The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Drama in the Air

  As finalized in Abu Dhabi, Sharif prepared to announce the promotion of Butt as the COAS on October 12. Just as the PIA flight, carrying two hundred passengers including Musharraf took off at three pm (Pakistan time) from Colombo for Karachi, Sharif appointed Butt as the COAS at the prime minister’s official residence in Islamabad in a fitting ceremony. This was aired on the sole state-run Pakistan TV.

  But at the GHQ in Rawalpindi, twelve miles from the capital, Lieutenant General Aziz Khan, chief of the general staff, denied Butt the control of GHQ. Spiked at this level, Butt’s orders could not go further down the chain of command. This was coupled with the refusal of Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, commander of the Rawalpindi-based Tenth Corps, to accept Butt’s authority.

  Around four pm Sharif’s office announced that General Musharraf had retired. An hour later soldiers from the 111 Brigade of the Tenth Corps rushed to Islamabad in trucks. Arriving there, they started pouring out onto the streets. Watched by curious onlookers, they seized the state television station and switched off the signal.

  This compelled Butt and Sharif to stop the airborne Musharraf from reaching Karachi. They were unaware that at the GHQ in Rawalpindi, Aziz Khan had phoned Lieutenant General Muzaffar Usmani, commander of the Fifth Corps in Karachi, to ensure Musharraf’s safe return to the city. The PIA flight from Colombo approached Karachi airport around six thirty pm, but air traffic control refused permission for the plane to land.

  High drama followed. Sharif ordered air traffic controllers to redirect the flight to the airport in Nawabshah, southern Sindh, where Sharif had dispatched his own plane and a security team to arrest Musharraf. Inside the PIA aircraft, Musharraf entered the cockpit. He instructed the pilot to keep circling the Karachi airport while he personally urged the air traffic controllers to let the plane land.

  They refused—until the control tower was seized by troops of the Fifth Corps. By the time Musharraf touched down on Pakistani soil, it was 7:47 pm, with the now stationary PIA airliner having only seven minutes of fuel left. He was instantly whisked away by officers of the Fifth Corps.64

  In Islamabad, soldiers of the 111 Brigade disarmed the security force at Sharif’s official residence. Soon Lieutenant General Ahmed arrived and asked Sharif to resign or rescind his order promoting Butt. Sharif refused both options. He was then escorted out by soldiers and detained at a government guest house near the airport. By now the troops controlled all TV stations, administrative offices, and the power and communications infrastructure throughout the country. They placed the entire cabinet under guard and cut international telephone lines.

  At 10:15 pm the military restored television broadcasts. Minutes later an announcement running across the bottom of the screen announced the dismissal of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Musharraf’s prerecorded message to the nation at 2:50 am on October 13 cited Sharif’s attempts to divide the army as one of the chief reasons for the coup. “This is not martial law, only another path towards democracy,” he added. “The armed forces have no intention to stay in charge any longer than is absolutely necessary to pave the way for true democracy to flourish in Pakistan.”65

  This was the fourth power grab by the military in Pakistan’s fifty-two-year history. It was triggered by its involvement in the Muslim separatist insurgency in India-held Kashmir and the fate of bin Laden. It highlighted the fact that the military was the final arbiter of power in Pakistan. There were historical, ethnic, and socioeconomic reasons for this state of affairs. The armed conflict over Kashmir came within a few months of the birth of the new country. That accorded the military the highest priority. Most of the ranks and officers of the army have come from Punjab, which accounts for 55 percent of the national population. The resulting ethnic homogeneity imparts the military extra strength. In a predominantly agrarian, largely illiterate or subliterate society, the army stands out as a paragon of discipline and order. And unlike all other institutions, it has remained almost free of corruption. As a consequence, it is held in high esteem by the public at large.

  By a strange coincidence, it was on October 13, 1999, that Vajpayee was sworn in as prime minister. As leader of the 303-strong NDA, he enjoyed a comfortable majority in the 545-seat lower house of Parliament.66 The contrast between India and Pakistan could not have been starker.

