TARIQ, ali - The Duel

by Ali, Tariq

  MEANWHILE, THE embittered ISI chief and a colleague were dispatched to Kabul to inform the Taliban that war was coming unless they handed the Al Qaeda leadership over to Pakistan. Whatever happened, the Taliban were not to resist the occupation, but pack their bags, make themselves scarce, and disappear. All Pakistan military and air force personnel in Afghanistan were recalled. The impulsive Mahmud Ahmad did transmit this message, but added his own footnote. He told Mullah Omar that he disagreed with the command and thought the Taliban should fight back. Immediately on his return to Islamabad, Ahmad was fired, and more pliant officers were sent to talk the Taliban out of any crazed attempt to resist U.S. military power. Most of the leadership did as asked and agreed to bide their time. Mullah Omar chose to tie his fate to that of his honored Al Qaeda guest, and when last seen, this veteran of the anti-Soviet war, half lame and half blind, was on a motorbike heading for the mountains to make his great escape. Unlike Steve McQueen in the movie, the mullah is still at large. All the high-tech surveillance devices have so far not succeeded in tracking him down.

  Musharraf’s unstinting support for the U.S. after 9/11 prompted local wags to dub him Busharraf, and in March 2005 Condoleezza Rice described the U.S.-Pakistan relationship since 9/11 as “broad and deep.” Had Musharraf not, after all, unraveled Pakistan’s one military victory to please Washington? He would always insist that he only agreed to become Washington’s surrogate because of State Department honcho Richard Armitage’s Stone Age threat. What really worried Islamabad, however, was a threat Musharraf doesn’t mention: if Pakistan had refused, the United States would have used the Indian bases that were on offer.

  This decision almost cost Musharraf his life. The victory in Afghanistan had struck a deep chord among the more conservative sections of the army. Ever since the war against East Bengal, soldiers had been heavily indoctrinated with anti-Hindu propaganda. The Hindus were the enemy. They would destroy Pakistan at the first opportunity. Coupled to this was the Islamization within the army pushed through by Zia especially during the jihad against the Soviet army next door. To accept a U.S. occupation of a Muslim state that they had helped set up was too much for some of the officers. For some soldiers too it was a shameful defeat. At an open GHQ seminar headed “Fall of the Taliban,” the now retired ISI brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, who had been invited as a participant, walked in and added the word Government after Taliban. He would not accept that it was all over. Nor was he wrong. Jihadi militants, helped by information from within the army, had decided to kill Musharraf. They felt betrayed. Their logic was simple: if it had been right to wage jihad against the Soviet infidels, why did the same not apply to the American infidels? The textbooks from the University of Nebraska had left a mark.

  When Musharraf seized power in 1999, he had refused to move from his homely, colonial bungalow in Rawalpindi to the kitsch comfort of the President’s House in Islamabad, which with its gilt furniture and tasteless decor owes more to Gulf State opulence than local tradition. The cities are close to each other, but far from identical. Islamabad, laid out in a grid pattern and overlooked by the Himalayan foothills, was built in the 1960s by General Ayub. He wanted a new capital remote from threatening crowds, but close to GHQ in Rawalpindi, which had been constructed by the British as a garrison town. After partition, it became the obvious place to situate the military headquarters of the new Pakistan.

  One of the nineteenth-century British colonial expeditions to conquer Afghanistan (they all ended in disaster) was planned in Rawalpindi. From here, a century and a half later, the Washington-blessed jihad was launched against the hopeless Afghan Communists. From here, the U.S. demand to use Pakistan as a base for its operations in Afghanistan was discussed and agreed upon in September 2001.

  For a short while after the U.S. occupation of Kabul, a misleading calm prevailed in Pakistan. I had predicted a rapid defeat of the Taliban, since that is what GHQ had decided, and suggested that the jihadi groups would regroup in Pakistan and, sooner or later, start punishing General Musharraf’s regime. This began in 2002. An unreported attempt to kill Musharraf was followed by three big hits: the kidnapping and brutal murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl; the assassination of the interior minister’s brother; and the bombing of a church in the heart of Islamabad’s tightly protected diplomatic enclave. In addition, targeted assassinations of middle-class professionals took place in Karachi. Over a dozen doctors belonging to the Shia minority were killed. These acts were a warning to Pakistan’s military ruler: if you go too far in accommodating Washington, your head will also roll.

  Were all these acts of terrorism actually carried out by hard-line groups such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Harkatul Ansar, who often claim them? Probably, but this is not an entirely coherent assertion. These organizations were, after all, funded and armed by the state as late as the Kargil war. Turn them upside down and the rational kernel is revealed. It is the ISI whose blatant manipulation of these groups has been obvious to everyone in the country for a long time. Those sections of the ISI who patronized and funded these organizations were livid at “the betrayal of the Taliban.”

  Unless this is appreciated, the random and selective terrorism that shook the country after the fall of the Taliban becomes inexplicable. Musharraf, like Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, inherited Zia’s ISI, whose size and budget had massively expanded during the first Afghan war. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s statement of March 3, 2002, exonerating the ISI from any responsibility for Pearl’s disappearance and murder shocked many Pakistanis. Virtually everyone I spoke to in Pakistan at the time stated the exact opposite. Musharraf was obviously not involved, but he must have been informed of what was taking place. He had referred to Pearl as an “overintrusive journalist” caught up in “intelligence games,” an indication that Musharraf did know something. Had he informed his bosses in Washington? And if so, why did Powell absolve the ISI? Pearl was lured to a fashionable restaurant in Karachi, kidnapped, then executed by his captors. A video showing Pearl’s throat being slit was distributed to the Western media, and a gruesome clip was shown on CBS News.

  The Pearl tragedy had shed some light on the darker recesses of the intelligence networks. He was a tough-minded, investigative (as opposed to embedded) journalist with a deep regard for the truth. While he showed little interest in political or social theories or ideologies, he was sensitive to the moral and human costs of their implementation. This applied as much to the “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo as to clerical misrule in Iran, though his reports from Iran never followed the official Washington line. Some of his best pieces in the Wall Street Journal were reasoned and eloquent rejections of state propaganda, including U.S. propaganda about Kosovo used to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia. He proved that the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory—bombed on Bill Clinton’s orders to distract attention from the Lewinsky affair—was exactly that and not a shady installation producing biological and chemical weapons as alleged by the White House.

  When Pearl’s death was announced, I remember thinking that the official U.S. response was rather subdued. What if the victim had been Thomas Friedman of the New York Times? Would Pervez Musharraf have been able to describe Friedman at a Washington press conference as “too intrusive,” which is what he said about Pearl? It was as if Pearl had connived in his own murder. The brother of Pakistan’s interior minister had been killed by an Islamist group a few weeks before Pearl. When, during a private meeting, the minister muttered something about Pearl bringing it on himself, a friend Pearl’s widow had brought with her asked, “With all due respect, Mr. Minister, would you blame your brother for having been murdered just because he was driving the streets of Karachi?”

  Pearl’s journalism was sorely missed in the run-up to the Iraq war when propaganda flooded the television networks and the “paper of record” had become almost as uncritical and unquestioning as the Pakistani media had once been under General Zia’s dictatorship. There was no mystery as to why Pearl had c
ome to Pakistan in the first place; obviously to track the big story, to see if he could uncover the links between the intelligence services and indigenous terrorism. His newspaper—and indeed the State Department—were remarkably coy on this subject, refusing to disclose the leads that Pearl was pursuing. Contrary to stories that were circulated later, Daniel Pearl was a cautious journalist. His wife, Mariane, detailed the memos he sent to his paper, arguing that they should train and protect journalists reporting from danger zones.* They were ignored. Pearl refused to go to Afghanistan—the situation was too insecure—but he also knew that the real story was in Pakistan. He decided to investigate the links between Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, and Islamist groups in Pakistan. This was presumably what Musharraf thought “too intrusive.” Pakistani officials more than once told Mariane that if Pearl had behaved like other foreign journalists, the tragedy might have been averted. Neither she nor the FBI experts who flew to Pakistan were able to decipher Pearl’s notes, written in code and describing, one assumes, what he found out.

