely confined to the tribal areas with the odd incursion into Islamabad. By 2007, however, the Pakistani capital was undergoing what the media were calling ‘Talibanization’.

The Talibanization of Islamabad was being driven by the Lal Masjid or Red Mosque, a sprawling complex housing the largest female
madrasah
in the world and a male seminary with strong links to Pakistan’s tribal areas. The Red Mosque always taught extremist views, which, over the years, its students exported throughout the world. The mosque was linked to Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7 July London bombers.

In 2007, the mullahs encouraged the students to exercise their fundamentalist beliefs in their own backyard by imposing Sharia law on the residents of Islamabad. Female students from the Red Mosque reportedly stormed a local brothel and kidnapped the madam while male students cracked down on stores in the capital selling ‘un-Islamic’ DVDs.

The campaign to enforce Sharia law in Islamabad was a direct challenge to Musharraf’s rule. Tensions between the Red Mosque and the country’s security forces were mounting and the students and clerics were reportedly preparing for an armed confrontation. Nic wanted to investigate.

Nic had been following the Red Mosque for some time, having interviewed one of its chief clerics, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the previous year. Ghazi was an unapologetic al-Qaeda sympathizer who publicly condemned Musharraf for supporting the War on Terror. At the time, few western journalists could secure an audience with Ghazi, but Nic’s groundwork had paved the way for a second interview.

My primary security concern with the interview was timing. Should we be unfortunate enough to be in the mosque when the police decided to attack, it would be very hazardous indeed. The odds of that happening, however, were remote. The other possible pitfall was being abducted by the students and held as human shields or bargaining chips to be used against the authorities. Again, an unlikely scenario in my view. Ghazi wanted to get his message broadcast impartially on international TV. Kidnapping journalists would work against that goal.

The Red Mosque sits in a large, walled complex in the heart of Islamabad. As the crow flies, it’s roughly a mile from the Presidential Palace but once you turn on to Masjid Road – a narrow, tree-lined street leading directly to the mosque – the hustle and bustle of the capital’s daily life dissolves.

We arrived to find students and worshippers calmly going about their daily business. The serenity was surreal given the circumstances. Although the students looked quite radical with their long, flowing beards, everyone seemed to be at peace with one another. There were signs, however, that a siege mentality had taken hold of the place. The walls of the mosque compound were surrounded by guards armed with sticks and spears and guards were posted on the rooftops of the buildings inside. As soon as Scotty started filming, many of them covered their faces to conceal their identities.

The crew and I were led through the main gate of the complex and searched. While this was going on, one of the guards asked me if I was a Muslim. I had grown a very long beard during my assignments in Afghanistan which I’d kept for my tour with Nic. I told the guard I wasn’t Muslim. He then asked if I was Christian. The follow-up question was a sticky one. As a child I thought religion was fantasy and as an adult I’ve seen it rip societies apart. I’m an atheist and in Muslim eyes being a
kafir
(a non-believer) is worse than being Christian or Jew. A kafir is the worst possible kind of infidel. I told the guard, ‘No, I’m not a Christian and I’m not Jewish,’ and left it at that.

Inside the mosque grounds there was total silence. As we walked to an administrative building to set up for the interview, I searched for signs of weapons. There were rumours that the students had amassed large caches, including AKs. I saw many sticks, the odd spear and even an axe, but no guns. I assumed that the guards posted outside the mosque and inside the courtyard were mere sentries. The hardcore jihadists were probably staying out of sight.

The interview was held in a small ten- by eight-foot office furnished with floor cushions and a desk covered in paperwork and DVDs of the mullah’s sermons. Ghazi showed up barefoot, dressed in a simple tan khamis. A stocky man in his mid-forties with a long, bushy, grey beard, Ghazi’s appearance was softened considerably by a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses.

Ghazi gave the interview sitting down on the floor. His English was very good and he expressed himself with complete clarity. Like many of the rogues I’d met before him – Arafat, Yassin, Khalifa – Ghazi knew his days were numbered. He was completely resigned to the fact that Musharraf’s security forces would eventually storm the Red Mosque and take him out. Ghazi vowed that he and his followers would fight to the death. If I’d learned anything by that point, it’s that infamous figures like Ghazi rarely grandstand. I had no doubts he would go down fighting.
²⁶

The Talibanization of Islamabad combined with Musharraf’s loss of moderate Muslim support had enormous implications for the War on Terror. If Musharraf couldn’t control events within a mile of his own palace, what possible hope did he have of stopping radicals from launching cross-border raids into Afghanistan? It was no secret that Taliban fighters had regrouped along the border with Afghanistan, but Nic wasn’t content to rely on second-hand reports. He wanted to see for himself whether the Taliban were operating there freely.

Nic had applied to the Pakistani authorities to travel to Quetta; a north-west border city which sits atop a plateau in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Though ethnically Quetta is predominantly Baluchistani, with its large Pashtoon population and Afghan refugee communities, it was an easy place for Taliban to go underground and re-emerge at a later date.

Baluchi separatists had been conducting a violent independence campaign in Quetta and the city had grown so dangerous that Pakistani authorities wouldn’t allow CNN to film there without a government minder and ring of police security present. Of course, the minder was also there to keep Nic from learning too much. During our first day of filming, the minder would step in and interfere whenever Nic attempted to interview someone on the streets. When that happened, I would hang back a few yards and canvas the locals on the sly.

