On the Grand Trunk Road (51 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

BOOK: On the Grand Trunk Road
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Few victims of political murder have contemplated their demise in advance as thoroughly as Benazir Bhutto did hers. In part, this habit of mind was an inheritance; before his execution, her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, wrote a book entitled If I
Am
Assassinated. For his children, violent intrigue was a recurring theme of family life. Benazir’s youngest brother, Shahna-waz, died from poisoning during a family holiday in Cannes in 1985; no one was ever charged in the case. Eleven years later, police shot and killed her other brother, Murtaza, outside his home in Karachi, in circumstances that remain disputed. Benazir’s political career encompassed two long periods of exile and two terms as Pakistan’s prime minister; a persistent pattern in her life, as she saw it, was the mobilization of her family’s enemies against her.
 
Last fall, as she prepared to return to Pakistan from her second exile, Bhutto received an intelligence report from the government of a “brother country,” as she put it to me. The report identified four Islamist networks that planned to kill her after she arrived. Three of them operate along Pakistan’s western frontier, near the border of Afghanistan: al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and a group of survivors from a raid at the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad. Bhutto told me that the fourth network named in the report was “some group in Karachi,” a city with a dauntingly large cast of violent Islamist radicals. In addition, Baitullah Mehsud, a fugitive radical Islamist leader who is attempting to unify Taliban fighters inside Pakistan, publicly threatened to kill her. (He has denied any involvement in her murder.) As Bhutto reflected on the death threats and assassination attempts against her, she did not dwell upon the foot soldiers in her country’s growing Islamist insurgency. She spoke instead about the support networks that these insurgents seemed to draw upon, which were rooted, she suspected, in sections of her country’s government. “Everybody talks about Baitullah Mehsud and Osama Bin Laden and all of that,” she said when we met in Karachi in October, three days after the attack on her homecoming rally. “There is another structure that is giving them succor, that is giving them encouragement.”
Between 1979 and 1992, the Pakistan Army, primarily through the ISI, received several billion dollars from the CIA and Saudi Arabia to support Islamic militias fighting against Soviet and Afghan Communist forces. Toward the end of this war, the ISI also built up jihadi groups that were seeking to liberate the disputed territory of Kashmir from India. The Taliban, which started in 1994 as a small group of religious students and veterans of the anti-Soviet war, became the best known and most successful of the ISI’s Islamist clients, but there were many others. After the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, President Musharraf repudiated these historical policies and pledged to destroy any Islamist groups in Pakistan that persisted in violence. Some of the groups continued their violent activities nonetheless, but Musharraf’s supporters, particularly those in the Bush administration, pleaded for patience; they rarely questioned his intentions or those of his colleagues in Pakistan’s military and intelligence bureaucracies. Benazir Bhutto, however, doubted that the army and the ISI had abandoned the policies of the past.
Between her glaring sense of entitlement and a tireless use of the media, Bhutto could seem like “a machine that operates solely in the mode of victimization,” as her estranged niece Fatima Bhutto put it late last year. Bhutto’s criticisms of Musharraf’s government did not make careful distinctions between fact and speculation. However, when she spoke of the nexus between the ISI and Pakistan’s Islamist groups, she could draw upon direct experience. During her second tour as prime minister, between 1994 and 1996, when Pakistan covertly supported the Taliban, Bhutto participated in many discussions with ISI officers about that support—a fact that she denied at the time but later conceded.
Pakistan’s politicians sometimes temporize about the Taliban; Bhutto, however, after September 11, did not. In her final weeks, she criticized the country’s radical Islamist groups and also warned repeatedly about civil violence. “Pakistan faces the threat of disintegration unless it can control the irregular armies, the irregular militias, the weapons depots, and the recruitment centers, training centers for those people who are suicide bombers and preachers of hate,” she said last fall. “Unless we do that, then our country’s going to face a very bloody internal situation. Already we have seen the havoc that suicide bombers can wreak.”
Nevertheless, even Bhutto may not have grasped the extent to which old patterns of radicalism in Pakistan are changing. Jihadi groups that once collaborated with the ISI are breaking away to pursue an independent revolutionary agenda, and they are having considerable success. The army’s fitful efforts to suppress this uprising have, so far, only motivated the militants to regroup. Early last year, for example, about a thousand Islamists gathered at the Red Mosque, which is not far from the headquarters of the ISI, and managed to stockpile rifles, grenades, and sophisticated military technology. In July, when army commandos raided the mosque, more than a hundred people, both soldiers and civilians, died. Radicalized survivors of the raid fled to western Pakistan, where they have joined the Taliban and embarked on revenge attacks against the army. These attacks seem to be generating confusion, demoralization, and conflict within the ISI, the army, and the Frontier Corps, a local paramilitary force. There is also evidence, according to Pakistani and outside specialists, to suggest that some current and former Pakistani military and intelligence officers sympathize with the Islamist insurgents with whom they are notionally at war—all this taking place in a country that possesses between fifty and a hundred atomic bombs. It seems doubtful that Benazir Bhutto will be this contest’s last notable victim.
The road from Peshawar, which lies about a hundred miles west of Islamabad, to Kohat, a garrison town in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, begins as a flat highway lined by metal shipping containers holding workshops and small garages. When I traveled down it a few days after Bhutto’s murder, it was filled with Japanese sedans, motorized rickshaws, horse carts, and brightly painted trucks. Buildings and brick walls were festooned with campaign posters, most of them featuring local candidates who were standing in the upcoming provincial and national elections. Bhutto’s was the only female face to be seen. Pashtuns, a minority who are tribally organized and speak a distinct language, are predominant in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, and office-seekers there cultivate two distinct personal styles: the mustachioed nationalist-criminal look and that of the hirsute religious activist. Because many voters are illiterate, political parties are assigned visual symbols to make balloting simpler. The symbol for Nawaz Sharif’s section of the Muslim League is a lion, and that of the Pakistan People’s Party is an arrow; some of the smaller parties based in the North-West Frontier have chosen more unusual ones, such as a ceiling fan and an AK-47 assault rifle.
 
