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TARIQ, ali - The Duel

Page 38

by Ali, Tariq


  *Barbara Crossette, “Who Killed Zia?” World Policy Journal, Fall 2005.

  *Quoted in the Economist, December 12, 1981. When in 1970 I first made this comparison in the very first sentence of Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power? there was outrage, especially among right-wing Pakistanis. A decade later the analogy had become halal, or kosher.

  *“Get America Out of the Way and We’ll Be OK,” interview with Harinder Baweja, Tehelka Magazine, February 2, 2008.

  *A fascinating account of this episode and numerous others in Pakistan’s military history is contained in Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within (Karachi: 2008).

  *Pervez Musharraf’s In the Line of Fire (New York and London: 2005) gives the official version of what has been happening in Pakistan over the last six years. Whereas Altaf Gauhar injected nonsense of every sort into Ayub’s memoirs, his son Humayun Gauhar, who worked with Musharraf on this book, has avoided the more obvious pitfalls. The general’s raffish lifestyle is underplayed, but enough is in the book to suggest that he is not too easily swayed by religious or social obligations.

  *New York Times, August 4, 2007.

  *Mariane Pearl, A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband (New York and London: 2004), subsequently a Hollywood movie.

  *To her credit, Bhutto generously acknowledged the help she had received from Husain Haqqani, a former Jamaat-e-Islami militant and Zia sympathizer who later became attached to the PPP and was Pakistan’s ambassador to Sri Lanka, a post from which he was removed following a security breach. He subsequently obtained an academic post in the United States, acting simultaneously as an adviser to first Benazir and more recently Zardari. Haqqani’s interests and those of the United States have always coincided, which is why, one assumes, he has been appointed the new Pakistani ambassador to the United States.

  *In 1968, when a right-wing, pro-military rag in Lahore published an attack on me, it revealed that I “had attended sex orgies in a French country house organised by [my] friend, the Jew Cohn-Bendit. All the fifty women in the swimming-pool were Jewish.” Alas, this was totally false, but my parents were amazed at the number of people who congratulated them on my virility.

  *London Review of Books, April 15, 1999.

  *John F. Burns, “House of Graft: Tracing the Bhutto Millions . . . A Special Report,” New York Times, January 9, 1998.

  *Interview with Newsweek, January 12, 2008.

  *Colonel H. C. Wylly, From the Black Mountain to Waziristan (London: 1912).

  †Ibid.

  *Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London and New York: 2002), chapter 18, “The Story of Kashmir.”

  *These newspapers were part of the Progressive Papers Ltd chain, which included an Urdu political-cultural weekly, Lail-o-Nahar (Day and Night). Set up in Lahore with Jinnah’s support in 1946, the newspapers were, in fact, owned and edited by left-wing intellectuals, some of them sympathetic to or members of the tiny Pakistan Communist Party. They included the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, literary critics Sibte Hasan and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. My father, Mazhar Ali Khan, was the editor of the Pakistan Times. I recently found a letter in his archives from the U.S. ambassador disinviting him from dinner because of a “hostile” editorial on the United States. The entire chain, a permanent irritation to every regime, was taken over by the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan in April 1959.

  *Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan and Alliances (Lahore: 1972).

  *Also present were Mustafa Khar and Mumtaz Bhutto, staunch members of the PPP. Our conversation rapidly changed course when General Yahya’s son was announced. I had just written a savage “Letter from Pakistan” for the satirical magazine Private Eye in which I had denounced the son as well as the father. On seeing me, Yahya junior turned to Bhutto and asked, “Sir, who do you think writes these lies about my family in Private Eye?” Bhutto responded with a twinkle in his eye, “Ask Tariq. He lives there.” Yahya junior looked at me. “I have no idea” was my response, “but I suspect it’s their editor, Richard Ingrams, who knows a lot about this world.” There was much merriment after Yahya junior departed. That this surreal conversation took place at all surprises me more now than it did at the time.

  *The book was The Nehrus and the Gandhis: An Indian Dynasty, the latest edition of which was published in 2005.

  *Shireen M. Mazari, “US Yearns for Pak Capitulation,” News (Islamabad), March 8, 2008.