One thing I discovered is that the people of Quetta watch a lot of CNN. At least half a dozen locals recognized Nic from television. They were full of praise for his commitment to reporting on events in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They were also attuned to CNN’s interest in Quetta. Several asked me if we were there to film the Taliban.

I looked around for overt signs of the Taliban, but if anything the centre of Quetta appeared moderate. Many of the men had western hairstyles and wore moustaches as opposed to long, flowing beards. This was the Quetta the Pakistani authorities wanted us to see. Nic knew from his contacts, however, that there were Afghan refugee camps in Quetta that were allegedly crawling with Taliban such as Pashtoonabad, on the city’s eastern side, and Nawa Gari in the north-west.

At first, our minder and police escorts were reluctant to let us go to either camp, though they all insisted that there were no Taliban there. Nic kept pushing the issue and eventually the minder allowed us, under police escort, to travel to Pashtoonabad. As the police weren’t a welcome sight in Pashtoonabad, it was decided that the best way to film the area was through the window of a moving vehicle under cover of darkness. The police and I agreed on a route that would lead us into the camp at one end and out through another. That way, we wouldn’t have to backtrack or dismount our vehicles.

Though it was dark, Pashtoonabad reminded me of the refugee camps I’d seen in Gaza. The narrow dirt road through the camp was lined with one- and two-storey buildings. Several times we had to pull over to allow trucks to pass. The brief stops gave an opportunity to get a closer look at the side streets leading off the main road. Most of them were too narrow to drive up and could only be used as walkways.

I asked our police escorts if they ever patrolled the area on foot. They didn’t – only by car, which meant that anything going on up the side streets was hidden from view. Madrasahs, mosques, homes – all were left to their own devices. We couldn’t confirm that Taliban were present, but, given their limited view on the camp, the police couldn’t rule it out either.

The next day, Nic got his best shot at securing concrete proof of the Taliban’s presence in Quetta. Some Pakistani news agencies were reporting that Taliban fighters wounded in Afghanistan were being treated in a hospital located on the main road through Quetta. We were given permission to film there. The conditions in the hospital were dreadful: dirty wards, beds crammed close together, the sour smell of body fluids permeating the air. Nic asked the doctors if he could see some patients’ charts. Sure enough, many of the injuries listed were consistent with shrapnel wounds. When Nic asked the doctors their opinion, they agreed; the wounds had most likely been sustained in battle. Short of the patients jumping on their beds and declaring themselves Taliban, it was a sure sign that Islamic radicals were moving freely over the border. If they were wounded in Afghanistan, they could limp back to Pakistan, receive medical treatment, and head back across the border to wage jihad against coalition forces.

Clearly, Musharraf had little control over the militants’ movements. But if Pakistan lost its grip on the border completely, it could undermine everything the US-led coalition had achieved and hoped to achieve in Afghanistan. The coalition claimed it was making progress securing the border from the Afghan side, but Nic and I wanted to see this for ourselves. We would soon get the chance. While we were in Quetta, Nic got word that his Kunar/Nuristan embed was a go.

CHAPTER 37

Landing the Nuristan embed was yet another major coup for Nic. Not only would he be the first western television journalist to film there, but he’d be travelling to an area some believed harboured the War on Terror’s most wanted man. Personally, I was over the moon about the embed as I’d been trying to find a way into Nuristan for some time. Tucked away in the north-east corner of Afghanistan on the south-western slopes of the Hindu Kush, Nuristan is perhaps the most rugged and inaccessible of all the Afghan provinces. Until the 1890s it was known as Kafiristan – land of the unbelievers – and was the setting for Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ on which the movie is based.

The Yanks were operating in Nuristan unilaterally as opposed to under NATO-led ISAF because when it came to fighting the War on Terror, Nuristan was the sharp end of the spear. Not only had Nuristan’s porous border become a major conduit for al-Qaeda fighters travelling over the border to and from Pakistan, but the province’s mountainous terrain was also thought to harbour Osama bin Laden. In 2003 a video was released showing bin Laden and his Lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, walking down a mountainside in what many believe is Nuristan. Some people think bin Laden is still hiding there (personally I think he’s in Yemen, but that’s for another story).

Fortunately for Nic – and for me – the US military was anxious to get press up to Nuristan to showcase its Provincial Reconstruction Teams or PRTs in the province. Staffed by professional soldiers and civilian experts, PRTs execute quick-impact development projects. At any given time there are roughly two to three dozen PRTs operating around Afghanistan: some administered by ISAF, some by NGOs and some directly by the US military. General McNeill had banged on about PRTs during his interview with Nic. Hardly surprising considering the US military had become positively evangelical about the ability of PRTs to win Afghan hearts and minds. Put simply: build a bridge, make a friend, win the war. It’s a great theory, but one which I have yet to see work in practice. As usual, before deploying, I did some background research on recent events in Nuristan. The American mission there wasn’t all about good works. In 2006 the US military launched Operation Mountain Fury in Nuristan to seal the border with Pakistan and root out al-Qaeda forces. If past reports were any indication, the US military was having a very tough time of it. The province shares a very lengthy border with Pakistan and is home to Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters who enjoyed local support in the form of Hizb-i-Islami, a rogue militia led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Ironically, Hekmatyar, a lifelong Mujahid, was the biggest recipient of US funds and training during the 1980s insurgency against occupying Soviet forces.