by Ahmed Rashid
Musharraf met with foreign ambassadors in Islamabad to admit that his intervention was a matter of self-preservation but also that it would better enable the army to fight the extremists in the Swat Valley. However, the day the Emergency was declared, the army, which had been holding secret talks with Baitullah Mahsud, released twenty-eight terrorists from jail, including eight self-confessed suicide bombers. In exchange, Mahsud released the hundreds of soldiers he was holding. One such released bomber was Sohail Zia, twenty-two, who had been sentenced to twenty-four years in jail just a month earlier for being caught carrying two suicide belts. The army agreed to withdraw some troops from FATA and to mount patrols only in conjunction with Mahsud’s commanders. The Emergency was thus an excuse not to confront but rather to appease the extremists in the mountains.
It was not until two weeks after the declaration of Emergency that the army was fully deployed in Swat and went after the militants. The valley was cleared by December, after heavy fighting and the extensive use of helicopter gunships and artillery. Some 290 militants were killed, but the entire leadership, including Mullah Fazlullah, was able to escape into the mountains. There were no large-scale arrests of militants in the cities and not a single madrassa known to be supporting terrorism was closed down. Instead, Pakistan’s middle-class and civil society bore the brunt of the police and ISI crackdown. Bhutto was placed under house arrest in Lahore for several days. On seeing the thousands of police surrounding her house, she sarcastically asked “when we have this huge deployment, [why] police of this kind can’t be used to hunt down Osama bin Laden.”19
Following Bhutto’s arrest, a wave of revulsion against Musharraf and the army swept the country. Lawyers and civil-society activists continued to protest outside courthouses, but they were mercilessly clubbed by the police, and up to ten thousand people were jailed for the duration of the Emergency. Washington defended Musharraf, although it demanded that he quickly lift the Emergency, and President Bush said he still trusted Musharraf to hold elections. “I take a person for his word until otherwise. . . . And he made a clear decision to be with us and he’s acted on that advice,” Bush said at Crawford on November 10, 2007.20 However, Pakistan became a hot debating item for the Democratic Party candidates. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama accused Bush of supporting a dictatorship in Pakistan. “The failed policies of the Bush administration are part of the reason we are in this difficult and dangerous position,” Clinton said on November 6, 2007.21
Before lifting the Emergency on December 15, Musharraf passed six more amendments to the constitution that made it impossible for the courts or a future parliament to question his past actions. Only then were thousands of innocent people freed from jail. On November 28, Musharraf had finally taken off his uniform and handed over command of the army to the American-trained general Ashfaq Kayani, who had previously headed the ISI. Kayani’s appointment was welcomed by Washington, who had worked well with him over the past few years. However, it was on Kayani’s watch that the growth of extremism and the debacles in Swat, in FATA, and at the Red Mosque had occurred.
The forty-two-day-long Emergency had blighted Pakistan, undermined its economy, destroyed what little trust the political parties and the public had in Musharraf, and turned the increasingly influential middle-class and civil society against both the army and the president. After Bhutto’s death, the elections were postponed to February 18. Musharraf became more arrogant and was in total denial about the crisis he had himself created. As with other absolute rulers on the verge of losing control, he insisted that everyone—judges, lawyers, politicians—was conspiring against him.
The political vacuum Musharraf had helped to create only encouraged the Pakistani Taliban to intensify their suicide attacks in the weeks before the elections. Lahore faced its first major suicide bombing on January 9, when nineteen policemen were killed on the city’s busiest road. In North Waziristan, groups of militants, sometimes as many as six hundred, overran army posts and again started capturing soldiers. In late January 2008 the militants audaciously seized the Kohat Tunnel, a key communications link south of Peshawar city. Peshawar, the capital of the North-West Frontier Province, received rocket fire on almost a nightly basis from militants parked on the outskirts. Between Bhutto’s death on December 27, 2007, and the election on February 18, 2008, another four hundred people were killed.
