by Nick Bryant
When the plane landed, with just seven minutes of fuel to spare, the general was in effective control of the entire country, and Dot and Buddy had become Pakistan’s ‘First Dogs’.
By the time I returned to South Asia, two years into the Bush administration’s war on terror, Musharraf was not only Pakistan’s undisputed ruler but could also lay claim to being among the world’s five most consequential leaders. (My list at that time would have read George W. Bush, Hu Jintao, Tony Blair, Musharraf and Hamid Karzai, just edging out Vladimir Putin.) He was also one of the most likeable: unpretentious, clubbable and with a taste for finely blended whisky – a highly congenial dictator.
I interviewed him once on the day after the Kashmir earthquake in 2005, when he was touring the worst-affected communities aboard his military helicopter. Then, when our questioning was complete, I asked if he would mind conducting an interview with the studio in London via satellite phone that would be broadcast live around the world. Without hesitation, Musharraf agreed. Alas, our timing was slightly awry. In London, our global continuous-news channel, BBC World News, was broadcasting a recorded program – a ‘back half-hour’ as they are known in the parlance of continuous news – and the rostered presenter had temporarily disappeared. It took an age for the producers to search the cafes, toilets and smoking dens of BBC Television Centre, and all the time the general’s aides were looking edgily at their watches and angrily at me. ‘Use him or lose him’ was their unspoken message. Even on a normal day, I would have forgiven Musharraf for taking a rain check, even for getting huffy. Yet he stood for almost ten minutes happily chatting away until a breathless presenter finally appeared at the other end of the line.
The encounter suggested he was uncomplicated, obliging and the polar opposite of devious. However, rising to the very top of the Pakistani military does not come about through winning popularity contests. Even though Musharraf had been born in pre-partition India, he was a fiery nationalist, who broke down and wept when he heard of his country’s surrender at the end of the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, after which East Pakistan became the independent state of Bangladesh. For all his amiability, the general had also masterminded the famed and ultimately ill-fated Kargil incursion in 1999, when Pakistani-sponsored Kashmiri militants crossed over the Line of Control into Indian-administered Kashmir – a crisis that produced South Asia’s first nuclear standoff and brought the rivals close to the point of all-out war.
For all his undoubted charm, then, it was always worth remembering that Musharraf was a grandmaster in Pakistan’s double game. The question of his true allegiances had troubled the Bush administration ever since it confronted the Pakistan leader after the attacks of 9/11 with the stark choice of being for or against its war on terror. His actions thereafter often suggested both.
In a speech to the nation on 19 September, eight days after 9/11, he stated that the capture of bin Laden could be achieved without the downfall of the Taliban and spoke ominously of a pro-Delhi government emerging in Kabul. Part of the double game. In December that year, Pakistan-based militant groups – Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed – carried out an attack on the Indian Parliament building in Delhi, which brought the two countries close to a nuclear exchange. It was hard to believe that such a bold and elaborate assault could have unfolded without the knowledge of Islamabad and even its active support. The double game squared.
When he came to publishing his memoirs in 2006 – tellingly, if predictably, entitled In the Line of Fire – Musharraf revealed that he had war-gamed the possibility of making America an adversary following the 9/11 attacks but had decided it would be near suicidal for Pakistan. However, while publicly he lent Pakistan’s support to the war on terror, privately he hedged. His government even offered sanctuary to the remnants of the Taliban when they fled over the border after the Americans and Northern Alliance had liberated Kabul in November 2001. Thinking that America’s presence in Afghanistan would be short-lived, Islamabad believed the Taliban should be kept on life support in anticipation some day of its eventual return. The double game times ten.
Many was the time, however, when Pakistan proved itself to be an invaluable ally. By 2006, it had arrested more than a thousand al-Qaeda suspects. These included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s number three and the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the founding members of the Hamburg cell that carried it out. For Musharraf, there was also a strong personal incentive to root out al-Qaeda. Twice in December 2003, Islamist militants had come close to assassinating him, and the former commando officer usually carried a laser-guided Glock pistol in a hip holster as his last line of defence.
