by Ahmed Rashid
The only unpredictable danger Musharraf faced was from the country’s Supreme Court. In June 2005, Musharraf had appointed Iftikhar Chaudhry as chief justice of the Court. The senior judiciary had traditionally been compliant and accepting of military rule. However, as the date for Musharraf’s reelection approached, Chaudhry moved Supreme Court judges to become proactive in the defense of civil rights and the rule of law. The Court began to issue rulings against police abuse and torture, forced marriages, discrimination against women, and unjust rape laws, and it even blocked high-rise land-development schemes—some sponsored by army officers—because they endangered the environment.
However, the most controversial issue the Supreme Court tackled was the case of hundreds of disappeared prisoners. Arrested secretly by the ISI in a manner already described in chapter 14, these prisoners were never brought to trial. None of the intelligence agencies even admitted holding them. When the courts started demanding their release or at least their appearance in court, some two hundred missing people were mysteriously set free during the winter of 2006/2007. Musharraf told the Americans that Chaudhry had become dangerous because he was releasing al Qaeda militants. In fact, most of those released were the regime’s political opponents from Sindh and Balochistan.
The army found such judicial activism quite intolerable, while Musharraf feared that the Supreme Court would rule against his seeking a second term as president on at least two counts—a serving military officer could not be elected president, and a government servant needed to be retired for two years before seeking public office. Poorly advised by hawkish generals and in a hurry to secure his position, on March 9 Musharraf suspended Chaudhry on charges of corruption and misuse of authority and placed him under house arrest.
The next day, demonstrations led by lawyers took place in every bar association in the country. Days of strikes followed, paralyzing law courts in even the smallest towns. The striking lawyers were soon joined by journalists, urban professionals, women activists, and members of nongovernmental organizations, all demanding the release of Chaudhry, the resignation of Musharraf, and the holding of free and fair elections. Musharraf had unwittingly galvanized Pakistan’s small but highly vocal middle-class civil society, who were tired of military rule. His advisers told him that the protests would peter out in a few days. Instead, they escalated, becoming larger and more abusive of Musharraf. When Chaudhry attended a hearing of the Supreme Judicial Council—the court that was to determine if he should be permanently suspended—tens of thousands of lawyers accompanied him to the courthouse, precipitating a daylong battle with police.
Over the next few months, Chaudhry toured the country to speak to bar associations, where he insisted that the rule of law, democracy, and the constitution be upheld. His speeches, although never overtly political, were a direct challenge to the army. On May 5 he took twenty-seven hours to travel the usually four-hour journey from Islamabad to Lahore as hundreds of thousands of people turned out to cheer his motorcade. A few days later, in Karachi, fifty people were killed as government-sponsored opponents to Chaudhry ran riot just before he was due to arrive in the city. On every occasion the police used excessive brutality to beat up lawyers, women, and journalists; thousands of peaceful protestors were arrested. The government imposed press censorship and forbade live TV broadcasts. Musharraf lost the battle and his credibility when on July 20 the Supreme Court bench hearing his case reinstated Chaudhry as chief justice. There was euphoria in the country and widespread celebrations.
While the security forces were focused on beating up lawyers, a more ominous threat was emerging from Islamic extremists, who now directly challenged the army. In January 2007 the government had tolerated madrassa students and armed extremists from the Red Mosque in the center of Islamabad who threatened citizens. The mosque and its complex of madrassas housed thousands of male and female students. The ISI had used the mosque as a sleepover station for militants traveling to Afghanistan and Kashmir as early as 1984, when foreign Muslims first arrived to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. More recently, the mosque housed the orphans and female relatives of suicide bombers who had died in Kashmir. The mosque was run by two brothers, Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Maulana Abdul Aziz Ghazi, who had long-standing links to the ISI and the military. Over time, the brothers had used their army contacts to seize more land around the mosque to enlarge their empire.
