by Ahmed Rashid
Despite the army’s attempts to deflect the real issues of terrorism taking root along Pakistan’s border region, Musharraf faced low-key pressure from Washington to move troops into South Waziristan and combat al Qaeda. Occasionally the simmering tensions between the two countries erupted into the open. “I personally believe that President Musharraf is genuine when he assists us in the tribal areas . . . but I don’t think that affection for working with us extends up and down the rank and file of the Pakistani security community,” Richard Armitage admitted on October 1.22 Islamabad retorted angrily, forcing Armitage to backtrack when he visited Islamabad a few days later. He now said that Pakistan’s security forces were “two hundred percent” behind Musharraf.23 This American shadowboxing at the expense of Afghanistan made Karzai and the Afghans increasingly angry.
The Pakistan army continued to patronize extremist groups in the country even though such groups had been banned. After the U.S. embassy received threats from one group in November, U.S. ambassador Nancy Powell publicly warned the regime that these groups posed a serious threat. . . . “These banned groups are re-establishing themselves with new names.” Musharraf promptly banned the same three extremist groups he had banned two years earlier but that had reappeared under new names.24 Yet even as Musharraf remained soft on banning the extremists, they were planning deadly attacks against him. Al Qaeda leaders had issued unambiguous threats to kill him. In October 2002, bin Laden had called on “my Pakistani Muslim brothers . . . to get rid of the shameful Musharraf.”25 A year later Ayman al-Zawahiri called on Pakistanis to “unite and cooperate to topple this traitor and install a sincere leadership that would defend Islam and Muslims.”26 For months there was talk in extremist circles about plans to kill Musharraf.
On December 14, 2003, the day Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces in Iraq, a massive bomb exploded under a bridge in Rawalpindi just thirty seconds after Musharraf’s convoy had driven across it. The heavily guarded bridge was just a mile from the army’s general headquarters and Musharraf’s home, yet militants were able to spend several days undetected tying explosives to the bridge’s pylons. Musharraf’s life was saved only by a jamming device in his car provided by the FBI, which momentarily blocked off all telephone signals, thereby delaying the explosion.
A week later there was an even more determined attack. On Christmas Day two suicide bombers rammed their explosives-packed cars into Musharraf’s convoy as he was returning home for lunch—just a few hundred yards from the first attack. Musharraf was hit by flying glass as his car windscreen shattered. Fifteen people were killed and fifty were wounded. Human body parts littered the highway. The face of one suicide bomber was lifted clean off his severed head and flattened against a nearby roof. The two suicide bombers were soon identified. One was Mohammed Jamil, twenty-three, a member of Jaish-e-Mohammed who had fought with the Taliban. On his return home in April 2002 he had been interrogated by the ISI, who had declared him “white,” or safe. Found in the debris was the memory chip from Jamil’s mobile phone, which showed that he had made one hundred calls before his death, including one to a policeman who told him about the timing of Musharraf’s convoy.
The second suicide bomber was identified as Hazir Sultan, forty-two, who had also fought with the Taliban. Both men had received their explosives from an al Qaeda camp in South Waziristan. The very men whom the army had encouraged to fight for the Taliban were now returning to haunt them. The profiles of the two men were a clear example of how terrorist networks partially created by the ISI remained intimately linked and how little had been done by the regime to break them up. At one time or another these two men had been engaged with al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, Kashmiri militants, Pakistani extremist groups, and dissidents in the armed forces of Pakistan. The attacks shocked the world because they demonstrated the worst-case scenario: disaffected military personnel on the inside linked to terrorist groups on the outside. Only a handful of military officers knew the route and timing of Musharraf’s travel plans or which of his several identical armored-plated cars he would be using.