For all that, the Bush administration thought the general could have done much more, but it gave him its support all the same – turning a blind eye to his suspension of democracy in the process – because it believed he was the only game in town. Here, once again, Musharraf displayed his Italianate cunning, for he had successfully persuaded Washington that he was an indispensable figure: the only Pakistani capable of holding his fractious nation together.
There were also unmistakable signs that Musharraf was trying to break his country’s India fixation. Increasingly dovish when it came to Indo-Pakistani relations, he entered into peace talks with the Indians in 2004 and even raised the possibility of dropping his country’s territorial claim on disputed Kashmir. A massive climbdown for any Pakistani head of state, let alone a military man, it was akin to a Palestinian leader relinquishing his people’s demands for the return of the West Bank.
Here, Musharraf appeared to enjoy the support of the Pakistani middle class, which was increasingly prepared to let history be just that. There was great public enthusiasm for the new cross-border bus links, connecting Islamabad to Delhi, which allowed relatives separated by partition to be reunited with family members, some of whom they had never set eyes on. Business travellers especially enjoyed the resumption of air links, which finally meant one could fly from Delhi to Lahore without changing planes in Abu Dhabi – a detour that added 4000 kilometres to the journey. And then, in March 2004, there was the end of a cricket drought.
In South Asia, politics did not just intrude on sport, the two were indivisible, and not for 14 years had the Indian Government allowed the national team to embark upon a fully fledged tour of Pakistan. Cricketing ties had been severed completely after an attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, which India blamed on Pakistan-sponsored militants, and thus the Pakistani Government, and the two sides had not met anywhere on the subcontinent since the beginning of the new millennium.
From the speed at which the 33,000 tickets sold out – there were riots in Karachi when they first went on sale – to the queues for visas outside the Pakistani embassy in Delhi, the pre-tour atmospherics – or mood music, as diplomats often call it – were encouraging to say the least.
On match day, fans transformed the terraces of the ground into a subcontinental fiesta. Rather than the usual face-paint nationalism, Pakistanis turned up with the flags of both nations daubed on their cheeks. Many carried aloft banners with messages such as ‘We Wish Friendship Forever’. Someone had sown together a massive flag combining the Indian and Pakistani colours, featuring the slogan ‘One blood’. Exceptionally beautiful Karachi women, wearing tight-fitting white T-shirts and oversized designer sunglasses, and carrying ripped-off Louis Vuitton handbags, found themselves sitting next to exceptionally beautiful Indian women in precisely the same get-up.
Most remarkable of all, perhaps, was the reaction to Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, the scions of India’s most famous political dynasty, who appeared in the stands joyfully brandishing the Indian tricolour. This in a city that their grandmother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had bombed during the 1971 war. In years past, the Gandhis would have run the risk of being lynched. Now, though, they were received like idols. It was almost as improbable as watching the Bush twins turn up for a football match in Baghdad to a standing ovation.
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p; To crown the day, the cricket was superb as well, with the drought between the two countries ending with a freakish cloudburst of runs, the most ever scored up until that time in a one-day international. Chasing a gigantic winning total of 350, Pakistan’s flabby captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, scored 122 off 102 balls – a characteristically nonchalant innings greeted in the stands with chants of ‘Aloo, aloo’, or ‘Potato, potato’. Needing a six off the final ball of the match, however, the home side just fell short.
After the match, we adjourned to a rooftop barbecue joint overlooking the port, where open stoves were lined with Seekh, Reshmi and Afghan kebabs, and the walls adorned with photographs of the owner greeting General Musharraf, whose bouffon looked even more magnificent than normal. Kicking back with a non-alcoholic mocktail, I felt that Karachi had the carefree air of the Riviera, although the women were arguably more stunning.
What we had seen that day was Pakistan’s often silent middle class asserting itself much more strongly. They were people who wanted to dress well, to eat in fashionable restaurants, to have the latest mobile phones and to match India’s fast-rising living standards. The problem they were up against, however, was that violent nihilists wanted to shape the country’s future and expressed themselves much more forcefully.
