TARIQ, ali - The Duel

by Ali, Tariq

  In the evening of that first day, and after several delays, a flustered General Musharraf, his hair badly dyed, appeared on TV, trying to look like the sort of leader who wants it understood that the political crisis is to be discussed with gravity and sangfroid. Instead, he came across as an inarticulate dictator fearful for his own political future. His performance as he broadcast to the nation, first in Urdu and then in English, was incoherent. The gist was simple: he had to act because the Supreme Court had “so demoralized our state agencies that we can’t fight the war on terror” and the TV networks had become “totally irresponsible.” “I have imposed emergency,” he said halfway through his diatribe, adding, with a contemptuous gesture, “You must have seen it on TV.” Was he being sarcastic, given that most channels had been shut down? Who knows? Mohammed Hanif, the sharp-witted head of the BBC’s Urdu Service, which monitored the broadcast, confessed himself flummoxed when he wrote up what he heard. He had no doubt that the Urdu version of the speech was the general’s own work. Hanif’s deconstruction—he quoted the general in Urdu and in English—deserved a broadcast all of its own:

  Here are some random things he said. And trust me, these things were said quite randomly. Yes, he did say, “Extremism bahut extreme ho gaya hai [extremism has become too extreme]. . . . Nobody is scared of us anymore. . . . Islamabad is full of extremists. . . . There is a government within government.... Officials are being asked to the courts.... Officials are being insulted by the judiciary.”

  At one point he appeared wistful when reminiscing about his first three years in power: “I had total control.” You were almost tempted to ask: “What happened then, uncle?” But obviously, uncle didn’t need any prompting. He launched into his routine about three stages of democracy. He claimed he was about to launch the third and final phase of democracy (the way he said it, he managed to make it sound like the Final Solution). And just when you thought he was about to make his point, he took an abrupt turn and plunged into a deep pool of self-pity. This involved a long-winded anecdote about how the Supreme Court judges would rather attend a colleague’s daughter’s wedding than just get it over with and decide that he is a constitutional president. . . . I have heard some dictators’ speeches in my life, but nobody has gone so far as to mention someone’s daughter’s wedding as a reason for imposing martial law on the country.

  When for the last few minutes of his speech he addressed his audience in the West in English, I suddenly felt a deep sense of humiliation. This part of his speech was scripted. Sentences began and ended. I felt humiliated that my president not only thinks that we are not evolved enough for things like democracy and human rights, but that we can’t even handle proper syntax and grammar.

  The English-language version put the emphasis on the “war on terror”: Napoléon and Abraham Lincoln, he said, would have done what he did to preserve the “integrity of their country”—the mention of Lincoln was obviously intended for the U.S. market. In Pakistan’s military academies the usual soldier heroes are Napoléon, de Gaulle, and Atatürk.

  What did Benazir, now outmaneuvered, make of the speech as she watched it on TV in her Dubai sanctuary? She first said she was shocked, which was slightly disingenuous. Even if she had not explicitly been told in advance that an emergency would be declared, it was hardly a surprise. U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had already made a token public appeal to Musharraf not to take this course, indicating clearly what lay ahead. Yet for more than twenty-four hours Benazir Bhutto was unable to give a clear response. At one point she even criticized the chief justice for being too provocative.

  Agitated phone calls from Pakistan persuaded her to return immediately to Karachi. To put her in her place, the authorities kept her plane waiting on the tarmac. When she finally reached the VIP lounge, her PPP colleagues told her that unless she denounced the emergency, the party would split. Outsmarted and abandoned by Musharraf, she couldn’t take the risk of losing key figures in her own organization. And so she criticized the emergency and its perpetrator, established contact with the beleaguered opposition, and, as if putting on a new lipstick, declared that she would now lead the struggle to get rid of the dictator. She also tried to call on the chief justice to express her sympathy, but wasn’t allowed near his residence.

  She could have followed the example of her imprisoned colleague Aitzaz Ahsan, a senior minister in both her governments, but she was envious of him: he had become far too popular in Pakistan. He’d even had the nerve to go to Washington without her patronage, where he was politely received by society and inspected as a possible substitute should things go badly wrong. Not a single message had flowed from her BlackBerry to congratulate him on his victories in the struggle to reinstate the chief justice. Ahsan had advised her against any deal with Musharraf. When generals are against the wall, he is reported to have told her, they resort to desperate and irrational measures. Others who offered similar advice in gentler language were also batted away. She was the PPP’s “chairperson for life” and brooked no dissent. That Ahsan had been proved right irritated her even more. Any notion of political morality had long ago been dumped. The very idea of a party with a consistent set of beliefs was regarded as ridiculous and outdated. Ahsan was now safe in prison, far from the madding hordes of Western journalists whom she received in style during the few days she spent under house arrest and afterward. She made a few polite noises about his imprisonment, but nothing more.

