A Strong Review of Musharraf's "In the Line of Fire"

An 'Ally' With His Own Agenda
By TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2006

Toward the end of "In the Line of Fire" -- in a chapter on the emancipation of women that has all the passion of a government circular -- Pervez Musharraf writes that "rape, no matter where it happens in the world, is a tragedy and deeply traumatic for the victim. My heart, therefore, goes out to Mukhtaran Mai and any woman to whom such a fate befalls."

Ms. Mukhtaran is a woman from a benighted village in Gen. Musharraf's Pakistan: After her brother broke a taboo by having a (consensual) sexual relationship with a woman from a tribe deemed superior to his own, a village tribunal decreed that the brothers of the higher-status woman could right this wrong by having their way with Ms. Mukhtaran.



Insights into a man accountable to no one, elected by no one and trusted by no one.

Gen. Musharraf relates in his book that Ms. Mukhtaran was dragged into a room and "came out visibly ruffled and partly undressed" -- which is one way to describe a woman's state after gang rape. Generals are allowed to be coy, occasionally, I suppose. Yet so coy is this general that he does not tell us that he -- the omnipotent chief executive of Pakistan -- ordered a travel ban on Ms. Mukhtaran when an NGO wished to fly her to the U.S. to publicize her plight. He did not, he said last year, want her "to bad-mouth Pakistan" abroad.

Not content with muzzling Ms. Mukhtaran -- a woman who had, through her fight for justice, become a genuine Pakistani heroine and a force for social good -- Gen. Musharraf told the editorial board of the Washington Post last year that rape had become "a money-making concern" in Pakistan. "A lot of people say that if you want to go abroad and get a visa from Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped."

This jaunty little aperçu about entrepreneurial rape doesn't appear on the pages of "In the Line of Fire." Indeed, there's much else that is missing from Gen. Musharraf's account of his life and times. The book is not so much an autobiography as a highly selective auto- hagiography, by turns self-congratulatory, narcissistic and mendacious.

And yet, at a certain level, the general deserves our thanks, for no one can possibly read "In the Line of Fire" and maintain the illusion that Gen. Musharraf offers a template for enlightened rule -- unless, of course, one is Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, who cooed these words at a recent love-in for the general at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York: "There is a very, very good chapter in this book about economic policy. I suggest to President Musharraf when he finishes in Pakistan he should come and govern here for a while."

A catalog of the book's omissions and revisionisms would require a book in itself, but two stand out as especially egregious. The first is his account of the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl -- whom he describes gratuitously as "a citizen of both the United States and Israel," even though Pearl was in Pakistan on an American passport and working for an American newspaper (to wit, this one).

Gen. Musharraf neglects to mention that Omar Saeed Sheikh, the mastermind behind Pearl's kidnapping, turned himself in to Brigadier Ijaz Shah -- the home secretary of the Punjab, a former spook of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and a bosom buddy of Gen. Musharraf -- a whole week before Sheikh's "arrest" was announced by the police. What was Sheikh doing with Brig. Shah and why has Gen. Musharraf never acknowledged this week-long ISI cocoon? The book doesn't deign to tell us.

The second distorting omission concerns India. Gen. Musharraf makes no mention in his book of the attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, conducted by a terrorist group based in Pakistan and armed by the ISI. Instead he writes merely of "war hysteria" in early 2002, as if India's ire came from nowhere. Typically, he spins the episode his way, in a comic passage of machismo: "We went through a period of extreme tension throughout 2002, when Indian troops amassed on our borders during a hair-trigger, eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation. We responded by moving all our forces forward. The standoff lasted ten months. Then the Indians blinked and quite ignominiously agreed to a mutual withdrawal of forces."

My advice to readers is this: Believe little of what you read in "In the Line of Fire." News accounts have made much of the book's claim that Richard Armitage, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, told a Pakistani official after 9/11 that the U.S. would bomb Pakistan back into the Stone Age if it did not collaborate in the quest for Osama bin Laden. This threat is almost certainly pure Musharraf fiction.

There is another fatuous passage where the general writes of the death in an airplane explosion of Zia-ul-Haq, a predecessor as military dictator: "The black box was recovered but gave no indication of a problem. It seems likely that gases were used to disable the pilots. But who unleashed them, we don't know. I have my suspicions, though."

So who killed Zia, and why are we kept, soap-operatically, on tenterhooks by Gen. Musharraf? Was it the CIA or the Russians, India or the Mossad? Or was it little green men? Perhaps we must wait for the sequel to this book for all to be revealed.

Though there's much the book doesn't tell us, it does offer invaluable (and frequently hilarious) insights into the levels of delusion that a man may reach when he is accountable to no one, elected by no one and trusted by no one. Self-preservation, here, becomes paramount -- democracy be damned. The general is quick to dismiss Pakistan's elected governments as "sham democracy." He offers himself as an antidote: a true patriot who is "putting the system right" -- in his own sweet time.

The only patsies to have swallowed this line are those who inhabit the upper reaches of the Bush administration. Gen. Musharraf has played the Americans beautifully. Anyone who could incriminate him has been placed out of reach. A.Q. Khan, for instance, conveniently dubbed a "rogue" nuclear scientist, was publicly scolded by Gen. Musharraf in a gaudy show of theatrics; but no American has been allowed to question him. And it is incredible to claim, as Gen. Musharraf has done, that a military command responsible for approving the foreign tours of nuclear scientists and providing security for Pakistan's nuclear establishments knew nothing of Khan's proliferation activities.

After five years of Pakistani collaboration with the U.S. military in Afghanistan, not one Taliban leader of consequence has been captured or killed. Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, cries himself hoarse over the Taliban functioning out of Pakistan's western regions and he is treated with open ridicule by Gen. Musharraf. There is precious little, however, that George W. Bush can do about this: He cannot now admit that a man he has called his "ally" for the past five years has been double-crossing him nearly every minute of that time.

Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal.