State Brutality in the era of "Enlightened Moderation"

Rawalpindi: Police beat Mohammad Bin Masood who was protesting against the disappearance of his father
From Dawn, December 29, 2006

Central Command of the Muslim World?

THE OTHER MALAYSIA: A Muslim central command HQ? — Farish A Noor
Daily Times, December 31, 2006

The question of authority in Islam is as old as the religion itself, and the historian will be the first to tell you that since time immemorial, countless Muslim scholars from Al Ghazali to Ibn Taimiyya to Ibn Khaldun have been grappling with the question of power and discursive authority among Muslims to address the fundamental question: “Who speaks for Islam?” So important has this concern grown over the past few years that this writer alone can claim to have attended no less than a dozen conferences since September 11, 2001 that were convened around the same — admittedly tiring and outdated — question.

Now the question has been raised again in Malaysia with the Director of the Malaysian Islamic Research Institute (IKIM) Dr Syed Tawfik Al-Attas’s proposal that the Malaysian government pave the way for the creation of the office of Grand Mufti of Malaysia, ostensibly to bring an end to the indecorous debates and polemics that have been flying across the country. Citing Egypt, Jordan and Australia as examples of countries whose governments have appointed scholars to such a post, Dr Al-Attas added that “with a Grand Mufti (in Malaysia) religious issues will no longer be debated openly in the media because it can then be discussed behind closed doors among qualified mufti”.

Dr Al-Attas’s concerns are, it has to be noted, legitimate to some degree: This year alone has witnessed a number of loud and angry demonstrations by Muslims across the country over the highly sensitive issue of freedom of faith and the right of Malaysians to choose the religion they wish to practise. The Director of IKIM correctly pointed out that some of the more ‘populist’ ulema of Malaysia have gone out of their way to incite and inflame public opinion with a host of rumours, including the bogus claim that around 200,000 Muslims had secretly converted to Christianity.

But the real question that has to be addressed is this: Would the centralisation of power and discursive authority put an end to such rumour-mongering and hate speeches? Or would it not merely add to the increased power of the state and result in the further co-optation of Islam and Islamic discourse in the country? Is there not the very real problem that once religious discursive authority is bolstered by power and institutionalised it merely ends up being yet another appendage to state power?

Here it has to be pointed out that this is not a concern unique to Islam or Muslims. Since the 19th century orthodox conservative Hindu reformists in India have likewise attempted to control the meaning and circulation of Hindu discourse, firstly to ‘purify’ it of non-Hindu elements and secondly to ensure that it does not degenerate into a form of popular Hinduism that breaks away from the Vedantic tradition. This preoccupation with purity and control contributed to the emergence of reformist movements like the Arya Samaj and later the BJP, and we all know the result by now.

Likewise, between the 17th to 18th centuries Europe was a hotbed of religious pluralism with sometimes grave and bloody consequences. The emergence of different schools of thought and the growing schisms within the Church led to the fears of philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, whose political treatise The Leviathan was as much concerned about ending the disputes between the different streams of the Church as it was to ensure the centralisation of state power.

Hobbes’s main worry in the Leviathan was how to prevent religious disputations leading to civil war, and his remedy was a simple one: The king, and the government, would bring an end to religious discourse by monopolising the discourse of religion and imposing bans on even the use of public language if and when it was necessary. This was the politics of divine containment at its maximalist, and Hobbes did not hesitate to recommend that religious dissenters be put to the sword if need be.

But dissent is precisely the stuff of religion and it has to be noted that the Abrahamic faiths all emerged from dissent. Islam began as a reaction against the corruption of the Bedouin tribes and their feudal customs, and it is the egalitarian ethos of Islam that rebelled against such feudal power that today fuels the differences of thought, belief and praxis among Muslims the world over. How can Muslim states ever contain, police and monopolise the discourse of Islam without striking at its very ethical and philosophical heart?

For many a Muslim government today, a reality check is in order. Rapid development since the postcolonial era, accompanied by mass migration to the cities and urbanisation, accelerated by globalisation and exposure to global media and trends of thought means that plurality of opinion and belief is greater now than ever before. Muslim elites have to realise that this pluralism can and should be turned into an asset, and not seen as a threat per se.

While it is true that the likes of Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakar Bashir exist out there to antagonise and provoke the masses, there are also countless Muslim intellectuals and scholars of note whose ideas are path-breaking, revolutionary and modern. The way to prevent the slippage towards a more communitarian and violent register is not to close the doors of free speech but to create the framework for a civil society where ideas can be discussed maturely and in the open.

This will surely take time, and perhaps the Muslim world does not have much time at its disposal. But nobody ever said that creating a society of mature responsible citizens was an immediate process that can be fast-tracked. What is required, however, are constitutional and institutional guarantees that such a civil society will not come under the domination of a small self-interested elite. That is why the remedy to the hyperbolic rhetoric of the likes of Osama lies not in more security laws, but in a free media, an open university system, the flourishing of texts and discourses and the rule of law that will guarantee that all citizens abide by the same rules.

No, the Muslim world does not need a ‘Muslim Central Command Headquarters’ that despatches government-approved fatwas by the minute. But it does need the space to think aloud and to dissent. In time, the angry voices of the likes of Osama will be drowned out not be government propaganda, but by ordinary Muslims who will simply say “enough is enough” and claim their faith back for themselves. I pray that my optimism is justified.

Dr Farish A Noor is a Malaysian political scientist and historian based at the Zentrum Moderner Orient; and one of the founders of the www.othermalaysia.org research site

House of Saud's School of Thought!

Saudi cleric labels Shias ‘infidels’Reuters: December 30, 2006
DUBAI: An influential cleric of Saudi Arabia’s hardline Sunni school of Islam has denounced Shia Muslims as “infidels” in a new religious edict that comes amid rising sectarian tension in the region. “The rejectionists (Shias) in their entirety are the worst of the Islamic nation’s sects. They bear all the characteristics of infidels,” Sheikh Abdel-Rahman al-Barrak said in the fatwa, or ruling, distributed on Islamist websites. “They are in truth polytheist infidels, though they hide this,” the fatwa said, citing theological differences 14 centuries after the death of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), such as reverence of shrines which followers of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi school consider abhorrent. Concern is growing in Saudi Arabia over Shia-Sunni violence in Iraq which has taken the northern neighbour to the brink of civil war. Sunni-Shia tensions are also high in Lebanon, where Shias are leading efforts to bring down a Sunni-led cabinet. “The Sunni and Shias schools of Islam are opposites that can never agree, there can be no coming together,” the fatwa said. Barrak, an independent scholar, has come to be regarded by many as the highest authority for Wahhabi Muslims. Clerics of the austere Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam have long dismissed Shias as virtual heretics and Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority complains of second-class treatment. But Barrak’s fatwa was the strongest in recent years. The fatwa, which was published on Barrak’s website in response to a follower’s question, also appeared to criticise efforts by some government-backed Saudi preachers at reconciliation between Sunnis and Shias. reuters

Muslim World in the face of Sectarianism and Terrorism

Zahoor's cartoon From Daily Times, December 29, 2006

"I Don't Think We Westerners Care About Muslims"

"I Don't Think We Westerners Care About Muslims" - Robert Fisk Delivers Keynote Address at MPAC Convention

Democracy Now: Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

ROBERT FISK: Ladies and gentlemen, when I first went to the Middle East -- on holiday from Belfast, of all places -- 1972, I went to Egypt, and anxious to try and pick up a few first words of Arabic, I had the misfortune of purchasing a very old book produced by the British army in Egypt in the 19th century. I still recall the three principal clauses which you were advised to learn if you were an Englishman: "We shall board the steamship, for there is talk of war," "Help," and "Where is the British embassy?" And I can tell you, I never believed I would actually watch people say these things, as I had to in Lebanon this last summer. There were all the refugees, all the foreigners, boarding the steamships because there was a real war, all wanting help and all demanding to know the way to their national embassies. “So it has come to this,” I thought to myself.

You know, in the last 30 years that I have been in the Middle East, there has been one -- no, two major changes. The first is that Muslims are no longer afraid. When I first went to Lebanon, if the Israelis crossed the border, for example, many, many, many Palestinians who were in the south would be rushing to Beirut. People would flee the south, run away. Whether it was the siege of Beirut in 1982 or not, I don’t know. But now, they do not run away. Muslims do not run away when they’re attacked, when they’re under air attack.

One of the most extraordinary events was the siege of ’82, when over and over again leaflets would fall from the sky. “If you value your loved ones, run away and take them with you.” An attempt to depopulate West Beirut. And I always remember my landlord -- I live on the seafront -- I met him at front door one day, and he was holding a little net full of fish. He had been fishing on the sea. He said, “We don't have to do as we’re told and leave our homes. We can live, you see, Mr. Robert. We can stay here.”

The other big change that has happened in the past 30 years is that when I first went to the Middle East, all the forces which were in conflict with the West were nationalist or socialist or pro-Soviet. Today, without exception, in Afghanistan, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Iraq, in South Lebanon, all the forces which are in conflict with the West or with Israel are Islamist. That is a change that I don’t think we westerners really understand.

Do we in fact really understand the extent of injustice in the Middle East? When I finished writing my new book, I realized how amazed I was that after the past 90 years of injustice, betrayal, slaughter, terror, torture, secret policemen and dictators, how restrained Muslims had been, I realized, towards the West, because I don't think we Westerners care about Muslims. I don’t think we care about Muslim Arabs. You only have to look at the reporting of Iraq. Every time an American or British soldier is killed, we know his name, his age, whether he was married, the names of his children. But 500,000-600,000 Iraqis, how many of their names have found their way onto our television programs, our radio shows, our newspapers? They are just numbers, and we don't even know the statistic.

Do you remember the time when George Bush was pushed and pushed: what were the figures of the Iraqi dead? At that stage, it was less, and he said, “Oh, 30,000. More or less.” Can you imagine if he had been asked how many Americans had died, and he said "3,000, more or less"? Those words, “more or less,” somehow said it all.

