If there is a single consistent theme in Pervez
Musharraf’s memoir, it is the familiar military
dogma that Pakistan has fared better under its
generals than under its politicians. The first
batch of generals were the offspring of the
departing colonial power. They had been taught to
obey orders, respect the command structure of the
army whatever the cost and uphold the traditions
of the British Indian Army. The bureaucrats who
ran Pakistan in its early days were the product
of imperial selection procedures designed to turn
out incorruptible civil servants wearing a mask
of objectivity. The military chain of command is
still respected, but the civil service now
consists largely of ruthlessly corrupt
time-servers. Once its members were loyal to the
imperial state: today they cater to the needs of
the army.

Pakistan’s first uniformed ruler, General Ayub
Khan, a Sandhurst-trained colonial officer,
seized power in October 1958 with strong
encouragement from both Washington and London.
They were fearful that the projected first
general election might produce a coalition that
would take Pakistan out of security pacts like
Seato and towards a non-aligned foreign policy.
Ayub banned all political parties, took over
opposition newspapers and told the first meeting
of his cabinet: ’As far as you are concerned
there is only one embassy that matters in this
country: the American Embassy.’ In a radio
broadcast to the nation he informed his
bewildered ’fellow countrymen’ that ’we must
understand that democracy cannot work in a hot
climate. To have democracy we must have a cold
climate like Britain.’

Perhaps remarks of this sort account for Ayub’s
popularity in the West. He became a great
favourite of the press in Britain and the US. His
bluff exterior certainly charmed Christine Keeler
(they splashed together in the pool at Cliveden
during a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’
Conference) and the saintly Kingsley Martin of
the New Statesman published a grovelling
interview. Meanwhile opposition voices were
silenced and political prisoners tortured; Hasan
Nasir, a Communist, died as a result. In 1962 -
by now he had promoted himself to field-marshal -
Ayub decided that the time had come to widen his
appeal. He took off his uniform, put on native
gear and addressed a public meeting (a forced
gathering of peasants assembled by their
landlords) at which he announced that there would
soon be presidential elections and he hoped
people would support him. The bureaucracy
organised a political party - the Convention
Muslim League - and careerists flocked to join
it. The election took place in 1965 and the polls
had to be rigged to ensure the field-marshal’s
victory. His opponent, Fatima Jinnah (the sister
of the country’s founder), fought a spirited
campaign but to no avail. The handful of
bureaucrats who had refused to help fix the
election were offered early retirement.

Now that he had been formally elected, it was
thought that Ayub would be further legitimised by
the publication of his memoirs. Friends Not
Masters: A Political Autobiography appeared from
Oxford in 1967 to great acclaim in the Western
press and was greeted with sycophantic hysteria
in the government-controlled media at home. But
Ayub’s information secretary, Altaf Gauhar, a
crafty, cynical courtier, had ghosted a truly
awful book: stodgy, crude, verbose and full of
half-truths. It backfired badly in Pakistan and
was soon being viciously satirised in clandestine
pamphlets on university campuses. Ayub had
suggested that Pakistanis ’should study this
book, understand and act upon it . . . it
contains material which is for the good of the
people.’ More than 70 per cent of the population
was illiterate and of the rest only a tiny elite
could read English. In October 1968, during
lavish celebrations to commemorate the ten years
of dictatorship as a ’decade of development’,
students in Rawalpindi demanded the restoration
of democracy; soon Student Action Committees had
spread across the country. The state responded
with its usual brutality. There were mass arrests
and orders to ’kill rioters’. Several students
died during the first few weeks. In the two
months that followed workers, lawyers, small
shopkeepers, prostitutes and government clerks
joined the protests. Stray dogs with ’Ayub’
painted on their backs became a special target
for armed cops. In March 1969 Ayub passed control
of the country to the whisky-soaked General Yahya
Khan.

Yahya promised a free election within a year and
kept his word. The 1970 general election (the
first in Pakistan’s history) resulted in a
sensational victory for the Awami League, Bengali
nationalists from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
The Bengalis were disgruntled, and for good
reason: East Pakistan, where a majority of the
population lived, was treated as a colony and the
Bengalis wanted a federal government. The
military-political-economic elite came from West
Pakistan, however, and all it could see in the
Awami League’s victory was a threat to its
privileges.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan
People’s Party, which had triumphed in the
western portion of the country, should have
negotiated a settlement with the victors. Instead
he sulked, told his party to boycott a meeting of
the new assembly that had been called in Dhaka,
the capital of East Pakistan, and thus provided
the army with breathing space to prepare a
military assault. Yahya prevented the leader of
the Awami League, Mujibur Rahman, from forming a
government and, in March 1971, sent in troops to
occupy East Pakistan. ’Thank God, Pakistan has
been saved,’ Bhutto declared, aligning himself
with what followed. Rahman was arrested and
several hundred nationalist and left-wing
intellectuals, activists and students were killed
in a carefully organised massacre. The lists of
victims had been prepared with the help of local
Islamist vigilantes, whose party, the
Jamaat-e-Islami, had lost badly in the elections.
The killings were followed by a campaign of mass
rape. Soldiers were told that Bengalis were
relatively recent converts to Islam and hence not
’proper Muslims’ - their genes needed improving.

The atrocities provoked an armed resistance and
there were appeals for military aid from New
Delhi, where the Awami League had established a
government-in-exile. The Indians, fearful that
Bengali refugees might destabilise the Indian
province of West Bengal and no doubt sensing an
opportunity, sent in their army, which was
welcomed as a liberating force. Within a
fortnight, the Pakistan troops were surrounded.
Their commander, General ’Tiger’ Niazi, chose
surrender rather than martyrdom, for which his
colleagues, a thousand miles from the
battlefield, were never to forgive him. In
December 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh
and 90,000 West Pakistani soldiers ended up in
Indian prisoner of war camps. Nixon, Kissinger
and Mao had all ’tilted towards Pakistan’ but to
little effect. It was a total disaster for the
Pakistan army: the first phase of military rule
had led to the division of the country and the
loss of a majority of its population.

Bhutto was left with a defeated army and a
truncated state. He had been elected on a
social-democratic programme that pledged food,
clothing, education and shelter for all, major
land reform and nationalisation. He was the only
political leader Pakistan has ever produced who
had the power, buttressed by mass support, to
change the country and its institutions,
including the army, for ever. But he failed on
every front. The nationalisations merely replaced
profit-hungry businessmen with corrupt cronies
and tame bureaucrats. As landlords flocked to
join his party, the radical reforms he had
promised in the countryside were shelved. The
poor felt instinctively that Bhutto was on their
side (the elite never forgave him) but few
measures were enacted to justify their
confidence. His style of government was
authoritarian; his personal vindictiveness was
corrosive.

Bhutto attempted to fight the religious
opposition by stealing their clothes: he banned
the sale of alcohol, made Friday a public holiday
and declared the Ahmediyya sect to be non-Muslims
(a long-standing demand of the Jamaat-e-Islami
that had, till then, been treated with contempt).
These measures did not help him, but damaged the
country by legitimising confessional politics.
Despite his worries about the Islamist
opposition, Bhutto would probably have won the
1977 elections without state interference, though
with a reduced majority. But the manipulation was
so blatant that the opposition came out on the
streets and neither his sarcasm nor his wit was
any help in the crisis.

Always a bad judge of character, he had made a
junior general and small-minded zealot,
Zia-ul-Haq, army chief of staff. As head of the
Pakistani training mission to Jordan, Brigadier
Zia had led the Black September assault on the
Palestinians in 1970. In July 1977, to pre-empt
an agreement between Bhutto and the opposition
parties that would have entailed new elections,
Zia struck. Bhutto was arrested, and held for a
few weeks, and Zia promised that new elections
would be held within six months, after which the
military would return to barracks. A year later
Bhutto, still popular and greeted by large crowds
wherever he went, was again arrested, and this
time charged with murder, tried and hanged in
April 1979.

