The Longest War (46 page)

Pakistan’s ruler in the years after 9/11 was General Pervez Musharraf. He had come to power following a bloodless military coup in 1999 that ended a decade of civilian rule, which had been characterized by the incompetence and corruption of Pakistan’s elected rulers. For the first years of his tenure as Pakistan’s leader Musharraf was wildly popular, but gradually he managed to alienate much of his country’s population. His first blunder was to rig a 2002 election so that religious parties, in an alliance known as the MMA, did better at the polls than they had ever done in Pakistani history, taking over the North-West Frontier Province. The MMA also did well at the polls in the province of Baluchistan, which is
where Mullah Omar
, the leader of the Taliban, had fled following the fall of his regime. Under Musharraf’s rule,
two out of Pakistan’s four
provinces were now largely controlled by the Islamists of the MMA, who were broadly sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The same year Musharraf also held a rigged referendum, boycotted by all the political parties, that extended his power as president for five years, which did much to damage his earlier reputation as a disinterested patriot rather than a
power-hungry officer
in the mold of other Pakistani military dictators who had preceded him.

On January 12, 2002, Musharraf made an important televised speech to the nation in which he said that Pakistan would no longer tolerate organizations that practiced terrorism in the name of religion. Musharraf
banned the militant Kashmiri groups
Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, both of
which had played a role in a gun battle outside the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi a month earlier in which seven guards died. That attack almost brought Pakistan and India
to the brink of war
again, this time with each side possessing nuclear weapons.

Musharraf’s ratcheting up of the pressure on the militant groups made him the
target of their wrath
. He survived two serious assassination attempts in December 2003 in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. In the first plot, a cell of Pakistani air force personnel bombed Musharraf’s convoy. In the second attempt, members of Pakistan’s elite commando Special Services Group conspired to kill Musharraf using suicide bombers. While military personnel were integrated into the plots, both assassination attempts were masterminded by al-Qaeda or its close affiliate, Jaish-e-Mohammed. And both attacks came three months after al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had for the first time issued a tape
specifically calling for attacks on Musharraf
because of his cooperation with the United States in the “war on terror.”

A symptom of the increasingly visible and vocal role of the militant Islamists in Pakistan that characterized the latter years of Musharraf’s rule was the standoff between his government and radicals based at the
Red Mosque
in Islamabad. In the early months of 2007, the militant imam of the Red Mosque, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, was suddenly a force to be reckoned with in Pakistani politics, as his students were staging a series of violent protests. The proximate cause of their anger was the demolition of several mosques in Islamabad that authorities said had been built without the required authorizations, but their agenda had broader elements, including a demand that Musharraf implement sharia law. Masked students armed with batons visited video store owners in Islamabad and told them to close their businesses, while others destroyed music CDs.

In the early summer of 2007, around the mosque grounds heavily bearded men and younger boys milled about, some armed with AK-47s. Inside the mosque, Ghazi, his face framed by professional gold-rimmed glasses, a bushy salt-and-pepper beard, and a reddish knit cap, explained his views on women. “Females should be educated,” he said, explaining why the two madrassas he managed included, somewhat unusually, a large number of female students. At the time Ghazi’s female charges were staging regular protests against the government, their pictures splashed across newspapers around the world, an army of women clad in black burqas wielding long wooden staves. The extent to which the al-Qaeda ideological virus that justifies suicide operations
had infected even relatively cosmopolitan parts of Pakistan could be seen in Ghazi’s claim that “a lot of people come to us and ask us if it is permitted to do suicide operations.” Asked for clarification on the exact numbers of would-be suicide bombers seeking his counsel, he replied, “Hundreds.”

When asked what would happen if the government tried to use force to take the mosque back from his armed militants, Ghazi said with a smile, “
We will resist
.” And they did.
Ghazi was killed
on July 10, 2007—along with dozens of his supporters—when Pakistani troops stormed his mosque after a weeklong siege.

The soldiers attacked the Red Mosque, which is just a few minutes’ drive from Pakistan’s parliament, after Ghazi’s followers had committed their most brazen act yet: kidnapping six Chinese women in Islamabad from what they said was a brothel. The women were released only after the Chinese
ambassador intervened
with the government, which in turn pressured Ghazi to free the abducted citizens of one of Pakistan’s closest allies.

The bloody siege of the Red Mosque increasingly spread the scourge of militancy from the FATA into the “settled” areas of the North-West Frontier Province and beyond into Pakistan’s Punjabi heartland. And the Red Mosque showdown became both a
rallying cry
for the militants and a pivot point that caused many of the different jihadist groups in Pakistan to turn against their government.

All this mayhem was quite out of character for Islamabad, which has a well-deserved reputation as one of the most boring cities in South Asia. Its regimented neighborhoods—with anodyne names like F6 and E11—are
filled with comfortable villas
, home to diplomats and senior government officials who are attended by fleets of servants. Their gardens are shaded by jasmine trees and generously scented with the wild marijuana that grows throughout the city.

Around the same time that Musharraf was clamping down on the Red Mosque militants, he also faced another mushrooming political crisis in the usually sedate capital. In March 2007, Musharraf made what would turn out to be a spectacular mistake, suspending the Supreme Court chief justice If-tikhar Chaudhry, ostensibly because he was abusing his office but more likely because he had shown refreshing independence from the government—for instance, by looking into the fates of some of the hundreds of “disappeared” Pakistanis who were widely believed to have been sucked into the maw of the ISI, the powerful military intelligence agency.

Almost overnight, the fired chief justice became a hero to all sorts of disparate groups fed up with Musharraf’s despotic ways. The first wave of protests was undertaken by the most unlikely of demonstrators:
lawyers
wearing black suits, pressed white shirts, and black ties. When they stormed the entrance to the Supreme Court building, it made for great television. In the days when Pakistan had only government-controlled TV, such footage never would have seen the light of day. But one of Musharraf’s positive legacies was that he presided over the rise of a genuinely independent media, and a number of private channels had sprung up under his rule, most prominently GEO Television.

And that’s where the government made another mistake. A week into the crisis, on March 16, GEO was carrying live pictures of demonstrations around the Supreme Court. Hamid Mir, GEO’s Islamabad bureau chief, had set up cameras on the roof of his office: “
We were showing police
firing rubber bullets on the protesters and tear gas—the first time that the Pakistani people were seeing these scenes live.” About an hour later, policemen armed with guns and lathi sticks started gathering outside the GEO office, then entered the building’s reception area and beat the receptionist. Mir says, “We retreated into our newsroom area”—rows of computer screens and televisions—“and made a human chain, including with our female colleagues.” Pakistani police are reluctant to attack women, so they stood down, but not before they had trashed an adjoining news organization’s office. GEO naturally videotaped much of this and carried it live. Within hours, Musharraf appeared on GEO to apologize for the government’s actions.

Meanwhile, Chaudhry, the fired chief justice, traveled to rallies around the country, where he was routinely greeted by boisterous crowds of tens of thousands of Pakistanis from all walks of life. Their demands were simple: that the government should uphold the independence of the judiciary and that Musharraf make good on his repeated promises to doff his uniform and surrender his dual role as president and chief of the military. This emergence of a grassroots, democratic movement suggested that wide swaths of the public wanted Pakistan
to emulate neighboring India
—a democratic state that had not constantly reverted to military rule, as Pakistan had done four times since the countries had both gained independence from the British in 1947.

Unfortunately for those who wanted a return to genuine civilian rule, Musharraf appeared to have something of a messiah complex, making him loath to relinquish any of his power. During the 2007 crisis, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice kept up
a constant barrage of calls
to Musharraf, urging him not to declare martial law as he repeatedly seemed poised to do. But in November, Musharraf declared emergency rule, making it clear that he would never willingly give up his position as both head of the military and president.

