On the Grand Trunk Road (53 page)

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Authors: Steve Coll

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One recent morning in the capital, I visited Khalid Khawaja, a former Air Force and ISI officer. He was detained last January and held for a total of seven months on charges that he was involved in terrorism at the Red Mosque and was in possession of religious hate material. Asserting his innocence, he said that he had been harassed by the government because of his human-rights advocacy. Khawaja wore a white cap and a full, gray-white beard; it was unusually cold, and we huddled before a heater in a sitting room on the lower level of his home. I asked him why the ISI, which had so long supported the Taliban and other Islamist groups, had now become a target for suicide bombers.
He said that the intelligence services and their onetime clients were basically not enemies but that the Musharraf government and its American allies had managed to create conflicts over loyalty and identity within those institutions. “The ISI was supposed to be supporting the Taliban—it cannot change in one day just because Uncle Sam has ordered it. So there will be the people who have sympathies. Yes, of course you can handle the big bosses—give them money, and threaten them, and all of that. But everybody cannot be threatened.” And, he went on, “Very successfully, you have pitched us against each other.” The ISI, he suggested, was to some extent at war with itself now. “They’re all the same people,” he continued. “Same brothers and cousins. They have their relatives in the army and the ISI. Sometimes people can take government orders; some resist that. I have talked to many security people. I have not met anybody who is really pro-American, who does not really hate Americans.”
As Benazir Bhutto prepared to return to Pakistan last year, senior military officers and planners at the Pentagon concluded that, despite the unhappy experience of the North Waziristan treaty, the Islamist insurgency in Pakistan should be attacked by political means, not merely with Predator drones or cordon-and-search operations by the faltering Pakistani Army. CENTCOM, the U.S. military command responsible for the region, together with Musharraf’s government, developed a strategy for calming the Tribal Areas. The emphasis was to be on long-term counterinsurgency, particularly through economic aid and increased training of local tribal forces from the Frontier Corps.
 
The Pentagon’s planners realized that the Tribal Areas were “not suddenly going to become governable,” as a senior Defense Department official put it. “You’ve got to work security, governance, and economics all at the same time, so that they become supportive of one another and eventually become a self-sustaining cycle that ultimately moderates the radical, just as it would anywhere,” the senior defense official said.
Bhutto presented herself in Washington as an instrument of these ambitions. The Bush administration had ignored her after September 11, but now there was a sense that she might be useful. The People’s Party was not particularly strong in the North-West Frontier or the Tribal Areas, but it did have allies and experience in both places. Also, Bhutto commanded the only political party in Pakistan with support in all four provinces and she was prepared to speak out for religious moderation; by doing so, she would lend legitimacy to Musharraf’s agenda. Bhutto and Musharraf both tended to see themselves, however, as indispensable saviors of Pakistan, a role that would be difficult for them to share.
In September 2007, on the eve of her return, I met with Bhutto in the lounge of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington. We took a table near a jazz pianist. I had not seen her for more than fifteen years. She was fifty-four and her face had become full, but her skin was pale and youthful. She was in a giddy mood; she ordered water for herself and, for me, a “pre-celebratory” glass of champagne. As we spoke, I was reminded of her ability, honed when she was president of the Oxford Union, to transform informal conversation into oratory, a feat that made her seem at once impressive and untrustworthy.
She spoke with particular conviction about the need to curtail the power of Pakistan’s intelligence services. “The security apparatus must be reformed,” she said. “Unless that is done, it is going to be very difficult for us to dismantle the terrorist networks and the militant networks, and today they’re a threat not only to other countries but to the unity and survival of Pakistan.”
As for the North-West Frontier and the Tribal Areas, Bhutto said that her return could create greater stability. “We want to bring the Tribal Areas into the modern world, the twenty-first century,” she said. “The people there do not have fundamental human rights. So our reform package aims at extending the political parties there, introducing habeas corpus, creating an elected council of those people who respect our laws.” She went on, “We intend to send in our paramilitary force and put together a law-enforcement team that can give protection to the people who are living in the Tribal Areas from the militias.”
This was vintage Benazir: perfect-pitch liberalism and, at the same time, a formulation barely distinguishable from the American foreign policy of the moment. The exception to her accommodation of the Bush administration’s agenda lay in her jaundiced attitude toward the army and the ISI, institutions that the administration had embraced as vital partners in the war on terror and to which it had given more than ten billion dollars in financial aid.
“General Musharraf’s team has relied on the principle that to catch a thief you send a thief,” Bhutto continued, speaking of the recent difficulties in North and South Waziristan. “So they’ve asked people—they’ve said, ‘These are “reformed Taliban,” or “reformed militants,” and let’s use them.’ It hasn’t worked. Signing peace agreements with them is not working. And it’s not going to work. I’m not saying this as an afterthought; I said this long ago. There are thousands in irregular armies. And we must really pause and think, Where do they get their food from, after all, to feed and look after irregular armies that have thousands of people? And to clothe them, and to heal their wounds when they get wounded in battle? It requires a huge apparatus—so it requires a real breakdown in governance for such forces to continue to prosper and grow. That’s what we’re seeing in Pakistan, a breakdown in governance.
“But I don’t rely on security agencies,” she concluded, her voice taking on the rhythms of public speech. “I rely on the people of Pakistan, because my party has a base and an organization—and that’s why the military hard-liners remain opposed to me.”
Assessments of Bhutto have tended to emphasize the contrasts in her public life: her feudal roots as the daughter of a landed aristocrat in the East versus her intellectual training in the West; her uncompromising stands while in opposition versus her accommodations of the army while pursuing office; the soaring idealism of her speeches versus the prosaic greed narrated in the allegations of corruption filed against her. Yet she did not seem to experience these dichotomies as contradictions.
Bhutto’s first term as prime minister ended in 1990, when she faced charges of financial and administrative malfeasance and was dismissed by the army and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan. But the real cause of her leaving may have been her decision to privately confront the military high command over Pakistan’s secret nuclear weapons program, which was about to bring economic sanctions from the first Bush administration. During her second term, which ended in late 1996, she again had uneasy relations with the army and the ISI, and she and her colleagues in the People’s Party aggravated their difficulties by allowing corruption to flourish to a point where it became garish even by Pakistani standards. Bhutto invited into the cabinet her husband, Asif Zardari, who was by then widely known as Mr. Ten Per Cent, in reference to his reputation for extracting illicit commissions on government contracts. Zardari became Bhutto’s Minister of Investment, a title that at least carried a degree of transparency. She was dismissed again, to be followed as prime minister by Nawaz Sharif, whose record of corruption and poor governance, made worse by difficult relations with the army, rivaled her own.
In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup. A self-confident man who had served two tours as a commando during his army career, he pledged to rid Pakistan of political corruption; the era of failed politicians like Bhutto had passed, he said, and a new period of efficiency and modernization would be ushered in under the army’s oversight. Since the 1990S, Pakistani investigators have charged Bhutto and her husband in more than ninety corruption cases involving the alleged misappropriation of hundreds of millions of dollars. The prosecutions may have been politically motivated, as the Musharraf government has recently admitted, but the evidence suggests that they were not all invented. Pakistan’s government continues to seek the return of about fifty-four million dollars allegedly deposited in Swiss banks by members of the Bhutto family. Investigators are looking into companies involved in Iraq’s oil-for-food program under Suddam Hussein, from which Bhutto allegedly benefit-ted. In another case, Zardari’s lawyers have acknowledged that he was the beneficial owner of a multimillion-dollar country estate in Surrey, England, where he built a replica of a village pub and apparently planned to raise polo ponies. He and Bhutto have asserted their innocence in the corruption cases; despite the many allegations, neither has been convicted of any crime in Pakistan or anywhere else.
Zardari was imprisoned in Pakistan for eleven years; he says that he was beaten and tortured, and toward the end of his confinement he suffered a heart attack. In 1999, while her husband was in jail, Bhutto left Pakistan to live in Dubai with their three children, a boy and two girls. “It was a difficult life,” she recalled. “The government waged relentless psychological warfare. And it was very painful to have my reputation attacked. I lived in a state of uncertainty and anxiety. I never knew when I would be arrested at an airport.”
Her feelings of being targeted unjustly did not seem to be accompanied by guilt over the sums of money that members of her family had evidently acquired while she was in office. Bhutto may have seen money as a form of informal campaign financing in a country that had no provisions for political funding, according to a Pakistani official who once worked closely with her and later became estranged. “If you rationalize it as ‘for the Party,’ you can justify it,” the official said.
On June 21, 2003, Bhutto celebrated her fiftieth birthday at her residence in Dubai with about a hundred friends. The guests received a privately printed pamphlet containing a poem entitled “The Story of Benazir.” Its concluding stanza suggested the culture of siege, inflected with tones of Bollywood melodrama, in which Bhutto had long seemed to thrive:
Midnight raids and imprisonment
Torture and terror....
Billions spent on false cases
On propaganda
Psy war and special operations
On a Mother.
 