Over the next ten years the political culture of
Pakistan was brutalised. As public floggings (of
dissident journalists among others) and hangings
became the norm, Zia himself was turned into a
Cold War hero - thanks largely to events in
Afghanistan. Religious affinity did nothing to
mitigate the hostility of Afghan leaders to their
neighbour. The main reason was the Durand Line,
which was imposed on the Afghans in 1893 to mark
the frontier between British India and
Afghanistan and which divided the Pashtun
population of the region. After a hundred years
(the Hong Kong model) all of what became the
North-Western Frontier Province of British India
was supposed to revert to Afghanistan but no
government in Kabul ever accepted the Durand Line
any more than they accepted British, or, later,
Pakistani control, over the territory.

In 1977, when Zia came to power, 90 per cent of
men and 98 per cent of women in Afghanistan were
illiterate; 5 per cent of landowners held 45 per
cent of the cultivable land and the country had
the lowest per capita income of any in Asia. The
same year, the Parcham Communists, who had backed
the 1973 military coup by Prince Daud after which
a republic was proclaimed, withdrew their support
from Daud, were reunited with other Communist
groups to form the People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA), and began to agitate for a
new government. The regimes in neighbouring
countries became involved. The shah of Iran,
acting as a conduit for Washington, recommended
firm action - large-scale arrests, executions,
torture - and put units from his torture agency
at Daud’s disposal. The shah also told Daud that
if he recognised the Durand Line as a permanent
frontier the shah would give Afghanistan $3
billion and Pakistan would cease hostile actions.
Meanwhile, Pakistani intelligence agencies were
arming Afghan exiles while encouraging old-style
tribal uprisings aimed at restoring the monarchy.
Daud was inclined to accept the shah’s offer, but
the Communists organised a pre-emptive coup and
took power in April 1978. There was panic in
Washington, which increased tenfold as it became
clear that the shah too was about to be deposed.
General Zia’s dictatorship thus became the
lynchpin of US strategy in the region, which is
why Washington green-lighted Bhutto’s execution
and turned a blind eye to the country’s nuclear
programme. The US wanted a stable Pakistan
whatever the cost.

As we now know, plans (a ’bear-trap’, in the
words of the US national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski) were laid to destabilise the
PDPA, in the hope that its Soviet protectors
would be drawn in. Plans of this sort often go
awry, but they succeeded in Afghanistan,
primarily because of the weaknesses of the Afghan
Communists themselves: they had come to power
through a military coup which hadn’t involved any
mobilisation outside Kabul, yet they pretended
this was a national revolution; their Stalinist
political formation made them allergic to any
form of accountability and ideas such as drafting
a charter of democratic rights or holding free
elections to a constituent assembly never entered
their heads. Ferocious factional struggles led,
in September 1979, to a Mafia-style shoot-out at
the Presidential Palace in Kabul, during which
the prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, shot
President Taraki dead. Amin, a nutty Stalinist,
claimed that 98 per cent of the population
supported his reforms but the 2 per cent who
opposed them had to be liquidated. There were
mutinies in the army and risings in a number of
towns as a result, and this time they had nothing
to do with the Americans or General Zia.

Finally, after two unanimous Politburo decisions
against intervention, the Soviet Union changed
its mind, saying that it had ’new documentation’.
This is still classified, but it would not
surprise me in the least if the evidence
consisted of forgeries suggesting that Amin was a
CIA agent. Whatever it was, the Politburo, with
Yuri Andropov voting against, now decided to send
troops into Afghanistan. Its aim was to get rid
of a discredited regime and replace it with a
marginally less repulsive one. Sound familiar?

From 1979 until 1988, Afghanistan was the focal
point of the Cold War. Millions of refugees
crossed the Durand Line and settled in camps and
cities in the NWFP. Weapons and money, as well as
jihadis from Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt,
flooded into Pakistan. All the main Western
intelligence agencies (including the Israelis’)
had offices in Peshawar, near the frontier. The
black-market and market rates for the dollar were
exactly the same. Weapons, including Stinger
missiles, were sold to the mujahedin by Pakistani
officers who wanted to get rich quickly. The
heroin trade flourished and the number of
registered addicts in Pakistan grew from a few
hundred in 1977 to a few million in 1987. (One of
the banks through which the heroin mafia
laundered money was the BCCI - whose main PR
abroad was a retired civil servant called Altaf
Gauhar.)

As for Pakistan and its people, they languished.
During Zia’s period in power, the
Jamaat-e-Islami, which had never won more than 5
per cent of the vote anywhere in the country, was
patronised by the government; its cadres were
sent to fight in Afghanistan, its armed student
wing was encouraged to terrorise campuses in the
name of Islam, its ideologues were ever present
on TV. The Inter-Services Intelligence also
encouraged the formation of other, more extreme
jihadi groups, which carried out acts of terror
at home and abroad and set up madrassahs all over
the frontier provinces. Soon Zia, too, needed his
own political party and the bureaucracy set one
up: the Pakistan Muslim League.

With the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev in March
1985 it became obvious that the Soviet Union
would accept defeat in Afghanistan and withdraw
its troops. It wanted some guarantees for the
Afghans it was leaving behind and the United
States - its mission successful - was prepared to
play ball. General Zia, however, was not. The
Afghan war had gone to his head (as it did to
that of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues) and
he wanted his own people in power there. As the
Soviet withdrawal got closer, Zia and the ISI
made plans for the postwar settlement.

And then Zia disappeared. On 17 August 1988, he
took five generals to the trial of a new US
Abrams M-1/A-1 tank at a military test range near
Bahawalpur. Also present were a US general and
the US ambassador, Arnold Raphael. The
demonstration did not go well and everybody was
grumpy. Zia offered the Americans a lift in his
specially built C-130 aircraft, which had a
sealed cabin to protect him from assassins. A few
minutes after the plane took off, the pilots lost
control and it crashed into the desert. All the
passengers were killed. All that was left of Zia
was his jawbone, which was duly buried in
Islamabad (the chowk - roundabout - nearby became
known to cabbies as ’Jawbone Chowk’). The cause
of the crash remains a mystery. The US National
Archives contain 250 pages of documents, but they
are still classified. Pakistani intelligence
experts have told me informally that it was the
Russians taking their revenge. Most Pakistanis
blamed the CIA, as they always do. Zia’s son and
widow whispered that it was ’our own people’ in
the army.

With Zia’s assassination, the second period of
military rule in Pakistan came to an end. What
followed was a longish civilian prologue to
Musharraf’s reign. For ten years members of two
political dynasties - the Bhutto and Sharif
families - ran the country in turn. It was
Benazir Bhutto’s minister of the interior,
General Naseerullah Babar, who, with the ISI,
devised the plan to set up the Taliban as a
politico-military force that could penetrate
Afghanistan, a move half-heartedly approved by
the US Embassy. Washington had lost interest in
Afghanistan and Pakistan once the Soviet Union
had withdrawn its troops. The Taliban
(’students’) were children of Afghan refugees and
poor Pathan families ’educated’ in the madrassahs
in the 1980s: they provided the shock troops, but
were led by a handful of experienced mujahedin
including Mullah Omar. Without Pakistan’s support
they could never have taken Kabul, although
Mullah Omar preferred to forget this. Omar’s
faction was dominant, but the ISI never
completely lost control of the organisation.
Islamabad kept its cool even when Omar’s zealots
asserted their independence by attacking the
Pakistan Embassy in Kabul and his religious
police interrupted a football match between the
two countries because the Pakistan players
sported long hair and shorts, caned the players
before the stunned crowd and sent them back home.

