Pakistan Is ...
By BARRY BEARAK
Barry Bearak is a staff writer for the New York Times magazine. His last article was about starvation in Africa.
Maulana Azam Tariq's assassins were of the thorough sort, firing 30 or 40 bullets into their victim, aiming especially at the head and neck. The Sunni cleric died along with his driver and three bodyguards, murdered near a tollbooth in a high-security area of Islamabad, the rich, spacious and usually sedate capital of a poor, crowded and deeply tumultuous country: Pakistan.
Azam Tariq was considered an extreme man even in a nation abundant with extremists. Often accused of ordering the deaths of innocent Shiites, he made his home in Jhang, a robust city in the vast plains of central Punjab. It is a relatively prosperous area, with an occasional tractor to share beastly burdens with the water buffalo. But the greatest portion of the wealth remains with feudal landlords, most of whom are Shiites. Resentment of these landlords helped provoke years of spasmodic sectarian violence. This reciprocal bloodshed joined the other centrifugal forces that always seem to be flinging Pakistan toward bedlam: the religious fanaticism, the ethnic separatism, the political corruption, the four military takeovers, the three wars with India, the two wars in Afghanistan, the inconstant friendship of America.
As it happened, I interviewed Azam Tariq two days before he was gunned down. ''Anyone will know how to find me,'' he had promised in lieu of directions. And indeed, people in Jhang confidently pointed the way through the curvy and narrow lanes of an old neighborhood, where an automobile seemed a clumsy machine amid motor scooters and donkey carts. Maulana is a term of respect for a scholar, one dutifully applied by Azam Tariq's thousands of followers. That morning, the maulana was busy at his small compound, encircled in his office by dozens of supplicants needing help with their unpaid bills and unresolved quarrels. A bespectacled man with a henna tint to his stiff beard, Azam Tariq, 41, was wearing a turban, its long tail hanging over the front of his white linen shalwar kameez. He sat patiently on the floor behind a cloth-covered table, his ministrations repeatedly disrupted by phone calls. Outside were young sentries with machine guns. A closed-circuit TV monitored the mosque across the street.
When Azam Tariq saw he had guests, he excused himself from the office and led my translator and me to a simply furnished guest room. An aide was sent to fetch bottles of 7Up and a plate of cookies. Then, unprompted by questions, the maulana began an enthusiastic self-defense, portraying himself as a reasonable man of virtuous restraint. Rather than killing Shiites, he said, they ''should merely be declared non-Muslims'' and jailed for 10 or 15 years. ''We have never called for violence against anyone.''
These were lies, which was to be expected. Pakistan is a great hub of duplicity, and the maulana was just one of the many chameleon characters who seemed able to operate at both its center and fringe, something like the nation itself, which is one of America's essential allies in the war against terrorism and also one of terrorism's essential incubators in its war against the West. Each time I visit the country, I hope for some blossom of understanding but return with the wilt of confusion. This is a nation of confounding murkiness, where every kind of deception, collusion and outright sham are recurring motifs in the political theater. Rumors and conspiracy theories are as commonly exchanged as rupee notes, the information -- some of it even true -- then twisted, inflated and endlessly rearranged. Much of the trickery is institutionalized. The I.S.I. -- the shorthand name for the military intelligence agencies -- is widely presumed to be an expert puppet master, the great Oz of a manipulated society.
Rumors were the reason I wanted a word with the maulana. I'd heard that he had cut a deal with the military a year ago to spring himself from jail.
Since Pakistan's most recent military coup, in October 1999, the country has been run by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, an often brash former commando. From the first, he professed a devotion to democracy and a loathing for the nation's ample supply of knavish politicians. His deepest belief, however, seems to be in his own indispensability, and he has connived to hold on to power even after allowing national elections. His patriotic campaigns against corruption and extremism have most often given way to the more pressing priorities of mundane self-interest.
The case of Azam Tariq is but a single example. Two years ago, soon after 9/11, the general ordered the jailing of the maulana and several other incendiary mullahs. Months later, in one of his many rousing denunciations of radical Islam, Musharraf officially outlawed Azam Tariq's organization, Sipah-e-Sahaba (Warriors of the Prophet's Companions), saying Pakistanis were ''fed up'' with ''fratricidal killings.''
But these pronouncements, however sincere, meant little in practice. Much like other banned groups, Sipah-e-Sahaba merely had to change its name to go on operating. In fact, when elections were finally held, Azam Tariq was able to win a seat in Parliament from his prison cell. Three weeks later, a court released him. Curiously enough, he then allied himself with the pro-Musharraf coalition in the Assembly, becoming one of many unlikely bedfellows in the governing majority, among them several legislators newly liberated from the distractions of lingering criminal cases.
''No, no, absolutely no deal was made,'' the maulana assured me, insisting that the timing of his release was purely a coincidence. Speaking in Punjabi, he swiftly changed the subject, preferring more familiar topics, like the many fruitless efforts by Shiite extremists to kill him. ''I've had 11 attempts on my life, with knives, guns, bombs, even rocket launchers,'' he boasted, as if these brushes with death verified his importance in life.
As goodbyes were said, he embraced me in the traditional way, pulling me toward him so that our right shoulders touched. Then he apologized for not having provided a full meal. In amends, he ordered his brother to escort us to a restaurant called Kim's. ''Best Chinese food in Jhang'' was the last thing I heard the maulana say.
The Smoldering Fire
o be honest, Pakistan frightens me. Not the being there, despite recent attacks on foreigners, despite what happened to Daniel Pearl. I have visited Pakistan a few dozen times since 1998, most recently for five weeks this fall. Almost always I've found the people warm and generous and protective. Rather, what greatly alarms me is Pakistan as a potential meltdown, a nuclear power with too many combustibles in the national mix.
I am hardly alone in my fears -- and yet this nation rarely finds itself under the American magnifying glass. ''Pakistan is an incredibly important country, but I don't think there's an awareness of that in the United States,'' Richard Haass told me. He had recently left the Bush administration as director of policy planning in the State Department and assumed the presidency of the Council on Foreign Relations. ''If you'd ask most people what are the biggest issues in the world, they'd say the Middle East, Iraq, North Korea, perhaps Afghanistan, a long list. But not a lot of people would say Pakistan.'' He, too, has pondered the dangerous skein of possibilities. ''Sure to be a nightmare is a breakdown in order. They haven't institutionalized succession in any meaningful way. At worst, you could have a loss of control over their nuclear weapons.''
Pakistan has a population (150 million) larger than all but five nations and more nuclear warheads (perhaps 50) than all but six or seven. Since its establishment, it has been in want of a coherent national identity: some there sarcastically call it less a nation than a crowd. Born in 1947, it was awkwardly excised from the British Empire in two separate pieces, an east and a west that happened to be 800 miles apart, with the largely Hindu behemoth of India situated in between. This new nation was meant to be the Muslim homeland of the subcontinent, but the formal role of Islam was left ambiguous and has ever remained an issue. Religion alone proved insufficient glue. In 1971, Pakistan's eastern half went its own way after Bengali Muslims -- with India's assistance -- broke loose and created Bangladesh. Four contiguous provinces remain: Baluchistan, Punjab, the Northwest Frontier and Sindh. Significant numbers of the present citizenry feel their greater bond is to ethnicity -- be it Pashtun or Baluchi or Sindhi -- and would rather not be part of Pakistan at all. Also under Islamabad's control is Azad (''Free'') Kashmir, one-third of a lovely Himalayan territory claimed by both the Indians and Pakistanis. The dispute is the main reason these neighbors continue to kill one another.
Though the British are long gone, the Pakistanis themselves remain colonized by privation. About two-thirds of the population survives on less than $2 a day. Nearly two of every five children are undernourished. Only 44 percent of all adults can read (only 29 percent of the women). The mosques, rather than the government, provide what frayed social safety net there is. Perhaps that is because Pakistan is habitually broke. Barely 1 percent of the population pays income tax. More than half of the central budget goes toward the military and repayment of the national debt.
Politically, Pakistan has been reliably unsteady, with democracy only a sporadic presence. The military has controlled the country for about half its 56 years. No elected government has ever completed a full term, and even when one is in place, it stays there only at the pleasure of the generals. The army -- some 500,000 strong -- is commonly thought to be Pakistan's elite institution. The military doesn't just dominate civilian affairs; its various ''welfare trusts'' are among the nation's largest industrial conglomerates. The Fauji Foundation, linked to the army, has substantial ventures in gas fields, sugar mills, a fertilizer plant, an oil terminal and an overseas employment service. Its corn flakes and other breakfast cereals control 80 percent of the market. Profits supply ex-servicemen and their families the quality schools and health care that most Pakistanis so badly lack.
The great murkiness of Pakistan is largely the fault of this formidable army and the skulking I.S.I., which have pursued furtive alliances with many of the nation's most violent Islamic extremists. For more than a decade, the military has trained and financed civilian jihadis who cross into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir to create havoc. This guerrilla combat was once an entirely indigenous Kashmiri rebellion against New Delhi, but the Pakistanis quickly hijacked it. Radical groups supplied much of the manpower, often enlisting students eager to enter paradise through the golden door of a martyr's death. The relentless havoc has time and again nudged the two new nuclear powers close to war. The alliance between the army and I.S.I. on one hand and extremists on the other has also led to a contorted set of cross-dependencies. Loyalties are now confused, and many Pakistanis wonder whether fundamentalist elements in the army's officer corps are more sympathetic to the jihadis than to their own superiors.
Musharraf's own dedication to the Kashmir cause is indisputable. In early 1999, just months into his tenure as army chief, he ordered the paramilitary forces of the Northern Light Infantry across the agreed cease-fire line. When the troops were finally discovered, the Pakistanis claimed they were mujahedeen acting on their own, a feeble story belied when the bodies of dead soldiers began to be returned to their families. The Indians responded to the encroachment with air power, giant howitzers and thousands of troops. This semi-war ended only after Nawaz Sharif, then Pakistan's prime minister, made a desperate July 4 trip to Washington seeking diplomatic intervention by President Clinton. In a retelling of the episode, Bruce Riedel, a special assistant at the White House, wrote that there had been ''disturbing evidence that the Pakistanis were preparing their nuclear arsenals for possible deployment.''
Musharraf has since assured the world that Pakistan is a responsible custodian of its nuclear arsenal. Still, pressures for one-upmanship with India are immense. According to American officials, Pakistan began swapping vital nuclear secrets with North Korea in exchange for ballistic missiles in the late 1990's. The dealings apparently continued after Musharraf's coup, but by the time they were disclosed last year, Islamabad was already a front-line warrior against Al Qaeda. The Bush administration responded tepidly, imposing sanctions on a single Pakistani nuclear laboratory.
In the past 25 years, American policy toward Pakistan has largely been devised to fit the events happening next door, in Afghanistan. Immediately after Sept. 11, Washington reinvigorated a waning friendship with Islamabad, employing President Bush's with-us-or-against-us ultimatum. The Pakistanis were ordered to forsake their Taliban associates, avail air bases to American troops and join in the hunt for terrorists. In many ways, Musharraf was pleased to comply. He had been treated warily in the West. Intimacy with America would come with generous military aid, forgiven debt and a new role for him, that of a reputable statesman.
There was precedent for Musharraf's abrupt rehabilitation. An earlier Pakistani ruler, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, hanged his civilian predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and imposed a punitive version of Islam especially harsh on women. And yet however much Zia had fallen into bad odor, the air was freshened by his strategic usefulness after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Throughout the 80's, jihad was a word to be embraced, not abhorred, in Washington. The United States employed Pakistan as the conduit for billions of dollars in arms to the Afghan resistance. The I.S.I., tutored in artifice by the C.I.A. itself, thrived in the role of middleman benefactor to the many mujahedeen groups.
Surely, the defeat of the Soviet Union was beneficial for the United States, but American policy lacked a fuller vision for the region. By 1989, when the Soviets finally fled their misadventure, Pakistan was awash with weapons, the inevitable leakage from the gushing pipeline. It was also an increasingly cordial locale for the heroes of radical Islam, the thousands of Pakistanis who fought in the jihad as well as the many ''Afghan Arabs'' from around the world who, like Osama bin Laden, had come to battle the infidels.
With the Soviets vanquished, they would begin to look for new enemies.
Making Democracy Safe for Musharraf
ne evening in Islamabad, I decided to visit a session of the National Assembly, where the same scene had been repeating itself for months. Once the session was called to order, members of the opposition rose from their soft leather chairs and began pounding notebooks and tubes of paper on the curved tables before them. A ritual chant accompanied this arrhythmic drumbeat: ''Go, Musharraf, go! No, L.F.O., no!'' After about five minutes of this noise, the defiant legislators walked out, leaving pro-Musharraf lawmakers behind in a half-empty chamber.
The main grievance was the Legal Framework Order -- the L.F.O. -- Musharraf's unilateral redrawing of the Constitution. He has bestowed upon himself the power to appoint Supreme Court justices and military chiefs, dissolve the Parliament and fire the prime minister. In other words, officials -- whether elected or otherwise -- were free to perform their duties so long as the general did not disapprove of how they did it.
After the 1999 coup, Musharraf promised his countrymen a ''true democracy,'' a way of governance he found hard to define though he openly supposed it would require his continuing guidance. Much the same had been pledged by the three previous military rulers, but the public was again keen for a fresh start, and the coup was widely cheered. Pakistanis had soured on Nawaz Sharif, an opulently wealthy industrialist whose greatest passions were food, cricket, fast cars and then more food.
Musharraf, on the other hand, presented himself as a man who would countenance no corruption. People from some of Pakistan's leading families were arrested on fraud charges without regard to their political connections. The general demanded that bank loans be repaid, a bothersome innovation for many of the rich.
I spent time with Musharraf during these early days. He is a forceful man who expresses himself with such common sense and seeming candor that it is hard to imagine a word being untrue. He favors declarations like ''It's high time we face facts!'' And yet for most Pakistanis, the general has been a disappointment. Anticorruption campaigns gave way, once again, to political vendettas. Farouk Adam Khan had been chief prosecutor during the initial period of crusading. One Sunday night, I found him in his law office, sitting under the dim light of a single desk lamp. ''Pervez Musharraf had a great opportunity,'' he said, ''but he lost it in the pursuit of power.''
The general learned the ins and outs of politics, best defined as how to keep the outs from getting in. In May 2000, the Supreme Court validated his coup. This occurred after the 13 justices were ordered to sign a loyalty oath to the new regime -- and the 6 who refused had been replaced. The court then recovered some of its dignity by setting an October 2002 deadline for parliamentary elections. At the time, Musharraf was referring to himself as Pakistan's ''chief executive,'' though the title of president later became his preference. He won a five-year term at the job in a national referendum with only his name on the ballot and a simple choice of ''yes'' or ''no.'' The reported tally showed 98 percent in the affirmative, a vote considered implausible by most observers -- even if no campaigning against Musharraf had been allowed. Within months, the new president, swept along by his landslide, issued the Legal Framework Order.
The parliamentary elections posed some difficulties for Musharraf, but not insurmountable ones. To have a malleable National Assembly, he would need support from a political party. Pakistan had plenty of those, but the two main ones relied on the cult of personality -- and their esteemed personages had long been on the lam. In an odd secret deal, Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League, traded prison in his homeland for exile in Saudi Arabia. Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the hanged Zulfikar, had herself twice been prime minister, inheriting the Pakistan People's Party. Educated at both Harvard and Oxford -- and charged with corruption by both Pakistan and Switzerland -- she now lived in both London and Dubai.
Neither Benazir Bhutto nor Sharif could have run again anyway. Musharraf had installed new rules for public office. Some were laudable, like reserving a quota of seats in Parliament for women. Others were quirky, moralistic or simply cunning. A college degree was required, disqualifying all but perhaps 4 percent of the population. Accused bank defaulters also could not run, nor could their relatives or business associates.
Yet however unusual these rules, it was their selective application that was most disturbing. In a detailed criticism of the election, observers from the European Union said the inconsistency was the ''result of a government strategy, in certain cases through the enforcement of person-specific provisions.'' Politicians allying themselves with Musharraf were often given ways around legal obstacles, the report noted. A few of the more ambitiously recruited were then rewarded with posts in the cabinet.
