THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH.(Brief Article)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 12-AUG-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In the early afternoon of June 14th, I stepped out of the Karachi airport into suffocating heat. When there was no sign of the car that was supposed to pick me up, I found a taxi; as we entered the city and neared the Marriott Hotel, the streets seemed to be under military siege. We inched through traffic, trying a succession of approaches to the hotel, but were turned back each time by grim lines of heavily armed soldiers. Finally, we found a way to the rear entrance. As I got out of the car, I felt broken glass crunch under my shoes. When I looked up, I saw that almost all the windows had been blown out of the first five floors.

At eleven that morning, someone had attempted to ram a car packed with explosives into the wall of the United States Consulate, next door. Twelve Pakistanis had died in the explosion, and some fifty more had been injured. Among the dead were a group of young women who had just passed their driving tests, a man and his niece, who was about to get married, and two security guards. A row of hotel shops had been destroyed.

In a park opposite the consulate, guards detailed to keep out onlookers were clustered in the shade; the grass was strewn with debris. Pieces of metal had rained down on the consul's residence, three hundred yards away. People had rushed out of their rooms at the exclusive Sindh Club to find that an arm had been blown over the roof of the building and landed in the parking lot. A torso fell into a gas station beyond the park. Pieces of shattered vehicles and shreds of body parts had lodged in the trees.

Some three weeks later, a group of suspects from one of Pakistan's hard-line Islamist groups confessed to the bombing, adding one telling detail: the car bomb, they said, had been built for an assassination attempt on Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's President and its Chief of Army Staff--the head of the Army--but had failed to detonate. Although Musharraf this time was nowhere close to the explosion, there was no doubt that the man accused by his enemies of playing lapdog to the United States--and whose popular nickname is Busharraf--was as much the target as the United States.

It was no coincidence that this terrorist attack took place in Karachi, a city of around twelve million people. On its crowded streets one can find most of the problems plaguing Pakistan itself, a nation that seems to combine quasi-democratic institutions, authoritarian regimes, and anarchic violence. Yet if Musharraf is to fulfill his ambitions, he must deal with the country's alarmingly high rates of illiteracy, violence, and economic failure, while facing a great many hostile forces: Islamic fundamentalists who distrust his policies and threaten his life; a political opposition that would easily control a majority in an elected parliament, although its leaders live in exile; and even much of the middle class, which has become disillusioned with his military rule. The Army has governed Pakistan for more than half of the country's fifty-five-year history, and Pervez Musharraf, whom I had come to Pakistan to interview, is, above all, an Army man.

Soon after I arrived, Fahim Zaman, a former mayor of Karachi, showed me some of the sights--many of them reminders of the recent, unsettled past, as well as warnings to the Musharraf regime. We drove by the Sheraton Hotel, where eleven French engineers working on a submarine project and three others died in a bomb blast in May. Nearby was a bridge where four employees of an American oil company were gunned down in 1997; a little farther on, we passed the site where two Iranian engineers were killed in 1998 and, not far away, the restaurant where the journalist Daniel Pearl was abducted.

We went past the fortresslike house of Benazir Bhutto, who was twice Pakistan's Prime Minister, and who now lives in self-imposed exile in Dubai. (Bhutto has hinted publicly that she might return, although she faces almost certain arrest.) Zaman pointed out the city's main storm drain, strewn with rubbish and lined with makeshift homes, where half a million people live, in danger from periodic flash floods that sweep through the drain when the rains come. We went into District West, where half the houses have no plumbing, and where a migrant population of Pashtuns, Afghans, and Biharis lives. As we drove through the bazaar, past flyblown camels and donkeys pulling overloaded carts, Zaman detailed the statistics of unemployment, corruption, and crime, of projects drowned in greed, of injustice and violent death.

Zaman talked of the Karachi that he had known as a child, in the nineteen-fifties. The city, built on the coastal desert and cooled by the breezes that blow from the Arabian Sea, had been an important industrial center and port, and it still generates seventy per cent of Pakistan's revenues. It was a gracious, orderly place whose elegant streets were washed once a day, and it was known for its lively bars and night clubs. Now the city is a palimpsest of failed regimes and threats of social collapse. When Pervez Musharraf took power, in the fall of 1999, he promised to reverse those failures, but, with Pakistan's internal stresses only worsened by all that has happened in the past eleven months, Musharraf is struggling to survive.

September 11, 2001, began as a routine day for Musharraf. He was in Karachi to address a conference of mayors when his military secretary gave him the news. At first, Musharraf thought that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had something to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It did not occur to him that they originated in Afghanistan, a country ruled by Mullah Omar and the Taliban, whose closest ally was Pakistan. Two days later, President Bush called. It was decision time, Bush told him. "You are either with us or against us." Musharraf quickly decided to support the anti-Taliban coalition.

Much was made of the risks that Musharraf ran in standing with the United States, but in his Cabinet, at least, there was no dissent. Lieutenant General Javed Ashraf Qazi, the Minister of Communications and Railways, told me that the decision was unanimous: "The Taliban hadn't listened to us. They hadn't returned the fugitives"--a group of sectarian killers who had taken refuge in Afghanistan. "The Cabinet was of the view that we shouldn't stick our necks out for them. The might of the U.S. was a much greater risk. They were looking for a target. Why should it be us?"

A few days later, Musharraf explained his position to the nation in terms of Islamic pragmatism. Pakistan's core objectives, he said, were four: security, the development of the economy, the protection of strategic nuclear assets, and the securing of Kashmir. The decision he would take, he insisted, would further these goals.

But Pakistan's Army planners had assigned a strategic role to Afghanistan: if India invaded Pakistan, they argued, Pakistani forces could retreat into Afghanistan and fight back. In addition, Pakistan's large Pashtun minority identified strongly with Afghanistan, and its religious fundamentalists held up the Taliban as Islamic exemplars. The question was, how big a challenge would they, as well as malcontents in the armed forces, pose to Musharraf's power?

As if in answer to that question, street demonstrations erupted last October, as the American bombing campaign began. They were at their peak each Friday, when worshippers filled the streets following afternoon prayers. But the rallies were not large and the slogans had a tired sameness; by November, the protests had all but stopped. Musharraf reshuffled his government to ease out opposition and, on the streets, at least, he had little to fear.

In January, Musharraf delivered a strong rebuke to the fundamentalists in a speech that seemed to set the nation on a new path. He insisted that the fight against extremist groups was in Pakistan's interest and would be pursued, and the madrasahs--the religious schools that had proliferated during the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan--would be brought into the mainstream. He announced that a number of extremist organizations were now banned, and that no group would be allowed to use the Kashmir question as an excuse for terrorism.

The country, apart from the outspoken religious lobby, seemed to welcome this speech; Musharraf continued the theme when he visited Washington in February and said that his aim was to bring the "real essence of democracy" to Pakistan. But although there will be elections in October, ordered by the Supreme Court, Musharraf's real commitment to democracy is uncertain.

Islamic fundamentalism continues to...

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