  Sensing trouble, Washington dispatched a go-between at short notice to sort out the mess. Negroponte spent time with Musharraf and spoke to Benazir, still insisting that they make up and go through with the deal. She immediately toned down her criticisms, but the general was scathing and said in public that she would never win the elections scheduled for January 2008. Perhaps he thought the ISI would rig them in style as they had done so often in the past. Opinion polls revealed that her old rival Nawaz Sharif was well ahead of her. Musharraf’s hasty pilgrimage to Mecca was no doubt an attempt to secure Saudi mediation in case he had to cut a deal with the Sharif brothers— who had been living in exile in Saudi Arabia—and sideline her completely. The Saudi king insisted that Nawaz Sharif should now be permitted to return to his country. Both sides denied that a deal was done, but Sharif returned to Pakistan soon afterward with Saudi blessings and an armor-plated Cadillac as a special gift from the king. There seemed little doubt that Riyadh would rather have him than Benazir.

  With Pakistan still under a state of emergency and the largest media network refusing to sign the oath of allegiance that would allow them back on air, the vote scheduled for January could only have been a general’s election. It was hardly a secret that the ISI and the civilian bureaucracy would decide who won and where, and because of this some of the opposition parties were considering not contesting the election. Nawaz Sharif told the press that he had in a long telephone call failed to persuade Benazir to join a boycott and thereby render the process null and void from the start. But once he was back in the country, he became less certain. His supporters insisted that their popularity in the Punjab had risen because of their refusal to deal with Musharraf, and a boycott would be counterproductive. Sharif accepted this view.

  What would Benazir do now? Washington’s leverage in Islamabad was limited, which is why they wanted her to be involved in the first place. “It’s always better,” the U.S. ambassador half joked at a reception, “to have two phone numbers in a capital.” That may be so, but they could not guarantee her the prime ministership or even a fair election. In his death cell, three decades previously, her father had mulled over similar problems and come to slightly different conclusions. If I Am Assassinated, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s last will and testament, contained some tart assessments whose meaning wasn’t lost on his colleagues:

  I entirely agree that the people of Pakistan will not tolerate foreign hegemony. On the basis of the self-same logic, the people of Pakistan would never agree to an internal hegemony. The two hegemonies complement ea
ch other. If our people meekly submit to internal hegemony, a priori, they will have to submit to external hegemony. This is so because the strength and power of external hegemony is far greater than that of internal hegemony. If the people are too terrified to resist the weaker force, it is not possible for them to resist the stronger force. The acceptance of or acquiescence in internal hegemony means submission to external hegemony.

  After Bhutto was hanged in April 1979, the text became semisacred among his supporters. But, when in power, Bhutto père had failed to develop any counterhegemonic strategy or institutions, other than the 1973 constitution, drafted by the veteran civil rights lawyer Mahmud Ali Kasuri (whose son Khurshid was until recently Musharraf’s foreign minister). A personality-driven, autocratic style of governance had neutered the spirit of Bhutto’s party, encouraged careerists, and finally paved the way for his enemies. He was the victim of a grave injustice; his death removed all the warts and transformed him into a martyr. More than half the country, mainly the poor, mourned his passing.

  The tragedy led to the PPP’s being treated as a family heirloom, which was unhealthy for both party and country. It provided the Bhuttos with a vote bank and large reserves. But the experience of her father’s trial and death had radicalized and politicized his daughter. She would have preferred, she told me at the time, to be a diplomat. Her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, were in London, having been forbidden to return home by their imprisoned father. The burden of trying to save her father’s life fell on Benazir and her mother, Nusrat, and the courage they exhibited won them the silent respect of a frightened majority. They refused to cave in to General Zia’s military dictatorship, which apart from anything else was invoking Islam to claw back rights won by women in previous decades. Benazir and Nusrat Bhutto were arrested and released several times. Their health began to suffer. Nusrat was allowed to leave the country to seek medical advice in 1982. Benazir was released a little more than a year later, thanks, in part, to U.S. pressure orchestrated by her old Harvard friend Peter Galbraith, who had useful contacts in the State Department. She later described the period in her memoir, Daughter of the East (1988); it included photo captions such as “Shortly after President Reagan praised the regime for making ‘great strides towards democracy,’ Zia’s henchmen gunned down peaceful demonstrators marking Pakistan Independence Day. The police were just as brutal to those protesting at the attack on my jeep in January 1987.”

  Benazir moved to London, where her tiny Barbican flat in the heart of the old city became a center of opposition to the dictatorship, and here we often discussed a campaign to take on the generals. Benazir had built up her position by steadfastly and peacefully resisting the military and replying to every slander with a cutting retort. Her brothers had been operating on a different level. They set up an armed group, alZulfiqar, whose declared aim was to harass and weaken the regime by targeting “traitors who had collaborated with Zia.” The principal volunteers were recruited inside Pakistan, and in 1980 they were provided with a base in Afghanistan, where the pro-Moscow Communists had taken power three years before. It is a sad story with a fair share of factionalism, show trials, petty rivalries, fantasies of every sort, and death for the group’s less-fortunate members.