Pakistan was now a major cause of concern for Washington. CENTCOM chief Admiral William Fallon said that during November and December 2007 the level of violence in Afghanistan’s eastern provinces was down by 40 percent because the Taliban were concentrating all their efforts on destabilizing Pakistan. Al Qaeda also had turned its face toward Pakistan, Fallon said. On January 9, 2008, Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, and Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, visited Islamabad, where they discussed with Musharraf and Ashfaq Kayani a plan to make operational in FATA a secret CIA base that could mount attacks on militants by Predator drones armed with missiles. Musharraf agreed and also accepted help from U.S. Special Forces to train and mentor Pakistani counterterrorism units. “The plan to counter insurgents is to work with the Pakistanis to share intelligence, increase cross-border cooperation between ourselves, the Afghans and the Pakistanis” and to increase the Pakistani army’s capability, said Fallon.22 Hundreds of millions of additional U.S. dollars would now pour in for the military.
There was one quick success with the death on February 1, 2008, of the number three man in the al Qaeda hierarchy, Abu Laith al-Libi, who was killed in a missile strike on a tribesman’s house near Mir Ali, in North Waziristan. At least seven other Arabs died with him. Libi, who had been a leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, was a key organizer and trainer of several militant groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Europe.
However, there was still a lack of trust between the CIA and the ISI as long as the ISI refused to deliver hard intelligence about the Afghan Taliban leaders who had safe sanctuary in Quetta. According to U.S. officials, surrendering Mullah Omar would be the ultimate test of the Musharraf regime’s sincerity. Dell Dailey, the State Department’s counter-terrorism chief, said the U.S. administration was displeased with “the gaps in intelligence” it was receiving from Pakistan. “We don’t have enough information about what’s going on there. Not on al Qaeda. Not on foreign fighters. Not on the Taliban,” Dailey said in January 2008.23
The elections were held in a state of widespread national despair. The wave of violence, the death of Bhutto, the refusal of the government to establish norms of transparency, and fears of large-scale rigging by the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q led to expectations of low voter turnout as people stayed away from the polls. Nobody believed that Musharraf would actually share power with the winners, especially if they were the PPP, as was widely expected. A huge sympathy vote was anticipated for the PPP, of which Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was now co-chairman. In fact, the results turned out to be much better than expected, defying all the pundits.
The election commission had failed to stop the PML-Q from carrying out extensive pre-poll rigging before the elections. However, army chief General Kayani had signaled to the administration and the intelligence agencies two days before the elections that there was to be no interference or rigging. More than 46 percent of the population came out to vote, and it did so in favor of the opposition. The final results for the National Assembly announced by the election commission on March 6 showed that the PPP had won 120 seats; the PML-N, the party of Nawaz Sharif, had won 90 seats; and the formerly ruling PML-Q had won only 51 seats.
More significant, the Islamic parties were wiped out. The combined Islamic parties’ alliance, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal—including the pro-Taliban Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, which had swept the Pashtun areas in 2002—had now won only 6 seats. Instead, the secular and moderate Pashtun-based Awami National Party had won the most seats in the North-West Frontier Province provincial elections and 13 seats in the National Assembly, making i
t certain that it would form the new provincial government in Peshawar.
No party held a majority, however, so a coalition government would have to be formed. Despite pressure from George Bush, Condi Rice, and Musharraf that Zardari join up with the remnants of the PML-Q, the PPP refused and immediately announced an alliance with Nawaz Sharif. Zardari wisely said he wanted to form a national unity government at the center and similar alliances in the provinces, where he embraced all moderate parties. For the first time in nearly a decade there was widespread hope that a popular coalition government would come to power and the democratic system would be allowed to take root.