After Benazir’s fall, the Sharif brothers
returned to power. And once again, Shahbaz, the
younger but shrewder sibling, accepted family
discipline and Nawaz became the prime minister.
In 1998 Sharif decided to make Pervez Musharraf
army chief of staff in preference to the more
senior General Ali Kuli Khan (who was at college
with me in Lahore). Sharif’s reasoning may have
been that Musharraf, from a middle-class, refugee
background like himself, would be easier to
manipulate than Ali Kuli, who came from a landed
Pathan family in the NWFP. Whatever the
reasoning, it turned out to be a mistake.

On Bill Clinton’s urging, Sharif pushed for a
rapprochement with India. Travel and trade
agreements were negotiated, land borders were
opened, flights resumed, but before the next
stage could be reached, the Pakistan army began
to assemble in the Himalayan foothills. The ISI
claimed that the Siachen glacier in Kashmir had
been illegally occupied by the Indians and the
Indians claimed the opposite. Neither side could
claim victory after the fighting that followed,
but casualties were high, particularly on the
Indian side (Musharraf exaggerates Pakistan’s
’triumph’). A ceasefire was agreed and each army
returned to its side of the Line of Control.

Why did the war take place at all? In private the
Sharif brothers told associates that the army was
opposed to their policy of friendship with India
and was determined to sabotage the process: the
army had acted without receiving clearance from
the government. In his memoir, Musharraf insists
that the army had kept the prime minister
informed in briefings in January and February
1999. Whatever the truth, Sharif told Washington
that he had been bounced into a war he didn’t
want, and not long after the war, the Sharif
family decided to get rid of Musharraf.
Constitutionally, the prime minister had the
power to dismiss the chief of staff and appoint a
new one, as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had done in the
1970s, when he appointed Zia. But the army then
was weak, divided and defeated; this was
certainly not the case in 1999.

Sharif’s candidate to succeed Musharraf was
General Ziauddin Butt, head of the ISI, who was
widely seen as corrupt and incompetent. He was
bundled off to Washington for vetting and while
there is said to have pledged bin Laden’s head on
a platter. If Sharif had just dismissed Musharraf
he might have had a better chance of success but
what he lacked in good sense his brother tried to
make up for in guile. Were the Sharif brothers
really so foolish as believe that the army was
unaware of their intrigues or were they misled by
their belief in US omnipotence? Clinton duly
warned the army that Washington would not
tolerate a military coup in Pakistan and I
remember chuckling at the time that this was a
first in US-Pakistan relations. Sharif relied too
heavily on Clinton’s warning.

What followed was a tragi-comic episode that is
well described in Musharraf’s book. He and his
wife were flying back from Sri Lanka on a normal
passenger flight when the pilot received
instructions not to land. While the plane was
still circling over Karachi, Nawaz Sharif
summoned General Butt and in front of a TV crew
swore him in as the new chief of staff. Meanwhile
there was panic on Musharraf’s plane, by now low
on fuel. He managed to establish contact with the
commander of the Karachi garrison, the army took
control of the airport and the plane landed
safely. Simultaneously, military units surrounded
the prime minister’s house in Islamabad and
arrested Nawaz Sharif. General Zia had been
assassinated on a military flight; Musharraf took
power on board a passenger plane.

So began the third extended period of military
rule in Pakistan, initially welcomed by all Nawaz
Sharif’s political opponents and many of his
colleagues. In the Line of Fire gives the
official version of what has been happening in
Pakistan over the last six years and is intended
largely for Western eyes. Where Altaf Gauhar
injected nonsense of every sort into Ayub’s
memoirs, his son Humayun Gauhar, who edited this
book, has avoided the more obvious pitfalls. The
general’s raffish lifestyle is underplayed but
there is enough in the book to suggest that he is
not too easily swayed by religious or social
obligations.

The score-settling with enemies at home is crude
and for that reason the book has caused a
commotion in Pakistan. A spirited controversy has
erupted in the media, something that could never
have happened during previous periods of military
rule. Scathing criticism has come from
ex-generals (Ali Kuli Khan’s rejoinder was
published in most newspapers), opposition
politicians and pundits of every sort. In fact,
there was more state interference in the media
during Nawaz Sharif’s tenure than there is under
Musharraf and the level of debate is much higher
than in India, where the middle-class obsession
with shopping and celebrity has led to a
trivialisation of TV and most of the print media.