  *Visiting Madrid, after Zapatero’s election triumph of March 2008, I was informed by a senior government official that they had considered a total withdrawal from Afghanistan a few months before the elections but had been outmaneuvered by a U.S. promise to Spain that the head of its military was being proposed for commander of the NATO forces and a withdrawal from Kabul would disrupt this possibility. Spain drew back only to discover that they had been tricked.

  *“C.I.A. Review Highlights Afghan Leader’s Woes,” New York Times, November 5, 2006.

  †See inter alia “The Good War, Still to Be Won,” New York Times, August 20, 2007; “Gates, Truth and Afghanistan,” New York Times, February 12, 2008; Francis Fukuyama, ed., Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq (Baltimore: 2006); and successive International Crisis Group reports.

  ‡New York Times, November 5, 2006.

  *“Into Pakistan’s Maelstrom,” Guardian, October 10, 2001.

  *Greg Flakus, “Afghan Soldiers Train at U.S. Army Base,” Voice of America, March 25, 2008.

  *Susanne Koelbl, “The Wild East,” Der Spiegel, September 29, 2006.

  *S. Frederick Starr, “Sovereignty and Legitimacy in Afghan Nation-Building,” in Francis Fukuyama, ed., Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq (Baltimore: 2006).

  *Barnett Rubin, “Saving Afghanistan,” Foreign Affairs, January–February 2007, 8.

  * New York Times, November 5, 2006.

  *Rory Stewart, “The Value of Their Values,” New York Times, March 7, 2007.

  *Dr. Ajmal Maiwandi, www.xs4all.nl/~jo/Maiwandi.html.

  †Mike Davies, Planet of Slums (London and New York: 2006). This work is a brilliant account of how globalization is transforming our world.

  ‡A classic example of blindness and double standards was U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates’s statement in Australia on February 24, 2008, when he was asked to comment on the entry of Turkish troops into Iraq to combat a Kurdish organization listed as “terrorist” by the “international community”: “Our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan show that military muscle should be complemented by efforts to address grievances held by minority groups. These economic and political measures are really important because after a certain point people become inured to military attacks. And if you don’t blend them with these kinds of nonmilitary initiatives, then at a certain point the military efforts become less and less effective.... I would strongly urge Turkey to respect Iraq’s sovereignty.”

  *Barnett R. Rubin, “Afghanistan: A U.S. Perspective,” in Crescent of Crisis, ed. Ivo H. Daalder, Nicole Gnesotto, and Philip H. Gordon (Washington: 2006).

  *Elizabeth Rubin, “Battle Company Is Out There,” New York Times, February 24, 2008.

  *Paul Gallis, “NATO in Afghanistan,” CRS Report for Congress, October 23, 2007.

  †Julian Lindley-French, “Big World, Big Future, Big NATO,” NATO Review, Winter 2005.

  *Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan:1947–2000: Disenchanted Allies (Washington and Baltimore: 2001). This is an extremely useful and sober, if not fully comprehensive, account of the “strategic relationship.”

  *Economist Intelligence Unit, Pakistan, Afghanistan (London: 2002), 26.

  *Benedict Anderson, “Exit Suharto,” New Left Review,March–April 2008.

  *I have explained this in some detail in Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (New York and London: 2002).

  *Christian Century 71 (1954).

  * “The Colour Khaki,” New Left Review 19 (January–February 2003).

&nbs
p; Table of Contents

  p. xvi

  Preface

  1. Pakistan at Sixty: A Conflagration of Despair

  2. Rewinding Pakistan: Birth of Tragedy

  3. The Washington Quartet: The Man Who Would Be Field Marshal

  4. The Washington Quartet: The General Who Lost a Country

  5. The Washington Quartet: The Soldier of Islam

  6. The Washington Quartet: The General as Chief Executive

  7. The House of Bhutto: Daughter of the West

  8. On the Flight Path of American Power

  9. Operation Enduring Freedom: Mirage of the “Good” War

  10. Can Pakistan Be Recycled?

  Epilogue: The Zardari Interregnum

  Index

  *

  †

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