The Duel (25 page)

A
RRANGED MARRIAGES CAN BE A MESSY BUSINESS
. D
ESIGNED
principally as a means of accumulating wealth, circumventing undesirable flirtations, or transcending clandestine love affairs, they often don’t work. Where both parties are known to loathe each other, only a rash parent, desensitized by the thought of short-term gain, will continue with the marriage knowing full well that it will end in misery and possibly violence. Occasionally the husband’s side will agree to a wedding, pocket the dowry, and burn the bride. That this is equally true in political life became clear in the ill-fated attempt by Washington to tie Benazir Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf.

The single, strong parent in this case was a desperate State Department—with John Negroponte as the ghoulish go-between and British prime minister Gordon Brown as the blushing bridesmaid—fearful that if it did not push this through, both parties might soon be too old for recycling. The bride was certainly in a hurry, the groom less so. Brokers from both sides engaged in lengthy negotiations on the size of the dowry. Her broker was Rehman Malik, a former boss of Pakistan’s FBI-equivalent FIA (Federal Investigation Agency), who was himself investigated for corruption by the National Accountability Bureau and served nearly a year in prison after Benazir’s fall in 1996, then became one of her business partners and is currently under investigation (with
her) by a Spanish court looking into a company called Petroline FZC, which made questionable payments to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Documents, if genuine, show that she chaired the company. She may have been in a hurry, but she did not wish to be seen taking the arm of a uniformed president. He was not prepared to forgive her past. The couple’s distaste for each other yielded to a mutual dependence on the United States. Neither party could say no, though Musharraf hoped the union could be effected inconspicuously. Fat chance.

Both parties made concessions. A popular opposition demand had been that Musharraf relinquish his military post before he stood for the presidency. Bhutto now agreed that he could take off his uniform after his “reelection” by the existing parliament, but it had to be before the next general election. (He did so, leaving himself dependent on the goodwill of his successor as army chief of staff.) He pushed through a legal ruling—yet another sordid first in the country’s history—known as the National Reconciliation Ordinance, which withdrew all cases pending against politicians (these included Nawaz Sharif) accused of looting the national treasury. The ruling was crucial for Bhutto since she hoped that the money-laundering and corruption cases pending against her, her husband, and her fixer Iftikhar Malik in three European courts—Barcelona, Geneva, and London—would now be dismissed. The Spanish obliged, but the Swiss remain adamant and London bowed to the wishes of the Pakistani government.

Many Pakistanis—not just the mutinous and mischievous types who have to be locked up at regular intervals—were repelled, and coverage of “the deal” in the Pakistani media was universally hostile, except on state television. The “breakthrough” was loudly trumpeted in the West, however, and a whitewashed Benazir Bhutto was presented on U.S. networks and BBC TV news as the champion of Pakistani democracy—reporters loyally referred to her as “the former prime minister” rather than the fugitive politician facing corruption charges in several countries.

She had returned the favor in advance by expressing sympathy for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, lunching with the Israeli ambassador to the UN (a litmus test), and pledging to “wipe out terrorism” in her own country. In 1979, a previous military dictator had bumped
off her father with Washington’s approval, and perhaps she thought it would be safer to seek permanent shelter underneath the imperial umbrella. HarperCollins had paid her half a million dollars to write a new book. The working title she chose was
Reconciliation
. It was published posthumously and contained little that had not already been said by commentators on Islam, the types who appear on the approved list of Daniel Pipes and the Campus Watch folk. The real struggle was not between the world of Islam and the United States, but within Islam itself. Moderate Islam, as represented no doubt by herself, Hamid Karzai, Hosni Mubarak, and other modernists, did not pose a threat to any Western values. Nor does the Koran. Nor do most Muslims. Evil extremism had to be destroyed.
*
Like Musharraf’s predecessors, he promised he would stay in power for a limited period, pledging in 2003 to resign as army chief of staff in 2004. Like his predecessors, he ignored his pledge. Martial law always begins with the promise of a new order that will sweep away the filth and corruption that marked the old one. In this case it toppled the civilian administrations of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. But “new orders” are not forward movements, more military detours that further weaken the shaky foundations of a country and its institutions. Within a decade the uniformed ruler will be overtaken by a new upheaval.

Dreaming of her glory days in the last century, Benazir wanted a large reception on her return. The general was unhappy. The intelligence agencies (as well as her own security advisers) warned her of the dangers. She had declared war on the terrorists, and they had threatened to kill her. But she was adamant. She wanted to demonstrate her popularity to the world and to her political rivals, including those inside her own fiefdom, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). She had been living in self-exile in Dubai since 1996, occasionally
visiting London to shop and Washington to meet her contacts in the State Department. For a whole month before she boarded the Dubai-Karachi flight, the PPP busily recruited and paid volunteers from all over the country to welcome her. Up to two hundred thousand people lined the streets, but it was a far cry from the million who turned up in Lahore in 1986 when a very different Benazir had returned to challenge General Zia-ul-Haq. The plan had been to move slowly in the Bhuttomobile from Karachi airport to the tomb of the country’s founder, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, where she would make a speech. It was not to be. As darkness fell, the bombers struck. Who they were and who sent them remains a mystery. She was unhurt, but 130 people died, including some of the policemen guarding her. The wedding reception had led to mayhem. Fingers were immediately pointed at jihadi groups in Pakistan, but the leader of the most prominent of these, Baitullah Masood, denied involvement. She herself singled out rogue elements from “within the government” and ex-military officers linked to the Taliban.