I said earlier on today -- and I’m going to give you the example this time -- that actually, I don't think the Iraq report is going to have any effect, but I think what is meant to have an effect in the United States is the gradual drip-drip idea that the Iraqis are unworthy of us Westerners. This is why and this is how we’re going to get out.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Here is Ralph Peters, former American Army officer, writing in USA Today. I’m not advising you to read USA Today, but I sometimes get trapped into airplanes for hours and hours and hours coming to talk to people like you. So, here is Ralph Peters writing -- remember this is quoting a mainstream newspaper. He was originally for the invasion. Obviously he needs a get-out clause now. "Our extensive investment in Iraqi law enforcement only produced death squads. Government ministers loot the country to strengthen their own factions. In reality, only a military coup could hold this artificial country together." You see? We’re already planning.

I remember back even in 2003, Daniel Pipes had a long article in which he said that what Iraq needed -- and please do not laugh at this -- what Iraq needed was a democratically minded strongman. Think about that for a moment.

But let me carry on with Ralph Peters. “For all our errors, we did give the Iraqis a unique chance to build a rule-of-law democracy. They preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption.” You see what we’re doing. We’re denigrating and bestializing the people we came allegedly to save. It's their tragedy, not ours, he writes. Iraq -- listen to this, “Iraq was the Arab world’s last chance to board the train to modernity, to give the region a future, not just a bitter past. But now, the violence staining Baghdad’s streets with gore isn’t only a symptom of the Iraqi government’s incompetence,” he says. “It is symbolic of the comprehensive inability of the Arab world to progress in any sphere of organized human endeavor.” Yes, that's what I thought when I read it. No letters to the editor about this. “If they continue to revel” -- revel, get that word -- “to revel in fratricidal slaughter, we must leave.” You see, the ground is being prepared.

Take David Brooks, now, this is the New York Times. This is really mainstream. He’s been reading some history books, remembering how the British occupation of Iraq came to grief in 1920. Pity he didn’t read the history books before he supported the invasion of Iraq. But anyway, he’s getting ’round to reading history now. “Today,” he says, “Iraq is in much worse shape than when the British were there. The most perceptive reports,” he says, “talk not of a civil war, but of complete social disintegration.” We’re already rubbing Iraq like this and turning it to dust, so there’s nothing left to leave. “This latest descent,” he says, “was initiated by American blunders but is exacerbated by” -- wait for it -- “the same old Iraqi demons: greed, bloodlust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise for the common good, even in the face of self-immolation.” This is similar to the Thomas Friedman line of the child-sacrificing Palestinians. “Iraq,” says Brooks, “is teetering on the edge of futility.” What does that mean? “It will be time to effectively end Iraq. It will be time soon,” he says, “to radically diffuse authority down to the only communities that are viable in Iraq: the clan, the tribe or sect.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the way in which we are being prepared for what is to happen. This is the grit, which will be laid on the desert floor to help our tanks move. Don't say there were never predictions about the future in the Middle East.

I’m going to make a quick request here. These lights are dazzling me. Is it possibly to have all the lights up like they were before, so you’re all human beings, like I’m trying to be? Can we have all the lights up?

So, but don't say there were no predictions of the future in the Middle East. The record of that 1920 insurgency against the British occupation is a fingerprint-perfect copy of the insurgency against the Americans and the British today. But on the other hand, don't say that no one warned many, many years before here now, before even the Second World War, of what was to happen in Palestine.

I’m going to read you a very brief paragraph by Winston Churchill, not about the Battle of Britain. It is Churchill prophesying the future from 1937, eleven years before the Nakba. This is Winston Churchill writing in a totally forgotten essay. He reflected upon the future and wrote of the impossibility of a partitioned Palestine. And he talked of how, I quote -- this is Winston Churchill in 1937 -- “The wealthy, crowded, progressive Jewish state” -- see, it doesn’t exist yet, but he’s already getting it right -- “lies in the plains and on the sea coast of Palestine. Around it, in the hills and the uplands, stretching far and wide into the illimitable deserts, the warlike Arabs of Syria of Transjordania, of Arabia, backed by the armed forces of Iraq, offer the ceaseless menace of war. To maintain itself,” -- 1937, remember, -- “To maintain itself, the Jewish state will have to be armed to the teeth and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army. But how long will this process be allowed to continue by the great Arab populations in Iraq and Palestine? Can it be expected that the Arabs would stand by impassively and watch the building up, with Jewish world capital and resources, of a Jewish army, equipped with the most deadly weapons of war until it was strong enough not to be afraid of them? And if ever the Jewish army reached that point, who can be sure,” Churchill asked, “that, cramped within their narrow limits, they would not plunge out into the new undeveloped lands that lay around them?”

“Ouch,” I said when I read that. 1937.

Today, you know, we journalists are complicit with governments in creating what I call the ministry of fear. This is not just a question of phone taps, racial profiling, secret tortures, it's also a way of making you and me constantly frightened. I happened to be in Toronto when the famous terror plot was uncovered, the 11 Canadian Muslims, or Muslim Canadians, who were arrested and allegedly were plotting to take over the Parliament Building in Ottawa, hold all the members of parliament hostage, and then to chop off the head of Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada. Harper himself wisely made a little bit of a joke about this, because he saw that this was getting a little bit too much.

But what struck me was the next morning, the Toronto Globe and Mail, mainstream press in Canada, had an eyewitness report -- and I use the quotation -- of the arrest of the “brown-skinned Muslims.” I kid thee not. That’s what it said. The next morning on the CTV, which owned and owns the Toronto Globe and Mail, I was on a live radio program. Live is good. You can't be edited. So I said, “Can you tell me why the Toronto Globe and Mail referred to these Muslims as ‘brown-skinned’? I mean, why didn't it refer to the white-skinned police chief of Toronto, for I am sure he is white, is he not?” He is, of course. You see, I was told, by the way, by the interviewer that it was a generic matter. Indeed, I’m sure it was. But this, remember, is mainstream journalism.

What is going on in our society? You know, after 9/11, I was flying around the world, and I wasn't allowed to have a knife to eat my food with. Now I can have a knife, but I can't have toothpaste. This is the ministry of fear in action. The reality behind this nonsense?

You know, whenever I hear British policemen announcing they foiled another terror plot in the -- it’s now red, gold, standard, green, yellow warning signs, you know, the famous colors; we have colors, like they do in the United States, to warn us of the horrors to come -- I think of the real horrors in Iraq. If only there were a few policemen to go there. But they don’t have the spittle for it. They’re going to frighten you. I’m thinking of some real terror in Baghdad, the terror that comes through the letterbox or is stuck onto walls. Now, here are real terror plots for the ministry of fear, plots to cleanse and massacre whole communities from their homes and cities on the grounds of their religious sect.

So let’s take a look at some really ferocious terror, collected on the streets of Baghdad and from the front doors of those who are indeed facing a generation of threats, many of them scrupulously collected, these documents, by local UN officials, given to some of my Italian colleagues, who handed them to me. And this is the first time they’ve been detailed in this country. They are printed, not hand-written, and they are poisonous.

“To the ignoble rejectionists who sold their religion and community for worldly rewards,” begins one note from a Sunni group about their Shiite Muslim countrymen, “it is clear that you must be classified among those who have betrayed the covenant of Allah and his prophet and are intellectually and actively involved in fighting against the Mujahideen. Therefore, we grant you 24 hours to vacate this righteous district. Otherwise, punishment and retribution shall be your fate. Allah is greater. Praise and grace be to Allah.”

There are dozens and dozens of these documents, and they’re not put there by people who are joking. Some of them, I suspect, may not be put there by groups at all, because I have a suspicion that there are people who want a civil war in Iraq, and they are not necessarily Iraqi. There are many of these documents which I suspect were not written by Iraqis. They’re very neatly printed, some of them.

Here’s a literary work of the Allahu Akbar Brigades, who are probably Sunnis and which specifically target schoolgirls. "Death, crucifixion, amputation of hands and feet will be the retribution against those who defy Allah, to all women, who due to their mode of dress encourage titillation, because this will lead to worldly damnation. Bullets and the cudgel will be the punishment for those who have no morals. We are fully aware” -- listen to this -- “We are fully aware of what takes place after noontime in the school hall on Museum Road. We are present among you and know all there is to know." Ouch. This is real terror, not the kind that our governments are trying to push us into believing is there waiting for us.

And I’ll show you another kind of terror, and it is a kind that journalism permits. I’m going back to January this year, on a military trial. It’s an Associated Press report. See if you can spot what’s wrong with it. “A military jury on Monday ordered a reprimand but no jail time for an army interrogator convicted of killing an Iraqi general by stuffing him headfirst into a sleeping bag and sitting on his chest. His wife” -- this is the wife of Lewis Welshofer, Jr., the American officer -- “testified that she was worried about providing for their three children if her American husband was sentenced to prison, but she said she was proud of him for contesting the case. ‘I love him more for fighting this,’ she said, tears welling up in her eyes. ‘He has always said that you need to do the right thing, and sometimes the right thing is hardest thing to do.’”

Torture is tough, ladies and gentlemen. Torturing people is very hard. But, by the way, it’s only halfway through this story that we’re told that the major general is called Abed Hamed Mowhoush. His identity, as usual, is not as important as that of the American who murdered him, killed him, sat on top of his sleeping bag, into which he had been stuffed upside-down. Incredible! And we’re not told whether General Mowhoush has a wife and children. That is absent from this report. The defense, by the way, had argued that Mowhoush’s death was caused by a heart condition. Well, it would have been, wouldn’t it, if he was stuffed upside-down inside a sleeping bag and had someone sitting on top of him.

“Officials believe” -- there’s always officials being quoted. “Officials believe that Mowhoush had information that would break the back of the whole insurgency.” One man, he knows about 20,000 others. So they sit on him upside-down in a sleeping bag. Incredible!

Later on, we actually have the case of the soldier himself, who was reprimanded, being close to tears. Everyone’s close to tears in this court case. And then he says, now listen to this, “I deeply apologize if my actions caused suffering in Iraq.” Sacrifice for the family of the general? No. He said, “I deeply apologize if my actions tarnished the soldiers serving in Iraq.” Not quite the same thing. AP didn’t quite spot there was a problem there.