Although the mosque is located just two miles from the president’s residence and half a mile from ISI headquarters and the diplomatic quarter, the regime saw the unruliness of its militants as a convenient message to Western embassies—that the threat of Islamic militancy in the heart of the capital made the Musharraf regime even more indispensable. In one cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz was said to have voiced the opinion that the militancy was a convenient distraction from the negative media coverage the government was receiving on the Chaudhry case.
Militants from the mosque sallied out to threaten women not wearing the veil and shopkeepers selling Western movies, while an all-female veiled vice squad armed with batons kidnapped alleged prostitutes from private homes and took them in for reeducation. In April, as militant Pashtuns from Waziristan and Swat took up residence in the mosque and more arms were brought in, the Ghazi brothers threatened civil war if the government did not accept Sharia law. It was clear that the movement was out of control, the Ghazi brothers had overstepped their limits and gotten carried away, and the militants were no longer listening to their ISI handlers.
The crisis was to continue for six months, until the army was forced to take action, turning Islamabad into a war zone. Whereas in January 2007 a small police party could have arrested the few culprits, by July an army brigade was needed to clear out the estimated ten thousand students and militants who now had barricaded themselves in the Red Mosque and pledged to become martyrs. The first clashes between the militants and the army began on July 3, after which several thousand students either escaped the mosque or surrendered. On July 8 Musharraf ordered a full-scale assault on those remaining inside, but it took another three days of heavy fighting before the complex was cleared. Abdul Aziz was arrested while trying to flee dressed as a woman, while his brother, Abdul Rashid, was killed in the final shootout. The government said 102 students and militants were killed, against a loss of 10 soldiers. However, the militants insisted that hundreds of their number had been killed, and those who escaped vowed to become suicide bombers.
Following the fall of the Red Mosque, a wave of retaliatory attacks and suicide bombings swept across the North-West Frontier Province. In the three weeks following the July assault, 167 people, including 120 soldiers and policemen, were killed in 21 attacks by militants, which included 12 suicide bombings. The government, the army, and the public were shocked. The country had never faced such a devastating bout of terrorism by its own citizens. Hundreds of militants now gathered in the Swat Valley, some one hundred miles north of Islamabad, in a bid to turn it into a new redoubt for Islam.
The government’s inept handling of the crisis was a turning point for al Qaeda, Pakistani Taliban, and other extremist groups, who now joined together and vowed to topple the government and create an Islamic state. Hundreds of suicide bombers born out of the rubble of the Red Mosque traveled to FATA, where they were trained and armed with explosives belts by the Pakistani Taliban. Others set up cells in urban areas or joined existing terrorist groups, such as Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Al Qaeda’s focus also shifted from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where it saw a demoralized army, a terrified citizenry, and an opportunity to destabilize the state. For the first time, senior Pakistani officials told me, the army’s corps commanders accepted that the situation had radically changed and the state was under threat from Islamic extremism. In fact, the Pakistan army was now fighting a civil war.
The deteriorating situation in Pakistan distracted Washington, but it did not hide the fact of the equally deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. Lt.-G
en. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded ISAF-NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, warned the U.S. Congress in February 2007 about “the reconstituted enemy” and “growing narcotics trafficking,” which could lead to “the loss of legitimacy of the government of Afghanistan.” Eikenberry became the first U.S. general to state publicly that NATO could not win in Afghanistan without addressing the sanctuaries the Taliban enjoyed in Pakistan.9 Bush took his cue from Eikenberry when, on February 15, 2007, speaking of the coming spring offensive by extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he described the FATA region of Pakistan as “wilder than the Wild West.”10
To persuade Pakistan to do more in FATA, U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates, Vice President Dick Cheney, and several U.S. military commanders traveled to Islamabad separately in the spring to meet with Musharraf. However, the Pakistanis were reluctant to break the September 2006 cease-fire they had agreed to with the new Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mahsud. Some Pakistani officials still gave the Taliban a kind of legitimacy that appalled the Americans. The governor of the NWFP, Ali Jan Orakzai, claimed that the Taliban movement was becoming “a national liberation movement”—a far cry from the epithet of “terrorists” given to them by the United States.11
The peace agreement in FATA was only torn apart after the assault on the Red Mosque in July 2007, as the Pakistani Taliban again began to attack the army in FATA. As Musharraf debated with his generals whether to relaunch an offensive in FATA, the Americans weighed in with unprecedented public statements, saying that Pakistan’s counterterrorism strategy had failed. In July 2007, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, a summary of sixteen American intelligence agencies, said that al Qaeda had reestablished its central organization, training infrastructure, and lines of global communication primarily due to its safe havens in FATA. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, said that al Qaeda was “working as hard as they can in positioning trained operatives here in the United States.”
