Durrani told me another fear was that someone might use a remote-controlled toy plane loaded with explosives to land a bomb on the bus. He was constantly on his mobile phone.
‘The government promised to provide us with jammers so we could intercept any remote-controlled explosive device within 200 metres,’ he explained. ‘But the man in the car in front of the bus with the jammer keeps telling me it isn’t working and that we should do something.’
Desperately, he tried to phone Tariq Aziz – the national security adviser and Musharraf ’s point man in the negotiations with the Bhutto camp – but to no avail. Then Asif, Bhutto’s husband, called.
‘He asked me what was going on. “I can see you all on mobile phones, and they shouldn’t work if the jammer is working.” I told him it wasn’t. [He said:] “For God’s sake, get Benazir behind the bulletproof screen.” I asked her but she said, “No, I must be at the front and greet my people.”’ It was not only bombers that they were concerned about. As darkness fell, I stood at the front with Bhutto.
‘Have you noticed the streetlights?’ she asked me. ‘Each one we approach goes off so the road is in darkness and my guards can’t see anything. Someone is doing this. We’ve had information they might try a shooting.’
She was right. Illuminated by the bus’s lights, we passed along like a bright bubble while the crowd on either side was in darkness.
I remembered back to when I lived in Pakistan. Whenever there was a mystery attack in Karachi, usually taking out somebody the intelligence agencies did not like, the shootings would be preceded by the streetlights going off.
Suddenly there was a crack of what sounded like gunfire. I threw myself on the floor before realising with embarrassment that it was fireworks.
‘I don’t like the firecrackers,’ Bhutto said. ‘Anyone could use it as cover for shooting.’
Her security people used searchlights to sweep the darkened crowds, looking out for anyone with a gun or a suspicious backpack.
‘There’s no technique to identify a suicide bomber in an open street like this until it’s too late,’ Durrani admitted. ‘That’s why we decided on a human shield.’
He said they had trained 5,000 young men, volunteers for the so-called jan israin na Benazir Bhutto – the Martyrs for Benazir. Of those, 3,000 were sent on to the bridges and tall buildings and into the crowd, while 2,000 stayed around the bus.
Unarmed, they were identifiable by their white or black T-shirts. Bravest of all – and many of them doomed – were those who formed a human chain around the bus. Others formed an outer cordon around the bus’s police escort, holding a rope to stop the crowds coming too near.
At about 10 p.m. we suddenly lurched to a halt. There was a moment of panic until someone explained that the bus had a flat tyre. Some local activists were told to disembark as the load was too heavy. I was allowed to stay.
We sat stationary, crowds surrounding us and the vans of bored-looking police officers with Kalashnikovs forming a cordon on either side. Somebody brought Pepsis and burgers, which we gobbled hungrily. Pizzas also arrived.
Seven hours after leaving the airport, we weren’t even halfway along the fifteen kilometre route to the Jinnah memorial, where Bhutto planned to make her speech.
‘If we keep going at this rate I’ll have to order in breakfast on the bus,’ Malik joked.
Eventually the bus started moving again. As it got later, the security fears began to be forgotten and the mood became euphoric.
There were even women in the crowd, which till then had been almost exclusively male. Many had brought their children, dressed in their best and excited to see such a spectacle.
Bhutto rested in an armchair inside the bulletproof shield on top of the bus, the wounded dove still perched on her shoulder, her face animated. I sat on the arm of the chair and we chatted.
‘Aren’t you tired?’ I asked. ‘Not at all,’ she laughed. ‘It’s incredible, far more people than in 1986. How must Musharraf be feeling seeing this?’ She continued: ‘This is the real Pakistan, not the militants or the military. We are giving a voice to the moderates that don’t want to see their country taken over by terrorists.’
For a moment she grew sombre. ‘I just hope I can meet all these expectations … but also that I am allowed to.’