Now, take this one. This is the Associated Press doing its job. It uses the Freedom of Information Act to get official documents out of Guantanamo Bay and managed in a long story, but buried deep within it, not at the top, to uncover the following. It’s the official account of a court case inside Guantanamo of Feroz Ali Abbasi. He’s actually a British citizen. He has since been released and is now at home.

He’s on trial, and he pleads and pleads to the American colonel, Air Force colonel, in charge of the trial, “Give me the evidence against me.” He’s not allowed to have the evidence. And the AP has this official document -- and this is the official American document I’m quoting, but I have to add it is paragraphs, paragraphs, into the story, not at the top. “An Air Force colonel would have none of it. ‘Mr. Abbasi, your conduct is unacceptable. And this is your absolute final warning’ the colonel said. ‘I do not care about international law. I do not want to hear the words “international law” again. We are not concerned about international law.’” Pretty much the George W. Bush policy, isn’t it, in the world?

And this, however, was not the headline. The headline was that the American papers, the documents, tell the Guantanamo stories. It’s way down here that we have the actual evidence. How about a headline that says, “American courts say they don't care about international law”?

So let us be frank, in Abu Ghraib, in Bagram, in Afghanistan, in US military bases across Iraq, prisoners, almost all Muslims, have been tortured by American men and women, who in some cases appear to be sadists.

How do I account in my work for the illiterate old man who tells me how American forces pushed a broomstick up his anus in Bagram and watched other prisoners endure the same treatment? How do I account for the murder under torture of prisoners in Bagram, in Afghanistan, something already admitted to by the US authorities? How do we account for the activities of US Unit 626, which has cruelly beaten its prisoners on the face, torso and sexual parts? How are we to react to those two incidents, both now officially investigated, in which US forces, under attack by Iraqi insurgents, apparently took their revenge by lining up local Iraqi civilian villagers, including women and children and shooting them?

At the Baghdad Airport detention camp, we now know highly trained US Special Forces officers -- there were 1,000 present at any one time -- have for years been beating prisoners before and during interrogation. Lieutenant General William Boykin -- this is the same weird general who disparaged the Muslim faith without being disciplined -- later claimed, totally wrongly, that there was no pattern of misconduct in the camp. There was, in many parts of Iraq and Afghanistan. It does continue to this day. My colleagues are still tracking these events.

Robert Fisk, chief Middle East correspondent for the London Independent. He is the author of several books, his latest is "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East."

Pakistan: The National-Security State Dilemma

Special Report: The national-security state
Aitzaz Ahsan, former Interior Minister, the Pakistan People’s Party
HIMAL South Asian,Vol. 19, No. 9: December 2006
The pain of the Partition has left a legacy. There also persists in some quarters a fairly widespread fragility syndrome – as if Pakistan would revert one day to India, and that it is a fragile state. It was something that was attributed to Jawaharlal Nehru. This held the minds of Pakistani intellectuals, because there was a crisis or a certain inability to properly identify and realise one’s own identity. The only way we could identify ourselves was that we were Muslims. But the presence of a large number of Muslims in India, the creation of Bangladesh, among other things, weakened this proposition. The fragility syndrome helped suppress these uncomfortable questions – you don’t ask questions, you cannot seek answers because Pakistan is fragile, India is hostile.

Indian hostility was manifested quite early. The first issue was that water was held back after the monsoons in 1947. Secondly, the division of assets became a sore issue. Now in the context of this fragility syndrome, and the initial hostility, a third feature emerged very early in Pakistan’s life. Pakistan adhered to a protectionist regime for its industrialisation. Imports were regulated very strictly. So we historically sealed out borders in a way regarding the exchange of goods and business with India.

The Pakistan Army took over in 1958. Gradually, but very perceptively and very surely, the very nature of the state changed, from what was initially to be a social-welfare state to a national-security state. In a welfare state, the first priority of the state is the citizen; in a national-security state, the first priority of the state is the soldier, and the intelligence agencies and the state establishment. To justify a military government, you also need to have palpable threats to national security. So you also tend to convert your neighbours to being your enemies.

Now, India’s contribution itself to this national-security paradigm in Pakistan has been profound and continuous. If India blasts the Pokhran sands with a ‘smiling Buddha’ in 1974, Pakistan has no option but to say ‘We’ll eat grass, but we’ll have the bomb’. If India blasts the Pokhran sands on 11 May 1998, we have no option but to shake the Chagai mountains on 28 May 1998. And India continues to raise its defence budget, which elicits a response from Pakistan.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was democratically elected, but was a continuum of the national-security state. He also sought to appease the mullahs with some gestures but it was during Zia’s time that money, weapons, weapon trainers came into jihad and empowered fundamentalist units. This period also saw the Islamisation of the textbooks. Hate literature came into it. Our history began in 712 AD, when Mohammed bin Qasim came to Pakistan. It was not the history of the land we were teaching; it was the history of the religion.

When you start creating a national-security state and paradigm, then you are bound to get into adventures like we did in the so-called Afghan jihad, against the Soviet Union, where we were used as tools. In that process of the jihad against the Soviet Union, Pakistan became populist, weaponised and jihadised, intolerant and militarised. All these jihadis were unemployed after the withdrawal of the Soviets and the failure of the operation in Jalalabad in 1989. And the whole swath actually moved into the Kashmir front, so that became live. All these events reinforced what was a marginal faction in Pakistani politics – the faction that believed that Pakistan was an ideological state, just like Israel.

The cold war between India and Pakistan has continued through this period and created vested interests – for instance, the weapons suppliers who sit and lobby in the Defence Ministry, sit and lobby in the prime minister’s house. The other problem is that our foreign offices are locked in reciprocity. Neither state has the imagination or the guts or the initiative to say, ‘We don’t care about reciprocity, we are going to open visas. We’re going to open imports.’

At present, Pervez Musharraf is incapable of breaking away from the hold of the national-security structures of the state and the national-security establishment. In fact, at least three close calls on his life in December 2004 have made him even more a prisoner. He owes his continued uniform and the holding of two offices to them, as they voted for him in the 17th Amendment.

Having said that, I think India is wasting an opportunity. The solutions that a Pakistan Army chief can undertake with India are not those that political parties will be able to do even after full democracy is restored. We should look at a gamut of measures in different fields that can improve ties – from the defence-security options to the economic security, and look for avenues and work on that. Pakistan will not cut its defence budget if India is increasing its defence budget. Secondly, nobody is stopping people from issuing visas, people-to-people contact. There has been a certain amount of movement in that. I think the visa regime should be relaxed enormously because it really brings people together.

Pakistan must realise the immense potential out of trade with India – it gets a market seven times its size. India gets a huge market as well. And despite such an opportunity, our commerce minister goes around begging for an increase of 0.01 percent in textile quota in category 622 in Europe and the US. On the import side, why is it the fault of my 160 million consumers, that he should have to buy a cycle for 4000 rupees when can buy it for 2200 rupees coming across on trucks from Wagah?

17 Banned Militant Groups Cannot Collect Hides: BUT Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Sunni Tehreek are Just on the Watch List (read: they can collect hides)!

17 banned groups warned against collecting hides
By Shahzad Malik
Daily Times, December 28, 2006

ISLAMABAD: The government has told the provinces to make sure that 17 banned religious and militant organisations are not able to collect the hides of sacrificial animals on Eidul Azha.

“The Interior Ministry has issued this directive to the four provinces and the Islamabad district administration while asking them to step up security around places where Eidul Azha prayers will be offered,” sources said.

Seventeen organisations have been banned under the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997. These are Al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Sipah-e-Muhammad Pakistan, Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammadi, Tehrik-e-Jafria Pakistan, Khudamul Islam, Islami Tehrik Pakistan, Millat-e-Islamia Pakistan, Jamiatul Furqan, Jamiatul Ansar, Hizbul Tahreer, Khairunnas International Trust, Islamic Students Movement and Balochistan Liberation Army. Jamaatud Dawa Pakistan and Sunni Tehrik are on a watch list.

The sources said that intelligence reports submitted to the Interior Ministry warned that members of banned militant and religious outfits would try to collect hides of sacrificial animals under fake names. The militants would ask the khateebs (prayer leaders) of their sects to appeal to people in their areas to collect hides for the welfare of poor students getting religious education there, the sources said. However, the fear is that money from the hides would be used to finance terrorist activities.

The provinces have also been asked to issue directives to district authorities to keep an eye on 570 prayer leaders who, under Section 11EE of the Anti-Terrorism Act, are not allowed to leave their areas during Eidul Azha, the sources said.

The Interior Ministry has also directed the authorities concerned of the four provinces and the district administration of Islamabad to mobilise officials of the Special Branch of the police to keep an eye on members of banned militant organisations, the sources said.

Fair Retrial of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: A Chance for Judiciary to Redeem Itself

Retrying Bhutto
The News, Editorial: December 27, 2006

A former Supreme Court judge's contentious remarks while speaking at a lecture organised by the PPP, revolving around the possibility of a reopening of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's case, will surely spark-off a heated debate across the country. The controversy, as is clearly evident by the continued debate on the topic, remains as potent today as it was nearly 30 years ago. The enigmatic Bhutto was unceremoniously dismissed in 1977, and subsequently hanged, by the incoming Martial Law of Ziaul Haq after being controversially found guilty by the Lahore High Court for conspiracy to murder. However, one cannot help but feel that the matter is long passed and the nation today faces many more important issues which deserve immediate attention. A reopening of this case would just tie up Pakistan's already thin judicial resources, which would, in turn, further exacerbate the backlog problem in the courts. In addition, the violent political backlash, which is always a distinct possibility when dealing with the reopening of sensitive old wounds, will do more harm than good, especially considering the already volatile socio-political milieu present in the country today.

Furthermore, with the presence of an army general at the helm, who himself dismissed a prime minister and had him tried in a controversial manner, indicates that there is little difference in the political structure compared to 1977. There is still the continued influence of the army in government institutions and the imbalance of power between the executive and judicial organs of the state. Even if the case is reopened, and Bhutto subsequently found to be wrongly accused, the verdict would still be susceptible to the same sort of criticism that was flung at the initial trial under Zia. In short, the act would be inherently self-defeating. Yet, one cannot simply dismiss such a proposal as futile and unimportant. The fact remains that whether or not Bhutto was guilty is inconsequential. Instead, the fact that he was dismissed by an army general, under whom he was tried in a subservient court system, forms the crux of the issue.

