Nicholas Schmidle: To Live or to Perish

Introduction: Land of the Pure: Quotes from a pamphlet by Rahmat Ali, titled "Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish For Ever?" (pp. 7-8):

Thus, the name PAKSTAN made its debut. But it was more than just an acronym for the composite Muslim-majority provinces in northern India. In Urdu, "Pak" means "pure," and thus "PAKSTAN" meant "Land of the Pure."

Rahmat Ali might have coined the name, but he wasn't the first to pitch the idea of combining Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh, and Baluchistan into a single political entity. Three years before Rahmat Ali's pamphlet circulated, Iqbal, acknowledged as a towering intellect even in his own day, had proposed this imagined configuration, which was to fall under the umbrella of an All-India Federation. But Rahmat Ali wanted total independence from India. An upstart student radical, twenty years junior to [Mohammad] Iqbal, Rahmat Ali noted, with due politeness and respect, that his demand was "basically different" from the one forwarded by the revered philosopher and poet. "There can be no peace and tranquility in the land if we, the Muslims, are duped into a Hindu-dominated Federation where we cannot be the masters of our own destiny and captains of our own souls," Rahmat Ali wrote. [ . . . ]

Since Rahmat Ali issued his ultimatum -- "to live or perish for ever" -- this question has remained foremost in the minds of Pakistanis. Millions died during the communal riots that punctuated Pakistan's violent birth, pangs in late summer and early fall of 1947. [Mohammad Ali] Jinnah, the slender and sophisticated lawyer, succumbed to tuberculosis just thirteen months after founding the country. An assassination in 1951 felled the first prime minister. Civil war tore the country in half in 1971. Military coups staged in 1958, 1968, 1977, and 1999 all promised to "save the nation" from depraved and corrupt civilian leadership, while all eventually becoming depraved and corrupt military dictatorships. In 2007, pro-Taliban insurgents employed dozens of suicide bombers in a terror campaign that killed nearly one thousand people -- including former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

(p. 10):

Over the course of twenty-three months, I traversed Rahmat Ali's "PAKSTAN," with the exception of Kashmir, the "K" that never joined. But I did travel to Bangladesh, which Rahmat Ali proposed calling Bangistan and which acceded to Pakistan in 1947. (It seceded twenty-four years later.) My travels took me as far south as the coast of the Arabian Sea and as far north as the glaciers and towering peaks bordering China. I journeyed to the border of archrival India, west to the restive tribal areas, and everywhere in between. Pakistan covered a landmass larger than Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico combined. Diversity characterized its land and its 170 million people. A friend once quipped that there wasn't just one Pakistan, but that each province represented its own distinct Pakistan. This book is -- in part -- my humble attempt to explain the many identities and histories that exist throughout Pakistan.

1. "To These Guys, You Are All Infidels" (pp. 17-18):

Sunni Arabs soon began expanding their empire beyond the Arabian peninsula. In 711, a teenage Arab general named Mohammad bin Qasim landed his invading force on the beach near present-day Karachi, along the coastline of the Arabian Sea, and quickly proceeded north up the Indus River. Qasim was more interested in seizing on economic opportunities, however, than religious ones, and a few hundred years later, Shia missionaries swept into the area, proselytizing their own interpretation of Islam. The pendulum swung back and forth for centuries, as Sunni and Shia preachers competed for followers. Those who attracted the largest following, the Sufi mystics who arrived from Central Asia and the Middle East, straddle the ideological line between Sunni and Shia beliefs. They often synthesized local religious and cultural traditions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, with Islamic precepts.

During the period of the British Raj in the nineteenth century, a handful of new sects within the Sunni tradition emerged. Some historians contend that this development reflected the British goal to divide and conquer their colonial subjects. Three out of the four dominant sects of Sunni Islam in modern Pakistan -- Deobandi, Bareilvi, and ahle-Hadith -- formed in the late nineteenth century. Contemporary Sunni militancy in Pakistan, exemplified by the Taliban and groups such as Sipah-e-Sahaba, all trace their ideology back to Darul Uloom Deoband, a madrassa in Deoband, India. From the outset, the Deobandis have been virulently anti-Shia. They deem the Shi'ites adoration of Ali, Hussein, and the other imams as bi'da, the Arabic term for "innovation," suggesting deviance from orthodox beliefs.