For the first time in six years, Bush officials admitted that the peace deals in FATA had been a failure. “It hasn’t worked for Pakistan. It hasn’t worked for the United States,” said Frances Fragos Townsend, White House homeland security adviser, on July 17, 2007.12 All options were on the table, Townsend added, including a possible U.S. military strike against al Qaeda in Pakistan.13 These new assessments were a huge embarrassment for the U.S. intelligence community, which had been claiming since 2003 that al Qaeda’s leadership had been decisively depleted.14 The change in U.S. public opinion toward Pakistan had come as a result of growing frustration with Musharraf and strong indications that al Qaeda was planning terrorist attacks in the United States.
FATA was now perceived as a global threat, as many plans for terrorist attacks discovered in Europe were traced back to training or contacts in the tribal region. In June 2007, Islamists had attempted to bomb a London nightclub and Glasgow airport. In July, a suicide bomber killed seven Spanish tourists in Yemen. That same month, three people in Germany—two converts to Islam and a Turk—were found in possession of fifteen hundred pounds of chemicals that were to be used to blow up the U.S. air base in Ramstein. The accused ringleader, Fritz Gelowicz, and two others reportedly trained at an al Qaeda camp near Mir Ali, in Waziristan, in March 2006, where they worked with a German-speaking trainer. Seven more German Muslims are believed to have later trained at the same camp, after having entered Pakistan through Iran.
All these men belonged to the Islamic Jihad Union, the Central Asian terrorist group allied to al Qaeda that had carried out several bombings in Tashkent and that had a base in Waziristan. Germany’s deputy interior minister, August Hanning, warned that his country was now a major target for al Qaeda and that “there is a new quality in the threat to Germany. ”15 In September 2007, eight men, including several Pakistanis, were arrested in Denmark after having received training in FATA. In January 2008, twelve Pakistanis and two Indians were arrested in Barcelona for planning a wave of suicide attacks in several European cities, starting with Barcelona. All had received training in Waziristan. “In my opinion the jihadi threat from Pakistan is the biggest emerging threat we are facing in Europe,” said Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s leading antiterrorism judge. “Pakistan is an ideological and training hotbed for jihadists, and they are being exported here.”16
U.S. pressure and public disclosures about the Pakistan army’s lack of performance in the war on terror sparked outrage in Islamabad but helped yield the results Washington sought. Moreover, the army high command was itself feeling threatened by the monster it had helped create. Musharraf abandoned the truce with the Pakistani Taliban, sacked Governor Orakzai in Peshawar, and, on July 19, 2007, formally launched a military offensive in FATA. There were pitched battles between the army and the militants, who retaliated by carrying their suicide bombing campaign into Punjab province. To overstretch the army, they also successfully occupied the Swat Valley, assaulting police stations, driving out the local administration, and forcing thousands of people to flee. Mullah Fazlullah, the local extremist leader in Swat, had the support of hundreds of fighters from FATA, including Arabs, Chechens, and Uzbeks.