Perhaps it was not surprising that a dictator would convince himself that only he could save his country. What was surprising is that Musharraf managed to convince others as well. No one fell for this hoax harder than President Bush. It was a central plank of the administration’s foreign policy that democratization was the best way to counter militant Islamists. Yet Bush, so keen to promote democracy in the rest of the Muslim world, was strikingly silent on the need for Musharraf to loosen his dictatorial grip on Pakistan, which had been a democracy on and off over the past six decades of its history and also is the world’s second-most-populous Muslim country.

In September 2006, Musharraf had made one of his periodic visits to the United States. At a joint Washington press conference, after telling Musharraf, “
I admire your courage
and leadership,” Bush went on to address a deal that the Pakistani government had just signed with the Taliban in the tribal area of North Waziristan on the Afghan border. It was very similar to a cease-fire that the Pakistanis had done a year earlier in South Waziristan that had failed. Bush assured the assembled reporters that his Pakistani counterpart had a plan: “When the president looks me in the eye and says, the tribal deal is intended to reject the Talibanization of the people, and that there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be al-Qaeda, I believe him.” Privately, Bush was delivering a different message about the second “peace” deal to Musharraf. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley recalls that during a dinner at the White House, Bush told the Pakistani general, “
We got real concerns about this
, whether it’s going to work.” And Musharraf said, “I want to try it. If it doesn’t work, I’m prepared to end it.”

Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush’s top counterterrorism adviser, was worried by these “peace” agreements. “I think that over time
we were getting diddled
. It took us a while before we figured that out. By the second one, I had had it. Obviously I didn’t win that debate inside the administration, but after what I saw about the first peace agreement, I had no patience for the second one. Complete waste of time.”

As part of that second “peace” deal, the Pakistani government even gave
local militant leaders
$540,000 so they could repay the loans they had taken out from members of al-Qaeda. Several months after the cease-fire agreement
was signed, on September 5, 2006, Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, the top American commander in Afghanistan, disclosed that cross-border attacks from that area of Pakistan were
200 percent higher
than the year before. Hadley says that by the spring of 2007 it was
obvious to the Bush team
that the peace deal wasn’t working and that letting the militants regroup unmolested in the tribal areas as a result of the cease-fire was having disastrous consequences for both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Bush administration handed
some $11 billion
to the Pakistani military after September 11, 2001, for its help in the “war on terror.” Yet the Taliban and al-Qaeda remained headquartered in Pakistan throughout the Bush administration’s two terms. By July 2007, the sixteen American intelligence agencies that collectively make up the U.S. intelligence community had all signed off on a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that al-Qaeda “
has protected or regenerated
key elements of Homeland attack capability, including a safe haven in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.”

Not only that, but the Pakistanis had proven either unwilling or incapable (or both) of effectively taking on the militants. In the spring of 2007, a U.S. military official in Afghanistan with access to intelligence information said that Taliban leader Mullah Omar “is
still in Quetta
,” a Pakistani city. And a U.S. military official based in Pakistan said that detailed “
target folders
” about the specific locations of high-value Taliban and al-Qaeda targets were provided by the U.S. government to Pakistan in late 2006, but were never acted upon. Moreover, on at least one occasion the Bush administration refused to do what Pakistan would not: In 2005 Donald Rumsfeld
nixed a proposed attack
on a meeting of al-Qaeda leaders in the tribal region—a group thought to include Ayman al-Zawahiri—in part because the operation, which would have involved more than a hundred Special Forces and CIA personnel, could have destabilized Musharraf.

Musharraf seemed to have convinced the Bush administration that he was the only person who could prevent radical Islamists from taking over his country and getting their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. But this was a self-serving fiction. Contrary to the myth that democracy would merely empower Pakistan’s Islamists, pro-Taliban political parties won
only 11 percent
of the countrywide vote in the 2002 elections, which Musharraf had fixed to disadvantage the two main secular parties. And when Musharraf was finally forced to hold a free and fair election in February 2008 under pressure from
both the United States and ordinary Pakistanis, the pro-Taliban parties won only a piffling 2 percent of the vote.