(pp. 19-20):

In February 1995, just before prayers at dawn, Sipah-e-Sahaba militants overran a Shia mosque in Karachi. They were heavily armed, and swiftly rounded up the fifteen worshippers present. The gunmen ordered them to line up against a wall and to remove their wallets and wristwatches. They sprayed the lineup with bullets, tossed the watches and wallets into a bag, and left. Eleven years later, I asked the brother of one of the victims if he thought Sipah-e-Sahaba was gunning for someone in particular; several prominent doctors and businessmen were among those murdered that morning. "They didn't have any idea who was inside," he said. "They just knew they were Shia."

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, Sipah-e-Sahaba congratulated them and offered their support. A few years later, as the Taliban conducted purges against the Hazaras, a Shia minority who lived in the central highlands, Sipah-e-Sahaba members reportedly participated in the massacres. (The Hazaras reside in the region around Bamiyan, the site of the Buddhist statues the Taliban later demolished.) "The Taliban had a very good government," [Qari] Shafiqur [Rehman, a Sipah-e-Sahaba member] told me. "What was their mistake? Why are they being punished now? They were doing good work."

Following the American invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001, the distinction between the Taliban and sectarian outfits like Sipah-e-Sahaba grew ever more muddled. Evidently, both believed that Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, and his cohorts represented the model form of governance. Soon, reports circulated of Sipah-e-Sahaba members training in camps throughout Pakistan's tribal areas, preparing to cross the border and fight against American and NATO forces. Suddenly, they all became anti-American insurgents. They shared constituencies, too. Every Friday outside of the Red Mosque in Islamabad, teenage boys hawked jihadi newspapers in one hand and copies of Sipah-e-Sahaba's treatise in the other.

(pp. 22-23):

In January 2002, former president Pervez Musharraf outlawed Sipah-e-Sahaba, along with a handful of other jihadi organizations, including the Shia militia, Sipah-e-Mohammad. "Religious militias calling themselves Sipahs, Jaishes, and Lashkars cannot exist parallel to the army," Musharraf said at the time, referring to the various Arabic words for "army" used by the jihadi groups. "Our army is the only Sipah and Lashkar in Pakistan." By banning Sipah-e-Sahaba, Musharraf closed their offices, froze their funds, proscribed their publications, and forced prominent members like Shafiqur underground. In many cases, however, the banned groups simply changed their names and resumed their activities; Sipah-e-Sahaba was renamed Millat-i-Islami Pakistan, or the Islamic Nation.

2. "Sell Your Luxury Goods and Buy a Kalashnikov" (p. 30-31):

[Farooq] Sattar belonged to another class of migrants, known as mohajirs. After the Partition of India in 1947, the term "mohajir" designated those Urdu-speaking Muslims who moved from India to Pakistan. Most of the mohajirs settled in Karachi. In 1984, Sattar helped form the MQM, originally named the Mohajir Quami Movement (Mohajir National Movement). At the time of the party's founding, Karachi was an ethnic tinderbox. Mohajirs, Pashtuns, and native Sindhis all competed for influence and resources. The spark was lit in 1985, when a passenger bus driven by a Pashtun hit and killed a mohajir schoolgirl. Mobs of mohajirs immediately descended on the scene of the accident. They torched the bus, and rampaged through the city, burning dozens more. Sine Pashtuns dominated the transport business, vandals considered every bus a fair target. A journalist who lived in Karachi at the time counted fifty-five burning buses in the following days. "After this, it basically became a turf war," he told me. "The MQM said: 'We are the chiefs. We are willing to negotiate if you accept, but Karachi is ours.'"

The MQM held its first public rally a year later, in August 1986. Altaf Hussein, Sattar's boss and the overlord of the MQM, mounted a stage set up in Karachi's Nishtar Park. Thousands cheered as Altaf rehashed the sacrifices mohajirs had made in the past and the ones they would have to make in the future. Masked gunmen flanked him on either side and fired their Kalashnikovs into the air. This combination of celebration and militant bravado -- or "fun and violence," as one anthropologist has termed it -- would become the MQM's signature. In the middle of the speech, a monsoon broke through the clouds and unleashed a fierce downpour. Altaf said later, "It was resolved on that day that if the rain could not deter our determination, then the rain of bullets would not even force us to leave the ideology and the struggle."

