The Longest August (50 page)

In the Bush team, Colin Powell played the lead role in defusing the near-combustible relations between the two leading South Asian nations. This became clear when at his press conference in Delhi on July 28 he referred to his third trip to the city in ten months. “I take note that the situation has improved considerably over the past month,” he said. “We have been able on the US side, to return our families who had temporarily moved back and we have also been able to change our alert levels or caution levels to a point where we are now hopeful that more American tourists will return to India and more businessmen and women will come and find ways to enhance trade between the United States and India.” At the same time he noted that both armies remained mobilized. “So we look to India to take further de-escalatory actions as Pakistan makes good on its pledges to permanently cease support for infiltration.” However, he conceded that though the infiltration had declined, it had not ended.
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In his subsequent meeting with Musharraf in Islamabad, Powell found him “more positive” about his commitment to ending all infiltration. But when he raised the closing of the camps training terrorists, Musharraf's response was “they will be dealt with in due course.” Powell expressed Washington's inability to independently verify the state of infiltration. And yet America's role remained pivotal. “It took US intervention for Pakistan to leave Kargil,” said an unnamed State Department official in Washington. “And don't forget, Musharraf's pledge [to end cross-border terrorism] was made to the US and not to India. So we have to guarantee it.”
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However, India's leaders were realistic enough to realize that it was in Pakistan's interest to create fear in India-held Kashmir during the run-up to the elections from September 19 to October 9. As before, the secessionists in Kashmir were opposed to the exercise. Infiltrations from Pakistan continued. As a result, during the electoral campaign, over eight hundred militants, civilians, election candidates, and security personnel were killed.

Despite the allegations of vote rigging and low turnout of 43 percent, the election produced an astonishing result. The Delhi-loyalist National Conference was reduced to 28 seats, followed by the Congress Party at 20. The newly launched People's Democratic Party (PDP) of Mufti Muhammad Sayeed—calling on India to have “an unconditional dialogue” with Kashmiris to end the long-running crisis—won 16 seats, and the People's Democratic Forum (PDF), opposed to the National Conference, 7. The coalition of the Congress and the PDP, backed by the PDF, formed the government in mid-October, turning the National Conference into
the opposition for the first time.
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This invested the coalition government with some legitimacy among Kashmiris.

Two days later Delhi announced that it would withdraw troops from its international border with Pakistan. Islamabad reciprocated. On the eve of the first anniversary of the December 13, 2001, attack on the Parliament House, the Vajpayee government decided to end the high-alert state of its military. Pakistan followed suit.

The yearlong mobilization of its armed forces cost India Rs 75 billion ($1.63 billion), including Rs 10 billion ($0.21 billion) for deploying and redeploying the navy, coast guard, and air force. It was an important contributory factor to produce the low GDP growth of 4.3 percent in fiscal 2002. The corresponding buildup of the Pakistani forces consumed $1.4 billion, a much higher percentage of its budget than India's.
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This nail-biting episode taught India's politicians and military a lesson to make certain basic changes to the composition and equipment of its land forces to cope with similar challenges in the future. After Padmanabhan's retirement at the end of 2002, his successor, General Nirmal Chandar Vij, implemented an ambitious modernization of the ground troops with new weapons systems, enabling each corps a limited offensive capability of its own. And the reequipment of the special forces augmented their ability to operate behind enemy lines for a considerable time.
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These changes were to be incorporated into a new armed forces doctrine that the Vajpayee government instructed military leaders to formulate.