After the attacks Musharraf carried out a widespread reshuffling in the army high command, including appointing Maj.-Gen. Nadeem Taj, a close confidant, as head of military intelligence, which now oversaw Musharraf’s personal security. The extremist threat within the armed forces was growing. In August, after an FBI tip-off, five officers had been arrested for suspected links to al Qaeda. They included a lieutenant-colonel and a major serving on the Afghan border.27 More than 150 police and security personnel were arrested and interrogated after the December attacks. Eventually six air force noncommissioned officers, several military personnel, and civilians were tried in a secret court-martial for the two assassination bids. It was alleged that the terrorists had been trying to kill Musharraf for the previous eighteen months. There was such secrecy around the trial that even the number of accused was never made public by the army, although twelve suspects were found guilty and given the death sentence in 2006.28
The air force personnel had been recruited by Amjad Hussain Farooqi, a leader of Jaish-e-Mohammed who had planned the two separate assassination attempts. Farooqi had fought in both Afghanistan and Kashmir since the age of nineteen and was well known to the ISI. Now twenty-seven, he and his deputy, Matiur Rehman, had been close associates of Mullah Omar and bin Laden.29 They had helped al Qaeda fighters escape to Pakistan and then helped reconstitute the terrorist network by compiling a Rolodex of jihadis whom they could call upon for special operations. A massive manhunt for Farooqi ensued, and he was finally killed by Pakistani police in Nawabshah, in Sindh province, on September 26, 2004. He had just gotten married for the second time and had been enjoying his honeymoon. Farooqi epitomized the new face of al Qaeda in Pakistan: local, in touch with many different groups and stratas of society, and capable of running several operations at the same time.
The attacks on Musharraf sent shudders through Washington and other Western capitals, as there was no clear line of political succession if Musharraf were to be eliminated and there were doubts as to whether a new Pakistani leader, even from the military, would continue as an ally of the United States. Just after the attacks, Indian prime minister Vajpayee arrived in Islamabad for his long-anticipated meeting with Musharraf in order to end the state of tensions between the two nations. In the past, Pakistani leaders may have promoted extremism in Kashmir, but now one was a victim of it. It was a point that the Indians did not hesitate to make.
The attacks on his life and the subsequent wave of public sympathy gave Musharraf another opportunity to cut the army’s umbilical cord with the extremists. It was clear that the ISI no longer controlled the monster of extremism it had created, while the army’s rank and file was becoming susceptible to extremist propaganda and recruitment, threatening the very institution that laid claim to be the guardian of the country. Yet even now Musharraf’s reactions were minimal—a reshuffling of the army’s high command, the roundup of suspects in the lower ranks, and the arrest of some civilians. None of the senior extremist leaders were arrested, nor were their parties forcibly disbanded. Washington, too, failed to use the moment to push Musharraf harder to curb terrorist violence. These seminal events— two assassination bids on a close ally of the White House—seemed to have had no impact on persuading Bush and Cheney that now was the moment to push Musharraf to do more.
Instead, the problem was seen as technical, the result of deficiencies in law enforcement. So the CIA provided more technology and equipment to the ISI. Hundreds of Pakistani law enforcement and intelligence officers, as well as bodyguards for Musharraf, were trained in the United States. The FBI provided money and training to the ISI to set up a counterterrorism Special Investigation Group made up of one hundred personnel. This squad was effective in gleaning evidence from suicide bomb sites to identify bombers, but there was no concerted drive to eliminate the sources of terrorism.
Musharraf still held the post of army chief and president, but t
here was mounting pressure by the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy (ARD), comprising all the nonreligious opposition parties, that he relinquish his job as army chief. He had promised time and again to do so but had failed to follow through, knowing full well that his power derived from that post. There was to be no pressure from Washington for him to relinquish the position. “You have a government which can’t deliver everything we would like to see,” Paul Wolfowitz told me in Washington in February 2004. “I think there is only so much change that can happen in Pakistan at any one time.”30 However, officials in the State Department were frustrated at the lack of U.S. pressure on Musharraf. “We refuse to question anything that Musharraf does at home,” an official told me in Washington. “We fail to even admit that retaining his uniform is counterproductive, when we could have easily nuanced our disapproval. By turning a blind eye, we only give Musharraf enormous leverage over Washington.”
