The Duel (23 page)

The next day, General Ahmad, accompanied by Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, was summoned to the State Department to receive the notorious ultimatum from Richard Armitage revealed by Musharraf in Washington to promote his memoir: either you’re with us or you’re against us, and “we’ll bomb you into the Stone Age” if you resist. Musharraf was insistent that the threat had been made. Bush was sure that those words would not have been used. Ahmad and Armitage denied it had been said at their meeting. Musharraf then claimed he had other sources of information. Clearly something had been said, but had Musharraf exaggerated to impress his corps commanders that there was no option but to do Washington’s bidding, or was it a simple ploy to increase sales of his book? Maleeha Lodhi’s account of the meeting was altogether more diplomatic, as befitted her status:

“The two of them were very tense,” Ms. Lodhi said of Mr. Armitage and General Ahmad. “Armitage started out by saying: ‘This is a grave moment. History begins today for the United States. We’re
asking all our friends— you’re not the only country we’re speaking to—we’re asking people whether they’re with us or against us.’”
*

The next day, the couple were sent for again, and Armitage handed the ISI boss a seven-point list of U.S. requirements from Pakistan for waging the coming war in Afghanistan. Without even looking closely at the printed sheet, Mahmud Ahmad put it in his pocket and said that he accepted everything. As some of the demands affected Pakistan’s sovereignty, even Richard Armitage was taken aback and asked the ISI boss whether he needed to consult with General Musharraf before making any commitments. “Not necessary,” replied General Ahmad. “He will agree with me.” Ahmad’s strong antipathy to the United States was hardly a secret. He was evidently in a hurry to get back home and convince his colleagues not to accept any of the demands. These were later published in
The 9/11 Commission Report
:

1. Stop Al Qaeda operatives at its border and end all logistical support for bin Laden.

2. Give the United States blanket overflight and landing rights for all necessary military and intelligence operations.

3. Provide territorial access to U.S. and allied military intelligence and other personnel to conduct operations against Al Qaeda.

4. Provide the United States with intelligence information.

5. Continue to publicly condemn the terrorist attacks.

6. Cut off all shipments of fuel to the Taliban and stop recruits from going to Afghanistan.

7. If the evidence implicated bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and the Taliban continued to harbor them, to break relations with the Taliban government.

This was a direct challenge to Pakistan’s sovereignty, reducing it to the status of Britain. Musharraf later denied that he had agreed to the second and third points, but that was certainly not the view in Washington.
Colin Powell informed the National Security Council that the Pakistanis had agreed to everything. What was not in the seven points but had been demanded in secret discussions was U.S. access to the nuclear facility. This Musharraf could not and did not accept, hence the endless campaign in the U.S. and European media on the jihadi “threat” to the weapons.

The Pakistani generals were faced with a difficult choice after September 11. If they did not agree to U.S. demands, Washington might follow the Israeli example and make an anti-Muslim pact with the religious extremists ruling India at the time. But if they kowtowed, the results could be catastrophic, given that Pakistani intelligence (ISI) had been funding fundamentalist groups in Pakistan since the Zia years (1977–88). Musharraf, backed by most of his generals, decided that it was necessary to withdraw from Kabul, to persuade his supporters in the Taliban not to resist U.S. occupation, and to open up Pakistan’s military and air force bases to the United States. From these bases, the U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan was mounted in October 2001.

In truth, Musharraf did not always cooperate or accept every demand. He also had a sense of humor. Why otherwise would he have decided to attend the Non-Aligned Conference in Havana timed to open on September 11, 2006? At a meeting with Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, Musharraf offered this advice: “You are far too aggressive with the Americans. Do as I do. Accept what they say and then do as you want.”

M
EANWHILE, 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 come 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.