Descent Into Chaos Read online

  After widespread corruption allegations against Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, became known, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, backed by the army, dismissed Bhutto’s government on August 6, 1990, and ordered general elections. They were to be won by Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan Muslim League. For the next decade Pakistan was on a political and constitutional roller coaster. A ruling “troika” emerged, consisting of the president, the army chief, and the prime minister. The state of tension and jockeying for power among the three never allowed an elected government to consolidate itself. The army played divide-and-rule among the political parties, stunting their development as genuine vehicles for democracy. Both Bhutto and Sharif were twice elected prime minister and both formed governments, only to be twice dismissed by the president at the urging of the army.33 Although the president had the legal power to dismiss the government, it was the constant undermining of the democratic process by the army and the ISI that failed to allow democracy to take root. No elected government ever completed its tenure, and the public was never given the opportunity to dismiss a government through the ballot box.

  Sharif and Bhutto carried on a bitter personal vendetta against each other that stymied issue-related politics and the opportunity to carry out desperately needed economic reforms. The army and the Islamic fundamentalist parties fueled this rivalry and continued to undermine elected governments even as they dominated foreign policy. The uprising in Kashmir against Indian rule through the 1990s allowed the military to sponsor new Islamic militant groups, which in turn trained thousands of Pakistani fighters for both Kashmir and Afghanistan. Pakistan’s foreign policy became associated with jihad against India and support to the Taliban. Relations with the United States deteriorated further, and in 1993 President Clinton placed Pakistan on a watch list of state sponsors of terrorism because of the ISI’s open involvement in training Kashmiri insurgents. The army was forced to remove the ISI chief and relocate its training camps to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

  Nawaz Sharif was elected for a second time in February 1997, after general elections that saw the lowest voter turnout in Pakistan’s history— only 32 percent of voters took part—a clear indication of public frustration at the stagnant political process.34 India and Pakistan became locked in a new rivalry in the spring of 1998, after India carried out nuclear tests. Pakistan responded by testing five nuclear devices on May 27, 1998. However, the government failed to prepare for global sanctions imposed on both countries. Pakistan went bust as its economy and exchange rate went into freefall. Although Pakistan had become a nuclear power, it had neither a stable economy nor a political system to match such responsibilities.

  Sharif tried to improve relations with India but was undermined by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, whom he had recently appointed as the new army chief. In the spring of 1999, Musharraf and a handful of generals secretly deployed troops into Indian Kashmir to occupy mountaintops in the Kargil sector. It was the first time since 1971 that Pakistani troops had violated the sanctity of the Line of Control, or LOC, dividing the two Kashmirs between India and Pakistan.35 Meeting no Indian forces, the Pakistanis advanced until they looked down on a major road to the important town of Leh. The Indians were taken by surprise as the Pakistanis started shelling the road and the town of Kargil. On May 22, Indian forces began to move dozens of heavy guns to Kargil to shell the mountaintops. A conventional but localized war ensued, although there were serious fears that it could escalate into a conventional or even a nuclear conflict.

  Musharraf had calculated that India would never escalate the conflict for fear it could lead to an unsheathing of nuclear weapons. He expected the United States to step in and mediate a cease-fire, after which Pakistan could demand talks on Kashmir. The Pakistanis believed that their nuclear capability would deter any Indian escalation of the conflict. The world was stunned at Musharraf ’s audacious threat of using nuclear weapons as a form of blackmail to settle an international dispute. Moreover, Pakistan was creating a deliberate air of unpredictability about when and how it would use such weapons. Pakistani officials told journalists they had indirectly conveyed to New Delhi that if Indian armored columns were to cross the international border and penetrate deep into Pakistani territory, the army was ready to use battlefield nuclear weapons against them—inside Pakistani territory and despite the possibility of massive Pakistani civilian casualties.