The general, while promising to collaborate with Benazir, was coolly making arrangements to prolong his stay at President’s House. Even before her arrival, he had considered taking drastic action by imposing a state of emergency to dodge the obstacles that stood in his way, but his generals (and the U.S. embassy) seemed unconvinced by the timing. The bombing of Benazir’s cavalcade reopened the debate. Pakistan, if not exactly the erupting volcano portrayed in the Western media, was being shaken by all sorts of explosions. The legal profession, up in arms at Musharraf’s recent dismissal of the chief justice, had won a temporary victory, resulting in a fiercely independent Supreme Court. The independent TV networks continued to broadcast reports that challenged official propaganda. Investigative journalism is never popular with governments, and the general often contrasted the deference with which he was treated by the U.S. networks and BBC television with the “unruly” questioning inflicted on him by local journalists: it “misled the people.” He had loved the coverage his book received in the United States and, in particular, his appearance with Jon Stewart on
The Daily Show
.

At home it was very different. He had become obsessed with the
media coverage of the lawyers’ revolt. A decline in his popularity had increased the paranoia. His advisers were people he had promoted. Generals who had expressed divergent opinions in what he referred to as “frank and informal get-togethers” had been retired. His political allies were worried that their opportunities to enrich themselves even further would be curtailed if they had to share power with Benazir.

What if the Supreme Court now declared his reelection by a dying and unrepresentative assembly illegal? To ward off disaster, the ISI had been preparing blackmail flicks: agents secretly filmed some of the Supreme Court judges in flagrante. But so unpopular had Musharraf become that even the sight of judicial venerables in bed might not have done the trick. It might even have increased their support.
*
Musharraf decided that blackmail wasn’t worth the risk. Only firm action could “restore order”—i.e., save his skin. The usual treatment in these cases is a declaration of martial law. But what if the country is already being governed by the army chief of staff? The solution is simple. Treble the dose. Organize a coup within a coup. That is what Musharraf decided to do. Washington was informed a few weeks in advance, Downing Street somewhat later. Benazir’s patrons in the West told her what was about to happen, and she, foolishly for a political leader who has just returned to her country, evacuated to Dubai.

On November 3, 2007, Musharraf, as chief of the army, suspended the 1973 constitution and imposed a state of emergency: all nongovernment TV channels were taken off the air, the mobile phone networks were jammed, paramilitary units surrounded the Supreme Court. The chief justice convened an emergency bench of judges, who—heroically—declared the new dispensation “illegal and unconstitutional.” They were unceremoniously removed and put under house arrest. Pakistan’s judges have usually been acquiescent. Those who in the past resisted military leaders were soon bullied out of it, so
the decision of this chief justice took the country by surprise and won him great admiration. Global media coverage of Pakistan suggests a country of generals, corrupt politicians, and bearded lunatics; the struggle to reinstate the chief justice had presented a different picture.

Aitzaz Ahsan, a prominent member of the PPP, minister of the interior in Benazir’s first government, and currently president of the Bar Association, was arrested and placed in solitary confinement. Several thousand political and civil rights activists were picked up. The former cricket hero, Imran Khan, a fierce and incorruptible opponent of the regime, was arrested, charged with “state terrorism”—for which the penalty is death or life imprisonment—and taken in handcuffs to a remote high-security prison. Musharraf, Khan argued, had begun yet another shabby chapter in Pakistan’s history.

Lawyers were arrested all over the country; many were physically attacked by policemen. The order was to humiliate them, and the police obliged. A lawyer, “Omar,” circulated an account of what happened:

While I was standing talking to my colleagues, we saw the police go wild on the orders of a superior officer. In riot gear . . . brandishing weapons and sticks, about a hundred policemen attacked us . . . and seemed intensely happy at doing so. We all ran. Some of us who were not as nimble on their feet as others were caught by the police and beaten mercilessly. We were then locked in police vans used to transport convicted prisoners. Everyone was stunned at this show of brute force but it did not end. The police went on mayhem inside the court premises and court buildings. . . . Those of us who were arrested were taken to various police stations and put in lockups. At midnight, we were told that we were being shifted to jail. We could not get bail as our fundamental rights were suspended. Sixty lawyers were put into a police van ten feet by four feet wide and five feet in height. We were squashed like sardines. When the van reached the jail, we were told that we could not get [out] until orders of our detention were received by the jail authorities. Our older colleagues started to suffocate, some fainted, others started to panic because of claustrophobia. The police ignored our screams and refused to open the van doors. Finally, after three hours . . . we were let out and
taken to mosquito-infected barracks where the food given to us smelled like sewage water.

Geo, the largest Pakistani TV network, had long since located its broadcasting facilities in Dubai. It was a strange sensation watching the network in London when the screens were blank in Pakistan. On the first day of the emergency I saw Hamid Mir, a journalist loathed by the general, reporting from Islamabad and asserting that the U.S. embassy had given the green light to the coup because it regarded the chief justice as a nuisance and wrongly believed him to be “a Taliban sympathizer.” Certainly no U.S. spokesperson or State Department adjunct in the Foreign Office criticized the dismissal of the eight Supreme Court judges or their arrest: that was the quid pro quo for Washington’s insistence that Musharraf take off his uniform. If he was going to turn civilian, he wanted all the other rules twisted in his favor. A newly appointed stooge Supreme Court would soon help him with the rule-bending. As would the authorities in Dubai, who helpfully suspended Geo’s facilities. Benazir Bhutto too, in the first few days after the state of emergency was declared, maintained an opportunist silence on the judiciary.

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: