Times Online : Playing a cunning game of survival in the war zone

Playing a cunning game of survival in the war zone

PROFILE Pervez Musharraf

October 01, 2006

Pervez Musharraf was, by his own admission, a naughty child. His discovery that an unfiltered cigarette made an efficient time fuse led him and some friends to construct firecracker bombs that exploded deafeningly in rubbish bins and mail boxes outside the houses of school staff. “There was utter confusion,” he recalled with satisfaction.

Old habits die hard, it seems. Last week the president of Pakistan fired up a string of incendiary revelations that embarrassed the White House, upset Downing Street and goaded President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan into a hissy fit. For good measure, he appeared on an American chat show and traded jokes about President George W Bush.

Musharraf was promoting his memoirs, a task usually left to retirement, but like most dictators, the 63-year-old army chief of staff shows little enthusiasm for leaving the stage. And just as his schoolboy prank went unpunished, he can count himself fireproof as one of the main beneficiaries of 9/11. Once a pariah whose links with terrorists accounted for President Bill Clinton’s refusal to be photographed shaking his hand, he is now feted by western leaders as a key figure in the global war against terror.

His first thunderflash last week was a stunner. Musharraf claimed the US had threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if it did not co-operate with America after the September 11 attacks.

A shaken Bush said he was “taken aback” by the claim and Richard Armitage, the former US deputy secretary of state accused of making the threat, insisted he had merely said “you are either with us or against us”.

Musharraf’s next firecracker was the disclosure that the US had secretly paid millions of dollars in bounties to Pakistan for the capture of wanted Al-Qaeda figures. In the gratifying furore over the illegality of such payments, Musharraf quietly mentioned that the money went to individuals, not to his government.

Then there was the entertaining spectacle of Musharraf and Karzai going into deep sulks when they joined Bush in the White House Rose Garden. Each blames the other for the Taliban’s revival. Karzai has accused Musharraf of giving the Taliban a haven. Musharraf called Karzai “an ostrich” with his head in the sand.

Musharraf was just getting started. His book seemed to exonerate Omar Sheikh, a Briton facing execution for the murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The general also put British intelligence on the spot by claiming that details of terror suspects had been kept back from Pakistan as it was “a backward country”.

Angered by a leaked British document calling for the dismantling of Pakistan’s intelligence service because of its links with terrorists, Musharraf retorted that the Ministry of Defence was a better candidate for abolition. That may not have gone down well with Tony Blair, whom he met in Downing Street last week.

In an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, he accused Britain of amnesia over Al-Qaeda, who were in effect the mujaheddin assembled by the West to overthrow the Russians in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he claimed, was abandoned to face the consequences.

“We fought for you for 10 years,” he said. “Then we were left high and dry.”

So what accounts for this outpouring of bile? Musharraf is that rare creature, a comparatively liberal dictator who has gone some way to reversing the injustices and corruption that existed under his predecessors. Committed to the “irreversible process of the empowerment of women”, he created 60 reserved seats for women in the national assembly in 2002. However, his efforts to reform Islamic laws that discriminate against women have been dismissed by many as sops to the West.

He has calmed relations with India since the two countries’ nuclear stand-off over Kashmir, although he pardoned Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of Pakistan’s bomb” who gave nuclear weapons technology to rogue states, including Iran and Libya. On the debit side, Amnesty International has accused Pakistan of widespread human rights violations in support of America’s war on terror.

He presents a genial, moustachioed figure to visitors at Army House in Rawalpindi, the cosy old British stucco residence that he and his wife, Sehba, alternate with the soulless, monolithic presidential palace in Islamabad.

“He comes from the liberal, whisky-drinking faction of the Pakistan army, rather than the fundamentalist side,” said one. “I was a bit surprised to see his wife watching a video and eating popcorn.”

The general’s talk is of squash, tennis and how he launched his bloodless coup from mid-air in 1999. He was returning on a flight from Sri Lanka when the pilot told him he had been sacked as head of the armed forces by Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister, and was forbidden to land at Karachi even though the plane had only seven minutes of fuel remaining.

Believing it was a plot to kill him, Musharraf called out the army and Sharif was deposed. “I don’t know how he thought of such a beautiful way of giving me power,” he mused later.

His recent revelations are evidently designed to rebut critics in Pakistan who accuse him of being in the pocket of the US and those in the West who think he is too close to the militants.

The ploy appears to have backfired in Pakistan, where the intelligence community is worried that his candour has damaged relations with allies. Separately, former top military figures and politicians have called for him to stand down. “They are asking whether dictatorship has really benefited Pakistan,” said a local commentator. “They look at India and see a global economic powerhouse with a foreign policy. Pakistan only has an India policy.”

Fuelling the claim that Musharraf is America’s poodle are his family’s ties to the US: his brother, a doctor, lives near Chicago and his son runs a high-tech company in Boston. The mullahs look askance at his fondness for alcohol and dogs, which Muslims regard as unclean. He is a secular leader who preaches “enlightened moderation”, yet relies on hardline Islamic parties for support.

He is even criticised for speaking too warmly of India and for visiting the bungalow in Delhi where he was born in 1943. He was the second of three sons born to his father Syed, a Foreign Office accountant who rose to become a director, and Zarin, a teacher who had graduated from Delhi and Lucknow universities at a time when few Muslim women received even a basic education.

Four years later the family joined other Muslims on a terrifying train ride to the newly created Pakistan. At every stop they saw bodies lying along the tracks, the victims of communal violence.

After two years in Karachi the family decamped to Turkey, where the young Musharraf developed a significant admiration for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who had moulded the country into a secular state. He was 13 when he returned to Karachi and enrolled at St Patrick’s, a Catholic missionary school where he learnt to use his fists.

“Without thinking, I punched the bully hard,” he recounts in his memoirs. “A fight ensued, and I really thrashed him. I became known as a tough guy whom you don’t mess with.”

In this immodest vein, he writes that he became a top gymnast, athlete and body-builder when he went to another Christian school, the Forman College in Lahore, run by American missionaries.

At the age of 18, he entered the Pakistan military academy. “Winning a spot was a cinch for an athletic, intelligent boy.” And naturally he began a swift rise to the top of the armed forces, bypassing rivals from the traditional Punjabi officer elite.

The world spotlight first fell on Musharraf in 1999 as the general who conceived and directed a huge intrusion into Kargil in Kashmir, sparking the first major Indo-Pakistan conflict for 28 years. He was depicted in BBC footage as a leathery, hard-bitten commando, a cigarette drooping from his lips.

According to a Clinton aide, Pakistan’s new nuclear weapons were deployed in forward positions, with Musharraf’s finger on the button. The incursion became a humiliating fiasco when Pakistan was forced to withdraw. Three months later, Musharraf pulled off his coup.

His pledge to democratise the country did not extend to submitting himself to the electorate. After making several attempts to legitimise his position, he won support from the electoral college of Pakistan in 2004 and was “deemed to be elected” to the office of president until October 2007.

He has promised to abandon his uniform by the end of this year but nobody is holding their breath. “Destiny and fate have always smiled on me,” he declares. It’s a belief shared by most dictators, until the music stops.