Adventures in Correspondentland

by Nick Bryant

  For any new arrival hoping to map Pakistan’s DNA, as good a starting point as any was to make the drive across the plains of Punjab from Lahore to Wagah – the only official border crossing with India. The trick was to arrive just before dusk to witness Wagah’s great sunset ceremonial, the Beating the Retreat.

  For 30 minutes each evening, soldiers from India’s Border Security Force and Pakistan Rangers would high-kick, stamp, speed-march and flash downward thumbs at each other in perfect and well-rehearsed synchronicity. Picked for their towering height, limb flexibility, extravagant facial hair and ability to carry off fan-shaped headdresses that gave them the appearance of strutting peacocks, they engaged in a burst of military machismo that rivalled the All Blacks’ haka in terms of its controlled fury and dignified rage.

  What made it even more entertaining was that it had shades of Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom, Basil Fawlty’s acrobatic goose-steps and the sort of harrumphing, head-turning high-camp that one might expect to see in a West End bedroom farce – normally at the point where the wife returns home to find her husband in bed with the Swedish au pair.

  The soundtrack came from two note-splitting buglers and the pantomime cheers of Pakistanis and Indians packed into bleachers on either side of the border. The ceremony would end with a brief exchange of handshakes, the slamming of gates and the lowering of flags. Honours were intended to be even. Yet, having watched the ceremony from both sides of the border, my guess was that it meant more for Pakistan than for its bigger, richer and more internationally lauded neighbour. Though it still considered Pakistan a major irritant and intermittent threat, India was starting to view China as its main twenty-first-century rival. Fifty years after partition, and three wars later, Pakistan still had an India fixation.

  This helped to explain why Pakistan was the principal sponsor of the Taliban when it rose to power in Afghanistan in September 1996 – providing food, fuel, financing, munitions and military assistance from its Frontier Corps. In South Asia’s modern-day Great Game, an Islamabad-friendly regime in Kabul was not only an essential bulwark against Delhi but it also meant that Pakistan could amass its forces on the border with India rather than worry about Afghanistan. Only three countries granted diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government in Kabul: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and, of course, Pakistan.

  The India fixation explained why forceful action was not taken against militant Islam by dismantling Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), its home-grown jihadists, or al-Qaeda, whose leaders had taken up residence in Waziristan, parts of the North-West Frontier Province and many of the major cities, such as Karachi. Viewed as useful proxies, these militant groups carried out attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and major Indian cities, such as Delhi and Bombay, which had a destabilising effect on Pakistan’s arch rival. This not only meant that the jihadists often avoided censure but also that they came to enjoy the active backing of high-ranking generals in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s shadowy intelligence service, as well as senior figures in the army.

  Operationally, the ISI was thought to be divided now into two sections: one that offered assistance to the Bush administration in its search for high-value al-Qaeda targets and one that maintained its patron–client relationship with the Taliban and other militant groups. Towards jihadists, the ISI was believed to have adopted an à la carte approach: assisting some while attempting to thwart others, even though ISI spies had been beheaded in the tribal areas and scores of its officials had been killed in suicide attacks.

  Pakistan was playing a double game, which also explained why the military continued to divert US funds earmarked for the war on terror – we are talking here of a gargantuan sum of money, now in excess of $20 billion – to finance its arms build-up against India. This, even after the Pakistani Taliban tried to take control of the Swat Valley, close to Islamabad, and al-Qaeda mounted attacks within the capital virtually at will. Militant Islam now posed an existential threat to the state – the talk was of the Talibanisation of Pakistan – but the army and ISI continued to sponsor jihadists.