Abida Hussein, one of Pakistan’s best-known women MPs and a former critic of Bhutto who recently switched sides, got on the bus. The two women went downstairs to the safe compartment. Perhaps twenty minutes remained before the bombs would shatter the euphoria.
Karachi’s police chief said yesterday the first bomb was a grenade or car bomb to make space, while the second blast was the work of a suicide bomber. His body – or body parts – has not yet been identified.
Although three people died on top of the bus, the only reason that Bhutto and the rest of us were not killed, it seems, is that the human shield worked – the young volunteers around the bus stopped the suicide bomber getting closer, paying for our protection with their own lives.
So, who did it? The awful thing about Pakistan today is that it could be any one of a number of people or organisations, from militants to the military.
Potential suspects include ethnic groups such as the Muttahida Quami Movement, the organisation that vies with the PPP for rule of Karachi, Taliban sympathisers and even old-guard politicians in deadly opposition to Bhutto.
‘Far from bringing stability, Bhutto’s return has threatened everybody,’ said a member of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest religious party.
Bhutto has pointed the finger at remnants in the intelligence and political elite from the Zia regime that executed her father. Some of them, she says, are still in power – although she is keen to make it clear that she is not implicating the president.
‘We have confidence in some elements of the current regime, such as General Musharraf and the foreign minister, but it is the wild cards that give us concern, and those wild cards are usually the old cards,’ she said.
Musharraf had telephoned her the morning after the attack, she said. ‘He told me he had warned me not to come back, that there were security risks and he himself had faced two assassination attempts. But he said this shows we moderates must stand together.’
Senior members of her party were not so sure. ‘My fear is they will use this as an excuse to declare martial law and not go ahead with the elections,’ said Malik.
Would the army really relinquish power? It has run the show for thirty-three of the country’s sixty years of existence and pulled the strings from behind for much of the rest of the time. During Bhutto’s two stints as prime minister she often complained: ‘I am in office but not in power.’ She later admitted she had been forced to leave both the nuclear programme and Afghan policy in the hands of the military.
Since Musharraf seized power in 1999, the military has markedly increased its role in the public and private sectors. Retired generals and brigadiers run the tax authority, the postal system and the housing department. Two of Pakistan’s four provinces have generals as governors. According to Military Inc., a recent book by the defence analyst Ayesha Siddiqa, the army also controls large parts of the economy, and is involved in everything from banks to cornflake factories.
For Bhutto, the assassination attempt was a brutal awakening to how much the country has changed since she packed her bags and fled to London in 1998.
The evening after the attack, I sat with Bhutto in her small, book-lined study. She had just held her first press conference since her return, a bravura performance during which she had railed against ‘those who turned triumph into tragedy’ and insisted she would not be deterred from her fight to bring back democracy, even if it cost her her life.
Dressed in sombre grey silk with a black armband, she told me she had had just less than four hours’ sleep after the attack, from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. She had woken up with blood in her ears from the effect of the blast.
‘I haven’t felt weepy yet,
but it suddenly hit me about 5.30 a.m. that maybe I wouldn’t have made it,’ she said. ‘I kept thinking of the noise, the light and the place littered with dead bodies. Everything seemed lit up.
‘Also I kept thinking of the boys, the human shields. Do you know more than fifty of them lost their lives?’
On the wall of the study was an old spelling certificate for her youngest daughter, Aseefa, who is 14, a reminder that Bhutto may be a politician but is also a devoted mother.
Her eldest, Bilawal, 19, started at Oxford earlier this month, while Aseefa and her other daughter, Bakhtwar, 17, have remained in Dubai with their father and ‘a house full of dogs’, as both have important exams coming up.
The first thing she thought of after the bomb went off was the children, and she admitted it had been hard speaking to them that morning.
‘They kept saying, “Mummy, are you okay? Mummy, are you okay?” They had been desperately keen to come with me, and I said, “That’s why I didn’t want you to come.”’ She added: ‘The worst thing is hurting them, making them fearful. I feel children need their parents. Losing my father was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I was 25 – they are still much smaller. I worry about the effect on them.’