  In March 1981, Murtaza and Shahnawaz Bhutto were placed on the FIA’s most wanted list. They had hijacked a Pakistan International airliner soon after it left Karachi (a power cut had paralyzed the X-ray machines, enabling the hijackers to take their weapons on board); it was diverted to Kabul. Here Murtaza took over and demanded the release of political prisoners. A young military officer on board the flight was murdered. The plane refueled and went on to Damascus, where the legendary Syrian spymaster General Kholi took charge and ensured there were no more deaths. That American passengers were on the plane was a major consideration for the generals, and for that reason alone the prisoners in Pakistan were released and flown to Tripoli.

  This was seen as a victory and welcomed as such by the PPP in Pakistan. For the first time the group began to be taken seriously. A key target inside the country was Maulvi Mushtaq Hussain, the chief justice of the High Court in Lahore, who had in 1978 sentenced Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to death, and whose behavior in court (among other charges, he had accused Bhutto of “pretending to be a Muslim”—his mother was a Hindu convert) had enraged the entire Bhutto family. Mushtaq was in a friend’s car being driven to his home in Lahore’s Model Town area when al-Zulfiqar gunmen opened fire. The judge survived, but his friend and the driver died.

  The friend was the founding father of the Chaudhrys of Gujrat: Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi, whom we have met earlier in this narrative. It is the next generation of Chaudhrys that currently provides Musharraf with civilian ballast: Zahoor Elahi’s son Shujaat organized the split with Nawaz Sharif and created the splinter PML-Q to ease the growing pains of the new regime. He still fixes political deals and wanted an emergency imposed much earlier to circumvent the deal with Benazir. He was to be the mastermind of the general’s election campaign. His cousin Pervez Elahi was chief minister of the Punjab; the latter’s son, in turn, is busy continuing the family tradition by evicting tenants and buying up all the available land on the edge of Lahore.

  The hijacking meanwhile had annoyed Moscow, and the regime in Afghanistan asked the Bhutto brothers to find another refuge. While in Kabul, they had married two Afghan sisters, Fauzia and Rehana Fasihudin, daughters of a senior official at the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Together with their wives they now left the country and after a sojourn in Syria and possibly Libya ended up in Europe. The reunion with their sister took place on the French Riviera in 1985, a setting well suited to the lifestyles of all three siblings.

  The young men feared General Zia’s agents. Each had a young daughter. Shahnawaz lived in an apartment in Cannes. He had been in charge of the “military apparatus” of al-Zulfiqar, responsible for the purchase of weapons, and life in Kabul had exacted a heavier toll on him. He was edgy and nervous. Relations with his wife were stormy, and he told his sister that he was preparing for a divorce. “There’s never been a divorce in the family. Your marriage wasn’t even an arranged one. . . . You chose to marry Rehana. You must live with it” was Benazir’s revealing reply, according to her memoir. This was to be her own attitude when her husband’s philandering was brought to her notice. Then on July 18, 1985, Shahnawaz was found dead in his apartment. His wife claimed he had taken poison, but according to Benazir, nobody in the family believed her story; there had been violence in the room and his papers had been searched. Rehana looked immaculate, which disturbed the family. She was imprisoned for three months under the Good Samaritan law for not having gone to the assistance of a dying person. After her release she settled in the United States. “Had the CIA killed him as a friendly gesture towards their favourite dictator?” Benazir speculated. She raised another question too: had the sisters become ISI agents? The truth remains hidden. Not long afterward Murtaza divorced Fauzia, but kept custody of their three-year-old daughter, Fatima, and moved to Damascus. Here he had plenty of time for reflection and told friends that too many mistakes had been made in the struggle against the dictatorship. In 1986 he met Ghinwa Itaoui, a young teacher who had fled Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of 1982. She calmed him down and took charge of Fatima’s education. They were married in 1989, and a son, Zulfiqar, was born the following year.

  Benazir returned to Pakistan in 1986 and was greeted by large crowds, nearly a million people in Lahore, who came out to show their affection for her and to demonstrate their anger with the regime. She campaigned all over the country, but felt increasingly that for some of the more religious-minded a young, unmarried woman was not acceptable as a leader. How, for instance, could she visit Saudi Arabia without a husband? An offer of marriage from the Zardari family was accepted, and she married Asif in 1987. The Zardaris were small landowners. The father, Hakim Zardari, had been a supporter of the National Awami Party and owned some cinemas in Karachi. They were
not wealthy but had enough to indulge Asif Zardari’s passion for polo. He loved horses and women and was not interested in politics. Benazir told me that she was slightly nervous that it was an arranged marriage, but was hoping for the best. She had been worried that any husband would find it difficult to deal with the periods of separation her nomadic political life would entail, but this never bothered Zardari, who was perfectly capable of occupying himself.

  A year later General Zia’s plane blew up in midair. In the elections that followed the PPP won the largest number of seats. Benazir became prime minister, but was hemmed in by the army on one side and the president, the army’s favorite bureaucrat, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, on the other. She told me at the time that she felt powerless. Being in power, it seemed, was satisfaction enough. She went on state visits: met and liked Mrs. Thatcher and later, with her new husband in tow, was received politely by the Saudi king. In the meantime, plots were afoot—the opposition was literally buying off some of her MPs—and in August 1990 her government was removed by presidential decree and Zia’s protégés the Sharif brothers were back in power.