by Ahmed Rashid
He lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen in the belief that young people would vote for him. He set about putting together a new “king’s party,” persuading feudal and co-opted politicians to join the Pakistan Muslim League Party, which would support continued military rule. He promised that elections would be held in October. All the country’s major political parties, as well as lawyers’ groups, trade unions, and human rights organizations, condemned the referendum as unconstitutional, since, under law, only the national and four provincial assemblies could elect the president. Musharraf ignored the criticism and, convinced that millions of people would turn out to see him, began a barnstorming referendum campaign around the country, addressing political rallies organized by the ISI and the bureaucracy—even though there was no candidate standing against him.
He began his campaign from Lahore on April 9, where generals crowded a stage bedecked with balloons and colored paper streamers. Dressed in his commando uniform and wreathed in garlands of roses, Musharraf addressed the crowd, promising food for the hungry and jobs for the jobless. There was a pitifully low public turnout, with the first dozen rows filled with soldiers from the Lahore garrison wearing civilian clothes. Thousands of peasants had been forcibly bused in from outside the city.
The political parties all boycotted the referendum. There was total silence from the international community—only the European Union parliament spoke out, condemning the referendum and postponing ratification of a trade agreement with Pakistan.7 On April 30, some eighty-seven thousand polling stations—double the normal number for an election—were set up in every corner of the country. There were no polling lists, however, no need for voters to show identity cards, and no independent monitors— making it easier for people to cast multiple votes. Sixty-two million voters were expected to go to the polls, but hardly anyone turned up. The government declared that 42.8 million people voted for Musharraf, while eight hundred thousand had voted against him—resulting in a massive 70 percent turnout. However, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which had sent out thousands of monitors across the country, and other groups declared that the turnout was actually less than 10 percent. In Lahore, I toured empty polling stations that had registered only a handful of votes during the entire day and then shut down early. The five-hundred-thousand -strong army and three million government employees were ordered to vote for Musharraf—many times over.
The damage to Musharraf’s credibility was catastrophic. “A much-liked general has emerged from this test a diminished man,” said Shafqat Mehmood, who had served in Musharraf’s first cabinet in 1999. “A sincere man who convinced almost everybody that he was above all this, has appeared as shallow and opportunistic as other politicians,” said Najam Sethi, editor of The Friday Times.8 Musharraf had severely miscalculated, and public resentment against him, and the Bush administration for its studied silence, skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, the world was gripped by the murder of an innocent American journalist. On January 23, 2002, Daniel Pearl, an American correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, disappeared in Karachi. Pearl, thirty-eight, was chasing a story about Richard Reid, who in December had been arrested while trying to detonate explosives in his shoes while flying from Paris to Miami. Reid had been inspired by a small Pakistani extremist group whom Pearl was now trying to track down. Instead, Pearl was lured into a trap by one of his contacts, who turned out to be the terrorist Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who had been rescued from an Indian jail after the 1999 Kandahar hijacking. Sheikh had cleverly befriended Pearl using an assumed name.
Four days after his disappearance, Pearl’s pregnant wife, Mariane, and several newspaper offices received e-mail messages that showed photographs of Pearl crouching in chains with a gun to his head. An unknown group called the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty threatened to kill Pearl unless Pakistanis held at Guantánamo Bay prison were freed. They accused Pearl of working for the CIA and Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. government, and Pearl’s family strongly denied the accusations.
Musharraf appeared at a loss to condemn the kidnapping strongly enough. He first said the kidnappers were linked to Indian intelligence, an allegation that was quickly derided by the media. He then said that the kidnapping was a backlash by extremist groups. On February 12, while Musharraf was at the Davos World Economic Forum in New York, the Pakistani government announced the arrest of Omar Sheikh. Musharraf said he was “reasonably sure” that Pearl was still alive, and then insinuated that the kidnapped journalist had been too intrusive. “I wonder whether it was because of his overinvolvement that he landed himself into this kind of a problem,” Musharraf told reporters.9 The accusation that Pearl was “over-intrusive” was repeated by other Pakistani officials.10 Musharraf’s contradictory statements led the FBI and the Karachi police to believe that perhaps the Pakistani president was not being fully briefed by the ISI. In fact, Daniel Pearl was already dead.