  Musharraf had been easily influenced by a few madcap generals and had not even informed his own high command or the navy and air force of his plan.36 The world swiftly turned against Pakistan, and President Clinton forced Sharif to carry out a humiliating climbdown during the Pakistani prime minister’s visit to Washington on July 4. Pakistan was forced to withdraw its forces and abandon Kargil after suffering some one thousand casualties. According to Bruce Riedel, then a senior director at the National Security Council, Clinton’s swift intervention was necessary because there was “disturbing evidence that the Pakistanis were preparing their nuclear arsenal for possible deployment.” Musharraf subsequently denied that Pakistan planned to use nuclear weapons.37

  Pakistan lost on all counts. Rather than highlighting the Kashmir dispute, Musharraf’s adventurism had ensured that Kashmir was further eclipsed and that India would win the propaganda war. “Its folly [in the war in Kargil] lay in the fact that it committed Pakistan to a battle which it could not, under any circumstances, win. . . . Kargil has done more to obscure the Kashmir issue and damage the cause of the Kashmiri people than anything else in recent memory,” wrote Pakistani columnist Ayaz Amir.38 Kashmiri leaders felt humiliated and betrayed. Pakistan’s actions had undermined their own credibility. However, Musharraf refused to accept failure and promoted all the generals involved in the Kargil debacle.39 Nobody was held accountable. Musharraf claimed that a great victory would have been possible had Sharif not chickened out.40

  Musharraf was now branded by friends and foes alike as a brash, adventurous hardliner mesmerized by the idea of military success against India yet unaware of strategy, diplomacy, or the economic chaos that even a minor war could bring upon Pakistan. The Clinton administration had no doubt that Musharraf was responsible for the incident. “Musharraf . . . bears . . . the lion’s share of the responsibility for Kargil,” said U.S. deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott.41 Islamabad was soon rocked by a blame game as Sharif pointed the finger at Musharraf, while Musharraf insisted that Sharif had been “on board” with all the key decisions regarding Kargil. The ISI began to mobilize the Islamic parties to hold rallies against Sharif.

  At the end of September, Sharif sent his brother Shabaz Sharif and the ISI chief Lt.-Gen. Mohammed Ziauddin, a Sharif loyalist, to Washington, where they told U.S. officials that Musharraf was preparing a coup. The two promised to try to help capture bin Laden if the United States supported Nawaz Sharif, although the CIA knew that Ziauddin did not fully control the ISI.42 Nevertheless, on September 20, the State Department issued a terse statement warning the army not to carry out any unconstitutional act. Musharraf was furious and prepared to launch a countercoup if he was sacked by Sharif. The 111th Brigade of the Tenth Corps, based close to Islamabad—the traditional coup-making unit—was put on fifteen-minutes -readiness notice. Ultimately it was Sharif who moved first.

  On the evening of October 12, 1999, while Musharraf was in the air returning from a trip to Sri Lanka, Sharif dismissed him and appointed Ziauddin as the new army chief. Musharraf’s plane, which was supposed to land in Karachi, was diverted to Nawabshah airport in Sindh province, where the police were waiting to arrest him. The army, however, moved swiftly to defend its chief and preserve its unity, taking control of the country and arresting Sharif, Ziauddin, and some two hundred politicians.43 Musharraf’s plane landed safely at Karachi, from where, in the early hours of the morning, he told the nation on television that Sharif had tried to divide the army.44

  For a decade the army had taken a backseat in political affairs but had pulled the strings without taking responsi
bility for its actions. Now it was back in the driver’s seat. Some Pakistanis were happy to see the end of the Sharif government, which had become increasingly repressive, while others resigned themselves to another long period of military rule. In the West, the coup was viewed with enormous concern. An unstable, nuclear-equipped nation that only six months earlier had almost gone to war with India was now led by a general considered reckless and unpredictable. With the army in control, there was even less chance that Pakistan would go after Osama bin Laden or end its support to the Taliban regime.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Chief Executive’s Schizophrenia Pakistan, the United Nations, and the United States Before 9 /11

  When Musharraf was asked just after the 1999 coup why he had decided to call himself chief executive—an odd title for a military dictator—he gave a surprising reply: “For your [the media’s] consumption—might I say it’s a very palatable name instead of chief martial law administrator, which is draconian in concept and name. I want to give it a civilian façade.”1 Blunt, frank, always in a hurry, sometimes outrageous, but ever defensive of the military’s role, Musharraf was obsessed with his image when he seized power. He wanted to be palatable to everyone, from Islamic fundamentalists to liberals but most of all to the international community. He thought that a title that sounded as though he were the head of a multinational company would hide the reality of his military rule. Whatever he called himself, though, abroad he was treated as an unreliable pariah and a dictator who had nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.