The election results led to renewed calls for Musharraf to step down. After 9/11 his popularity had soared to 80 percent; now it was barely 20 percent. With his desire for continued power and his belief that he was indispensable to Pakistan, the army, and the world, he had undermined his own achievements. In fact, Musharraf had stayed in office for so long by concentrating all power in the presidency and being fully supported by the army and the intelligence services. He had co-opted a small section of the political elite by offering them office and patronage, but gave them no share in power or decision making. In return, they were expected to mobilize civilian support as Musharraf needed it. He had also co-opted the major Islamic parties, who maintained a fiction that they were opposed to military rule while, in fact, they helped sustain it.24
However, it is to the army that Musharraf owed everything, and in turn he had pampered it like no other army chief before him. Since his rule, the army had developed even greater stakes in the economy, and so exercised ever greater social and political control of the country. Author Ayesha Siddiqa estimates that Pakistan’s military-industrial complex was worth around $20 billion in 2007.25 The three armed services were running hotels, shopping malls, insurance companies, banks, farms, and industries. Army-owned factories made cornflakes, bread, cement, textiles, and sugar. Two army-run conglomerates, Fauji Foundation and the Army Welfare Trust, controlled one third of the entire heavy manufacturing in the country.
The army’s most important asset and reward for loyalty is the land parceled out to officers during their careers and again when they retire. The army owns an estimated twelve million acres, equivalent to 12 percent of total state-owned land. In 1900 the British began the tradition of granting agricultural land to loyal native officers. After 1947 more lucrative urban plots were given out to officers at nominal prices. Officers sold these plots at market rates, reaping profits of fifty to one hundred times. Under Musharraf, bureaucrats quipped that army officers at general headquarters were too busy trading plots of land on their mobile phones to protect the country. Musharraf fiercely defended the new greed he had perpetrated. “So, what is the problem if [the armed forces] are contributing to town development,” he said when quizzed about the issue. “The defence societies everywhere are the top societies of Pakistan. . . . Now, why are we jealous of this? What is the problem? . . . There’s no problem.”26
Musharraf had also inducted more than twelve hundred retired and serving military officers into all-civilian institutions and government departments. In 2000, he had more than one hundred generals working under contract in the government. As a result, the civilian bureaucracy and civilian institutions were ruthlessly undermined.27 At one point the vice chancellor of every university in the country was an army officer. Every general who retired from the army was promised a civilian job, and in this way Musharraf silenced any criticism from his corps commanders. He promoted this policy as “national development,” which could not be trusted to civilians. Yet corruption and incompetence were no less prevalent under the military than under civilian rule.
Musharraf had become increasingly callous and totally disregarding of public opinion. The only time I met him one-on-one was when he summoned me to his office to warn me directly to stop writing articles about the ISI’s support of the Afghan Taliban. The meeting, scheduled for half an hour, carried on for nearly two and a half hours. Musharraf gave me an hour-long lecture on how, since 1979, Pakistan had never interfered in Afghanistan.28 Many of the facts, dates, and names he mentioned were incorrect, but he was never contradicted by the two generals sitting in the room with us. Clearly he had not read his history, or the ISI had poorly briefed him. After his lecture, I bluntly told him that nobody believed Pakistan’s denials about supporting the Taliban. The discussion went in circles, but I had to be grateful that instead of arresting me, Musharraf had tried to engage me and change my mind. However, the encounter convinced me that he considered himself a master of spin and tragically believed that his spin was the absolute truth.
In Afghanistan the expanding Taliban offensive and the burgeoning failure of the Karzai government to deliver services and sustain its popularity among the Afghan people coincided with an even larger crisis in NATO. For much of 2007 the entire international community seemed to be at odds, unable or unwilling to agree on how to meet the growing threat of instability in Afghanistan, the expanding war against the Taliban now engulfing northern Pakistan, and the largely unspoken fear that al Qaeda was planning another major terrorist strike in Europe or the United States. The United States and the handful of European nations fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan bitterly resented the continued refusal of other NATO countries to get their hands dirty and support the war effort. The list of caveats these latter nations imposed on their troops in order to prevent them from seeing combat became even longer.
There was no overarching NATO strategy to deal with the problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan or the cross-border nature of the Taliban, or to coordinate nation building between the Afghan government and all the various agencies and NGOs. There was no coordinator with the clout of a Lakhdar Brahimi to knock Afghan and Western heads together so as to produce a common plan. One year the Americans decided that the Afghan National Army had to be built up, and all funding was poured into it. The next year it was the police who were to be funded. Trying to get sustained money for any service-sector project for any length of time was next to impossible. When the West earmarked a powerful coordinator—the British politician Lord Paddy Ashdown—as UN special envoy to Afghanistan, his imperial manner and a few of his interviews alienated Karzai from him.