There could be some constructive prospects in embarking on such an act if one is willing to leave aside the subjective and personal matter of the case's outcome and concentrate on the larger picture. There is little, if any doubt, that Bhutto was tried under what were less-than-ideal circumstances, to say the least. The subservience of the then CJ to the military dictator was open knowledge as was the pressure on other judges to comply with the decision to hang Bhutto. That was, and is, a central problem in Pakistan. Aside from the historical significance, the case could potentially serve as a platform to formally condemn the intervention of the military in civilian affairs and, of course, the subservience of the courts to the executive. That, however, would have to mean that the efforts are concentrated on criticising the nature of the trail and not defending Bhutto himself. The defendant here would not be Bhutto, but democracy and judicial autonomy.

Will the U.S. Attack Iran?

WASHINGTON DIARY: Iran-the new front — Dr Manzur Ejaz
Daily Times, December 27, 2006

Contrary to prevailing expectations, the Bush Administration is going ahead with its old plans to invade Iran. Since Israeli interests define the US agenda in the Middle East, the only chance that the US will abandon its decision of invading Iran is if the Zionist state changes course. So argues Scott Ritter in his new book, Target Iran: The Truth about White House’s Plan for Regime Change. But for now, it does not seem likely.

In the aftermath of debacle in Iraq and the electoral backlash of the November 2006 Congressional election, one would expect the Bush Administration not to take on another disastrous adventure in the Middle East. However, the newly initiated mammoth naval build-up in the Persian Gulf confirms fears that the Bush Administration has not learned its lesson and is going ahead with its old plans to invade Iran. Stretched to the limit, the US army may be resisting such a venture, but if the invasion is limited to using Air Force and the Navy, the Bush Administration may get its way.

The hawks in Bush Administration argue that the US public is against losing the war in Iraq and not against the invasion itself. Therefore, if the US humbles Iran through aerial bombardment, the Bush Administration can declare a victory and keep her hegemonic and interventionist doctrine alive. The US public will greatly approve of such an outcome and President Bush can lift up his sinking approval rating and improve the chances for Republican victory in the presidential and other elections of 2008.

The Democrat-controlled Congress may try to create hurdles for an Iran invasion but, eventually, it will give in. Constitutional experts argue that President Bush does not need fresh Congressional approval for his Iran invasion: He will use the umbrella approval that he obtained for the Iraq invasion, which allows him to attack any country which is accused of abetting terrorism.

Furthermore, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)—the main lobby for the Zionist state — is equally influential with Democrats. AIPAC has successfully established the notion among the US public and legislators that Israel’s interests are identical to the US’s. They have created such an environment that even ex-President Jimmy Carter cannot get away with criticising Israel. Nowadays, the bulk of the media is attacking him for his scathing criticism of Israel in his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Scott Ritter, an ex-UN weapon inspector, provides substantial proofs in his above-mentioned book that the Israeli lobby has successfully confused the Israeli with US interests. In his view, the US has no real conflict with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Hammas or Hezbollah. It is Israel that considers these countries and outfits detrimental to its own interests and the AIPAC deftly turns them into US interests.

“One of the big problems is — and here goes the grenade — Israel. The second you mention the word ‘Israel,’ the nation Israel, the concept Israel, many in the American press become very defensive. And the other thing we’re not allowed to do is discuss the notion that Israel and the notion of Israeli interests may in fact be dictating what America is doing, that what we’re doing in the Middle East may not be to the benefit of America’s national security, but to Israel’s national security,” writes Mr. Ritter.

Mr. Ritter goes further in saying that the Israeli intelligence has become very ideologically oriented and has lost its flair for fact-finding. He claims that he has a long experience of working with Israeli intelligence, which used to be excellent in uncovering facts. However, with the rise of the extreme right in Israel, the intelligence agencies have become ideological. They don’t go for facts but for what they believe is or should be true. It has marred their ability to foresee and act. Consequently, the US is also led by those make-belief intelligence reports compiled by Israel and filtered to the US by various means.

Given the present Israeli mindset, not only Iran’s nuclear weapon program is unacceptable, but even its civilian use of nuclear technology. Israel does not want Iran to have any nuclear technology at all, Mr. Ritter asserts. According to his account, Israel and the US have conducted investigations many times over to find traces of the Iranian nuclear weapons program, without any success. Other investigators also concur that Iran is too far away from enriching weapon grade Uranium: Iran may be enriching the Uranium at the level of less than 5%, while it needs to get to above 90% to be able to make nuclear weapons.

However, the US and Israel are campaigning as if Iran is making nuclear weapons. They are using Iran’s dissident group Mujahdeen-e-Khalaq (MEK) for disinformation. MEK is playing the same role that Ahmad Chalabi played in spreading disinformation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. US declared MEK as a terrorist organisation, but such categorisation has not stopped the Israeli-US intelligence agencies from using their services.

Saudi Arabia has also told Vice President Dick Cheney that US should not resume diplomatic dialogue with Iran. This indicates that the Saudis are also encouraging the US to confront Iran. Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the US’s closest allies in the Middle East, are afraid of Iran’s increasing influence in the area. The Saudis, like the Israelis, do not want Iran to have any nuclear technology at all. Somehow, their interests coincide with Israelis in this regard. Therefore, almost all major US allies are keen to see the US destroying not only Iran’s nuclear facilities but also its economic infrastructure, to push it many decades behind. Israelis ran the trailers of such destruction in Lebanon.

Only a changed Israeli strategy can derail the US invasion plans, argues Mr. Ritter. He hopes that Israel may have learned its lesson in Lebanon that war does not pay and change its outlook about Iran and its other perceived enemies. A Democratic Congress’s resolve not to fund the new war might also tie the Bush Administration’s hands. However, the chances for such an Israeli about-face and Congressional resolve are quite dim. The US naval build-up in the Persian Gulf is for real. It is hard to say when and how the Iran invasion may be triggered but preparations are underway.

The writer can be reached at manzurejaz@yahoo.com

A Milestone

Women cadets break all-male tradition
Daily Times, December 27, 2006

KARACHI: Eight female cadets from the Pakistan Army’s elite training academy on Monday became the first female honour guards at the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

State-run television showed the female contingent, clad in khaki cadet slacks, some wielding swords and others holding guns, marching to military tunes with their male colleagues in a ceremony at the mausoleum of Mr Jinnah, the Father of the Nation, in Karachi. In November, for the first time in the history of Pakistan, the Pakistan Military Academy Kakul opened its doors to women. In March, women also broke into the all-male air force when it inducted four women pilots.

Forty-one females joined the army academy to undergo a rigorous six months of military training along with men before being inducted as officers in various branches of the army.

President Gen Pervez Musharraf, who attended ceremonies in Karachi marking the 130th birthday of Mr Jinnah, laid flowers at the mausoleum and praised the female cadets who are to graduate next April. “I am really impressed by the girls,” Musharraf said. “This is the future of Pakistan.” Previously, women had only served in the army’s medical corps without being trained at the academy. But the 41 female cadets at PMA will join the army as non-combat officers in the communication, engineering, legal and education branches. ap

Pushtunwali: Honour among them

Pushtunwali: Honour among them
The Economist: Dec 19th 2006 | GARDEZ AND PESHAWAR

Thieves, murderers, rapists; and how the Pushtuns' ancient tribal code is fighting for survival against radical Islam


IN A cinema hoarding in Peshawar's Khyber bazaar, Arbaz Khan brandishes a Kalashnikov rifle with a muscular brown arm dripping with scarlet blood. Two nicely plump, pink-cheeked maidens are arranged on the grey rocks behind the actor, manacled and in chains. Mr Khan's roaring, jet-moustachioed mouth bellows the name of the film: “It is my sin that I am Pushtun!”

As an examination of moral equivalence, the film raises difficult questions. To simplify: Mr Khan's father is killed in a blood-feud, after which, according to the tribal code of the Pushtuns—or Pakhtuns, or Pathans, as they are also called—Mr Khan's uncle should marry his dead brother's widow and accept Mr Khan as his son. But Mr Khan's mother is rather long-in-the-tooth, so Mr Khan's uncle (or father) takes up with a dancing-girl, whom, to satisfy his mother's honour, Mr Khan kills. Mr Khan then falls in love. But, dash it, his uncle (or father) makes a play for his girl! Herein lies a dilemma. According to the tribal code, which is called Pushtunwali, Mr Khan must honour his father and also slaughter anyone who messes with his lady. Which way should he choose? After brief anguish, Mr Khan slots his randy uncle.

To Western critics, “Aayeena” might sound like Bollywood schlock. But it has real-life resonance in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). Your correspondent recently paid a visit there to a politician, Anwar Kamal Marwat, a florid gentleman of military bearing and parliamentary leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz in the NWFP assembly. By chance, Mr Kamal had that evening returned from a distant jirga, or tribal council, involving several hundred elders from Pakistan and Afghanistan, representing several dozen Pushtun tribes and their constituent clans. The jirga had been convened to settle a blood-money claim against the Marwat tribe, which Mr Kamal leads, incurred in April 2004.

For several years previously, the Marwat had been feuding with their neighbours, the Bhattani, another small Pushtun tribe. The tit-for-tat offences were quite piffling, said Mr Kamal—a spot of thieving or kidnapping of fighting-age males. Then some Bhattani hotheads abducted two Marwat girls; and Mr Kamal went Pushtun-postal. Leading an army of 4,000 Marwat fighters, equipped with artillery, he levelled a Bhattani town, killing 80 people, including the two unlucky, but nonetheless dishonoured, girls. Neither the bloodletting, nor the jirga that followed it (which stung Mr Kamal and his tribe for $60,000), seem even to have been mentioned in the Pakistani press.

Asked whether he saw any contradiction in a senior lawmaker instigating such extreme violence, Mr Kamal appeared astonished. “Well, we don't claim this is something to be proud of,” he stuttered. “But it is a question of prestige, you see, a question of honour.” In other words, he might have said, paraphrasing Mr Khan: it is his sin that he is Pushtun.

