Adventures in Correspondentland (26 page)

When I encountered her at an election rally in Lahore, Bhutto came across as a deeply embittered figure, fuming with acid,
whose once-beautiful face was haggard and white like a geisha's. Though still only in her early-40s, the ravages of Pakistani politics had made her look ten years older. No great fan at that time of the BBC, she launched a scolding tirade at what she perceived as our bias when I approached her for an interview. Seemingly, we had been added to an enemies list in her mind that included the president, the army, the ISI and her main election rival, Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League.

Sharif, a podgy-faced industrialist from Lahore – who, like Bhutto, had once been sacked as prime minister following the usual accusations of corruption and misrule – was much more accommodating. As the clear favourite in the election, he was more than happy for us to join him on his helicopter as he launched into a campaign swing that felt like a round-Pakistan whirlwind intended to show the country's topographical and meteorological extremes.

First, we flew into a mountain community in the Swat Valley, where the craggy ledges formed a natural amphitheatre, as Sharif delivered a limp speech met by the local tribesmen with respectful puzzlement. From the bitter cold of the Swat Valley, we headed to the parched farmland of Punjab, where we stepped out of the helicopter into oven-like temperatures and a giant dust storm of our own making.

Next was a massive rally in Rawalpindi, the garrison city on the edge of Islamabad that is the home to the headquarters of the Pakistani Army. Here, a mob of screaming supporters rushed towards our helicopter with such force that for a time we were swept uncontrollably towards its still-whirling tail rotor. (Given the sheer size and passion of crowds on the subcontinent, one of the major regional hazards was of being crushed in a stampede at a political rally or religious festival.)

Finally, we made the short hop to the centre of Islamabad for a fast-breaking iftar supper at the Marriott, where, having observed his Ramadan fast since dawn, Sharif showed considerably more appetite for his plate of biryani than for his day of campaigning.

Fun though it was to fly with Nawaz and joust with Benazir, the main reason I was in Pakistan was to follow Imran Khan, the former cricketer whose newly formed party, the Movement for Justice, was making its political debut. All the fly-in correspondents who descended upon Pakistan arrived hoping to write the story of how a World Cup-winning cricket captain became the leader of his country in one giant leap. Once Pakistan's most flamboyant playboy, Imran was still remembered in Britain as a debonair cricketer, Oxford Blue and late-night fixture at Mayfair nightspots such as Annabel's and Tramp. More recently, the tabloids and celebrity magazines had feasted on his high-society marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, who had converted to Islam and borne the first of their two sons. Now, however, Imran was unrecognisable: devout, humourless and strangely melancholic.

His home in Lahore had the same joyless air throughout the hour or so we spent there, and his young bride, Jemima, looked thoroughly miserable. Less than two years into their troubled marriage, it was clear that she belonged still in
Tatler
rather than in Lahore. Neither did his political career merit the fairy-tale treatment. For all his supporters' fervour – ‘He is still captain, he is still my captain,' yelled one of his fans at microphone-busting volume during a night-time rally in Lahore – Imran was a neophyte. So shambolic was his new party that it had not even organised for him to vote on election day – a political golden duck.

Rather than spend election night with the Imran camp, we set up shop on the lawn of Nawaz Sharif's Lahore mansion.
Sharif was celebrating the biggest landslide since Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in the late-1970s. Not that it meant much. Turnout across the country hovered around a pitiful 30 per cent – an indication of the lamentable health of Pakistani democracy. It was not the sort of mandate that the Pakistani military was likely to respect.

It is worth recalling what happened in the aftermath of the 1997 election, if only to undersore Pakistan's chronic democratic dysfunction. To avoid corruption charges, Benazir went into self-imposed exile in Dubai and London. By this time, her husband, Asif Ali Zardari – who was known as ‘Mr Ten Per Cent' because of the kickbacks he was alleged to have received during her prime ministership – was already in jail. Then, in the way that these things often work out in South Asia, he won election to the Senate from his prison cell in Karachi.

After Benazir returned to Pakistan in 2007 in a bid to regain power, she was assassinated at the same municipal park in Rawalpindi where we had landed in Sharif's helicopter. In the elections that followed, her widowed husband, who had now been released from prison, rode the wave of public sympathy and anger all the way to the presidency of Pakistan.

As for the victor of the 1997 election, Nawaz Sharif soon found himself in a power struggle with the military top brass. This in turn contributed to the rise of a general, little known at that time beyond Pakistan's borders, who was about to become a central figure in the whole post-9/11 story. Back in 1999, during his flunked pop quiz ahead of the New Hampshire primary, George W. Bush had not been able to recall his name. Now, in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington, General Pervez Musharraf became a vital ally.

In a garrison nation where the army had been in the chair for 24 out of the 53 years since independence, there was a certain brazenness in Nawaz Sharif's decision to mount his own personal coup. He seized his chance in October 1999 when he sacked the army's chief of staff, General Musharraf, who was on a brief visit to Sri Lanka, and announced that the head of the ISI, the country's leading spymaster, would take his place.

Musharraf was mid-air on his way back from Colombo when he learnt of his dismissal, and his plane, a commercial airliner with 198 passengers and crew on board, was prevented from touching down at Karachi Airport, where the landing lights were turned off and fire trucks blocked the runway. With fuel fast running out and his fellow passengers in peril, Musharraf was given the option of flying to India. ‘Over my dead body will you go to India,' thundered the general, even though he had actually been born in Delhi. Instead, the pilot started heading to another airfield in Pakistan in the hope of getting clearance to land.

On the ground below, Musharraf's military underlings were already coming to his rescue, and in the time it took for his plane to climb to 20,000 feet the army seized control of Karachi Airport. When a soldier came across air-traffic control to assure Musharraf it was now safe to land, he thought it was a trick and that a Sharif plant was trying to lure him to his death. ‘Can you tell me the names of my dogs?' asked Musharraf, fully expecting to expose the ruse.

‘Dot and Buddy,' came the instant reply.

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.