U.S. secretary of defense Robert Gates was later to raise the specter of NATO’s becoming a two-tier organization, with one group of countries prepared to fulfill all the obligations of the alliance and fight and the other group refusing to do so. However, the Europeans had their own criticism. They continued to resent the Bush administration and were now palpably awaiting the U.S. elections and a new president. They still doubted the extent of U.S. commitment to nation building in Afghanistan, and they resented not being consulted when the United States took unilateral decisions about Afghanistan. Yet no European nation had significantly raised its level of defense spending since 9/11. NATO had two million men under arms, but only 25 percent were deployable overseas—a figure that had not changed since 9/11. Even though European governments spoke existentially of terrorist threats emanating from Afghanistan, they refused to explain to their publics how helping Afghanistan was directly related to ensuring the security of Europe.
The divisions within NATO, and between governments and their opposition, generated acute political crises. In 2007 two governments fell as a result of internal domestic opposition to the war in Afghanistan. The first to fall, in February 2007, was the fragile government of Italy’s Romano Prodi, which lost a vote of confidence in parliament on the issue of maintaining two thousand Italian troops in Herat. Prodi was reinstated by the Italian president ten days later, but his government remained fragile until elections were called in 2008. The second government to fall, in September 2007, was that of Japan. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party had struggled to maintain Japan’s commitment to refueling the Western-led warships in the Arabian Gulf that monitored sea-lanes used by al Qaeda. The Japanese opposition demanded that Tokyo cease al
l such cooperation with NATO and on September 12 Abe was forced to resign, ending Japan’s help to the allies. Japan resumed refueling the warships only in January 2008, after Yasuo Fukuda, the new prime minister, rammed legislation through parliament making it obligatory for Japan to support Afghanistan.
The entirety of 2007 was spent with the United States demanding more troops and equipment from NATO countries, and NATO stalling. In January 2007, at a meeting in Brussels, the United States asked for more troops from NATO countries, especially troops that could be used on the front against the Taliban. Once again, European nations refused to oblige. The Germans and the French, with the largest armies in Europe, were the worst offenders. Both had large troop contingents in safe areas in Afghanistan—the Germans in the north, and the French around Kabul. After much browbeating, Germany finally agreed to allow six Tornado aircraft to carry out reconnaissance surveys in the south.
When NATO members met again, in Quebec in April, just as the Taliban summer offensive started, Robert Gates was even blunter about demanding more troops and helicopters. He reminded his European counterparts that at a time when the U.S. military was overstretched because of Iraq, it still had fifteen thousand troops as part of the ISAF-NATO force, plus another eleven thousand troops deployed as part of Operation Enduring Freedom hunting down terrorists. On the other hand, twenty-six NATO countries and eleven other allies were contributing a total of thirty-five thousand troops.
The lack of an overall NATO response to helping out in Afghanistan led those countries fighting in the south to react as they saw fit. In the space of one week, in April 2007, Canada’s twenty-five-hundred-strong forces in Kandahar province lost nine soldiers. The opposition Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion demanded that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his minority Conservative government commit to withdrawing all Canadian troops by the scheduled February 2009. The Canadians had lost fifty-four soldiers, a quarter of all foreign troops killed in Afghanistan and third only to the United States and Britain in number of casualties. Public anger in Canada against the deployment was rising daily. An independent team commissioned by the Ottawa government recommended in January 2008 that if no NATO forces were prepared to join Canada in Kandahar, then all Canadian troops should be withdrawn and redeployed to a more peaceful zone by February 2009. By then, Canada had lost seventy-eight soldiers. For several weeks Harper tried to persuade European nations to help Canada, but failing to raise any attention, he declared on February 21, 2008, that Canada would withdraw its troops from Kandahar by 2011.