Two months later, a caravan of MQM supporters, making their way to Hyderabad for the party's first rally outside of Karachi, were ambushed near Suhrab Goth. A gun battle broke out between mohajirs and Pashtuns. It wasn't the first, and wouldn't be the last. Sattar, a political prodigy at the ripe age of twenty-six, crouched for cover and escaped unhurt. Others were less fortunate, and several people died. The survivors, wearing blood-soaked clothing and driving cars pierced with bullet holes, eventually reached their destination in Hyderabad.

(p. 33):

Sattar and Altaf, like millions of other mohajirs, were both raised on tales about the horrors of Partition. On August 14, 1947, the British government relinquished control over the subcontinent, which led to the creation of independent Pakistan, India, and, eventually, Bangladesh. The weeks and months after the Partition were to have been a time of ecstasy, but widespread murder, rape, and torture prevailed instead. In the late summer and fall of 1947, Hindu families living in Muslim-majority Pakistan boarded trains heading east for India, while mohajirs, as Muslims living in Hindu-majority India, headed west. Along the way, members of either opposing faith frequently boarded one another's train cars long enough to light a match, start a fire, and transform them into rolling morgues. The trains often eased into their destinations reeking of death.

3. "Don't Speak English in Public" (pp. 41-42):

Tribesmen flocked from all over North Waziristan and gathered around the gallows. They shouldered rifles and wore floppy wool caps. Some of them were Taliban, experienced in fighting against the American military in Afghanistan, just a few dozen miles away. But many of them were simply local people, tired of robbers and thieves and punks creating problems. Someone should punish those people, they thought. And so, on a crisp winter day, tucked in a valley near the Afghanistan border, the Taliban hanged five alleged criminals in the main bazaar. Once the bodies went limp, the Taliban lowered the five men, cut their heads off, and then restrung them, decapitated and upside down, from the scaffold. I watched all this on a grainy, Taliban-made propaganda DVD, distributed in the winter of 2006. The video offered a rare peek into Pakistan's otherwise impenetrable tribal areas. But even more than that, its distribution announced that, from here on, the Taliban ruled Waziristan.

The Taliban's formal declaration of an "Islamic State of Waziristan" didn't come as a surprise. They had been in control for years. Following the American invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters fled to Pakistan. They soon transformed South and North Waziristan, two of the seven agencies that comprise the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), into their jihadi headquarters. From there, guerrillas equipped with guns and suicide bombers outfitted with explosive vests streamed, unfettered, across the border into Afghanistan. In 2007, an American staff sergeant based in Khost, Afghanistan, whose base was being hit by rocket and mortar fire at least once a week, told the New York Times that Taliban fighters based in Pakistan "cross the border on a regular basis."

But Pakistan was more than just a staging ground, and the Taliban began transforming their lawless sanctuaries into self-governed enclaves. They policed, adjudicated, and levied fines and taxes to supplement their military budget -- all in the name of Islam. "We want to live an Islamic life, to live under an Islamic government," a young man from South Waziristan told me around the same time the DVD came out. "The Pakistani government has failed us; now we'll see what the Taliban can do," he said. "The Taliban's only problem is coercion. Otherwise, they are doing a good job."

(pp. 43-44):

How could the Taliban operate so freely in Pakistan? Where were they getting support? The more I looked around, the more I realized that everyone, everywhere in Pakistan, seemed to be offering some help. The military's intelligence agencies played a double game, taking money from the Americans and still aiding the Taliban. Pakistanis on the street praised the Taliban as humble, pious servants of Allah. "Ninety-nine point nine percent of Pakistanis, from their heart of hearts, are happy to see the Taliban creating problems for the Americans in Afghanistan and for Musharraf in Waziristan," Hamid Mir, a columnist and talk show host, told me in his Islamabad office one day. In the 2002 parliamentary elections, voters handed a coalition of Islamist parties, whose support for the Taliban had formed a central tenet of its election campaign, a larger share in the assembly than any Islamist party had received in the past. Pakistanis loved the idea of the Taliban. As Mir pointed out, they just feared the actual guys with the turbans and the guns. "One hundred percent of people don't want the Taliban in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, or even Karachi," he added.