It is over 250 years since Afghanistan was cobbled together, from many ethnic groups, and two centuries since British colonisers tried stretching their writ to India's (now Pakistan's) north-western frontier, where the plains crumple up towards the Hindu Kush. Yet, in both places, a large part of the population is still wedded to Pushtunwali. Some 15m Pushtuns live in Afghanistan, or 50% of its population; and 28m in Pakistan, mostly in NWFP, representing about 15% of the population there. Most of them are ruled by their tribal code, the notable exception being where the rival Islamist code, of the stringent Saudi variety which is preached by the Taliban and quite new to Afghanistan, is strong. Islamism has rivalled Pushtunwali for centuries; it has often gained prominence, as currently, in time of war. More typically, the two competing ways have cross-fertilised in Afghanistan, each subtly influencing the other.

Pushtunwali's principles have not changed in centuries—certainly not since they were recorded by Victorian ethnographers, middle-class soldiers and civil servants: players of the Great Game. Most lionised the fierce tribesmen, who periodically murdered them. Some even swallowed a delicious Pushtun claim to be descended from a lost tribe of Israel. But not all Westerners fell for the Pushtun. As a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, attached to the Malakand Field Force, Winston Churchill wrote: “Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices, has produced a code of honour so strange and inconsistent that it is incomprehensible to a logical mind.”

Pushtun amateur genealogists (that is, most Pushtun men) say Pushtunwali is 5,000 years old. But as Pushtu was first written less than 500 years ago, the theory is hard to test. The code's sine qua non is honour, or nang, a word which, according to Sir Olaf Caroe, an imperial scholar of the Pushtuns, contains a mythical sense of chastity. According to Khusal Khan Khattak, a great 17th-century Pushtun poet, credited with 45,000 poems: “I despise the man who does not guide his life by nang,/the very word nang drives me mad!” In dusty Pushtun villages today, few bearded men would not nod approvingly at this. “Any man who loses his honour must be completely ostracised,” said Sandaygul, a long-beard of the Mangal tribe in Afghanistan's south-eastern Paktia province. “No one would congratulate him on the birth of child. No one would marry his daughter. No one would attend his funeral. His disgrace will endure for generations. He and his family must move away.” In Pushtu, to be disgraced means literally to be an outsider.

The insulting Americans
There are infinite ways to slight a Pushtun's nang, but most involve zar, zan or zamin: gold, women or land. The search tactics of American troops in Afghanistan, five years after they invaded the country, tend to offend on all counts. By forcing entry into the mud-fortress home of a Pushtun, with its lofty buttresses and loopholes, they dishonour his property. By stomping through its female quarters, they dishonour his women. Worse, the search may end with the householder handcuffed and dragged off before his neighbours: his person disgraced. America and its allies face a complicated insurgency in Afghanistan, driven by many factors. But such tactics are among them.

But Pushtunwali is not all fierce imperatives. The code also contains many flexible means of preventing conflict through consensus and compromise. Chief among these is the jirga, of which each of Afghanistan's main groups, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Pashai, Hazaras and Baloch, has its version. By one estimate, jirgas settle over 95% of Afghanistan's disputes, civil and criminal. The figure for northern Pakistan is perhaps only slightly lower. This is not just because the regular courts are incompetent and corrupt (Afghanistan's were recently reformed by Italy). It is because, given high levels of illiteracy, many Afghans and Pakistanis find it easier to understand unwritten customary law, in Pushtu called narkh. And, where authority is contested by a well-armed citizenry, the jirga's verdicts, delivered with the warring parties' consent, tend to be more enforceable than off-the-peg legal or Islamic judgments.

A juddering two-hour drive from Peshawar, at Jamrud, in Khyber Agency, a 60-strong jirga recently settled half a dozen cases in a day—more than a bent Pakistani magistrate might manage in a week. Two disputes over money and property, including one involving the murder of five people, were ended with compromises. A dispute over a murderer who had been given sanctuary by a neighbour was postponed, pending deliberation from the spingeeri—literally, white-beards—who make up the jirga on a forerunning series of killings. A man accused of “adultery”, of rape in fact, was told to pay 1m Pakistani rupees ($16,500) to his victim's family; he may thank his stars he had lived so long.

Among the spingeeri sat Adam Khan Afridi, who had himself been judged shortly before. For 25 years he squabbled with a cousin over which of them would inherit an uncle's lands, until Mr Khan killed his cousin and his cousin's sons and grandson. Then he killed their uncle. This was excessive, Mr Khan conceded; he had committed the crime of miratha—annihilating every male in the rival camp. The jirga decreed that two of Mr Khan's houses be destroyed, and fined him 500,000 rupees. He thought this harsh.

Jirgas do even greater service, as with the Marwat and the Bhattani, in ending tribal wars. On a chill recent morning in Kabul, your correspondent sat with a jirga convened to settle a dispute between two nomadic clans of the Siddiquekhail, a sub-tribe of the powerful Pushtun Ahmedzai. In 1980, a 17-year-old youth of one the clans, named Babur, disappeared while travelling through Pakistan with members of the other; then in 1992, a 60-year-old shepherd of the second clan was found murdered, allegedly killed with an axe by an uncle of Babur.

Previous attempts to settle the dispute had foundered in part on a deposit of $10,000 that each tribe had been asked to lodge with the jirga, with a vow to abide by its decision. “It is time for this feud to end,” said Haji Naim Kuchi, the chief mediator, or narkhi, and member of a different Ahmedzai clan. “You should be at home sleeping with your wives, not plotting to kill each other!” Mr Kuchi, who is famed for his deep knowledge of customary law, asked the feuders to “place a stone” on their dispute—to suspend hostilities while the jirga sat. “We all know that if this continues many men will die before you return to the jirga,” said Mr Kuchi, who had been released from American custody shortly before, after three years' imprisonment without trial in Guantánamo Bay.

To settle disputes, Mr Kuchi has two main options. He can order a guilty party to compensate its victim with cash, a practice known as wich pur, “dry debt”, or he can order the two parties to exchange women, or lund pur, “wet debt”. By binding the antagonists together—just as in medieval European diplomacy—lund pur is considered more effective. Typically it involves exchanging a 15-year-old, a ten-year-old and a five-year-old girl, to be married into three succeeding generations of the enemy clan. Thereby, and though human-rights groups understandably revile the practice, Pushtuns have peace and happy grandfathers. “Blood cannot wash away blood,” runs a Pushtu proverb. “But blood can be turned into love.”



In a land far, far away
If Pushtunwali is about more than killing, its strictures are still remarkably unforgiving. Many Tajiks, like Pushtuns, would die before they suffered a slight. But, unlike Pushtuns, they do not fear their peeved neighbours to the extent of living in castles. A recent European Union analysis of jirgas in eastern Afghanistan found that elopement was the crime most often heard by Pashai jirgas, but Pushtun jirgas rarely considered it. That could be because few Pushtun lads and lasses elope or, more likely, because they are more likely to be killed when they do. What makes Pushtunwali so durable and so harsh?

One reason is remoteness. At the confluence of civilisations, between Central Asia, ancient Persia and India's plains, Afghanistan has been contested by marauding armies and strange traders for millennia. A ruined capital, or two, lies buried in most of its 34 provinces, and each has left its trace in the languages and traditions of today. Pashto, for example, is believed to have originated in Bactrian, the language spoken by Greek descendants of Alexander the Great. And yet the wildest Pushtun places, especially along the lofty border where the strictest Pushtunwali is practised, have been relatively untouched by outsiders for centuries. Waziristan, in Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal area, has never been held by any foreign power.

Another reason for Pushtunwali's rude health lies in the nature of Pushtun society. Once rulers of Delhi, in the ranks of the Mughal emperors, and never vanquished for long, Pushtuns consider their society every bit as superior as Winston Churchill considered his. And it is defined by Pushtunwali: there is no Pushtun nation or, in fact, ethnicity. A Pushtun is simply someone who speaks Pushtu and who therefore follows the tribal code: Pushtunwali literally means to “do Pushtu”.

A third factor promoting Pushtunwali is one of its most appealing features, egalitarianism. Leadership among Pushtuns is rarely inherited. It is more often bestowed by a jirga on merit. Even then, the most elevated Pushtun elder dares not condescend to another man of his tribe. When lunch is served at a Pushtun feast, with tasty dishes of mutton, raisins and rice, there are no servants, but servers, of equal status to host and guests. Where a good name is the cost of social inclusion, Pushtuns will fight to keep it so.

It is above all this political function that makes Pushtunwali so resistant to change; but it is not unchanging. Pushtun tribes constantly update their code. Three years ago, the Mangals of Paktia ended a practice of revenge-taking by proxy, whereby a weak man had only to slaughter a sheep outside the house of his stronger neighbour to make him accept his blood-debt. “We were doing too much killing,” explained Sandaygul, the Mangal in Gardez.

More traumatic change to the code has come from external pressures. In urban places, where the Pakistani and Afghan states somewhat function, aspects of Pushtunwali have been jettisoned; jirgas of the Kasi tribe, which is based in the Pakistani city of Quetta, rarely meet. More powerful opposition has come from political Islam, which seeks to replace the authority of the jirga with the mullah, customary law with Islamic sharia.

Over the past millennium or so, the Pushtuns' religious and tribal codes have roughly co-existed. As a mark of a time-honoured accommodation, Pushtun elders and mullahs often insist there is no contradiction between the two prerogatives. “The sharia and jirga systems are not opposed,” said Maulvi Sayeed, a member of the Muslim council, or shura, in Kandahar, capital of southern Afghanistan. “To solve a problem through the use of a shura, a council, is the aim of both. The jirga is not against sharia law. If there has been a murder then the aim is to satisfy the relatives of the victim,” said the mullah, seated cross-legged amid stacks of religious texts, with a vast white turban atop his grizzled head.

In fact, sharia courts, which in Afghanistan are often indistinguishable from regular courts, are an alternative to blood-feuding and jirgas. Like jirgas, they can urge the victims of a crime to settle the matter through compensation. But where this is rejected, the courts can issue death sentences, or other harsh penalties, which jirgas do not. A plaintiff who is unhappy with a jirga's verdict may seek an alternative ruling from a sharia court. According to Maulvi Sayeed: “If the brother of a man who has been murdered does not agree to forgive his killer according to the jirga, then he can go to the sharia court. If the murder was unjust then the sharia court will say that the killer has to be killed.”