Our trip to Karachi, a city that the writer William Dalrymple pithily described as South Asia’s Beirut, offered proof of that as well. In the run-up to the cricket match, the Pakistani police had turned Karachi’s National Stadium into a citadel, encircling it with armoured vehicles, troops and sharpshooters, such was the fear of a suicide-bomb attack. As an added precaution, various decoy convoys fanned out from the Indian team’s hotel in the hope of foxing militants who might be waiting in ambush for their coach.
Our hotel and theirs, the Sheraton, had been bombed during the New Zealand cricket team’s last visit in June 2002, an attack that killed 11 French engineers and three Pakistanis. Next door was the US consulate, an outpost so heavily fortified that it resembled a cliff-top gun emplacement ready at any moment to repel an invasion. Twice since 9/11, it had been hit by jihadists, ranking it third on the list of America’s most dangerous embassies or consulates, after Baghdad and Kabul. Only days after the cricket ended, it was targeted again, when militants tried to detonate a van loaded with 200 gallons of liquid explosives that was parked outside (which made sense of our precaution never to open the curtains in our hotel rooms, since they overlooked the consulate).
The host to a wave of anti-American protests since 9/11, in which US flags and effigies of George W. Bush were torched with paraffin, Karachi performed a dual role for al-Qaeda. It was a key recruiting ground and a frequent target.
Also close to the Sheraton was the street corner where the Wall Street Journal’s South Asian bureau chief Daniel Pearl had been abducted in January 2002. Nine days later, he was butchered by his captors, who hacked off his head and cut his body into ten pieces – an execution that they released with grotesque pride three weeks later as a beheading video entitled ‘The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist – the Jew Daniel Pearl’.
Pearl’s successor at the Journal became a good friend and followed the procedure, whenever he was on the road in Pakistan, of regularly ringing New York to assure his editors of his safety. By now, however, all the foreign journalists in the region were much more risk averse in the face of al-Qaeda’s barbarism. Again, this made Pakistan infuriatingly difficult to cover, because it was so difficult to get access to the key players: the jihadists themselves. Correspondents usually show a wilful disregard for the strictures of health and safety, but in Pakistan they truly were a matter of life and death. The beheading videos had made us pause.
As Karachi always reminded us, Pakistan was a country with a seemingly never-ending list of problems: the threat from al-Qaeda, other Islamist militants and more recently the Pakistan Taliban; the lawlessness of its tribal regions, where the writ of Islamabad did not extend; the dysfunction of its politics, where corruption was endemic and assassinations were routine; the regular bursts of sectarian violence between the majority Sunni Muslims and the minority Shias; a little-reported nationalist insurgency, which Islamabad claimed that India was bankrolling, in Balochistan, the country’s largest province.
Under that sort of buckling pressure, the state should probably have failed. Yet Pakistan had this extraordinary ability to absorb whatever crisis or calamity befell it, and then to muddle through. However intense the national convulsion, however dire the warnings that it was staring into the abyss, whatever the fears that its nuclear weapons were about to fall into the hands of militants, Pakistan somehow withstood the shock waves. Just.
Flying into Islamabad to cover the latest bombing or political crisis, I was always slightly amused by the in-flight announcement aboard Pakistan International Airlines as we made our final approach: ‘We will be landing in Islamabad in five minutes, Insha’Allah [God willing].’ Admittedly, I would have preferred something more definite. But also it provided an essential clue to understanding the country down below. In their earthly lives, many Pakistanis seemed reconciled to living in an unending state of crisis and often were inclined to defer to their leaders as a result, whether they be elected prime ministers or military dictators. At times of crisis, this compliant, unquestioning faith had strong adhesive powers. It helped keep the country from falling apart. For all its manifold problems, Pakistan was as Allah intended it to be.
