one in Pakistan seemed a retrograde step in a country that had spent half its existence under military rule. Pakistan was expelled from the Commonwealth. Even Pakistan’s traditional friend Saudi Arabia was showing a cold shoulder; the Saudi royal family was close to the Sharifs, and would go on to provide them with homes in exile.
It wasn’t just the way that Musharraf had seized power that caused international concern. Pakistan and India had fought three wars over the disputed province of Kashmir, and five months before his coup, the then army chief Musharraf had brought the two nations to the verge of a fourth, this time nuclear. As Musharraf liked to remind people, his background was as a commando, and in May 1999 he ordered Pakistani troops into Indian Kashmir disguised as jihadis. The plan was to seize a 15,000-foot strategic height called Kargil. The ill-conceived operation prompted a fierce reaction from India, which responded with aerial bombardments. Western intelligence picked up that the Pakistani army was preparing nuclear missiles.
The Kargil operation totally undermined Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s efforts to make peace with India after Pakistan’s nuclear tests the previous year, and he always insisted it was launched without his knowledge. He pointed out that he had just signed the Lahore Declaration with his Indian counterpart Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a bilateral treaty to normalise relations between the two countries, and that it would make no sense to then wreck it by sending troops across the agreed Line of Control which divides Kashmir. Musharraf pooh-poohed the idea that Sharif did not know, saying, ‘Nothing could be farther from the truth.’ He claimed the Prime Minister was briefed three times.
Either way, by July Sharif was in a panic, and flew to Washington, where he begged President Clinton to intervene to broker peace with India. Clinton insisted that before there could be any ceasefire Pakistan must withdraw all its troops. Sharif agreed, to the fury of Musharraf and the army, who saw it as a humiliating climbdown. ‘We became the most sanctioned country on earth’ said Chaudhry Nisar Ali, his Interior Minister, who went with him.4 The Prime Minister’s days were almost certainly numbered from that point.
‘People forget how close we came to nuclear war,’ said David Manning, who was foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair at the time.5
9/11 changed everything, making Pakistan once again crucial, just as it had been after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It seemed an astonishing replay of history, for that time Pakistan had also been under military dictatorship, that of General Zia. He too had ousted an elected Prime Minister – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – who had appointed Zia as his army chief because he thought him unintelligent and no threat, calling him ‘my monkey general’ and pretending to jerk him on a string like a puppet-master. It was an unwise move – Zia referred to Bhutto as ‘the bastard’. A few hours after the two men attended a Fourth of July reception at the US Embassy in 1977, Zia had him arrested and seized power.
He did not stop there. Bhutto was sent to the gallows on 4 April 1979, prompting worldwide condemnation.
As a vocal defender of human rights, the US President Jimmy Carter was outraged. But Pakistan was not the only country in the region in turmoil. A seismic shift in international relations was under way as a result of Islamic revolution in neighbouring Iran, prompted by the return from exile of the Shia cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. The American-backed Shah, Reza Pahlavi, was toppled in January 1979, taking the West completely by surprise. The Shah’s demise deprived the US of vital CIA listening posts to monitor its main enemy the Soviet Union. American officials looking at the map of Central Asia realised they needed Pakistan.
Yet Pakistan’s relations with the US were plummeting to a new low. On 4 November 1979 Iranian revolutionary students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took hostage fifty-two American diplomats and citizens. While the Carter administration was consumed by this crisis, sending warships to the Gulf, on 20 November a mysterious group of Muslim fanatics seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in the Islamic world, trapping thousands of pilgrims inside. The next day, with the mosque under siege, wild rumours spread across Pakistan that the US and Israel were behind the siege. Students belonging to the Islamic Jamaat-e-Islami society at Islamabad’s elite Quaid-e-Azam University decided to take action. Thousands of students in government buses converged on the US Embassy, pouring over the compound walls and setting the buildings aflame. One hundred and thirty-eight people were trapped inside.
The Pakistan army headquarters was only a few miles down the road, yet it was almost four hours before General Zia dispatched a helicopter. It circled once over the burning Embassy then turned back, the army command apparently convinced no one still inside could have survived, and that it was not worth risking Pakistani troops to retrieve the bodies of dead Americans. However some Americans were still trapped inside, including an injured Marine who would probably have survived if he had received help. He died, as did another American who was beaten to death with one of his own golf clubs, as well as two Pakistani employees.
One US government auditor, who was relaxing eating a hot dog by the Embassy pool when the riot started, had been taken to a student dormitory and subjected to a mock trial by students. Afterwards he said he felt his crime in their eyes was ‘simply being American’.6 Maybe somebody should have taken notice that a country with such hatred for the US was unlikely to be its loyal ally.
A month later, just after Christmas 1979, everything changed, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Once again the Carter administration was caught unawares, perhaps not surprisingly, as many in the Soviet regime were just as shocked. Carter’s hawkish National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski immediately spotted a chance. ‘The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border I wrote to President Carter, we now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War,’ he later recalled.
American diplomats were still sifting through the charred remains of their Embassy when their government began shipping weapons to Islamabad, though not ones that could be traced back to them. First they sent in Soviet-made ones which they had stockpiled, then later Egyptian and Chinese mortars and AK47s.
Zia was unimpressed, and dismissed an initial offer of $400 million in aid as ‘peanuts’. Then in 1981 the Republicans returned to the White House in the form of Ronald Reagan. A fervent Cold War warrior, he upped the deal to $3.2 billion. General Zia would soon be gracing the doors of the White House and 10 Downing Street. The Soviet invasion became known as ‘Zia’s Christmas present’.
In the same way Musharraf determined to make the most of 9/11. He would get the most possible from the Americans, but he would not trust them, and he would hedge his bets.
There was, however, a major problem. Having given the Bush administration his agreement, Musharraf had to convince an army that was predisposed to take a dim view of the US, and that saw the Taliban as ‘misunderstood’. As his Ambassador in Washington, Musharraf had appointed Maleeha Lodhi, a tiny, feisty woman who had been Pakistan’s first female newspaper editor, but was also close to the military. She tried to defend the Taliban to Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Adviser, arguing that it had cracked down on opium production (in November 2000 Mullah Omar had imposed a ban on poppy cultivation which reduced production from almost 4,000 tons that year to 185 tons in 2001). ‘Yeah, Stalin also got a lot of things done,’ came Rice’s dry reply.
Musharraf himself was a secular, whisky-drinking general. When I interviewed him in Army House just after he took power, his wife Sebha and another couple were sitting on a sofa in a back room eating popcorn and watching an American movie. There was shock in Pakistan when he allowed himself to be photographed cradling his pet Pekingeses, Dot and Buddy, as dogs are regarded by many Muslims as unclean.
Pakistan’s President had little personal sympathy for the Taliban; indeed, he found them exasperating at times, such as when they blew up the ancient Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001 after refusing to bend to international pressure, including a mission by his own Interior Minister, General Haider, and ISI chief General Mahmood.
However, Musharraf had personally fought in two of Pakistan’s wars against India, and was obsessed by trying to capture Kashmir, the former princely state which