Another big difference between the codes is in their treatment of women. In sharia law, there can be no exchange of women as a means to end disputes, and women are guaranteed some rights of inheritance—unlike in Pushtunwali. Nor does sharia law recognise the Pushtun habit of wife inheritance, wherein a widow is forcibly married to her dead husband's brother or cousin. “Such things happen when people are uneducated,” sniffed Maulvi Sayeed. “We don't oppose the system of tribal elders but they must follow the way of Islam. They can convene jirgas and dispense the law, but the law must be that of sharia.”

Though fiercely religious, Pushtuns have mostly preferred their leaders and law to be tribal. The great exception has been in times of duress, when a standard is needed to rally their fractious tribes and sub-tribes: then they have tended to hoist the flag of jihad. Of the 19th-century Masood tribe of Waziristan, Sir Olaf wrote that they wanted “at all costs to resist subjection and to preserve their own peculiar way of life. To attain this end they were always prepared to make use of adventitious aids such as appeals with a pan-Islamic flavour.”

Thus the jihad launched in the 1980s against Soviet invaders united all Afghan tribes. It was generously backed by Saudi Arabia and America and given sanctuary by Pakistan, which was home to 3m Afghan refugees. Yet still its Pushtun leaders found it necessary brutally to suppress their tribal peers, terrorising the refugee camps and murdering the jirga-leaders who defied them there.

In the early 1990s, after the Soviets had been driven out and the former jihadist chiefs were fighting a civil war, Pushtuns again rallied around Islam. A band of Ghilzai Pushtuns near Kandahar, led by a mullah named Omar, backed by Pakistan and calling themselves the Taliban, raised the black flag. Gushing with Islamist zeal, Pushtun youths rushed to join them as they swept the feuding militias away.

But once the Taliban restored order to most of Afghanistan, Pushtuns began recoiling against their rulings. Their public executions and other outrages to public decency were anathema to them. So too when the Taliban—despite their celebrated chauvinism—outlawed wich pur and advocated female inheritance. No wonder if the lives of the vast majority of Afghan women have not eased since the Taliban were bombed from power.

For two years after their demise, the Taliban were not mourned in Afghanistan. But since then an insurgency has gathered pace. It is not quite clear what is driving it. An exploding opium harvest, which is providing cash for the Taliban and a reason for Pushtun farmers to keep the government away, is one reason. Another, as Sir Olaf might have foretold, is the response of the most remote and traditional Pushtuns to a foreign invasion.

In late 2001, thousands of Taliban and several hundred Arab and Central Asian followers of Osama bin Laden poured into northern Pakistan's tribal areas—including Waziristan, home of the Masood. To hunt them, and in a bid to save Western troops in Afghanistan from the same cross-border insurgency that hobbled the Soviet Union, Pakistan sent 80,000 troops into the tribal areas.

Alas, they have achieved the very opposite effect of that intended. Calling themselves the Pakistan Taliban, fighters of Waziristan's main tribes have rallied against the army, killing several hundred soldiers. As in the former refugee camps, jihadist assassins have killed several hundred Pushtun elders, ensuring that sharia, not Pushtunwali, is the law.

If history is any guide, many Pushtuns in northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan will continue their drift to Islamist militancy until they are defeated, which looks impossible, or the Pakistani and Western forces are withdrawn. They are then likely to return to their simmeringly murderous tribal ways. That would be better than the current mess. But it would also leave millions of people outside the writ of Pakistan and Afghanistan. If either state is to succeed, the alternative writs of Pushtunwali and jihadist Islam will have to wither. But that will not be soon.

To imagine quite how long it may take, consider Nakband. It is a suburb of Peshawar, the most developed Pushtun city, a mere two-hour drive from Pakistan's smart capital of Islamabad. Yet it is little different from the craggy and forbidding tribal areas, where Pakistan's constitution does not apply. Nakband's inhabitants have no state services except the electricity they steal from the mains. There is no half-serious hospital for 20 miles. Pushtunwali, with a sprinkling of the Koran, is the law in Nakband. Blood-feuding, as marked by the ratchet of gunfire in the unbroken gloom of night, is routine. The government makes no effort to intervene in these disputes. Combing his long black hair beside a baked-mud road, a resident of Nakband said that, in theory, the city police were free to enter his suburb. But the locals had not permitted them to do so, so far as he could recall, since 1998.

Future of Musharraf?

The General in his Labyrinth
Tariq Ali
London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 1, 4 January 2007

If there is a single consistent theme in Pervez Musharraf’s memoir, it is the familiar military dogma that Pakistan has fared better under its generals than under its politicians. The first batch of generals were the offspring of the departing colonial power. They had been taught to obey orders, respect the command structure of the army whatever the cost and uphold the traditions of the British Indian Army. The bureaucrats who ran Pakistan in its early days were the product of imperial selection procedures designed to turn out incorruptible civil servants wearing a mask of objectivity. The military chain of command is still respected, but the civil service now consists largely of ruthlessly corrupt time-servers. Once its members were loyal to the imperial state: today they cater to the needs of the army.

Pakistan’s first uniformed ruler, General Ayub Khan, a Sandhurst-trained colonial officer, seized power in October 1958 with strong encouragement from both Washington and London. They were fearful that the projected first general election might produce a coalition that would take Pakistan out of security pacts like Seato and towards a non-aligned foreign policy. Ayub banned all political parties, took over opposition newspapers and told the first meeting of his cabinet: ‘As far as you are concerned there is only one embassy that matters in this country: the American Embassy.’ In a radio broadcast to the nation he informed his bewildered ‘fellow countrymen’ that ‘we must understand that democracy cannot work in a hot climate. To have democracy we must have a cold climate like Britain.’

Perhaps remarks of this sort account for Ayub’s popularity in the West. He became a great favourite of the press in Britain and the US. His bluff exterior certainly charmed Christine Keeler (they splashed together in the pool at Cliveden during a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference) and the saintly Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman published a grovelling interview. Meanwhile opposition voices were silenced and political prisoners tortured; Hasan Nasir, a Communist, died as a result. In 1962 – by now he had promoted himself to field-marshal – Ayub decided that the time had come to widen his appeal. He took off his uniform, put on native gear and addressed a public meeting (a forced gathering of peasants assembled by their landlords) at which he announced that there would soon be presidential elections and he hoped people would support him. The bureaucracy organised a political party – the Convention Muslim League – and careerists flocked to join it. The election took place in 1965 and the polls had to be rigged to ensure the field-marshal’s victory. His opponent, Fatima Jinnah (the sister of the country’s founder), fought a spirited campaign but to no avail. The handful of bureaucrats who had refused to help fix the election were offered early retirement.

Now that he had been formally elected, it was thought that Ayub would be further legitimised by the publication of his memoirs. Friends Not Masters: A Political Autobiography appeared from Oxford in 1967 to great acclaim in the Western press and was greeted with sycophantic hysteria in the government-controlled media at home. But Ayub’s information secretary, Altaf Gauhar, a crafty, cynical courtier, had ghosted a truly awful book: stodgy, crude, verbose and full of half-truths. It backfired badly in Pakistan and was soon being viciously satirised in clandestine pamphlets on university campuses. Ayub had suggested that Pakistanis ‘should study this book, understand and act upon it . . . it contains material which is for the good of the people.’ More than 70 per cent of the population was illiterate and of the rest only a tiny elite could read English. In October 1968, during lavish celebrations to commemorate the ten years of dictatorship as a ‘decade of development’, students in Rawalpindi demanded the restoration of democracy; soon Student Action Committees had spread across the country. The state responded with its usual brutality. There were mass arrests and orders to ‘kill rioters’. Several students died during the first few weeks. In the two months that followed workers, lawyers, small shopkeepers, prostitutes and government clerks joined the protests. Stray dogs with ‘Ayub’ painted on their backs became a special target for armed cops. In March 1969 Ayub passed control of the country to the whisky-soaked General Yahya Khan.

Yahya promised a free election within a year and kept his word. The 1970 general election (the first in Pakistan’s history) resulted in a sensational victory for the Awami League, Bengali nationalists from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The Bengalis were disgruntled, and for good reason: East Pakistan, where a majority of the population lived, was treated as a colony and the Bengalis wanted a federal government. The military-political-economic elite came from West Pakistan, however, and all it could see in the Awami League’s victory was a threat to its privileges.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, which had triumphed in the western portion of the country, should have negotiated a settlement with the victors. Instead he sulked, told his party to boycott a meeting of the new assembly that had been called in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan, and thus provided the army with breathing space to prepare a military assault. Yahya prevented the leader of the Awami League, Mujibur Rahman, from forming a government and, in March 1971, sent in troops to occupy East Pakistan. ‘Thank God, Pakistan has been saved,’ Bhutto declared, aligning himself with what followed. Rahman was arrested and several hundred nationalist and left-wing intellectuals, activists and students were killed in a carefully organised massacre. The lists of victims had been prepared with the help of local Islamist vigilantes, whose party, the Jamaat-e-Islami, had lost badly in the elections. The killings were followed by a campaign of mass rape. Soldiers were told that Bengalis were relatively recent converts to Islam and hence not ‘proper Muslims’ – their genes needed improving.

The atrocities provoked an armed resistance and there were appeals for military aid from New Delhi, where the Awami League had established a government-in-exile. The Indians, fearful that Bengali refugees might destabilise the Indian province of West Bengal and no doubt sensing an opportunity, sent in their army, which was welcomed as a liberating force. Within a fortnight, the Pakistan troops were surrounded. Their commander, General ‘Tiger’ Niazi, chose surrender rather than martyrdom, for which his colleagues, a thousand miles from the battlefield, were never to forgive him. In December 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh and 90,000 West Pakistani soldiers ended up in Indian prisoner of war camps. Nixon, Kissinger and Mao had all ‘tilted towards Pakistan’ but to little effect. It was a total disaster for the Pakistan army: the first phase of military rule had led to the division of the country and the loss of a majority of its population.