  Any Western journalist, however friendly, who visits Pakistan is routinely watched and followed. This is an old intelligence habit, an article of faith, dating back to the country’s founding (and before), and it goes on even when elected governments are in power. In the wake of the Afghan war the intelligence agencies became overstocked with cheap labor. The notion that Danny Pearl, beavering away on his own, setting up contacts with members of extremist groups, was not at the same time being carefully monitored by the secret services is incredible. In fact, it is unbelievable. And nobody in Pakistan believed it at the time or does now.

  Circumstantial evidence suggested the involvement of the intelligence agencies in Pearl’s death. There was no direct proof, but it was no secret in Pakistan that Omar Saeed Sheikh, the psychopath who set up the kidnapping, had intelligence connections. In 1994, ISI-spawned Islamist groups had infiltrated him into Kashmir. A specialist in kidnapping foreigners and keeping them as hostages, he masterminded an action of this kind in Delhi to secure the release from Tihar jail of Masood Azhar, leader of an Islamist group. The kidnapping succeeded, but so did Indian intelligence: after a shoot-out, Sheikh was captured. He slapped the senior police officer who arrested him and was beaten up in return. Five years later, in December 1999, his colleagues hijacked an Indian airliner on its way to Kandahar and threatened to kill everyone on board unless Sheikh and other “liberation fighters” were freed. They were.

  What drove a Sylvester Stallone fan, born in East London in 1973, to become a religious fanatic? His parents had emigrated to Britain in 1968 with enough capital to establish a small garment business. Perfect Fashions did well enough for Omar to be sent to prep school. But his fondness for drink and thuggery worried his parents, who sent him back to the Land of the Pure. He didn’t last long at Aitchison College, a top private school in Lahore: after a couple of years, he was expelled for “bullying.” A contemporary described him to me as having had “strong psychopathic tendencies... even then,” and said he was always threatening to kill other boys. He returned to London and was sent to school at Snaresbrook, where he was a contemporary of Nasser Hussain, the future England cricket captain. Omar was a keen chess player and arm wrestler, ever eager to demonstrate the latter skill in local pubs.

  He did well at Snaresbrook and went to study statistics at the London School of Economics. A number of active Islamist groups were on campus, and Bosnia became their cause. The involvement of Western intellectuals in Bosnia has been well publicized, usually by themselves. Less well documented is that remnants of the Afghan mujahideen, including some of Osama’s men, had been taken in U.S. transport planes to fight the holy war in the Balkans. In 1993, Sheikh went to Bosnia as part of a group of Muslim students from the LSE taking medicines and supplies to victims of the civil war. Here, he first established contact with the armed-struggle Islamist groups who converted him to their version of jihad. General Musharraf later claimed that Sheikh was a double agent who had been recruited by MI6 and sent to Bosnia. By January 2002 he was in Islamabad promising Daniel Pearl a much-sought-after interview with the clerical godfather of the shoe bomber.

  Many questions about Pearl’s death remain unanswered. The group that kidnapped and killed Pearl supposedly called itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. One of its demands—the release of the Guantánamo prisoners—was obvious, but the second was extraordinary: the delivery of F-16s, which the United States had been paid for but had not delivered, to Pakistan. A jihadi group that supposedly regards the Musharraf regime as traitorous for selling out the Taliban endorsing a twenty-year-old demand of the military and state bureaucracy? Impossible.

  Sheikh surrendered to the provincial home secretary (a former ISI officer) in Lahore on February 5, 2002. Officially he was arrested in Lahore a week later. None of these matters was raised at his trial in a closed court in Hyderabad in July 2002. He was sentenced to death, his fellow conspirators to life imprisonment. Both sides appealed, Sheikh against the death sentence, the state against the sentence of life imprisonment—rather than hanging—for the other three. Sheikh wrote a statement that was read out by his lawyer: “We’ll see who will die first, me or the authorities who have arranged the death sentence for me. Musharraf should know that Almighty Allah is there and can get his revenge.” The three attempts on Musharraf’s life, two of which took place within a fortnight and one of which came close to success, indicated that Sheikh wasn’t making an empty boast.