Omar Sheikh had given himself up a week earlier, on February 5, to a former ISI officer, retired brigadier Ejaz Shah, who was now the home secretary of Punjab. The Karachi police were not even informed of Sheikh’s surrender until he was handed over to them a week later. Sheikh told the police that he had been involved in the Daniel Pearl kidnapping and that Pearl was already dead. That missing week remains the darkest hole of the entire affair. It has never been explained, nor is it known, what transpired between Sheikh and the ISI.11 Mariane Pearl later asked several pertinent questions, which many Pakistanis also asked, but which the government never answered satisfactorily: “Was there information they [the ISI] didn’t want revealed? Were they making some kind of deal with him—‘go to jail for a bit and we’ll make sure you are set free’? Or are they just taking their time to erase any clues leading back to them?”12
As the American press exploded in a litany of accusations, Colin Powell was forced to go public and defend the ISI. “I cannot totally rule out anything, but there is no evidence to suggest that the ISI was involved or anybody in the Pakistan government was accomplice to this tragedy,” he told CNN.13 In late February a video was handed over to the U.S. consulate in Karachi showing Pearl’s execution. The world was shocked—it was the first execution by al Qaeda to be recorded on video. In mid-May Pearl’s body was recovered. It had been cut into nine pieces and his head severed. It is still unclear if Pearl was targeted because he was Jewish or a journalist or because he worked for a right-wing American newspaper that had unearthed a computer disk in Kabul on the inner workings of al Qaeda or because he had simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Some Pakistani journalists suspected that hard-line elements in one of the intelligence agencies may have encouraged militants to carry out the kidnapping of a Western journalist in order to disourage reporters from delving too deeply into extremist groups. After all, such tactics had been used in the past.14 The government vehemently denied all such suspicions. What is certain is that extremist groups wished to embarrass the government and exert pressure on Musharraf to end his crackdown. In this they were successful, as after the kidnapping thousands of Pakistani militants were freed from jail. However, Daniel Pearl’s death was a devastating blow to Musharraf and Pakistan’s credibility.
Pakistan refused Washington’s requests to extradite Omar Sheikh to the United States. From jail, Sheikh threatened the military regime with severe repercussions if he was extradited.15 His videotaped trial was held in Hyderabad jail. On July 15, 2002, he and three others were convicted of kidnapping and killing Pearl. Sheikh received the death sentence. Investigators later revealed that he had directed the plot using separate cells of militants—some sixteen in all. While one cell carried out the abduction, another was used to negotiate with the authorities, while a third killed Pearl. Several of the sixteen militants involved were eventually arrested. The July trial involved only those in the first cell. Others who were caught belonging to other cells were never put o
n trial.16
The FBI later concluded that Daniel Pearl had not been executed by Omar Sheikh but by three Arabs, one of whom was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal organizer of the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed admitted killing Pearl in a March 2007 hearing in Guantánamo Bay, although the reliability of his confession was questioned, as there was little doubt that it came after he had been subjected to considerable torture by the CIA.17
Sheikh left a legacy of new tactics for extremists. For the kidnapping, he had recruited militants from several local terrorist groups, introduced them to al Qaeda, and forged operational unity through terrorist action. It was a model designed to maximize operational security and boost morale because it involved several groups. In the months ahead, jihadis from various extremist groups would contribute either manpower, expertise, or safe houses to conduct similar operations under al Qaeda’s auspices. No single group would be responsible for an entire operation, thus making the police’s task much more difficult. The militants came to hero-worship Omar Sheikh. Several subsequent terrorist acts were carried out by a cell calling itself Lashkar-e-Omar, or “the Army of Omar.”
In the aftermath of Daniel Pearl’s murder, a wave of deadly terrorist attacks swept Pakistan. On March 17, two suicide bombers threw grenades into Islamabad’s Protestant International Church, close to the U.S. embassy, during the Sunday service, killing five people and wounding forty-one. Two of the dead were Americans—the wife and daughter of a diplomat— while many foreigners, including five Britons, were wounded. General Franks and the State Department’s assistant secretary for South Asia, Christina Rocca, arrived as the American embassy was sending home all nonessential staff. On May 8 a car bomb blew up outside the Sheraton Hotel in Karachi, next to a bus full of French naval engineers. Eleven Frenchmen and three Pakistanis were killed. The bomb was so powerful that pieces of it landed on the roof of a ten-story hotel across the street. Now European embassies began to send all nonessential staff home.
On June 14 a car bomb blew up outside the U.S. consulate in Karachi, killing twelve Pakistanis and wounding forty-five. It was a daring attack against one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the country. The Karachi stock market fell by 3 percent the next day, and international airlines suspended all flights to Karachi as foreigners fled the city. When the police later arrested the perpetrators, they said that the same car bomb had been positioned in April to assassinate Musharraf but that the explosives provided by al Qaeda had failed to detonate.18 Those arrested included military personnel—one was a naval soldier and another a paramilitary ranger— who had provided the terrorists with intelligence about the route Musharraf was taking. These arrests made it clear that the militants were recruiting from the armed forces in order to target Musharraf. The U.S. Secret Service stepped up training for Musharraf’s security detail, which now numbered between two hundred and three hundred men.
In Karachi, sectarian Sunni jihadis began to kill Shia professionals, particularly doctors. Sunni extremists following the Deobandi and Wahhabism sects had long believed that Shias were not proper Muslims and should be eliminated. Al Qaeda had helped the Taliban carry out programs against Afghan Shias and now they helped Sunni militants do the same to Pakistani Shias. In the first four months of 2002 in Karachi, seventeen doctors, four lawyers, five journalists, four teachers, and sixteen government officials—all Shias—were gunned down. In mid-March, four Shia doctors were killed in five days. Doctors were furious with the government’s inability to stop the mayhem and went on strike, shutting down the city’s hospitals. The Karachi police, who faced the brunt of public anger, were infuriated at the lack of cooperation from the ISI in handing over lists of known militants.19 Police officials in Karachi said they believed that the ISI had extensive information on the militants and their safe houses in the city but were refusing to help the police track them down.
The police were also angry that the government had failed to bring a single charge of terrorism against the three thousand militants arrested after Musharraf’s January 12 speech. Pakistan’s three hundred thousand policemen, with a basic average monthly salary of one hundred dollars, were notoriously underpaid, poorly equipped and trained, and had no fingerprinting or DNA-testing facilities. Not surprisingly, they were also notoriously corrupt. A senior police officer pointed out that the army received 25 percent of the national budget while the police received only 1 percent, and yet the police were the main victims of terrorist attacks.
The contradictions in Pakistan’s counterterrorism strategy were becoming glaring. Even as the ISI helped the CIA run down al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan’s cities, Pakistani Islamist militants, with quiet ISI approval, were attacking Indian troops in Kashmir or helping the Taliban regroup in Pakistan. Yet al Qaeda itself was involved in training and funding the Islamist militants ordered to kill Musharraf. The regime continued to differentiate between so-called good jihadis, who fought in Kashmir on behalf of the ISI, and bad terrorists, who were largely Arabs—but such differences had long ceased to exist. In a briefing, Musharraf divided the extremists into three groups—the al Qaeda-Taliban, the Pakistani sectarian groups, and the “freedom fighters of Kashmir.”20 The military was clearly signaling that it still considered some jihadis as acceptable and was maintaining links with them. “It is not possible to completely crack down on the fundamentalists, as they may be needed in any future conflict with India,” one general told me.
Benazir Bhutto spoke of Musharraf’s dilemma: “The regime is living day to day, surviving on the pats it gets from the world community. . . . Each external and internal crisis gets the rest of the world community dialing or visiting the general to hold his hand. Increasingly, the West’s favorite dictator is viewed by his own people as nothing more than a foreign puppet. This creates the very environment that works to the advantage of the militants.”21
The battle against extremism took second place to the military regime’s fight to create a victory for the Pakistan Muslim League in the parliamentary elections, scheduled for October 10, 2002. The army wanted to push through twenty-nine amendments to the constitution that would legitimize the 1999 coup and make the president all-powerful. Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif would be banned from ever becoming prime minister again. The army also limited who was eligible to stand in the elections. Anyone without a university degree could not stand for election—a ridiculous supposition in a country with a 54 percent literacy rate. Meanwhile, graduation certificates issued by madrassas would be considered the equivalent of a university degree, thereby allowing thousands of mullahs to stand in the elections. Aitezaz Ahsan, a leading constitutional lawyer, called the decrees “the scorched earth policy of the military mind.”22 The amendments led to a storm of protests from the opposition parties, lawyers, and the media.
Maj.-Gen. Ihtesham Zamir, the head of ISI’s political wing, prepared lists of candidates on a color-coded chart of black, white, and gray— signifying those who would support or oppose Musharraf and those who were in between. Through harassment, persuasion, and threats, dozens of politicians were forced to abandon the opposition parties. ISI officers would arrive at the homes of potential candidates with a dossier containing tax returns, property holdings, telephone bills, and estimates of income and use them to threaten them, citing corruption or living beyond their means. “The ISI colonel gave me a choice, either you are with us or against us,” a politician told me. “It is like Bush’s war on terrorism.”
International monitors voiced deep skepticism about the intensive pre-rigging carried out by the military. A pre-poll report by a team of observers from the European Union described how “Pakistan appears to be the only country in the world where candidates can be disqualified for unpaid utility bills.”23 However, the United States looked away as officials visited Islamabad to boost Musharraf.24 Christina Rocca made no mention of the pre-poll rigging when she addressed the American Congress. Several Democratic congressmen delivered withering rebuttals, accusing her of ignoring “the sham referend
um” and describing the constitutional amendments as “an insult to democracy encouraging a dictatorship in Pakistan.”25
On August 21 Musharraf issued a Legal Framework Order that made him president for the next five years and the proposed twenty-nine amendments part of the constitution that would increase his and the military’s power. Waving the list of amendments in the air, he told reporters, “This is part of the Constitution. I am hereby making it part of the Constitution. ”26 Legally, only parliament had the power to amend the constitution, with a two-thirds majority vote. The next day Bush quipped that Musharraf “is still tight with us in the war against terrorism. . . . He understands that we have got to keep al Qaeda on the run.”27 On September 28, just two weeks before the Pakistani elections, Washington authorized a $230 million package of military spare parts to Islamabad, signaling the strongest possible endorsement for Musharraf. Pakistanis joked that the key electoral alliance was not between the army and the Pakistan Muslim League but between Musharraf and Bush.
After such intensive pre-poll rigging, there was little public enthusiasm for the actual election campaign. The government had banned political rallies and processions, and a deep cynicism pervaded the streets. The only issue-based campaign came from the newly formed Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), or United Council of Action, a six-party alliance of Islamic fundamentalist parties, who were able to put up large numbers of candidates due to the legalizing of madrassa certificates.28 MMA candidates ran on a shrill anti-U.S. platform, demanding the withdrawal of U.S. bases from Pakistan and an end to American interference. Significantly, the MMA was the only group allowed by the military to hold political rallies because its members were described as religious and not political leaders.