Bhutto was left with a defeated army and a truncated state. He had been elected on a social-democratic programme that pledged food, clothing, education and shelter for all, major land reform and nationalisation. He was the only political leader Pakistan has ever produced who had the power, buttressed by mass support, to change the country and its institutions, including the army, for ever. But he failed on every front. The nationalisations merely replaced profit-hungry businessmen with corrupt cronies and tame bureaucrats. As landlords flocked to join his party, the radical reforms he had promised in the countryside were shelved. The poor felt instinctively that Bhutto was on their side (the elite never forgave him) but few measures were enacted to justify their confidence. His style of government was authoritarian; his personal vindictiveness was corrosive.

Bhutto attempted to fight the religious opposition by stealing their clothes: he banned the sale of alcohol, made Friday a public holiday and declared the Ahmediyya sect to be non-Muslims (a long-standing demand of the Jamaat-e-Islami that had, till then, been treated with contempt). These measures did not help him, but damaged the country by legitimising confessional politics. Despite his worries about the Islamist opposition, Bhutto would probably have won the 1977 elections without state interference, though with a reduced majority. But the manipulation was so blatant that the opposition came out on the streets and neither his sarcasm nor his wit was any help in the crisis.

Always a bad judge of character, he had made a junior general and small-minded zealot, Zia-ul-Haq, army chief of staff. As head of the Pakistani training mission to Jordan, Brigadier Zia had led the Black September assault on the Palestinians in 1970. In July 1977, to pre-empt an agreement between Bhutto and the opposition parties that would have entailed new elections, Zia struck. Bhutto was arrested, and held for a few weeks, and Zia promised that new elections would be held within six months, after which the military would return to barracks. A year later Bhutto, still popular and greeted by large crowds wherever he went, was again arrested, and this time charged with murder, tried and hanged in April 1979.

Over the next ten years the political culture of Pakistan was brutalised. As public floggings (of dissident journalists among others) and hangings became the norm, Zia himself was turned into a Cold War hero – thanks largely to events in Afghanistan. Religious affinity did nothing to mitigate the hostility of Afghan leaders to their neighbour. The main reason was the Durand Line, which was imposed on the Afghans in 1893 to mark the frontier between British India and Afghanistan and which divided the Pashtun population of the region. After a hundred years (the Hong Kong model) all of what became the North-Western Frontier Province of British India was supposed to revert to Afghanistan but no government in Kabul ever accepted the Durand Line any more than they accepted British, or, later, Pakistani control, over the territory.

In 1977, when Zia came to power, 90 per cent of men and 98 per cent of women in Afghanistan were illiterate; 5 per cent of landowners held 45 per cent of the cultivable land and the country had the lowest per capita income of any in Asia. The same year, the Parcham Communists, who had backed the 1973 military coup by Prince Daud after which a republic was proclaimed, withdrew their support from Daud, were reunited with other Communist groups to form the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), and began to agitate for a new government. The regimes in neighbouring countries became involved. The shah of Iran, acting as a conduit for Washington, recommended firm action – large-scale arrests, executions, torture – and put units from his torture agency at Daud’s disposal. The shah also told Daud that if he recognised the Durand Line as a permanent frontier the shah would give Afghanistan $3 billion and Pakistan would cease hostile actions. Meanwhile, Pakistani intelligence agencies were arming Afghan exiles while encouraging old-style tribal uprisings aimed at restoring the monarchy. Daud was inclined to accept the shah’s offer, but the Communists organised a pre-emptive coup and took power in April 1978. There was panic in Washington, which increased tenfold as it became clear that the shah too was about to be deposed. General Zia’s dictatorship thus became the lynchpin of US strategy in the region, which is why Washington green-lighted Bhutto’s execution and turned a blind eye to the country’s nuclear programme. The US wanted a stable Pakistan whatever the cost.

As we now know, plans (a ‘bear-trap’, in the words of the US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski) were laid to destabilise the PDPA, in the hope that its Soviet protectors would be drawn in. Plans of this sort often go awry, but they succeeded in Afghanistan, primarily because of the weaknesses of the Afghan Communists themselves: they had come to power through a military coup which hadn’t involved any mobilisation outside Kabul, yet they pretended this was a national revolution; their Stalinist political formation made them allergic to any form of accountability and ideas such as drafting a charter of democratic rights or holding free elections to a constituent assembly never entered their heads. Ferocious factional struggles led, in September 1979, to a Mafia-style shoot-out at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, during which the prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, shot President Taraki dead. Amin, a nutty Stalinist, claimed that 98 per cent of the population supported his reforms but the 2 per cent who opposed them had to be liquidated. There were mutinies in the army and risings in a number of towns as a result, and this time they had nothing to do with the Americans or General Zia.

Finally, after two unanimous Politburo decisions against intervention, the Soviet Union changed its mind, saying that it had ‘new documentation’. This is still classified, but it would not surprise me in the least if the evidence consisted of forgeries suggesting that Amin was a CIA agent. Whatever it was, the Politburo, with Yuri Andropov voting against, now decided to send troops into Afghanistan. Its aim was to get rid of a discredited regime and replace it with a marginally less repulsive one. Sound familiar?

From 1979 until 1988, Afghanistan was the focal point of the Cold War. Millions of refugees crossed the Durand Line and settled in camps and cities in the NWFP. Weapons and money, as well as jihadis from Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt, flooded into Pakistan. All the main Western intelligence agencies (including the Israelis’) had offices in Peshawar, near the frontier. The black-market and market rates for the dollar were exactly the same. Weapons, including Stinger missiles, were sold to the mujahedin by Pakistani officers who wanted to get rich quickly. The heroin trade flourished and the number of registered addicts in Pakistan grew from a few hundred in 1977 to a few million in 1987. (One of the banks through which the heroin mafia laundered money was the BCCI – whose main PR abroad was a retired civil servant called Altaf Gauhar.)

As for Pakistan and its people, they languished. During Zia’s period in power, the Jamaat-e-Islami, which had never won more than 5 per cent of the vote anywhere in the country, was patronised by the government; its cadres were sent to fight in Afghanistan, its armed student wing was encouraged to terrorise campuses in the name of Islam, its ideologues were ever present on TV. The Inter-Services Intelligence also encouraged the formation of other, more extreme jihadi groups, which carried out acts of terror at home and abroad and set up madrassahs all over the frontier provinces. Soon Zia, too, needed his own political party and the bureaucracy set one up: the Pakistan Muslim League.

With the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985 it became obvious that the Soviet Union would accept defeat in Afghanistan and withdraw its troops. It wanted some guarantees for the Afghans it was leaving behind and the United States – its mission successful – was prepared to play ball. General Zia, however, was not. The Afghan war had gone to his head (as it did to that of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues) and he wanted his own people in power there. As the Soviet withdrawal got closer, Zia and the ISI made plans for the postwar settlement.

And then Zia disappeared. On 17 August 1988, he took five generals to the trial of a new US Abrams M-1/A-1 tank at a military test range near Bahawalpur. Also present were a US general and the US ambassador, Arnold Raphael. The demonstration did not go well and everybody was grumpy. Zia offered the Americans a lift in his specially built C-130 aircraft, which had a sealed cabin to protect him from assassins. A few minutes after the plane took off, the pilots lost control and it crashed into the desert. All the passengers were killed. All that was left of Zia was his jawbone, which was duly buried in Islamabad (the chowk – roundabout – nearby became known to cabbies as ‘Jawbone Chowk’). The cause of the crash remains a mystery. The US National Archives contain 250 pages of documents, but they are still classified. Pakistani intelligence experts have told me informally that it was the Russians taking their revenge. Most Pakistanis blamed the CIA, as they always do. Zia’s son and widow whispered that it was ‘our own people’ in the army.

With Zia’s assassination, the second period of military rule in Pakistan came to an end. What followed was a longish civilian prologue to Musharraf’s reign. For ten years members of two political dynasties – the Bhutto and Sharif families – ran the country in turn. It was Benazir Bhutto’s minister of the interior, General Naseerullah Babar, who, with the ISI, devised the plan to set up the Taliban as a politico-military force that could penetrate Afghanistan, a move half-heartedly approved by the US Embassy. Washington had lost interest in Afghanistan and Pakistan once the Soviet Union had withdrawn its troops. The Taliban (‘students’) were children of Afghan refugees and poor Pathan families ‘educated’ in the madrassahs in the 1980s: they provided the shock troops, but were led by a handful of experienced mujahedin including Mullah Omar. Without Pakistan’s support they could never have taken Kabul, although Mullah Omar preferred to forget this. Omar’s faction was dominant, but the ISI never completely lost control of the organisation. Islamabad kept its cool even when Omar’s zealots asserted their independence by attacking the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul and his religious police interrupted a football match between the two countries because the Pakistan players sported long hair and shorts, caned the players before the stunned crowd and sent them back home.

After Benazir’s fall, the Sharif brothers returned to power. And once again, Shahbaz, the younger but shrewder sibling, accepted family discipline and Nawaz became the prime minister. In 1998 Sharif decided to make Pervez Musharraf army chief of staff in preference to the more senior General Ali Kuli Khan (who was at college with me in Lahore). Sharif’s reasoning may have been that Musharraf, from a middle-class, refugee background like himself, would be easier to manipulate than Ali Kuli, who came from a landed Pathan family in the NWFP. Whatever the reasoning, it turned out to be a mistake.

On Bill Clinton’s urging, Sharif pushed for a rapprochement with India. Travel and trade agreements were negotiated, land borders were opened, flights resumed, but before the next stage could be reached, the Pakistan army began to assemble in the Himalayan foothills. The ISI claimed that the Siachen glacier in Kashmir had been illegally occupied by the Indians and the Indians claimed the opposite. Neither side could claim victory after the fighting that followed, but casualties were high, particularly on the Indian side (Musharraf exaggerates Pakistan’s ‘triumph’). A ceasefire was agreed and each army returned to its side of the Line of Control.