Instead, in March 2004, the White House conferred the status of “a non-NATO ally” on Pakistan and announced a $700 million aid package for 2004 that earmarked $364 million for the military and a paltry $19 million for “improving democratic participation.” The Pakistani military went on a spree, purchasing weapons worth $3.8 billion in 2003 and $6 billion in 2006. The support to Pakistan from around the world had dramatically improved the once-moribund Pakistani economy. By 2003 the servicing of Pakistan’s $38 billion debt was reduced by half—to 36 percent of GDP, as compared with 66 percent in 2000. Exports grew dramatically as better trade deals were signed and Pakistanis working abroad sent more money home, fearing scrutiny of their foreign bank accounts.
Foreign exchange reserves grew to $9 billion in 2003, compared with just $1 billion in 2000. The Karachi Stock Exchange had surged by 112 percent in 2002, the highest percentage gain of any bourse in the world, and rose by another 65 percent in 2003. Before 9/11 the market capitalization of the Exchange was just $5 billion, but by 2004 it had reached $17 billion. As energy prices rose worldwide, a special oil facility from Saudi Arabia worth $1 billion per year allowed Pakistan to defer payments on expensive oil imports.
However, there was still inadequate funding for the social sector, especially health and education. State schools could challenge the madrassas only if they were plentiful and provided a better education, but that meant more money for the education budget. In 2002 the United States had given a $100 million grant spread over five years for educational reforms, but the funds were not matched with a similar commitment by the Pakistani government. Had Musharraf, on his first visit to Washington after 9/11, appealed for a major international aid effort to fund a countrywide literacy campaign rather than asking for F-16 fighter aircraft, there is little doubt that he would have been swamped with offers of government money. The regime appeared to have no strategy for turning around the chronic educational morass in the country, which was fueling ignorance and jihadism.
Sixty years after independence, Pakistan’s literacy rate is an appalling 54 percent, with female literacy at less than 30 percent and, in some areas, such as Balochistan, less than 15 percent. The total number of illiterate people has more than doubled in the past half century. Public expenditure on education as a percentage of gross domestic product fell from 2.6 percent to 1.8 percent between 1990 and 2001, and remained at that level until 2003.31 By one estimate, less than 25 percent of the work force is literate, making it impossible to train workers for anything other than menial jobs. Primary school enrollment grew only 1 percent between 1999 and 2002, the first years of the Musharraf regime, while the high-school dropout rate was one of the highest in Asia.32 Next door, Afghanistan launched a major literacy drive that sent five million children back to school, but in Pakistan—a state far better equipped—there was no such endeavor. For those children who did attend school, educational standards had dropped drastically. A prominent educator commented that “most students have not learned how to think, they cannot speak or write any language well, rarely read newspapers and cannot formulate a coherent argument or manage any significant creative expression. This generation of Pakistanis is intellectually hand icapped.”33
School textbooks were developed by each regime as political manifestos to brainwash students into accepting a continuous state of tension with India or to justify military rule, hatred of non-Muslims, or symbols that promoted religious intolerance and jihadism.34 The army was invariably glorified as the only patriotic institution in the country. Textbooks frequently portrayed Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who was a non-practicing Shia, as a pious man at prayer expounding reactionary religious beliefs rather than the democratic principles he had actually espoused. The ulema were portrayed as heroes of the Pakistan Movement, when in fact they had opposed the creation of Pakistan.
Higher education was in an even more deplorable state, with the country’s universities producing just fifty Ph.D.s a year in 2001—a figure that rose to seven hundred with the help of U.S. Fulbright scholarships. However, the army had a limited agenda—to invest in higher education in the fields of science and technology so as to improve Pakistan’s military-industrial complex, compete with India, and provide workers for its nuclear program. “This is an educational vision appropriate for a totalitarian state, not for one that aspires to be a free society,” wrote Stephen Cohen, an American scholar of Pakistan.35
The most immediate problem was reforming the estimated 12,000 madrassas in the country. Once the seat of learning for Muslim priests and judges, madrassas had been taken over by Islamic parties and extremist groups in the 1980s and now taught a syllabus of jihad to recruit fighters for the wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir. In 1947 there were only 137 madrassas in Pakistan; but they doubled in number every ten years until the 1980s, when the military regime of President Zia ul-Haq approved state funding for a massive growth in madrassas.36
Many madrassas in the Pashtun belt in the NWFP and Balochistan, controlled by the Deobandi sect, promoted jihad to the detriment of all other Islamic teachings. Deobandi mullahs were also recruited in large numbers for the army. Even after 9/11 some madrassas continued to be funded by Wahhabi groups in the Arabian Gulf and large donations by Pakistanis. It was estimated that out of a total of $1.1 billion in donations by Pakistanis to charities, or the giving of zakat—the Islamic tax of 2.5 percent of income that is given to the poor—94 percent of the money went to religious institutions.37
In 2001 the government had approved a plan that would for the first time register madrassas, halt their funding from abroad, and modify their curricula to teach modern subjects such as math, history, and science.38 The Islamic parties protested the new law, and the government promptly shelved it. Every year the state budget allocated one billion rupees for madrassa reforms, but the reforms were never implemented. The lack of international pressure on the regime to do so only encouraged further postponements. The U.S. State Department and USAID maintained the charade that Pakistan was actively carrying out reforms.
After a meeting at Camp David in June 2003, Bush praised Musharraf’s commitment to reform: “He’s taking on the issue in a way that is visionary and strong. He’s dealing with the madrassas in a way that is productive and constructive,” he said.39 In fact, all reforms had stalled and hundreds of new madrassas were popping up all over the country. In Islamabad, with a population of just one million, there were 127 madrassas in 2006 and 42 new ones being created. One new madrassa was being opened every week in the capital.40
The Bush administration was forced to oblige Musharraf again in the spring of 2004 when scandal broke over Dr. A. Q. Khan, Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, who was caught proliferating nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. The world was shocked, even as the Bush administration went to extraordinary lengths to appear uncritical of any possible army involvement in the scandal. In February, Musharraf pardoned Khan after the scientist publicly took responsibility for the proliferation upon himself. In turn, Bush let Musharraf off the hook by accepting the steps Pakistan was taking to clean up its a
ct. Keeping Musharraf onside was now vital to the White House as Bush went on the campaign trail for his reelection bid in the summer of 2004. With the insurgency in Iraq worsening, Karl Rove had scripted one stump speech for Bush in which he presented how the U.S. relationship with Pakistan was a stunning foreign policy success story. In July, Bush told an audience at Oak Ridge, Tennessee:
Three years ago Pakistan was one of the few countries that recognized the Taliban regime. Al Qaeda was active and recruiting in Pakistan, and was not seriously opposed. Pakistan served as a transit point for al Qaeda terrorists leaving Afghanistan on missions of murder. Yet the United States was not on good terms with Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders. . . . Today the governments of the United States and Pakistan are working closely in the fight against terror. . . . Pakistan is an ally in the war on terror and the American people are safer.41
The assassination attempts on Musharraf had allowed Bush to project him as the brave pro-American Muslim leader holding the front line to prevent terrorists reaching the shores of the U.S. homeland. At the time, nobody, including John Kerry and other Democratic candidates, questioned the assumption of how the United States could be safer if Musharraf himself was not safe.42 Further attacks only belied Bush’s claims. On June 9, 2004, in the midst of Karachi’s morning rush hour, the convoy of the city’s corps commander, Lt.-Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat, was ambushed. Gunmen raked the vehicles with machine-gun fire and exploded grenades. The general escaped, but his driver, seven soldiers, and three policemen were killed.
The terrorists involved belonged to a new group, called Jundullah, or the “Army of God,” made up of educated middle-class professionals, including doctors and lawyers, who trained in South Waziristan with al Qaeda. Jundullah’s leader, Attaur Rehman, had a master’s degree in statistics from Karachi University. Rehman himself had fought with the Taliban and had helped al Qaeda set up an underground network in Karachi after 9 /11. The wave of terror strikes the group carried out included attacks on the U.S. consulate, the office of a Christian group, and a peace concert. In all, seventeen people were killed in these attacks.43 Jundullah demonstrated a disturbing new trend: well-educated individuals willing to create a terrorist group that had no past record or association with madrassas or extremists, thus making it next to impossible to identify its members. Police officials in Karachi estimated that some two dozen unknown terrorist groups like Jundullah were operating in Karachi alone. As al Qaeda’s support base in Pakistan broadened, it was able to depend more and more on a class of well-educated Pakistanis.