  Trying to fully comprehend Islamabad’s double game was difficult enough, but making half-decent television out of it was immeasurably harder. Finding a diplomat or a former Pakistani spook to repeat on camera what they would tell you off the record was next to impossible. As for getting pictorial evidence of the ISI’s complicity with jihadists, it was not as if they offered embeds. On issuing journalist visas, the Pakistan authorities also placed quite heavy restrictions on where we were allowed to travel, limiting us for a long while to the major cities. Suffice to say, the areas of our primary interest, such as the North-West Frontier Province, where the militants were most active, were out of bounds and guarded with military checkpoints. Alas, this was a story best told in heavily classified intelligence cables rather than in the form of broadcast journalism, because so few people would speak honestly on the record.

  Often, I would come away from Pakistan – a country I looked upon with great affection – thinking I was probably too naive to cover it properly. Journalistically speaking, it was a place that favoured the deeply cynical – wizened old hacks who never believed a word that anyone told them, on or off the record. Being something of a conspiracy theorist was also useful – a spy novelist even – because of all the secret plots that were actually playing out. It was more a case, however, of being a conspiracy reporter: of working clandestine contacts, over and over, to chronicle what was happening in the shadows, where the fantastical so often doubled as fact.

  From 2003 onwards, the country’s deteriorating security situation came to be reflected in our choice of accommodation. On trips to Islamabad, we traditionally stayed at the Marriott, the long-time haunt of visiting correspondents, where waiters served wine in teapots to break the Islamic prohibition on booze and where beers ordered through room service arrived with forms for guests to sign admitting to a medical dependence on alcohol – a signature that many a correspondent could deliver with an entirely clean conscience. By 2004, we had started staying in small guest houses, which were less of a target. The allure of a middling pinot noir served in bone china or a locally brewed Murree lager – which was something of a crime against beer – was no longer worth the risk.

  In October that year, I happened to be staying at a nearby guest house when the Marriott was bombed for the first time, destroying much of the lobby and restaurant area on the ground floor, where 11 members of staff from the US embassy were dining. Downplaying the incident, Pakistan’s inaptly named information minister told us that the explosion was caused by an electrical short circuit. But the official explanation was risible given that the foyer was strewn with wrecked furniture and broken glass, and that seven people had been injured, including an American diplomat. Here, the phrase ‘it looks like a bomb has hit it’ was a statement of the blindingly obvious. Still, the information minister refused to recognise the evidence right before his eyes. In common with so many officials in Pakistan, he was in a state of public denial about the dangers posed by jihadists. Sure enough, an investigation quickly found that the explosion had been the work of a bomber, who had tried to smuggle a laptop packed with explosives in through the front door.

  That attack on the Marriott came just days before the 2004 American presidential election between George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, and I had flown to Islamabad just in case the Bush administration pulled off a genuine October surprise by announcing the capture of Osama bin Laden. With the election deadline looming, everyone knew that the CIA and US military had redoubled their efforts to capture the al-Qaeda leader, although there was nothing to suggest that the trail was anything other than wintry.

  Not for the first time, however, it was bin Laden who pulled off the coup, by getting his couriers to smuggle an 18-minute tape to the offices of the Arabic news network Al Jazeera in Islamabad – yet another indication that he was hiding out within the borders of Pakistan rather than Afghanistan
.

  Dressed in a snow-white turban and a golden robe, looking noticeably older and greyer than in his previous appearances, he presented himself as the untitled leader of the Islamic caliphate he so desperately wanted to restore. There was even the quasi-presidential flourish of being seated behind a desk with his script laid out before him, as if he were mimicking an Oval Office address. Even more so than in his usual recorded messages, he heaped scorn on its present occupant and admitted responsibility for the attacks of 9/11 – the first time he had done so publicly. ‘It never occurred to us that the commander-in-chief of the country would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone,’ he scoffed, in what sounded very much like a riff from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, ‘because he thought listening to a child discussing her goats was more important.’