 
In the fall, I asked Bhutto whether, at some basic level, she trusted President Musharraf, her prospective political partner. “You know, what is trust?” she replied. “You can’t see into people’s hearts. I don’t know him, so I can’t say.”
The negotiations began when Musharraf telephoned her while she was visiting New York in August 2006. General Ashfaq Kiyani, then the chief of the ISI, led an initial round of discussions. In January 2007, Bhutto flew by helicopter to a palace in Abu Dhabi to meet secretly with Musharraf. “Much to my surprise, the meeting was both long and cordial,” she wrote in a book entitled
Reconciliation
that was published in February 2008. They exchanged cell phone numbers, talked periodically, and met again without publicity in July.
But their negotiating priorities, and those of the Bush administration, which involved itself in the talks, were not easily reconciled. Musharraf was motivated principally by his need for parliamentary support from the People’s Party to insure reelection to another five-year term as president. Bhutto bargained hard for immunity from criminal prosecutions that she and her husband faced in the corruption cases—a prerequisite, she reasoned, for her return to active political life in Pakistan.
An agreement might have been difficult to achieve under any circumstances; as it was, the negotiations took place during a period of extraordinary political turmoil in Pakistan. Beginning in March, thousands of the country’s lawyers mounted a protest movement after Musharraf suspended the Supreme Court’s chief justice. Soon afterward, Nawaz Sharif agitated to return from exile in Saudi Arabia. Because of Musharraf’s high-handedness in confronting the judiciary, but also because of general exhaustion with his rule, his popularity fell during 2007. As his predicaments grew worse, the Bush administration stepped up its efforts to secure an agreement that would satisfy both Musharraf and Bhutto. Richard Boucher, the assistant secretary of state, tried to move both sides toward compromise. By early fall, following at least two direct interventions by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the outline of a deal had been fashioned that would grant Bhutto and Zardari immunity and permit Bhutto to return to Pakistan and take part in parliamentary elections; in exchange, Bhutto agreed to tacitly support Musharraf’s reelection, after he resigned as army chief. But it was a shaky agreement at best.

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