When Musharraf seized power in 1999, he refused
to move house, preferring his more homely,
colonial bungalow in Rawalpindi to the kitsch
comfort of the President’s House in Islamabad,
with its gilt furniture and tasteless decor that
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 19^th-century British colonial
expeditions to conquer Afghanistan (they all
ended in disaster) was planned in Rawalpindi. And
it was also from there, a century and a half
later, that the Washington-blessed jihad was
launched against the hopeless Afghan Communists.
And it was there too that the US demand to use
Pakistan as a base for its operations in
Afghanistan was discussed and agreed in September
2001. This was a crucial decision for the army
chiefs because it meant the dismantling of their
only foreign triumph: the placing of the Taliban
in Kabul.

Heavy traffic often makes the ten-mile journey
from Islamabad to Rawalpindi tortuous, unless
you’re the president and the highway has been
cleared by a security detail. Even then, as this
book reveals in some detail, assassination
attempts can play havoc with the schedule. The
first happened on 14 December 2003. Moments after
the general’s motorcade passed over a bridge, a
powerful bomb exploded and badly damaged the
bridge, although no one was hurt. The armoured
limo, fitted with radar and an anti-bomb device,
courtesy of the Pentagon, saved Musharraf’s life.
His demeanour at the time surprised observers. He
was said to have been calm and cheerful, making
jocular allusions to living in perilous times.
Unsurprisingly, security had been high - decoys,
last-minute route changes etc - but this didn’t
prevent another attempt a week later, on
Christmas Day. This time two men driving cars
loaded with explosives came close to success. The
president’s car was damaged, guards in cars
escorting him were killed, but Musharraf was
unhurt. Since his exact route and the time of his
departure from Islamabad were heavily guarded
secrets the terrorists must have had inside
information. If your security staff includes
angry Islamists who see you as a traitor and want
to blow you up, then, as the general states in
his memoir, Allah alone can protect you. He has
certainly been kind to Musharraf.

The culprits were discovered, and tortured till
they revealed details of the plot. Some junior
military officers were also implicated. The key
plotters were tried in secret and hanged. The
supposed mastermind, a jihadi extremist called
Amjad Farooqi, was shot by security forces.

Two questions haunt both Washington and
Musharraf’s colleagues: how many of those
involved remain undetected and would the command
structure of the army survive if a terrorist
succeeded next time around? Musharraf doesn’t
seem worried and adopts a jaunty, even boastful
tone. Before 9/11 he was treated like a pariah
abroad and beset by problems at home. How to
fortify the will of a high command weakened by
piety and corruption? How to deal with the
corruption and embezzlement that had been a
dominant feature of both the Sharif and Bhutto
governments? Benazir Bhutto was already in
self-exile in Dubai; the Sharif brothers had been
arrested. Before they could be charged, however,
Washington organised an offer of asylum from
Saudi Arabia, a state whose ruling family has
institutionalised the theft of public funds.

Musharraf’s unstinting support for the US after
9/11 prompted local wags to dub him ’Busharraf’,
and was the motive behind the attempts on his
life. (In March 2005 Condoleezza Rice described
the US-Pakistan relationship since 9/11 as ’broad
and deep’.) Had he not, after all, unravelled
Pakistan’s one military victory in order to
please Washington? General Mahmood Ahmed, who
headed the ISI, was in Washington as a guest of
the Pentagon, trying to convince the Defense
Intelligence Agency that Mullah Omar was a good
bloke and could be persuaded to disgorge Osama,
when the attacks of 11 September took place. That
his listeners were freaked out by this is hardly
surprising. Musharraf tells us he agreed to
become Washington’s surrogate because the State
Department honcho, Richard Armitage, threatened
to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if he
didn’t. What really worried Islamabad, however,
was a threat Musharraf doesn’t mention: if
Pakistan refused, the US would have used Indian
bases.