  Rather than hurting George W. Bush, however, bin Laden was giving him an election-winning boost, which CIA analysts believed was precisely his intention. John Kerry – for all his weaknesses as a candidate and for all Karl Rove’s attempts to portray him as a closet Frenchman – had gone into the final weekend of campaigning ahead of the president in a number of polls. But to attack George W. Bush now that the tape had been broadcast gave the appearance almost of siding with bin Laden or of being unpatriotic. Indeed, the Massachusetts senator, who had once lambasted Bush for not doing more to bring the al-Qaeda leader to justice, had decided months before to drop references in his speeches to how bin Laden remained at large. Internal polling showed it was badly hurting him with voters.

  The proof of this came when Bush received an Osama bounce on that final weekend, which meant that going into the last two days of campaigning the wind was behind his back. In another photo-finish election, Bush won with 50.7 per cent of the vote compared with Kerry’s 48.3 per cent. It remains one of the great political paradoxes of the post-9/11 years that George W. Bush’s failure to capture his number-one enemy actually helped him win re-election.

  More obliquely, what bin Laden was also delivering in that tape was a crushing indictment of the Bush administration’s war on terror. Al-Qaeda clearly believed that the invasion of Iraq, and the scandals coming out of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, had invigorated the global jihad. Its leader, who seemingly relished his eye-to-eye struggle with George W., was essentially saying that he viewed America’s commander-in-chief as al-Qaeda’s leading recruiting sergeant.

  Long before 9/11, and soon after the end of my traineeship with the BBC, Pakistan had provided an early rite of passage for a wannabe foreign correspondent: my first election abroad. It was February 1997, and a few months earlier the president had dismissed the government of Benazir Bhutto on charges of corruption and misrule. Not only were Cabinet ministers alleged to be looting billions from the national exchequer, but also the prime minister herself was accused of leading a cover-up into the death of her elder brother and dynastic rival, Murtaza, whom the Karachi police had mowed down a few months earlier. These allegations seemed jaw-dropping for a fledging reporter just in from London, but they were fairly run of the mill for a Pakistani press corps that had witnessed almost every kind of scandal.

  When I encountered her at an election rally in Lahore, Bhutto came across as a deeply embittered figure, fuming with acid, whose once-beautiful face was haggard and white like a geisha’s. Though still only in her early-40s, the ravages of Pakistani politics had made her look ten years older. No great fan at that time of the BBC, she launched a scolding tirade at what she perceived as our bias when I approached her for an interview. Seemingly, we had been added to an enemies list in her mind that included the president, the army, the ISI and her main election rival, Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League.

  Sharif, a podgy-faced industrialist from Lahore – who, like Bhutto, had once been sacked as prime minister following the usual accusations of corruption and misrule – was much more accommodating. As the clear favourite in the election, he was more than happy for us to join him on his helicopter as he launched into a campaign swing that felt like a round-Pakistan whirlwind intended to show the country’s topographical and meteorological extremes.

  First, we flew into a mountain community in the Swat Valley, where the craggy ledges formed a natural amphitheatre, as Sharif delivered a limp speech met by the local tribesmen with respectful puzzlement. From the bitter cold of the Swat Valley, we headed to the parched farmland of Punjab, where we stepped out of the helicopter into oven-like temperatures and a giant dust storm of our own making.

  Next was a massive rally in Rawalpindi, the garrison city on the edge of Islamabad that is the home to the headquarters of the Pakistani Army. Here, a mob of screaming supporters rushed towards our helicopter with such force that for a time we were swept uncontrollably towards its still-whirling tail rotor. (Given the sheer size and passion of crowds on the subcontinent, one of the major regional hazards was of being crushed in a stampede at a political rally or religious festival.)

  Finally, we made the short hop to the centre of Islamabad for a fast-breaking iftar supper at the Marriott, where, having observed his Ramadan fast since dawn, Sharif showed considerably more appetite for his plate of biryani than for his day of campaigning.