As might be expected, many Pakistanis believe the I.S.I. was shoulder-deep in election mischief. Intelligence agents may well have intimidated more than a few. Stories of such threats are common if difficult to confirm. ''They handcuffed me, put a black hood over my head, threw me in a car and put a blanket over me,'' Ahsan Iqbal told me. He was once responsible for economic planning under Nawaz Sharif and had refused to switch sides. ''They took me to one of their safe houses.'' There, he said, he was entombed in darkness for 16 to 18 hours until the abductors pushed him back into the car and abandoned him in a remote area. ''They were letting me know that if I misbehaved, something worse could happen.''
With Benazir Bhutto absent, I instead visited her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who once bore the unfortunate nickname Mr. 10 Percent, a reference to the money he supposedly took off the top while his wife ran the country. For the past eight years he has been in prison, and the only way to see him was during one of the hearings in his continuing legal saga. ''Come here, right next to me,'' Zardari said affably. He was sitting in the side yard of a courthouse in Rawalpindi, relaxing under a tree. He pinched my arm and nodded to his left. ''The I.S.I. is posted there. Better put away your tape recorder.'' I had been expecting the dashing man I had seen in photos, a playboy polo player known as much for his dalliances as for his marriage. Instead he appeared pasty and bloated, a fidgety guy in a wheelchair with back problems and diabetes. His eyeglasses hung on a band around his neck; his cane rested against a tree stump. During his first years of captivity, he was tortured, he said. He stuck out his tongue to show me a groove excavated from the center.
Our conversation rambled, and he was emphatic in denying any wrongdoing. He himself brought up the matter of a $180,000 diamond necklace his wife is said to have bought with dirty money. ''She doesn't need more jewelry,'' he said, as many a husband would. And her family was wealthy. ''Benazir has more jewelry than she can count.'' To him, their legal troubles were part of some conspiracy. ''The world is not Camelot,'' he said, as if summarizing some philosophy's central truth.
An old air-conditioner was rattling in the background. When it unexpectedly stopped, Zardari sent a man into the courthouse to restart this camouflage of noise, again nodding warily toward the I.S.I. agents. ''Musharraf is basically a wolf in sheep's clothing; he's playing footsy with the world,'' he said ruefully. But he seemed to envy the president more than dislike him. Musharraf had dumb luck on his side. ''If it wasn't for 9/11, we would have won the election hands down. He couldn't have kept Benazir from coming back. He couldn't have changed all those laws.''
He couldn't have kept Asif Zardari locked away.
The Mullahs Are Coming!
ven without Benazir, her party got slightly more total votes than the one loyal to Musharraf, but his side won the most individual seats in Parliament.
The biggest surprise, however, was the success of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (M.M.A.), or United Action Forum, an odd coalition of six religious parties never before known for mutual harmony or strength at the polls. It won the third-largest block of seats. More stunningly, it did well enough in provincial races to control the assembly in the Northwest Frontier and become a major partner in a ruling coalition in Baluchistan. Government by ''the mullahs'' has long been a dreaded prospect by the vast majority of Pakistanis with less doctrinaire views, and the M.M.A.'s unexpected victories intensified fears that ''Talibanization'' was creeping its way across the land.
Seven months later, extremists -- shouting the all-purpose invocation ''God is great!'' -- inflamed those anxieties by marauding through the city of Peshawar. As police placidly looked on, the crowd confiscated CD's and tapes from stores and burned music and movies in a bonfire. They blackened the faces of women on billboards. In the meantime, politicians in the new government spoke of plans to not only enforce their version of Shariah law but also compel its obedience with patrols of religious constables.
Conspiracy theorists and others reacted to the M.M.A.'s election success with a frenzy of suspicion. They began to call the coalition the Military-Mullah Alliance, speculating that the wily Musharraf had backed the religious parties to scare the gullible Americans into meting out more aid. (''The mullahs are coming! The mullahs are coming!'') To them, it seemed the M.M.A. had received an unfair leg up. Degrees from madrasas (religious schools) had been accepted to fulfill the educational requirement for candidates. On the ballots themselves, where each party was denoted by an emblem, the M.M.A. was granted the symbol of a book. In a mostly illiterate country, some people were then easily persuaded that their choice was to vote for or against the Holy Koran.
end of part one |