  Musharraf, the “Chief Executive”

  Two days later Musharraf declared an emergency, suspended the constitution, and assumed supreme power as the chief executive. He closed down the prime minister’s secretariat while leaving in place the incumbent Muhammad Rafiq Tarar as president. On October 17, during his second nationwide TV address, he announced the formation of a seven-member military-civilian council under his chairmanship.

  Washington was quick to condemn the coup and urged a return to democracy. The reaction in Delhi, however, was mixed. “He is the man who attacked us in Kargil,” said Jyotindra Nath Dixit, former foreign secretary and advisor to the National Security Council. “We should be much more alert about General Musharraf.” Having just taken the oath of office, Vaj­payee was diplomatic. “We are willing to talk to any regime in Pakistan,” he told reporters. “It is for Pakistan to create a climate for resumption of dialogue between the two countries.” Unsurprisingly, the response of pro-Pakistan Kashmiris was euphoric. “It is good to see military rule in Pakistan but the step was delayed,” said a spokesman of the Hizb ul Mujahedin. “It should have come earlier at the time of the Kashmir [Kargil] war when Nawaz Sharif betrayed us.”67

  Following the Kargil debacle, the separatist Hizb ul Mujahedin and Harkat ul Mujahedin stepped up their attacks on the security forces in Indian Kashmir. Harkat ul Mujahedin hit the headlines in the international media when five of its militants, armed with pistols, knives, and hand grenades, hijacked an Indian Airlines (aka Air India) aircraft flying from Katmandu to New Delhi on the morning of December 24. After refusals by several airports in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates, the plane landed at the Kandahar airport in the early hours of Christmas Day with 155 passengers and crew.

  The hijackers demanded the release of thirty-six Kashmiri prisoners and a £125 million ransom. After refusing to deal with them, the Vajpayee government entered into staggered negotiations through the Taliban authorities in Kabul. As days passed, the passengers, crew, and hijackers cooped up inside the plane kept warm in the freezing temperature of an Afghan winter by the power generated by the plane’s engines. The Indians managed to bring down the hijackers’ demand to just three names from the top of their list.

  By the time they arrived at the Kabul airport, accompanied by the Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh, it was December 31. The released men included Maulana Masoud Azhar, a Pakistani cleric whose brother, Muhammad Ibrahim, was one of the hijackers. Azhar had gone to Indian Kashmir to conciliate the two feuding factions of Harkat ul Ansar (later renamed Harkat ul Mujahedin) and was imprisoned. One of the remaining two freed men was Ahmad Umar Shaikh, a Pakistan-based British national involved with the separatist movement committed to separating Kashmir from India. At Kandahar airport, the gun-toting hijackers along with the released militants boarded a van provided by the Taliban, whose government refused them asylum. It let the van cross the Afghan-Pakistan border, with its passengers disembarking in Pakistan to shelter in safe houses briefly before going underground.

  Within days, Maulana Azhar surfaced in Karachi. Surrounded by bodyguards in camouflage-colored clothes and brandishing automatic rifles, he delivered an incendiary speech to ten thousand supporters assembled in front of a central Karachi mosque. “I have come back and I will not rest in peace until Kashmir is liberated,” he declared.68 The Musharraf government had stated earlier that the hijackers would be arrested if they stepped into Pakistan. But there was no effort to detain Azhar or stop him from addressing a rally.

  This hijack drama, the longest in the world to date, pushed Indo-Pakistan relatio
ns to their lowest ebb in peace times at the turn of the century.

  15: General Musharraf

  Buckles Under US Pressure

  The strengthening alliance of Musharraf-ruled Pakistan with the Taliban government in Afghanistan caused grave concern in Washington. President Bill Clinton was also well aware of Musharraf’s masterminding of the military campaign in the Kargil region of the Indian Kashmir and his reckless preparation for a nuclear attack on India. The general had then capped his dangerously surreptitious actions with toppling the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif.