Musharraf was initially popular in Pakistan and
if he had pushed through reforms aimed at
providing an education (with English as a
compulsory second language) for all children,
instituted land reforms which would have ended
the stranglehold of the gentry on large swathes
of the countryside, tackled corruption in the
armed forces and everywhere else, and ended the
jihadi escapades in Kashmir and Pakistan as a
prelude to a long-term deal with India, then he
might have left a mark on the country. Instead,
he has mimicked his military predecessors. Like
them, he took off his uniform, went to a
landlord-organised gathering in Sind and entered
politics. His party? The evergreen, ever
available Muslim League. His supporters? Chips
off the same old corrupt block that he had
denounced so vigorously and whose leaders he was
prosecuting. His prime minister? Shaukat
’Shortcut’ Aziz, formerly a senior executive of
Citibank with close ties to the eighth richest
man in the world, the Saudi prince Al-Walid bin
Talal. As it became clear that nothing much was
going to change a wave of cynicism engulfed the
country.

Musharraf is better than Zia and Ayub in many
ways, but human rights groups have noticed a
sharp rise in the number of political activists
who are being ’disappeared’: four hundred this
year alone, including Sindhi nationalists and a
total of 1200 in the province of Baluchistan,
where the army has become trigger-happy once
again. The war on terror has provided many
leaders with the chance to sort out their
opponents, but that doesn’t make it any better.

In his book he expresses his detestation of
religious extremists and his regrets over the
murder of Daniel Pearl. He suggests that one of
those responsible, the former LSE student Omar
Saeed Sheikh, was an MI6 recruit who was sent to
fight the Serbs in Bosnia. Al-Qaida fighters had
also been sent there (with US approval) and
Sheikh established contact with them and became a
double agent. Now Sheikh sits in a death-cell in
a Pakistani prison, chatting amiably to his
guards and emailing newspaper editors in Pakistan
to tell them that if he is executed papers he has
left behind will be published exposing the
complicity of others. Perhaps this is bluff, or
perhaps he was a triple agent and was working for
the ISI as well.

Next year there will be an election and rumours
abound that Musharraf is offering Benazir
Bhutto’s People’s Party a deal, but one that
excludes her. A few years ago she could be
spotted in Foggy Bottom, waiting forlornly to
plead for US support from a State Department
junior on the South Asia desk. All she wanted
then was a cabinet position under Musharraf, so
that she could remain a presence on the political
scene. Musharraf is much weaker now and she may
decide not to play ball with him, but to hang on
for something better.

And then there is Afghanistan. Despite the fake
optimism of Blair and his Nato colleagues
everyone is aware that it is a total mess. A
revived Taliban is winning popularity by
resisting the occupation. Nato helicopters and
soldiers are killing hundreds of civilians and
describing them as ’Taliban fighters’. Hamid
Karzai, the man with the nice shawls, is seen as
a hopeless puppet, totally dependent on Nato
troops. He has antagonised both the Pashtuns, who
are turning to the Taliban once again in large
numbers, and the warlords of the Northern
Alliance, who openly denounce him and suggest
it’s time he was sent back to the States. In
western Afghanistan, it is only the Iranian
influence that has preserved a degree of
stability. If Ahmedinejad was provoked into
withdrawing his support, Karzai would not last
more than a week. Islamabad waits and watches.
Military strategists are convinced that the US
has lost interest and Nato will soon leave. If
that happens Pakistan is unlikely to permit the
Northern Alliance to take Kabul. Its army will
move in again. A Pakistan veteran of the Afghan
wars joked with me: ’Last time we sent in the
beards, but times have changed. This time,
inshallah, we’ll dress them all in Armani suits
so it looks good on US television.’ The region
remains fog-bound. Pakistan’s first military
leader was seen off by a popular insurrection.
The second was assassinated. What will happen to
Musharraf?