She insisted, however, that they understood that she had to return to Pakistan. ‘My mother comes from Iran, and many of her relatives and friends never went back home, so I used to think I didn’t want to be one of those people who’d lost their country.’
She said that after the attack her husband had been about to jump on the next plane from Dubai to be with her. ‘I said: “Don’t come back, because what if they don’t let you out? Then the girls will be on their own.”’ Although she vows to continue, she is having to rethink her strategy. Today she had planned to return in procession to her ancestral home in Larkana, but that has been put on hold.
‘Originally I was planning to be on the road the whole time, but now that’s clearly impossible,’ she said. ‘We can’t be intimidated by them but we can’t take reckless risks. We know they won’t give up.
‘The problem is, in Pakistan people want to see their leaders,’ she added. ‘Our power base is the poor and dispossessed. They don’t have TVs or computers we can reach them through.’
Yesterday the usually cacophonous city of Karachi was subdued. Relatives of those who never came home on Friday morning crowded city hospitals and morgues, waving pictures of the missing. Others brought them to Bhutto’s house.
A survivor, Nadir Ali Magsi, a 25-year-old peasant farmer from a village close to Larkana, lay in the neurosurgery ward at Jinnah hospital. He had shrapnel embedded in his head and legs. One eye was bandaged up, and he had difficulty hearing, but he managed to speak. ‘Benazir zindabad,’ he repeatedly said. Long live Benazir.
PS In Memoriam
Fonz of Kabul, hotelier and fast-talking fixer, found dead
Sunday Times, 31 December 2006
MOST WAR-TORN CAPITALS have a hotel adopted by foreign correspondents where they can gather gossip and information or blot out the horrors of the day.
In Kabul that hotel is the Mustafa, not because of the place – it was never very comfortable – but because of Wais Faizi, its larger-than-life manager. He was known as the Fonz of Kabul, fast-talking king of fix-it men and owner of the only convertible in Afghanistan. Inside his hotel he opened the first post-Taliban bar, which soon became the gathering point for journalists, mercenaries, bounty hunters and security consultants.
Last Wednesday evening, Wais, 36, was found dead in a hotel bathroom in unexplained circumstances. Within hours my inbox had filled with emails from those of us from different lands and different walks of life he had brought together. Not only were we devastated at losing a friend but his tragic death seemed to symbolise Afghanistan’s downward spiral.
I got to know Wais, pronounced Wise, in November 2001, shortly after the fall of the Taliban, when I was among the Mustafa’s first guests. Wais had returned that summer after twenty-one years of exile in America. Presuming that with the Taliban in power Kabul would hardly attract tourists, he decided to turn the family hotel into a bazaar for moneychangers and gem dealers.
He had just finished replacing the walls between rooms with glass partitions and iron bars when 9/11 happened. Two months, and many B-52 raids later, the Taliban were gone and journalists and aid workers were streaming into the city looking for somewhere to stay.
With no time to rebuild, Wais simply painted the glass partitions white and reopened as a hotel. The glass boxes were bitterly cold and you could hear everything in the next room, horrible if like me you were between a snoring Australian and a Japanese journalist who had high-pitched conversations with his office in the early hours of the morning.
In truth the Mustafa was not much of a hotel but what it lacked in comfort Wais made up for in personality. Short but powerfully built, he was a former bodybuilding champion with a fondness for Al Pacino movies and Frank Sinatra songs and a puppyish desire to be liked. He talked like the New Jersey car dealer he once was.
The 9 p.m. curfew meant we spent a lot of time in the guesthouse. Wais acquired a television powered by a car battery, which we would watch by candlelight wrapped in blankets as the electricity went on and off. When I was shivering on the roof using the satellite phone to file my copy, he would send out cups of green tea.