In the slums of Mumbai, where the stench of diesel oil and human excrement putrefied the air and stung the nostrils, we could smell the old India and see the new. We had flown in from Delhi to meet Hermat, a young father who sat almost motionless for hours on end in front of a colour television tuned to one of the 24-hour business-news channels, watching transfixed as a fast-moving ticker covered with corporate hieroglyphics raced from right to left across the bottom of the screen.
Every quarter-hour, the channel replayed a jingle in which a thumping bed of Bhangra music was overlaid with the words ‘Indian Dream’. In his cramped, barely furnished shanty, Hermat was living out his own. With his tiny baby daughter in his lap, a cup of chai in his hand and a ring-bound brochure for the latest Initial Public Offering, or IPO, on his knee, he kept a constant check on the value of his share portfolio. Given the skyward trajectory of the Bombay Stock Exchange, it was rising with each infrequent blink of his eyes.
‘I saw lots of people making money out of the stock market,’ he told us. ‘Now I’m doing the same.’ Outside his open door, neighbours watched in wonderment, with looks of compliant faith that were reserved normally for holy men and doctors. Each of them had entrusted Hermat with small amounts of their own money and were waiting to see how quickly he could turn a profit. With India in the throes of a revolution of rising expectations, the feeling was now commonplace that tomorrow would be better than today. And here we were witnessing the oddest of oxymorons: a newly gentrified slum. In a country where hope had always fought a running battle with despair, even the poor were daring to dream.
Always a land of jolting disparities, never had they been more pronounced. The new collided with the old. The rich accelerated away from the vast majority of the poor. The beautiful averted their gaze from the wretched. And, rather usefully for the purposes of television, often the contrasts could be captured with a simple tilt, pan or zoom of the camera lens. Just down the road from Hermat’s shanty in Mumbai, we filmed jetliners gliding in to land at the international airport, and then tilted down to the corrugated shacks just metres from the runway that lay on the fringes of Asia’s largest slum.
In Hyderabad, the mirror-glassed citadels of hi-tech Cyberabad sat atop a hill, their satellite dishes angled upwards, while a Third World shanty occupied the valley down below.
In Calcutta, you did not even have to adjust the camera to catch in the same frame a chauffeur-driven Mercedes or BMW overtaking a rickshaw propelled by a willowy human puller.
At any major junction in any major city, you could film st
reet urchins with hands outstretched and heads tilted pleadingly, then slowly pan across to the traffic jam of newly imported cars, with electric windows firmly shut and passengers peering implacably ahead. Useful as this particular footage often was, we used it sparingly. After all, we were often the ones sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of the BBC’s fleet of four-wheel drives, with the glass unopened and the beggars blithely ignored.
In covering India’s transformation from a near socialist economy to a fully fledged capitalist one, we operated out of a bureau that stood in stubborn defiance of these fast-paced times. Located on the top floor of an art gallery run by the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, with a sumptuous view of the pillared rotunda of the Indian Parliament building and the turrets of Lutyens’ presidential palace just beyond, it was the kind of newspaper-strewn office in which you half-expected to see Graham Greene hunched over an Underwood typewriter or Ernest Hemingway sucking on a cigar.
In the absence of a water cooler or vending machine, a squadron of waiters spent the day ferrying trays of lukewarm water, chai and coffee from the kitchen to the newsrooms. In the absence of a lift, a team of porters dressed in pale-blue uniforms lugged our television equipment up two spiralling flights of stairs.
Three delightful receptionists manned the entrance, huddled together in a glass-fronted cubicle that looked like a soundproof booth from a 1950s quiz show. Inside, they answered the phones, sorted the mail into the wooden pigeonholes ranged behind them and sifted through all the bureau gossip.
Finally, there were 70 or so journalists, from the English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Tamil language sections, who were crammed into a space that could comfortably accommodate about a third of that number. Theoretically, the overcrowding could have been worse, for there were 22 official Indian languages in which we feasibly could have broadcast. For years, we had been trying to move to new premises, but, on a matter of high principle, we refused to pay the mandatory bribes demanded by our prospective new landlords.