  Musharraf was born in New Delhi in August 1943, the second of three sons. His family moved to Pakistan after Partition in 1947—the trauma of which he describes movingly in his otherwise unreliable autobiography.2 Both his parents were well educated and liberal, a working couple long before such things became the norm. His father joined Pakistan’s foreign service and in 1949 was posted to Turkey, where his mother worked for the United Nations and the entire family learned to speak Turkish. The young Musharraf’s hero was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), the secular founding father of the Turkish republic, and for a time after the coup, Musharraf tried to emulate him.

  He was educated in Christian missionary schools in Karachi and Lahore, where he made lasting friends—some of whom were later to become his advisers. His friends nicknamed him “Gola,” which means “round” or “ball,” because of his pudgy physique. According to his contemporaries, the young Musharraf was not particularly bright—a poor student who never read books—but he loved sports, dancing, dressing up, seeing girls, and riding around on his motorbike.

  At a loss with what to do with himself, he entered the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul in 1961 and was commissioned in the field artillery three years later. “I joined the army because of the glamour,” he said.3 A happy-go-lucky junior officer who partied a lot, he was frequently hauled in for disciplinary charges. He fought in the 1965 war with India and then joined the Special Service Group (SSG), the commando force of the Pakistan army. In the 1971 war, he commanded an SSG unit that went behind Indian lines, and he later became the head of the SSG. He often alluded to his commando training and, after the coup, always met the press in the camouflage uniform and beret of a commando. “He has brilliant tactics but no strategy, and that is what you learn as a commando,” a retired army chief told me. Musharraf later described how he had launched the coup. “I took a fast decision. I keep to Napoleon’s view that two thirds of the decision making process is based on analysis and information and one third is always a leap in the dark.”4

  Musharraf trained at Fort Bragg in the United States and led the SSG in joint exercises with U.S. Special Forces. He later attended a military course in Britain. When Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif appointed him army chief in October 1998, he considered Musharraf a safe bet because as a Muhajir—an Urdu-speaking refugee from India—he did not have the breadth of support in the officer corps, which was dominated by Punjabis and Pashtuns, to become too powerful. Sharif thought Musharraf would do as he was told. Yet within the next twelve months, the impetuous Musharraf was to launch a war in Kargil and mount a coup.

  After the coup, Musharraf held three posts, chief executive of Pakistan, chief of army staff, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. In his first press conference he showed both strength and vulnerability, which initially made him very appealing to the domestic media. “My work and appointments I have made are transparent, my judgments may be wrong but not my intentions. This is not martial law. We will be honest and dynamic so give us a chance,” he appealed to the press.5 He appeared to be personable, charming, and a great talker, as he rarely spoke in public with a text. George Polk, a European technology entrepreneur who sat down to breakfast with Musharraf in 2006, later described him as “a tightly coiled spring” whose chest any moment “would begin to swell, like the Hulk.”6

  Musharraf had had a liberal upbringing, but while training young officers, the army inculcates in them a powerful bias that includes hatred for India, distrust of the United States, contempt for all civilian politicians, and a heightened religiosity and respect for Islamic militants fighting the army’s foreign wars in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Musharraf and his generals were personally liberal, but their worldview and politics remained extremely reactionary. Thus Musharraf could dance at parties and rarely enter a mosque but, at the same time, strongly defend jihad, the Taliban worldview, and the right for militants to cross into Indian Kashmir. After the coup, he stepped up support for Kashmiri militants and the Taliban to show that he was not soft on India. After 9/11, his gregarious nature and bluntness appealed to Western leaders, but they soon realized that he spoke too much, made more commitments than he could realize, and was arrogant.7