Meanwhile, on January 4, 2003, India's Cabinet Committee on Security summarized the nuclear doctrine. While reiterating the “No First Use” of nuclear weapons, it said that “nuclear retaliation to a first strike [by the enemy] will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” In the case of “a major attack against India, or Indian forces anywhere, by biological or chemical weapons, India will retain the option of retaliating with nuclear weapons.” It stated that the Nuclear Command Authority (NCA) comprised a Political Council and an Executive Council. The Political Council, chaired by the prime minister, was the only body to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. The function of the Executive Council, headed by the national security advisor, was to provide inputs for decision making by the NCA and implement the orders given to it by the Political Council.
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Politicized Musharraf Turns Pragmatic

A succession of major Indo-Pakistan dramas in Kargil (May–July 1999), the hijacking of the Indian airliner by Pakistan-based jihadists (December 1999), and the terrorist attack on the Parliament House in Delhi (December 2001) were covered widely and engagingly by privately owned Indian electronic media. Over time these TV channels had garnered a large audience among Pakistanis with access to satellite and cable television and bored by the bland, sanitized fare offered by the state-owned Pakistan television, PTV. Given tens of thousands of cable operators, it was impossible for the Musharraf government to enforce its ban on accessing Indian TV channels.

To counter the inexorably growing input of the Indian media in molding public opinion in Pakistan, Musharraf decided to liberalize the electronic media while making sure to set the political agenda and regulate private outlets on the sensitive subject of national security. On January 16, 2002, his government established the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) to license privately owned radio and TV stations.

Pakistanis with subscriptions to cable or satellite services were already receiving two private channels in Urdu. These were ARY, set up by Pakistani businessman Abdul Razzak Yaqoob in Dubai in 1997, and Geo TV,
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run by the Karachi-based Independent Media Corporation, broadcasting from Dubai and London.
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The Geo TV channel, established in Karachi in May 2002, did its test transmission on Independence Day, August 14. Its regular transmission started on October 1, nine days ahead of the general election held by the Musharraf government as ordered by the Supreme Court. It broke new ground by airing debates between candidates and giving ample time to opposition parties—in contrast to state-run television. Geo TV would astonish its viewers by announcing election results hours before PTV. Over the years, however, the fiercely competing Urdu language channels tried to outdo one another in their biased reporting and analysis of India as well as America, perceived to be empathizing with its rival because of the shared feeling of being a victim of extremist Islamist terrorism.

Musharraf had prepared well for the electoral contest. Following his instructions, the loyalist Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul Haq, set out to create a pro-Musharraf party. His
starting point was to cause a serious split in the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz Sharif)—PML (N). The defectors were then led to coalesce with pro-Musharraf groups and independents. The end result was the birth of the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-i-Azam)—PML (Q)—on July 20, 2002. Its leader was Zafarullah Khan Jamali, a bland Baluchi tribal chief. In exchange for the Islamist camp's backing of Musharraf to remain the COAS while serving as president, he encouraged the formation of a six-party coalition of six Islamist parties, called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (Urdu: United Council of Action; MMA).

On September 1 the authorities allowed the election campaign to start with a ban on street rallies and use of loudspeakers. Besides the PML (Q), those who entered the race included the PML (N), the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), and the MMA. For the PML (Q), the campaign did not go as well as the Musharraf government had wanted. It became nervous. “Pakistani journalists are of two categories,” said Lieutenant General Javed Ashraf Qazi, the minister of communications and a former head of the ISI. “The left-wing, liberal journalist can be bought by India for two bottles of whisky while the right-wing journalists are patriotic. The job of the ‘purchased' journalist is to pick up disinformation published in India and print it in Pakistan as his own investigative work.”
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India came in handy as the ultimate malevolent player in denying Musharraf unfettered power.

The official figure of 40 percent voter participation was far above the generally agreed 25 percent.
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In the 342-strong National Assembly, the PML (Q) garnered 103 seats, the PPP 80, the MMA 59, with the rest going to small factions and independents.
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The entry of the Islamist MMA, which demanded the application of the Sharia Islamic canon and ran a vigorously anti-American campaign, into the political mainstream was a new development. This worried Washington as much as Delhi. In its election campaign the MMA attributed the 9/11 attacks to the machinations of the CIA and the Israeli foreign espionage agency Mossad, and equated “war on terrorism” with “war on Islam.” Intriguingly, Musharraf had turned a blind eye to the MMA's violation of the ban on street meetings and loudspeakers.