  Fun though it was to fly with Nawaz and joust with Benazir, the main reason I was in Pakistan was to follow Imran Khan, the former cricketer whose newly formed party, the Movement for Justice, was making its political debut. All the fly-in correspondents who descended upon Pakistan arrived hoping to write the story of how a World Cup-winning cricket captain became the leader of his country in one giant leap. Once Pakistan’s most flamboyant playboy, Imran was still remembered in Britain as a debonair cricketer, Oxford Blue and late-night fixture at Mayfair nightspots such as Annabel’s and Tramp. More recently, the tabloids and celebrity magazines had feasted on his high-society marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, who had converted to Islam and borne the first of their two sons. Now, however, Imran was unrecognisable: devout, humourless and strangely melancholic.

  His home in Lahore had the same joyless air throughout the hour or so we spent there, and his young bride, Jemima, looked thoroughly miserable. Less than two years into their troubled marriage, it was clear that she belonged still in Tatler rather than in Lahore. Neither did his political career merit the fairy-tale treatment. For all his supporters’ fervour – ‘He is still captain, he is still my captain,’ yelled one of his fans at microphone-busting volume during a night-time rally in Lahore – Imran was a neophyte. So shambolic was his new party that it had not even organised for him to vote on election day – a political golden duck.

  Rather than spend election night with the Imran camp, we set up shop on the lawn of Nawaz Sharif’s Lahore mansion. Sharif was celebrating the biggest landslide since Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in the late-1970s. Not that it meant much. Turnout across the country hovered around a pitiful 30 per cent – an indication of the lamentable health of Pakistani democracy. It was not the sort of mandate that the Pakistani military was likely to respect.

  It is worth recalling what happened in the aftermath of the 1997 election, if only to undersore Pakistan’s chronic democratic dysfunction. To avoid corruption charges, Benazir went into self-imposed exile in Dubai and London. By this time, her husband, Asif Ali Zardari – who was known as ‘Mr Ten Per Cent’ because of the kickbacks he was alleged to have received during her prime ministership – was already in jail. Then, in the way that these things often work out in South Asia, he won election to the Senate from his prison cell in Karachi.

  After Benazir returned to Pakistan in 2007 in a bid to regain power, she was assassinated at the same municipal park in Rawalpindi where we had landed in Sharif’s helicopter. In the elections that followed, her widowed husband, who had now been released from prison, rode the wave of public sympathy and anger all the way to the presidency of Pakistan.

  As for the victor of the 1997 election, Nawaz Sharif soon found himself in a power struggle with the military top br
ass. This in turn contributed to the rise of a general, little known at that time beyond Pakistan’s borders, who was about to become a central figure in the whole post-9/11 story. Back in 1999, during his flunked pop quiz ahead of the New Hampshire primary, George W. Bush had not been able to recall his name. Now, in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington, General Pervez Musharraf became a vital ally.

  In a garrison nation where the army had been in the chair for 24 out of the 53 years since independence, there was a certain brazenness in Nawaz Sharif’s decision to mount his own personal coup. He seized his chance in October 1999 when he sacked the army’s chief of staff, General Musharraf, who was on a brief visit to Sri Lanka, and announced that the head of the ISI, the country’s leading spymaster, would take his place.

  Musharraf was mid-air on his way back from Colombo when he learnt of his dismissal, and his plane, a commercial airliner with 198 passengers and crew on board, was prevented from touching down at Karachi Airport, where the landing lights were turned off and fire trucks blocked the runway. With fuel fast running out and his fellow passengers in peril, Musharraf was given the option of flying to India. ‘Over my dead body will you go to India,’ thundered the general, even though he had actually been born in Delhi. Instead, the pilot started heading to another airfield in Pakistan in the hope of getting clearance to land.

  On the ground below, Musharraf’s military underlings were already coming to his rescue, and in the time it took for his plane to climb to 20,000 feet the army seized control of Karachi Airport. When a soldier came across air-traffic control to assure Musharraf it was now safe to land, he thought it was a trick and that a Sharif plant was trying to lure him to his death. ‘Can you tell me the names of my dogs?’ asked Musharraf, fully expecting to expose the ruse.

  ‘Dot and Buddy,’ came the instant reply.