For Musharraf, the deal was an opportunity to extend his tenure as president safely into a second term, to transition the country to a more genuine democracy, and to complete the political transformation he had promised back in 1999. All that was needed was that he shed his uniform as army chief, hold free and fair elections, show a little modesty, agree to share power with an elected prime minister and parliament, and keep the army from hogging the limelight of political and economic power.
However, Musharraf would double-cross both the Americans and Bhutto, implementing none of the benchmarks he had earlier agreed to in two face-to-face meetings with Bhutto in Dubai and London, in which the Americans had acted as guarantors. These benchmarks included appointing a neutral interim government and an independent election commission to supervise the elections, and disbanding local government officials, the nazims who could influence the vote on the side of the ruling party. As Musharraf refused to fulfill his side of the bargain, and the Americans refused to pressure him, Bhutto was left struggling against the odds.
Two weeks before her death, Bhutto told me she was facing enormous pressure from the White House—particularly Vice President Cheney’s office—to conform, while there was no similar pressure placed on Musharraf to carry out his side of the bargain. U.S. officials refused to accept that the deal was dead or that Musharraf was double-crossing them, even though the U.S. embassy in Islamabad reported extensively on plans being drawn up by the ISI to rig the elections. Still, U.S. deputy secretary of state John Negroponte traveled to Islamabad in late November and urged Bhutto to continue collaboration with Musharraf, as did Richard Boucher, head of the State Department’s Bureau of South Asia Affairs.
With the elections just days away, Bhutto’s main message the day she died was that Musharraf was preparing to rig the elections in favor of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q) or the Qaid-e-Azam faction. On the previous evening, she was scheduled to meet with two U.S. lawmakers— Senator Arlen Specter and Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy—to hand them a dossier of evidence describing the preelection rigging being carried out by the ISI. She spoke of this rigging both to the crowd who assembled to hear her final speech and to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who met with her that morning. “She was very frank to me about the ISI and the role they were playing in undermining her,” Karzai later told me. “She was a brave, brave unafraid woman who wanted the best for her country. The sad thing about her death is that she predicted it, and she was proved right.”
3
There is little doubt that Bhutto and Karzai, working together, would have formed a team committed to combat extremism.
The Bhutto-Karzai meeting reminded me of another day of hope in 1989, when the young Bhutto—only thirty-six when she first became prime minister—hosted in Islamabad Rajiv Gandhi, the equally young prime minister of India. Both had promised to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation between their two countries—a promise soon thwarted by the insurgency in Indian Kashmir.
As her body was carried in an air force plane to her hometown of Larkana, in Sindh province, public grief and suspicions about possible government involvement turned into anger. The government managed to act guilty even as it claimed not to be so. The fire brigade hosed down the site of the bombing within a few hours, destroying all evidence, and doctors at the hospital where Bhutto was treated changed their statements after being pressured by unknown intelligence officials. No autopsy was held— although Bhutto’s husband did not insist upon one. Musharraf refused PPP calls for an international investigation led by the United Nations, but he eventually agreed to Scotland Yard detectives being brought in—although they were mandated to discover only how Bhutto died, not who killed her.
For the next three days the country experienced mayhem as banks, railway stations, government offices, and container trucks in Sindh province and Karachi were attacked and burned. Nearly forty people were killed in the ensuing riots and disturbances. In panic, the government delayed the general elections until February 18, and quickly claimed to have identified the perpetrators of the assassination plot. It blamed Baitullah Mahsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal agencies, for organizing the assassination and released a telephone transcript of him asking a colleague about the plot.
In 2007 there had been 56 suicide bombings in Pakistan, which killed 419 security officials and 217 civilians, compared to just 6 such attacks the previous year. Despite this tenfold increase in suicide bombings, the regime had failed to track down a single culprit.
4
Now the public was expected to believe that the military had resolved the Bhutto murder in a couple of days, blaming the very man with whom the ISI had struck a peace deal earlier in the year. Reinforcing this sense of disbelief and anger at the government was Musharraf’s failure to show any remorse over Bhutto’s death. Instead, he blamed her for sticking her head out of the sunroof and said that the army had never liked her anyway.
5
“The United States thought Benazir was the right person to fight terrorists, ” Musharraf said after her death. “Who is the best person to fight? You need three qualities today if you want to fight the extremists and the terrorists. Number one, you must have the military with you. Well, she was very unpopular with the military. Very unpopular. Number two, you shouldn’t be seen by the entire religious lobby to be alien—a nonreligious person. The third element: don’t be seen as an extension of the United States. Now I am branded as an extension, but not to the extent she was.”
6
A few weeks later, in January 2008, the police in Dera Ismail Khan, close to the Afghan border, arrested Aitezaz Shah, a fifteen-year-old boy alleged to be a member of the group responsible for killing Bhutto. Shah told police that Baitullah Mahsud had planned the murder, that the shooter was a man named Ikram, and that the suicide bomber standing behind Ikram was Bilal—the latter two both Pashtun tribesmen from South Waziristan.
7
Two more tribesmen from South Waziristan were arrested in Rawalpindi in early February. A report by Scotland Yard on the cause of Bhutto’s death agreed with the government that she had died not from a gunshot but from hitting her head on the latch of the sunroof. However, the Pakistan Peoples Party continued to insist upon a full inquiry by the United Nations.
8
Bhutto’s death was the latest in the past ten months of crises as Musharraf came under intense domestic and international pressure to share power, doff his uniform, and allow free and fair elections. Instead, he was to manipulate the political scene in order to ensure his political survival and a second term as president. Now, as a result, the country hovered on the edge of political meltdown.
In the spring of 2007, Musharraf was confident that he faced no real political threats to his reelection as president. The opposition parties were subdued, divided, and unable to mobilize mass agitation against the regime; the Bush administration fully supported his reelection and described him as indispensable in the war against terrorism; and the Pakistani economy was doing relatively well, posting annual growth rates of 7 percent.
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.