Why did the war take place at all? In private the Sharif brothers told associates that the army was opposed to their policy of friendship with India and was determined to sabotage the process: the army had acted without receiving clearance from the government. In his memoir, Musharraf insists that the army had kept the prime minister informed in briefings in January and February 1999. Whatever the truth, Sharif told Washington that he had been bounced into a war he didn’t want, and not long after the war, the Sharif family decided to get rid of Musharraf. Constitutionally, the prime minister had the power to dismiss the chief of staff and appoint a new one, as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had done in the 1970s, when he appointed Zia. But the army then was weak, divided and defeated; this was certainly not the case in 1999.

Sharif’s candidate to succeed Musharraf was General Ziauddin Butt, head of the ISI, who was widely seen as corrupt and incompetent. He was bundled off to Washington for vetting and while there is said to have pledged bin Laden’s head on a platter. If Sharif had just dismissed Musharraf he might have had a better chance of success but what he lacked in good sense his brother tried to make up for in guile. Were the Sharif brothers really so foolish as believe that the army was unaware of their intrigues or were they misled by their belief in US omnipotence? Clinton duly warned the army that Washington would not tolerate a military coup in Pakistan and I remember chuckling at the time that this was a first in US-Pakistan relations. Sharif relied too heavily on Clinton’s warning.

What followed was a tragi-comic episode that is well described in Musharraf’s book. He and his wife were flying back from Sri Lanka on a normal passenger flight when the pilot received instructions not to land. While the plane was still circling over Karachi, Nawaz Sharif summoned General Butt and in front of a TV crew swore him in as the new chief of staff. Meanwhile there was panic on Musharraf’s plane, by now low on fuel. He managed to establish contact with the commander of the Karachi garrison, the army took control of the airport and the plane landed safely. Simultaneously, military units surrounded the prime minister’s house in Islamabad and arrested Nawaz Sharif. General Zia had been assassinated on a military flight; Musharraf took power on board a passenger plane.

So began the third extended period of military rule in Pakistan, initially welcomed by all Nawaz Sharif’s political opponents and many of his colleagues. In the Line of Fire gives the official version of what has been happening in Pakistan over the last six years and is intended largely for Western eyes. Where Altaf Gauhar injected nonsense of every sort into Ayub’s memoirs, his son Humayun Gauhar, who edited this book, has avoided the more obvious pitfalls. The general’s raffish lifestyle is underplayed but there is enough in the book to suggest that he is not too easily swayed by religious or social obligations.

The score-settling with enemies at home is crude and for that reason the book has caused a commotion in Pakistan. A spirited controversy has erupted in the media, something that could never have happened during previous periods of military rule. Scathing criticism has come from ex-generals (Ali Kuli Khan’s rejoinder was published in most newspapers), opposition politicians and pundits of every sort. In fact, there was more state interference in the media during Nawaz Sharif’s tenure than there is under Musharraf and the level of debate is much higher than in India, where the middle-class obsession with shopping and celebrity has led to a trivialisation of TV and most of the print media.

When Musharraf seized power in 1999, he refused to move house, preferring his more homely, colonial bungalow in Rawalpindi to the kitsch comfort of the President’s House in Islamabad, with its gilt furniture and tasteless decor that owes more to Gulf State opulence than local tradition. The cities are close to each other, but far from identical. Islamabad, laid out in a grid pattern and overlooked by the Himalayan foothills, was built in the 1960s by General Ayub. He wanted a new capital remote from threatening crowds, but close to GHQ in Rawalpindi, which had been constructed by the British as a garrison town. After Partition, it became the obvious place to situate the military headquarters of the new Pakistan.

One of the 19th-century British colonial expeditions to conquer Afghanistan (they all ended in disaster) was planned in Rawalpindi. And it was also from there, a century and a half later, that the Washington-blessed jihad was launched against the hopeless Afghan Communists. And it was there too that the US demand to use Pakistan as a base for its operations in Afghanistan was discussed and agreed in September 2001. This was a crucial decision for the army chiefs because it meant the dismantling of their only foreign triumph: the placing of the Taliban in Kabul.

Heavy traffic often makes the ten-mile journey from Islamabad to Rawalpindi tortuous, unless you’re the president and the highway has been cleared by a security detail. Even then, as this book reveals in some detail, assassination attempts can play havoc with the schedule. The first happened on 14 December 2003. Moments after the general’s motorcade passed over a bridge, a powerful bomb exploded and badly damaged the bridge, although no one was hurt. The armoured limo, fitted with radar and an anti-bomb device, courtesy of the Pentagon, saved Musharraf’s life. His demeanour at the time surprised observers. He was said to have been calm and cheerful, making jocular allusions to living in perilous times. Unsurprisingly, security had been high – decoys, last-minute route changes etc – but this didn’t prevent another attempt a week later, on Christmas Day. This time two men driving cars loaded with explosives came close to success. The president’s car was damaged, guards in cars escorting him were killed, but Musharraf was unhurt. Since his exact route and the time of his departure from Islamabad were heavily guarded secrets the terrorists must have had inside information. If your security staff includes angry Islamists who see you as a traitor and want to blow you up, then, as the general states in his memoir, Allah alone can protect you. He has certainly been kind to Musharraf.

The culprits were discovered, and tortured till they revealed details of the plot. Some junior military officers were also implicated. The key plotters were tried in secret and hanged. The supposed mastermind, a jihadi extremist called Amjad Farooqi, was shot by security forces.

Two questions haunt both Washington and Musharraf’s colleagues: how many of those involved remain undetected and would the command structure of the army survive if a terrorist succeeded next time around? Musharraf doesn’t seem worried and adopts a jaunty, even boastful tone. Before 9/11 he was treated like a pariah abroad and beset by problems at home. How to fortify the will of a high command weakened by piety and corruption? How to deal with the corruption and embezzlement that had been a dominant feature of both the Sharif and Bhutto governments? Benazir Bhutto was already in self-exile in Dubai; the Sharif brothers had been arrested. Before they could be charged, however, Washington organised an offer of asylum from Saudi Arabia, a state whose ruling family has institutionalised the theft of public funds.

Musharraf’s unstinting support for the US after 9/11 prompted local wags to dub him ‘Busharraf’, and was the motive behind the attempts on his life. (In March 2005 Condoleezza Rice described the US-Pakistan relationship since 9/11 as ‘broad and deep’.) Had he not, after all, unravelled Pakistan’s one military victory in order to please Washington? General Mahmood Ahmed, who headed the ISI, was in Washington as a guest of the Pentagon, trying to convince the Defense Intelligence Agency that Mullah Omar was a good bloke and could be persuaded to disgorge Osama, when the attacks of 11 September took place. That his listeners were freaked out by this is hardly surprising. Musharraf tells us he agreed to become Washington’s surrogate because the State Department honcho, Richard Armitage, threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if he didn’t. What really worried Islamabad, however, was a threat Musharraf doesn’t mention: if Pakistan refused, the US would have used Indian bases.

Musharraf was initially popular in Pakistan and if he had pushed through reforms aimed at providing an education (with English as a compulsory second language) for all children, instituted land reforms which would have ended the stranglehold of the gentry on large swathes of the countryside, tackled corruption in the armed forces and everywhere else, and ended the jihadi escapades in Kashmir and Pakistan as a prelude to a long-term deal with India, then he might have left a mark on the country. Instead, he has mimicked his military predecessors. Like them, he took off his uniform, went to a landlord-organised gathering in Sind and entered politics. His party? The evergreen, ever available Muslim League. His supporters? Chips off the same old corrupt block that he had denounced so vigorously and whose leaders he was prosecuting. His prime minister? Shaukat ‘Shortcut’ Aziz, formerly a senior executive of Citibank with close ties to the eighth richest man in the world, the Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal. As it became clear that nothing much was going to change a wave of cynicism engulfed the country.

Musharraf is better than Zia and Ayub in many ways, but human rights groups have noticed a sharp rise in the number of political activists who are being ‘disappeared’: four hundred this year alone, including Sindhi nationalists and a total of 1200 in the province of Baluchistan, where the army has become trigger-happy once again. The war on terror has provided many leaders with the chance to sort out their opponents, but that doesn’t make it any better.

In his book he expresses his detestation of religious extremists and his regrets over the murder of Daniel Pearl. He suggests that one of those responsible, the former LSE student Omar Saeed Sheikh, was an MI6 recruit who was sent to fight the Serbs in Bosnia. Al-Qaida fighters had also been sent there (with US approval) and Sheikh established contact with them and became a double agent. Now Sheikh sits in a death-cell in a Pakistani prison, chatting amiably to his guards and emailing newspaper editors in Pakistan to tell them that if he is executed papers he has left behind will be published exposing the complicity of others. Perhaps this is bluff, or perhaps he was a triple agent and was working for the ISI as well.

Next year there will be an election and rumours abound that Musharraf is offering Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party a deal, but one that excludes her. A few years ago she could be spotted in Foggy Bottom, waiting forlornly to plead for US support from a State Department junior on the South Asia desk. All she wanted then was a cabinet position under Musharraf, so that she could remain a presence on the political scene. Musharraf is much weaker now and she may decide not to play ball with him, but to hang on for something better.

And then there is Afghanistan. Despite the fake optimism of Blair and his Nato colleagues everyone is aware that it is a total mess. A revived Taliban is winning popularity by resisting the occupation. Nato helicopters and soldiers are killing hundreds of civilians and describing them as ‘Taliban fighters’. Hamid Karzai, the man with the nice shawls, is seen as a hopeless puppet, totally dependent on Nato troops. He has antagonised both the Pashtuns, who are turning to the Taliban once again in large numbers, and the warlords of the Northern Alliance, who openly denounce him and suggest it’s time he was sent back to the States. In western Afghanistan, it is only the Iranian influence that has preserved a degree of stability. If Ahmedinejad was provoked into withdrawing his support, Karzai would not last more than a week. Islamabad waits and watches. Military strategists are convinced that the US has lost interest and Nato will soon leave. If that happens Pakistan is unlikely to permit the Northern Alliance to take Kabul. Its army will move in again. A Pakistan veteran of the Afghan wars joked with me: ‘Last time we sent in the beards, but times have changed. This time, inshallah, we’ll dress them all in Armani suits so it looks good on US television.’ The region remains fog-bound. Pakistan’s first military leader was seen off by a popular insurrection. The second was assassinated. What will happen to Musharraf?

Tariq Ali ’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope , about Latin America, is out from Verso.