  Despite Musharraf’s allegiance to the Taliban and the Kashmiri militants, the mullahs considered Musharraf too secular as an army chief and quite different from Zia ul-Haq. They were appalled when he compared himself to Atatürk, who, in the 1920s, drowned hundreds of Turkish mullahs in the Bosporus Sea. “Musharraf’s knowledge on Islam and madrassas is zero, he has no idea even of what a madrassa looks like or any idea about Islamic education,” Maulana Fazlur Rehman, of the political party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, told me after the coup.8 Added Amir ul-Azim, of the Jamiat-e-Islami, “Musharraf has no roots in the traditions of this country or of Islam.”9 Even though Musharraf personally disliked the extremism of the mullahs, he had no compunction about using militants as an extension of the state’s foreign policy. Before 9/11 he was a vociferous defender of jihad who tried to convince skeptical Western audiences. “There is no question that terrorism and jihad are absolutely different. You in the West are allergic to the term jihad, but jihad is a tolerant concept,” Musharraf said in 2000.10

  After seizing power, Musharraf declared an emergency but did not impose martial law. He suspended the constitution and legislatures, sacked the heads of all political institutions, and restricted the courts from passing any judgments on his actions. He later forced judges of the Supreme Court to swear a new oath of loyalty to the regime. He gave no timetable for the army’s remaining in power. He announced a seven-point agenda to rebuild Pakistan by reviving the economy, improving law and order, and going after loan defaulters and the corrupt.11 The ISI vetted a civilian cabinet that included several well-known businessmen, bankers, and liberal politicians. Shaukat Aziz, favorite nominee of the ISI who had dealt with him extensively in the past, was given the daunting task of reviving a virtually bankrupt exchequer.12

  Liberal figures who joined the cabinet did so believing that this time around the army would rebuild public faith in civil society and carry out long-needed reforms of the bureaucracy, the police, and the judiciary. They expected the army to sow the seeds of genuine democracy and nation building, but they were to be severely disappointed. Military rule at the tail end of the twentieth century was an outdated model for rebuilding a deeply polarized and fractured society. The army could never carry out a reform agenda as long
as it continued to support jihadis and extremist religious groups who carried out the army’s policies toward India and Afghanistan. These same jihadis would become the biggest obstacle to reform and nation building at home.

  In January 2000 the army put Nawaz Sharif and six others on trial, charging them with treason and hijacking an aircraft—charges that carried the death sentence. Sharif looked weak and wan but unrepentant as I chatted with him in a Karachi courtroom full of intelligence officers, lawyers, and family members. He accused Musharraf of “preparing a blueprint for the overthrow of my government.”13 The trial could hardly be considered free and impartial.14 On April 6, 2000, Sharif was found guilty and given two life sentences, but after a year in jail he was sprung by the Saudi royal family, who took him into exile, promising Musharraf that Sharif would not take part in politics for ten years. The country’s three major political leaders were all now in exile: Sharif, Bhutto, and the muhajir leader Altaf Hussain.

  The international community’s main demands from the military regime were to cease support to the Taliban, help deliver bin Laden, and stop aiding Kashmiri militants fighting in Indian Kashmir. There was already deep suspicion running among U.S. congressmen and the media that the regime was a state sponsor of terrorism, suspicion fueled by an effective Indian media campaign that blamed the uprising in Kashmir as entirely a result of Pakistani interference. Thus, in 1999, terrorism was already on the agenda for Musharraf.

  The hijacking of an Indian aircraft in December 1999 appeared to confirm the world’s worst fears. ISI agents appeared to be involved when Harkat ul-Ansar, a Pakistan-based and ISI-backed Kashmiri extremist group, hijacked an Indian Airlines aircraft and flew it to Kandahar. After days of tense negotiation on the tarmac of Kandahar’s decrepit airport, between UN officials and the Taliban, India was forced to release three Kashmiri militants in exchange for the 160 passengers held hostage. U.S. officials privately said that the hijacking had been backed, if not carried out, by the ISI, while India blamed the ISI publicly. The United States and Britain demanded that Pakistan ban Harkat and other extremist groups. Britain’s chief of the Defence staff, Gen. Charles Guthrie, delivered the first of several tough messages to Musharraf in January 2000. “Everything is now up to General Musharraf to convince us that he is taking steps in the right direction, ” Guthrie told me.15