Support for the Taliban came in multiple ways, including financial, moral, and military backing. At the Red Mosque in Islamabad, all of these aspects gelled in one place. Before I traveled into the Taliban-affected areas near the border of North Waziristan, I visited the Red Mosque, hoping to learn more about how it fit into the cross-border jihadi puzzle. Two brothers ran the mosque, the older one, Maulana Abdul Aziz, who delivered the sermon every Friday, praised Osama bin Laden, raised donations for the Taliban, and encouraged parishioners to wage jihad, and the younger one, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who held a master's degree in international relations, spoke fluent English and was a sharp observer of global politics. I had met Ghazi once before when I had been referred from Khalid Khawaja, the former pilot and intelligence officer.

In 2004, the brothers issued a fatwa declaring that Pakistani soldiers killed in South Waziristan should be denied a proper Muslim burial. The fatwa outraged Musharraf and his circle. But they could do little against the mosque. Some members of Musharraf's own cabinet regularly prayed there.

(pp. 45-46):

No formal government has ever existed in Waziristan. Even the border that demarcates Afghanistan from British India -- and later, Pakistan -- remains contentious. The border, known as the Durand Line, was drawn in 1893 as a way for the British to undermine the unruly tribes in Waziristan and areas north. Instead, it merely made the tribes resent the British authority even more. And they ignored the border. Today, tens of thousands of people cross the border daily, without passports or visas, for work, to visit family, or, increasingly, to fight against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Flabbergasted at the recalcitrance of the tribes in and around Waziristan, Lord Curzon, the former viceroy of India, once said: "No patchwork scheme -- and all our present recent schemes, blockade, allowances, etc., are mere patchwork -- will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine."

(pp. 47-49):

Pakistani laws don't apply in the tribal areas. Fifty years passed after the creation of Pakistan before residents of FATA even enjoyed voting rights. And still, their enfranchisement lacked substance: FATA representatives sat in the parliament, though none of the laws drafted there pertained to the tribal areas.

Like their English predecessors had done, Pakistani leaders had for years "governed" the tribal areas through proxy, relying on maliks, or tribal elders. The maliks intermediated between the political agent, who acted as the local government representative, and the tribesmen. Islamabad paid cash to the political agent with instructions to keep things under control, and the political agent, in turn, paid cash to the maliks, with similar orders. If tribesmen stepped out of line, the political agent could punish an entire tribe for the crimes of one man. This system, while draconian and often criticized by human rights organizations for its application of collective punishment, generally achieved its goal: the tribes remained, overall, obedient.

But the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan had begun a process that damaged beyond repair the stability and sanctity of the Pashtun tribal system. In the late 1970s, anti-Communist countries, led by the United States, capitalized on the strategic value of Pakistan's tribal areas as a staging ground for military operations against the Red Army. The CIA worked closely with Saudi Arabian intelligence services to flood the tribal areas with weapons to enhance the operational capability of the mujahideen (the West referred to them as mujahideen back then, not "terrorists" or "jihadis") and built madrassas to strengthen their ideological commitment to jihad. An archipelago of madrassas and training camps provided an endless flow of eager martyrs.

But for a Mehsud tribesman, it made little difference whether his adversary was from London, Moscow, or Washington; any non-Pashtun who occupied Pashtun lands instantly became an adversary. "These people of Waziristan have been trained to fight for centuries," said Hamid Gul, a retired general in the Pakistani army and the former director of the ISI, told me one day at his home in Rawalpindi. "Their war horse starts snorting and they want to go muck it up with whatever force it is."

The jihad also effected a cultural transformation. Warlords and mujahideen commanders, not the maliks as in the past, soon began to wield increased authority over the tribes. The political agent, whose access to gold and guns had made him the ultimate kingmaker, became less relevant. The influx of weapons and money created a parallel, war economy. A professor at Peshawar University told me that "the presence of all these foreigners stopped the colonial structures from working." Having worked in the Afghan refugee camps during the early 1980s, the professor recalled watching Arabs, "with briefcases full of clean notes," wandering the camps, handing out money to budding insurgents.

After the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, another wave of foreigners arrived, this time Arab and Uzbek al-Qaeda affiliates. They resided in the tribal areas and urged the local Taliban to upend the existing system. The Taliban soon began murdering maliks by the hundreds. They threatened anyone who represented traditional authority. Khalid Aziz, a former political agent in North Waziristan, wrote in a 2008 column, "The British failed to end tribalism in a hundred years, and Pakistan failed to do so in sixty years. However, the militants have been successful in only seven years."

