Musharraf: With Us or Against Us?

With Us or Against Us
By FOUAD AJAMI
The new York Times, January 7, 2007

IN THE LINE OF FIRE: A Memoir.
By Pervez Musharraf.

It is an old, and persistent, American affliction, an odd one for a democratic people: a weakness for dictators with charm and guile and a "modernist" veneer who rule exotic, dangerous lands. We may not know Bahrain but we can be friends with its king; we may not have known Persian ways, nothing, for instance, of the seminarian culture of Qum, but we knew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and our travelers and diplomats and journalists felt at home in his court. Jordan may be a realm apart, a place of poverty and a breeding ground of angry warriors of the faith, but young King Abdullah II and his queen, Rania, are fixtures on the international circuit. And now that we have extravaganzas like Davos, no land is truly foreign, the exotic rulers can rub shoulders with Oliver Stone and Angelina Jolie. They can all serve on panels together. Why bother learning Arabic, Farsi or Urdu, when the rulers of distant lands offer a shortcut for the voyeurs and the travelers.

Grant Pakistan's ruler, Pervez Musharraf, his due: he may be a professional soldier, a commando at that, but his feel for the world of celebrity is unerring. Musharraf turned out to be a booker's dream as he hawked his memoirs on American talk shows. He knew his audience — "In the Line of Fire" is a book written for American readers, a tale of how the Bush administration recruited him into the new war after 9/11. "You are either with us or against us," a fellow soldier, Secretary of State Colin Powell, told him. But the book's best break — the author's luck — was provided by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. The choice was clear, Armitage told the director general of Pakistan's intelligence — America or the terrorists. And if Pakistan chose the terrorists, it should be "prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age."

Musharraf lives with a nightmare: that the attention that came Pakistan's way after 9/11 would dissipate, and his country would return to what it was before those attacks: a forgotten, abandoned land. It is essential for Musharraf that Pakistan be a "dangerous" place: he and his country (more precisely, the intelligence services and the army commanders arrayed around him) feed off the menace. He might even give a nod to Bernard-Henri Lévy's assertion that Pakistan is the "most delinquent of delinquent nations."

Musharraf knows the fickle ways of Western nations. There had been that earlier run, in the 1980s, when the global jihad against the Soviet conquest of Afghanistan turned Pakistan into a "frontline state." American intelligence operatives and Saudi financiers swarmed in, and the place became awash with money and guns as the final battle of the cold war played out in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan. It was a time of great tumult — and possibilities. There was Islamization for the warriors of the faith; for the officer corps and the intelligence services of Pakistan there was the chance to play the modern game of nations.

Ever since its birth as a nation-state in 1947, Pakistan had lived in India's shadow. The jihad had given its political-military elites a place in the world. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, a stern soldier who had seized power in 1977 — and who sent his flamboyant Western- educated predecessor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to the gallows — offered his country the incendiary mix of despotism and Islamization. But as in the best of Oriental tales of revenge and redemption, Zia perished in a mysterious air crash in 1988, and Bhutto's daughter Benazir claimed her father's fallen standard. The country would then know four national elections in nine years, and a decade of drift before Pervez Musharraf seized power with the familiar promise of rescue and order. By then the foreign powers had long drifted away.

When Musharraf came to power in 1999, Pakistan was a virtual pariah in the world of nations, sanctioned for its adventurism in Kashmir, and for crossing the nuclear threshold in 1998 when it detonated six nuclear devices . The terror of 9/11 came to Musharraf's — and Pakistan's — rescue. It is Musharraf's pride — a pride that runs through his book — that he positioned Pakistan skillfully in this new war on terror.

"My love of dogs began in Turkey," Musharraf writes. "We had a beautiful brown dog named Whiskey. I loved him. He was killed in a road accident but left with me a lifelong love of dogs." No zealous Muslim believer would write this way of dogs, for to the faithful dogs are unclean. And then there is the dog's name, another transgression. It was of no small consequence to Musharraf that he had gone to Turkey as a boy of 6 in 1949, when his father was assigned to his country's embassy in Ankara as superintendent of the accounts department. The Musharrafs were to spend seven years in Turkey, and it was there that the young Pervez picked up his passion for dogs, along with a measure of admiration for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Turkey was (and remains?) the most modern of Muslim nations. Ataturk had been a soldier, a modernizer from above and a savior of his country. He was to bequeath his inheritance — the creed of Kemalism — to army officers in Turkey, and in Islamic lands beyond. There is a measure of Kemalism — its style, its irreverence in the face of the nation's culture — in Musharraf. Pakistan today is not the Turkey of Ataturk, it is a more lethal place, and Musharraf stops well short of Ataturk's unyielding secularism. But in his swagger, his eagerness to pull Pakistan into the Western orbit of power, he is reminiscent of the legendary Turkish leader.

In all fairness, the trajectory of Musharraf's life is a fair reflection of his country's. The relation of Pakistan to Islam had been complicated to begin with. The pious among the Muslims of the subcontinent had not created Pakistan. It was the assimilated, the rejected political men who had been firm believers in Indian nationalism, who took their people out of India and into a state for Muslims. The creation of Pakistan issued from a tale of hurt, and of great insecurity.

In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Muslims of India had fallen behind the Hindu majority, who took an easier leap into the modern world. A despondency overtook Indian Islam. Thus it was that a barrister by the name of M. A. Jinnah, later Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), a firm believer in British law and Indian nationalism, a man who married outside the faith and tried in the 1930s to get himself elected to the British Parliament while forgetting all about Hindus and Muslims, led his people to the promised land of Pakistan. Along the way the Saville Row suits would be traded for Punjabi attire, and the Anglicized name changed to his old Muslim name. By the time Jinnah settled in his new home in Karachi in 1947, he was an old man ravaged by tuberculosis and cancer of the lungs; he would die soon after the creation of what he dismissed as "moth-eaten " Pakistan. Jinnah had always aspired to something grander: Bombay was his beloved city; he had merely settled for Pakistan. Musharraf recalls sitting on a wall along the road of Jinnah's funeral cortege, a young boy weeping over the death of the great man.

Musharraf's family — like Jinnah himself — came to Karachi during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, in the tidal migration that was the mother of all ethnic cleansings. His family belonged to the mohajir class, the migrants who gave up their world in India for the new state, and its promise. But a surprise lay in wait for them. The land of the faith that they entered was not empty. Karachi lay in the province of Sindh, and to the Sindhis it was home. A sense of unease was to trail the mohajirs as they jostled with the principal nationalities of Pakistan — the Punjabis, the Baluchis, the Pathans and the Sindhis.

Fouad Ajami teaches at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. His most recent book is "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, The Arabs, and the Iraqis."