One day he asked me to follow him, barely able to contain his excitement. In the garage was a 1968 open-top Chevrolet Camaro that had once belonged to an Afghan prince. We drove through the ruins of western Kabul, laughing and waving like royals as children pointed and old men almost fell off their bikes, and bobbing blue burqas came to an abrupt stop.
Wais was always full of schemes. He held Thursday-night barbecues on the roof terrace where you could sit in the seats of an old Soviet MiG and look at the stars over the Hindu Kush mountains. He located someone raising turkeys in the Panjshir valley so we could have Christmas dinner.
In 2002 he opened Kabul’s first bar. Entered through a heavy safe door with a combination lock, it was a marble and mirror extravaganza. A sculpture of the four horsemen of the apocalypse protruded from one wall and a dancing Osama bin Laden doll presided over the bar. Heinekens were known as Green Grenades and its signature cocktail was the Tora Bora Sunrise.
For a while there was a bearded barman whose neck was tattooed with a dotted line and the words ‘Cut Here’. Bullet holes in the ceiling testified to the gunfights, and once, when everyone was bored, a macaque monkey was hired from the zoo to stand on the bar bearing a Kalashnikov.
Every time I came back Wais would excitedly show off his latest innovations, whether it was carpets and curtains in the rooms, showers instead of buckets, the courtyard of white doves or the imported espresso machine. I had one cappuccino before the machine exploded due to Kabul’s erratic power supply.
As his schemes failed, Wais grew depressed, moaning about the deteriorating security and growing demands for protection money. A Pashtun, he became convinced the Panjshiris from the Northern Alliance were trying to kill him. His desk was covered in pots of vitamin pills, and sleeping often consisted of passing out after an excess of one stimulant or another.
Few of his fellow young Afghan-Americans returned. ‘What’s here?’ Wais would ask. ‘Just rubbish and ruins. Back in Ridgefield I was clearing $40,000–50,000 easy after tax and you could pick up a pizza on the way home or take in a movie and when you turned on the shower the hot water came out like “pow!” Here nothing works.’
I felt the same about the Mustafa. I was fed up with the constant power cuts because of his refusal to pay bribes and feared the hotel had become a target because of all the dodgy Defense Department types it attracted. A couple of years ago I switched to a different guesthouse with a generator, feeling horribly guilty, particularly after Wais told me he regarded me as his sister.
Despite all the setbacks, Wais was endlessly generous, throwing surprise birthday parties for those stranded in Ka
bul, far from home. He remained the first stop for information and the Mustafa was the natural venue for the founding of the Afghan Foreign Press Association.
Last time I went to the bar, in July, a group of men in dark glasses with pistols strapped on their thighs were watching Apocalypse Now as if straight out of central casting.
I cannot imagine Kabul without Wais. He was buried at the foot of TV Mountain overlooking the city which he loved and loathed. It is often said, ‘You can rent an Afghan but never buy one.’ In a land of shifting loyalties Wais was that rare precious thing – a true friend.
Acknowledgements
Being a foreign correspondent largely involves descending on people in faraway lands or tough situations and expecting them to drop everything for you and your notebook. It’s a job that would be impossible without the kindness of strangers along the way, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
Twenty years of reporting from four continents is an awful lot of places and people. If I started writing a list of all those who have helped me it would be as long again as this book.
Some who have helped me most prefer not to be mentioned because of the sensitivities of the areas or regimes where they live. Of those I can name, I would particularly like to thank Bashir Riaz and Benazir Bhutto for literally changing my life; Umer for some very interesting introductions; Akbar Ahmed for always patiently sharing his great knowledge of Islam; Hamid Karzai and Zia Mojadeddi for teaching me about the Pashtun tribes; the Arbab family for their hospitality and insights on Pakistan’s tribal areas; Kabul Bob for wine and wisdom; Mike and Brian for incredible adventures; Fredi and Rita Ruf for their kindness in Zimbabwe; and Major Paul Blair and C Company of 3 Para for keeping me alive.
Small Wars Permitting Page 39