  Though Pakistan’s withdrawal to the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir was completed by the end of July 1999, the deaths of India’s security personnel caused by the insurgents in Indian Kashmir more than doubled from the previous year’s figure, to 425 in 1999. The loss of life among the armed militants, however, was almost three times as much.1 The long, tortuous cease-fire line passing through assorted terrains had proved immune to being sealed thoroughly by India, which was at the receiving end of the violence committed by young Kashmiris who, after crossing the LoC, had received training and arms in Pakistani Kashmir.

  It was this state of affairs that led Clinton to call the LoC arguably “the most dangerous place in the world today”2 as he prepared for a weeklong trip to Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan in mid-March 2000.

  Five Days in India, Five Hours in Pakistan

  After a brief visit to Dhaka, Clinton arrived in Delhi on March 20 and spent five days in the country, touring Agra to see the Taj Mahal, the pink city of Jaipur, the village of Nayala, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. His time in India equaled the combined total spent earlier by three US presidents: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. Wherever he went, he witnessed Clinton-mania, which pleased not only him but also his daughter, Chelsea, and his mother-in-law, Dorothy Rodham, who accompanied him.

  At the end of a series of meetings with top Indian officials and a speech to the joint session of Parliament, he signed agreements on commerce and science and technology while acknowledging India’s potential as an information technology superpower. Along with Indian premier Atal Bihari Vajpayee he issued a statement spelling out a new “vision” for Indo-American ties. He spoke of institutionalizing mutual dialogue up to the highest level and continuing talks on the nuclear issue. At the joint press conference, Vajpayee said, “We have a problem of cross-border terrorism, but there is no threat of war.” During his visit to Nayala, ten miles from Jaipur, Clinton got a glimpse of democracy at work at the village level in India when he talked to elected representatives, some of them women in colorful Rajasthani dresses. The overall result of Clinton’s extended sojourn in India was to raise the level of Delhi-Washington engagement to a higher level, particularly when compared to Islamabad-Washington ties.3

  This became dramatically evident within hours of Clinton’s departure for Islamabad. Arriving at the Mumbai airport on the morning of March 25, he walked toward the Presidential Air Force One C-17, giving the impression of planning to board this plane. He paused briefly to bid farewell to Richard Celeste, the US ambassador to India. But then he did not make the expected move. Air Force One left the airport without Clinton, who, unknown to onlookers, had sneaked into the adjoining small, unmarked Gulfstream III, which took off a little while later.

  Clinton played this hide-and-seek game at the insistence of his Secret Service. Its chief had warned him that Pakistan’s security forces were so thoroughly penetrated by terrorists that extremist groups, possibly Al Qaida, would be privy to his travel route from their sympathizers within the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate and would attempt to shoot down the presidential plane.

  The Secret Service’s ruse did not stop at the safe arrival of the Clinton-bearing Gulfstream III at Islamabad’s Chaklala airport. On its way to the office of Pakistani president Muhammad Rafiq Tarar, Clinton’s motorcade stopped near an underpass, where he changed cars.4 To leave nothing to chance, the Pakistani government emptied out the center of its capital on the eve of his arrival. It was in the midst of this fortified ghost town that Clinton addressed Pakistanis on TV, a precondition for his visit, which would last all of five hours.

  “Now we are in the dawn of a new century, and a new and changing world has come into view,” Clinton began. “Clearly, the absence of democracy makes it harder for people to move ahead. . . . Democracy cannot develop if it is constantly uprooted before it has a chance to firmly take hold. . . . The answer to flawed democracy is not to end democracy, but to improve it.” Clinton then turned to terrorism. “We [Americans and Pakistanis] have both suffered enough to know that no grievance, no cause, no system of beliefs can ever justify the deliberate killing of innocents,” he stated. “Those who bomb bus stations, target embassies or kill those who uphold the law are not heroes. They are our common enemies, for their aim is to exploit painful problems, not to resolve them.” Next he focused on the region. “For India and Pakistan this must be a time of restraint, for respect for the Line of Control, and renewed lines of communication,” he said. “There is no military solution to Kashmir. International sympathy, support and intervention cannot be won by provoking a bigger, bloodier conflict. On the contrary; sympathy and support will be lost. And no matter how great the grievance, it is wrong to support attacks against civilians across the Line of Control.” As for the United States, “We cannot and will not mediate or resolve the dispute in Kashmir. Only you and India can do that, through dialogue.”5

  To emphasize his strong disapproval of Musharraf’s military role, he ensured that his handshake of the dictator was not recorded by cameras. During his one-on-one meeting with Musharraf he raised the issues of terrorism and a road map for democracy in Pakistan but found him non-committal.