  Heavy traffic often makes the ten-mile journey from Islamabad to Rawalpindi tortuous, unless you’re the president and the highway has been cleared by a security detail. Even then, carefully orchestrated assassination attempts can play havoc with the schedule. The first happened on December 14, 2003. Moments after the general’s motorcade passed over a bridge, a powerful bomb exploded and badly damaged the bridge, although no one was hurt. The armored limo, fitted with radar and an antibomb device, courtesy of the Pentagon, saved Musharraf’s life. His demeanor at the time surprised observers. He was said to have been calm and cheerful, making jocular allusions to living in perilous times. Unsurprisingly, security had been high—decoys, last-minute route changes, etc.—but this didn’t prevent another attempt a week later, on Christmas Day. This time two men driving cars loaded with explosives came close to success. The president’s car was damaged, guards in cars escorting him were killed, but Musharraf was unhurt. Since his exact route and the time of his departure from Islamabad were heavily guarded secrets, the terrorists must have had inside information. If your security staff includes angry Islamists who see you as a traitor and want to blow you up, then, as the general states in his memoir, Allah alone can protect you. He has certainly been kind to Musharraf.

  The culprits were discovered and tortured till they revealed details of the plot. Some junior military officers were also implicated. The key plotters were tried in secret and hanged. Amjad Farooqi, the supposed mastermind and a jihadi extremist, was shot dead by security forces. Two questions haunt both Washington and Musharraf’s colleagues: How many of those involved remained undetected, and would the command structure of the army survive if a terrorist succeeded next time around? Musharraf didn’t seem worried and adopted a jaunty, even boastful tone. Before 9/11 he was treated like a pariah abroad and beset by problems at home. How to fortify the will of a high command weakened by piety and corruption? How to deal with the corruption and embezzlement that had been a dominant feature of both the Sharif and Bhutto governments? Benazir Bhutto was already in self-exile in Dubai; the Sharif brothers had been arrested and Nawaz was charged with high treason. Washington rapidly organized an offer of asylum from Saudi Arabia, a state whose ruling family has institutionalized the theft of public funds. These questions soon disappeared from the agenda as the Chief Executive of Pakistan, a title more in keeping with the spirit of the age and preferable to the old-fashioned Chief Martial Law Administrator, began to settle down, adjust to the realities
of elite existence, and prepare to make himself president.

  As for Omar Saeed Sheikh, who could certainly reveal a great deal, he continues to live in a death cell in a Pakistani prison, chatting amiably to his guards and e-mailing newspaper editors in Pakistan to tell them that if he is executed, papers he has left behind will be published exposing the complicity of others. Perhaps this is a bluff, or perhaps he was a triple agent and was working for the ISI as well.

  What the Pearl killing revealed was that Musharraf had not yet succeeded in establishing total control over the intelligence agencies. He would only do so after the attempts on his own life. General Ashfaq Kayani, another senior officer trained in the United States, was appointed director general of the ISI. He supervised the gathering of information that led to the capture of those in the army who had helped Musharraf’s would-be assassins. Kayani was promoted to chief of army staff, replacing Musharraf in November 2007. In a dispatch from Carlotta Gall on January 7, 2008, the New York Times reflected the tremor of excitement felt in Washington:

  “He’s loyal to Musharraf to the point where Musharraf is a liability and no longer an asset to the corporate body of the Pakistani military,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. and White House official who is an expert on Pakistan. “They will say: ‘Thank you very much for your interest in security affairs. Here is your ticket out of the country.’”

  As he has risen through the military, General Kayani has impressed American military and intelligence officials as a professional, pro-Western moderate with few political ambitions.

  Musharraf had been described in similar language ten years previously, but now his allies were not pleased. The foreign policy half of the apple was beginning to shrivel, but what of the other half? The Chaudhrys were permanently reaping the harvest of power. Musharraf’s favorite prime minister, Shaukat “Shortcut” Aziz, formerly a senior executive of Citibank with close ties to the eighth-richest man in the world, the Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal, was spouting a great deal of nonsense. The model preferred by some Western commentators on permanent military rule with technocrats running the Finance Ministry has proved a total failure. Watching Aziz flattering the Chaudhrys with wild assertions of their genius in what passes for a parliament in Islamabad reminded one of a paid piper rather than an “impartial technocrat.” One wondered what had recommended him in the first place. Whose choice was he? As it became clear that nothing much was going to change, a wave of cynicism engulfed the country.