Kohat is a jumble of whitewashed houses, shops, and mosques on a knoll in a desert valley; in the center is an imposing military cantonment. Beyond ridges rising to the west are Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the seven semiautonomous political regions, along the border with Afghanistan, where tribal rather than Pakistani law prevails. (Pakistan is divided into four provinces: the North-West Frontier, Baluchistan, Sind, and the Punjab, which is the most populous, and is home to the country’s dominant Punjabi ethnic group.) Kohat did not seem particularly tense, but it is one of the places that have been affected by the recent spread of the Pakistani Taliban. To the north, the army has deployed armor and helicopter gunships to drive Taliban and other militants out of Swat, a once popular tourist destination known for its mountain vales. Kohat’s difficulties with the Taliban have been more sporadic, but two weeks before I arrived a suicide bomber had detonated himself beside a soccer team of army soldiers as they walked home after a match, and twelve of them died.
I had an appointment with Javed Ibrahim Paracha, who is running for the National Assembly, where he has served before; his bearded face stares out from election posters on the walls of Kohat’s shops. He seemed well qualified to explain the Taliban’s growth inside Pakistan. Paracha, a member of Nawaz Sharif’s party, has, by his own account, been arrested three times since September 11, most recently in 2005, on criminal and terrorism charges; he now faces about six dozen charges in Pakistani courts. On each occasion, he says, he was interrogated by FBI personnel working in Pakistan.
The Paracha tribe, from which he draws his name, has a strong presence in Khurram, one of the seven Tribal Areas. It lies just over the border from the former al Qaeda redoubt at Tora Bora, where, in December 2001, the United States and its Afghan allies fought against al Qaeda volunteers, including Osama Bin Laden. Afterward, a number of Bin Laden’s followers found their way to Paracha, who is a lawyer by profession. He helped them in court and formed groups to support them—one of which was named the World Jihad Council.
Down an alley where a man was shoveling garbage into a wheel-barrow, I found Paracha in a back room of his urban compound, sitting on a cot strewn with pillows. He is a rotund man in late middle age, with coffee-colored skin, bushy black eyebrows, and an undisciplined, graying beard. He wore a gown and a sweater, and had a bright gold watch. Speaking in deliberate, sonorous English, he told me that while he was in detention he was beaten and abused at first. (Bill Carter, a spokesman for the FBI, said that agents sometimes interviewed detainees in Pakistani custody but that the bureau never comments on particular cases. He added, “It is the policy of the FBI not to be involved in the abuse of individuals.”) Eventually, Paracha said, his American interlocutors adopted a softer strategy: they offered him half a million dollars to serve as “a bridge” between the United States and the Taliban and al Qaeda. Paracha said that he turned down the offer. “Their way of discussion is based on dollars,” he explained. “Every man is not purchasable.” Besides, he continued, “if I arrange a meeting and they send them to Cuba, what’s in my hand? What is the guarantee of my trust?”
When I asked why there had been such a dramatic increase in suicide bombings, he gave three reasons, the first of which was “a reaction to the Red Mosque in Islamabad.” He went on, “The second reason is Bajaur and Waziristan”—large, mountainous regions in the Tribal Areas, populated by young men who have grown up with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. These regions are now controlled almost entirely by the Taliban or related groups, Paracha said, which are pushing down from the mountains. “The third reason is the agencies”—a common term for Pakistan’s intelligence services. “Sometimes there are blasts in the most carefully protected security areas,” he said. “Where military forces are standing, how is this possible, that a new man will enter in this area?” He implied that only inside help could explain it.
“Everyone has sympathy with the Taliban,” he continued. “It is very easy to approach them. In our area, with the Pakistani government, it’s very difficult to approach a police officer or a minister, because they are afraid of suicide bombers.” Kohat’s residents, he said, had come to prefer the jirga approach—informal courts and councils overseen by the Taliban—to that of the Pakistani government, where an ordinary judge may require several years to resolve a case. “With the Taliban, a very big unsolved problem is solved in one week or even three days. If there is any case between tribes, they sit together with the Taliban on the floor. Every party explains its case in front of the second party. Even in Kohat town the Taliban are present in every mosque.”
As we talked, three white-bearded tribal elders entered the back room of Paracha’s compound and sat down on cushions on the floor. They said that they had come from Parachinar, a Pakistani town near Tora Bora, to escape warfare between Sunni and Shia tribes. One of them, Mohammad Nazir, a thin man in a white robe, introduced himself as the chief of the Paracha tribe in Khurram. He said that when he and his colleagues left Parachinar they turned their houses and businesses over to the Taliban; they were confident that their property would be handed back in good condition whenever they chose to return. In the meantime, they were available to help their clansmen Javed Ibrahim in his election campaign.

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