THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH.(Brief Article)

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.