  Then, to the surprise of Clinton and many others, the Supreme Court of Pakistan stepped in to dictate its own road map. In mid-May the twelve-member bench unanimously coupled its justification of the coup on the grounds of corruption, maladministration, and the faltering economy with an instruction to Chief Executive Musharraf to hold elections within three years from the date of the coup—that is, October 12, 2002.6

  Delhi-Washington Bonding Softens Musharraf

  During his state visit to Washington in mid-September Vajpayee warmed up relations between the largest and the most powerful democracies of the globe. He addressed a joint session of Congress. The next day he was received by Clinton with full state honors on the South Lawn of the White House. In his talk with his host he did not veer from his previous stances on terrorism (“India was a victim of cross-frontier terrorism from Pakistan”), reviving the Lahore Declaration process (“It was up to Pakistan to stop aiding Kashmiri insurgents as a precondition for reconciliation”), and the nuclear agenda (“India had no attention of subscribing to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which the US Senate had rejected in 1999”). “I took the bus to Lahore, but the bus went to Kargil,” repeated Vajpayee at every opportunity.7

  In his public utterances, Clinton was relentless in his praise of India. He was more eloquent about the virtues of Mohandas Gandhi than Vajpayee was when the latter unveiled a bronze image of the seminaked, striding Mahatma, armed with a long walking stick, on the triangular island along Massachusetts Avenue across the road from the Indian embassy. Mahatma Gandhi thus became the first South Asian personage to be so honored in the American capital.

  The convergence between India and the United States went beyond geopolitics. The service India’s software companies provided to US corporations to immunize their computer systems from crashing on January 1, 2000, opened a new chapter in the Indo-American commercial-industrial arena. And the 6.5 percent expansion in India’s GDP in fiscal 1999 showed the country breaking out of its traditional growth band of 3 to 5 percent. This encouraged US companies to invest in India.

  Critics who argued that Vajpayee’s visit to Washington at the very end of the Clinton administrati
on was badly timed missed the point that the burgeoning economic links between the two nations were unrelated to the tenure of an American president.

  Among those who fretted about the ever-tightening concord between Delhi and Washington was Musharraf. By establishing the National Accountability Bureau, headed by Lieutenant General Syed Mohammad Amjad, Musharraf had cracked down hard on corruption. That won him much popular acclaim and helped him consolidate his power. He was now ready for a meeting with the Indian prime minister. His chance would have come if the biennial meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) had taken place in 2000. Because of Vajpayee’s refusal (expressed privately) to share the SAARC platform with dictator Musharraf, the biennial conference was postponed.

  It was only in mid-March 2001 that an opening appeared for Musharraf because of the South Asia visit by UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. After meeting Musharraf and his foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, in Islamabad on March 11, Annan explained to journalists that since UN resolutions on Kashmir were not passed under the self-enforcing Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, these needed the cooperation of the concerned parties for their implementation. He urged Pakistan and India to start a fresh dialogue on Kashmir.8

  On arriving in Delhi four days later, Annan said, “You and Pakistan have too much in shared heritage by way of history, as well as family and cultural ties, not to resolve your differences. . . . It is time to begin healing the wounds.” Following his meeting with Vajpayee, he stressed the need for Indo-Pakistan dialogue on the dispute over Kashmir.9

  Since the Vajpayee-Sharif summit had been held in Pakistan, it was the Indian leader’s turn to invite his Pakistani counterpart to India. They agreed on a three-day visit starting July 15.