In early September two suicide bombers targeted a military bus just outside the army’s general headquarters in Rawalpindi, killing twenty-six officers and soldiers and wounding another sixty-six. A few days later the army faced its biggest humiliation when Baitullah Mahsud’s men surrounded a convoy carrying 270 Frontier Corps soldiers and forced them to surrender. In the following days, dozens more soldiers were kidnapped, surrendered, or even deserted to the militants. This reflected the low morale among the troops, which caused enormous concern in the army and in the West. The army dubbed Baitullah Mahsud, forty-two, the principal leader of the militants, and every terrorist attack was now laid at his door. Shy and unwilling to be photographed—like his mentor Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban—Mahsud is a short man, just a little over five feet, with thick locks of hair that fall halfway down his back and invariably cover his face. He had fought for the Taliban in the 1990s and helped al Qaeda and the Taliban escape from Afghanistan after December 2001.
Now Mahsud was in regular contact with al Qaeda, which increasingly seemed to be giving strategic direction to the Pakistani Taliban movement. Although uneducated, Mahsud resorted to rhetoric laden with references to the global jihad ideas of al Qaeda, as he threatened the United States and Europe with destruction. He said, “The main objective of this coalition is ‘defensive’ jihad.”17 In mid-December 2007, forty extremist militia commanders in FATA and the North-West Frontier Province met to set up an umbrella organization, the Tehreek-e-Taliban, or Movement of the Taliban, in Pakistan, appointing Mahsud as their amir, or leader.
The ISI had no inkling of the meeting until it was well over. Other key commanders who took part in the meeting included Mullah Fazlullah, thirty-two, who had become an important figure after the insurrection he led in the Swat Valley; Faqir Mohammed, based in the Bajour tribal agency, who worked closely with al Qaeda; and Sadiq Noor, another young and powerful leader from North Waziristan, who is closely allied to the veteran Afghan fighter Jalaluddin Haqqani. Together these commanders now led some forty thousand heavily armed tribesmen and militants, who had joined them from the cities.
As the battles in the north intensified and mass arrests continued in Pakistani cities, Musharraf came under much greater American pressure to open up the political system in order to salvage his crumbling reputation. On October 4, after secret talks with Bhutto in London and Dubai, Musharraf finally issued a National Reconciliation Ordinance that provided amnesty from prosecution and dropped corruption charges against Bhutto and all politicians who had served in government between 1988 and 1999. In return, Bhutto agreed that the members of parliament belonging to her Pakistan Peoples Party would abstain from voting when Musharraf ran for a second term as president. (To be elected president, one needs a simple majority from the 1,170 members of the national and four provincial assemblies.) On Octob
er 6, 2007, Musharraf won his election with just 57 percent of the total number of MPs voting for him, as several hundred MPs had resigned from parliament rather than taking part in the sham election. On October 18, 2007, Bhutto returned home to Karachi to a tumultuous public reception—and the assassins who awaited her.
The Supreme Court could still challenge Musharraf’s second term in office, however, which would endanger him just before the scheduled elections. So on November 3, 2007, he mounted a second coup by declaring a state of emergency—virtually martial law. He suspended the constitution and basic rights and sacked all Supreme Court judges, including Chaudhry. Thousands of activists, ranging from politicians to human rights workers and lawyers, were arrested overnight. All private TV satellite news channels were taken off the air, which left only the state-controlled Pakistan television network to relay news. Strict censorship was imposed over the print media. It was a throwback to a 1950s coup.
On November 3, 2007, Musharraf issued a new provincial court order, or PCO, which forced all judges to take a new oath of office that would validate his actions. Thirteen of the seventeen judges of the Supreme Court refused to take the oath and were placed under house arrest. Sixty out of ninety-seven judges in the four provincial high courts also refused to take the oath. This did not deter Musharraf, who appointed Abdul Hamid Dogar, a close friend, as chief justice. In addition, the Army Act disciplining army officers was amended so that civilians, too, could be tried for treason in military courts.18 Parliamentary elections were scheduled for January 8, 2008. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, who vehemently defended the Emergency, threatened that if protests continued the elections could be delayed for a year.