It took Musharraf's military overseers nearly six weeks to cobble together a coalition of 170 members with Jamali as the prime minister. He reiterated continued good relations with Washington while bemoaning the fact that Delhi had not responded positively to Islamabad's offers of talks.

This was as well. The Vajpayee government had noted that within a year of their proscription in January 2002, the five extremist Pakistani organizations were back in business under different names. Lashkar-e Taiba (LeT) reemerged as the Pasban-e Ahl-e Hadith and Jaish-e-Muhammad as Al Furqan. Moreover, the shadowy ISI paid substantial sums to such jihadist leaders as Hafiz Muhammad Saeed of the LeT and Maulana Masoud Azhar of the JeM to persuade them to keep a low profile for an unspecified period.
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With many of their cadres released from prison within months, there was only a minor dip in the activities of these and other jihadist factions.

All this was very much part of the Pakistani military's unchanging doctrine: India is the foremost enemy of Pakistan. So it is incumbent on Islamabad to balance Delhi's superiority in conventional defense by following a dual strategy: build up Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, and encourage periodic terrorist acts against targets in India as well as the Delhi-friendly government in Kabul. To offset any advantage that India might gain in Afghanistan after the ultimate withdrawal of the US-led NATO forces from that country, Islamabad must sustain and bolster the Afghan Taliban as its proxy.

The downside of this two-track strategy was that Pakistan remained a very risky country for Western corporate investment, which its fragile economy needed desperately. This realization started to seep into the Musharraf administration as the standing of its finance minister since the coup, Shaukat Aziz, a former Citibank executive, started to rise. With that, a glimmer of normalization of Indo-Pakistan relations appeared. In May 2003 the two neighbors restored full diplomatic ties after a break of eighteen months.

Feeling the economic pain of maintaining its forces across the LoC on high alert, Pakistan saw salvation in easing tensions in Kashmir. In his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York on September 24, Musharraf invited India to join Pakistan in “a sustained dialogue” aimed at resolving the Kashmir issue. Musharraf proposed that both countries should announce a cessation of violence in Kashmir, involving “reciprocal obligations and restraints on Indian forces and on the Kashmiri freedom fighters,” he proposed.
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Vajpayee let Musharraf's offer lapse.

Two months later, however, India and Pakistan agreed to a comprehensive cease-fire, covering the international border and Kashmir. This coincided with the start of the Eid al Fitr, which marks the end of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan. And on December 1 the two neighbors restored air links that had been cut off two years earlier.

Meanwhile, Musharraf's active involvement in Washington's campaign against Al Qaida and the Taliban had led him to deploy large forces in the semiautonomous Federally Administered Tribal Agencies along the Afghan-Pakistan border. This had alienated the traditional tribal leaders, some of whom were reportedly harboring the deputy leader of Al Qaida, Ayman Zawahiri, and Taliban's Mullah Muhammad Omar. In turn, Al Qaida leadership made Musharraf their number one target. Its first attempt to kill him in Karachi in April 2003 failed.

On December 14, Musharraf narrowly escaped a well-planned assassination attempt, when five bombs exploded under a bridge in Rawalpindi soon after his black Mercedes had passed over it. “When I came back from my tour of Sindh and as I was going home [in Islamabad] from Chaklala [airbase near Rawalpindi] and we crossed the Ammar Chowk Bridge, there was an explosion just half a minute or one minute after we crossed,” he told PTV. “I felt the explosion in my car. That is all that I know, except of course that it was certainly a terrorist act and certainly it was me who was targeted.”
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He was saved by a CIA-supplied radio-jamming device to block all wireless communications within a radius of 650 feet fitted into his car. That blocked the use of a remote-controlled device to detonate the explosives while his car was on the bridge.