(pp. 50-51):

We parked in an alleyway behind the Bannu Press Club and met a newspaper reporter in his late forties with a long, gray beard, who asked us not to use his name. The man was based in Bannu, but often shuttled back and forth to Miramshah, the capital of North Waziristan. "Every home in this area has at least one Talib in it," he said, sounding confident of this fact and even a bit proud of it. "This is all because of the army operation." He told me about a farmer in North Waziristan, who had been tilling the fields when Pakistani helicopters strafed his village with machine-gun fire. The farmers' sister was killed instantly while taking a bath. "That farmer grabbed his gun and went to the mountains. Now he is with the Taliban."

In such an environment, I wondered how the Taliban could ever be defeated. Collateral damage fueled the insurgency as the culture's emphasis on honor and vengeance drove ordinary Pashtuns into the arms of the Taliban. American unmanned drones routinely tried to kill top al-Qaeda leaders, but, more often than not, missed the intended target and instead killed dozens of locals. In October 2006, a Predator drone fired missiles at a madrassa in Bajaur, the northernmost tribal agency, targeting al-Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri. (The Pakistani army acknowledged "sharing intelligence" with the United States, but said "to say that [the Americans] carried out the operation is totally wrong.") The attack failed to kill Zawahiri, but left more than forty madrassa students dead, and featured in countless propaganda speeches and leaflets distributed by Pakistani jihadi groups.

Rather than eliminating enemies, each missile strike only created more. "The government thinks it can persuade people to its side through development," the Bannu journalist said. "And you know what? The people might thank the government. But revenge will never leave their minds. No one will forget that the Pakistani army attacked them. The day you forget your revenge, you are not a proper Pashtun."

4. "Left Alone in a Cave of Time" (pp. 58-59):

The madrassas began to change, and become more politicized, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British administration placed a disproportionate amount of blame for the uprising on the Muslim community, leading to both a spiritual revival and a growing resentment against the Raj. In 1867, a handful of leading ulema congregated in the Indian town of Deoband to create the Darul Uloom Deoband, or Deoband University. The madrassa in Deoband spawned the sect of Sunni Islam known as Deobandi. Of the roughly sixteen thousand madrassas in Pakistan today, more than ten thousand subscribe to the Deobandi sect. Most Indian, Bangladeshi, and Afghan madrassas also follow the basic curriculum taught in Deoband, called dars-i-nizami (the study system).

In the 1980s, to meet the challenge posed by the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, thousands of madrassas peddled the virtues of jihad to young boys. When the war in Afghanistan ended, those who had imbibed radical theology relocated to Indian-occupied Kashmir. In the mid-1990s, with Afghanistan paralyzed by civil war, lawlessness, and banditry, a movement led by madrassa students (and heavily backed by Pakistan's intelligence services) rolled out of the southern city of Kandahar and swiftly conquered the country. "Let the students take over Afghanistan," one madrassa teacher reportedly told the ISI at the time. In 1996, a movement of turbaned students toting RPGs (rocket-propelled grenade launchers), known as the Taliban, indeed became the rulers of Afghanistan. They pledged their allegiance to the Quran, sharia, and jihad.

(pp. 59-60):

In the ensuing years [after 9/11], the U.S. government spent tens of millions of dollars trying to reform the madrassas in Pakistan. In doing so, they relied on cooperation from Islamabad. But the Pakistani government wasn't so eager to cooperate. Insofar as many madrassas provided a pool of recruits for the ISI to use in waging jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, the madrassas had become an arm of Pakistan's foreign policy. They were understandably reluctant to implement wide-scale reforms that might counter their assumed strategic interests. President Musharraf told the United States that he was trying his best and that he needed more time. Musharraf promoted a plan to register each madrassa, expel foreign students, and force the schools to incorporate "modern" subjects like natural science, math, computer science, and English. Musharraf said that, one day, he hoped madrassa students would be able to go on to become doctors, scientists, and engineers.

5. "It Just Sounds Awkward to Call Myself a Pakistani" (pp. 70-71):

Gwadar [a coastal town near the far west end of Pakistan, in Baluchistan] embodied one of contemporary Pakistan's most significant challenges: How do you reconcile the nostalgic appeal of age-old traditions with the curious tug of modernity? President Pervez Musharraf wanted to turn Gwadar, a sleepy fishing village, into a booming, neon-lit port city along the likes of Dubai and Shanghai. Musharraf, who modeled himself on Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, hoped to lead Pakistan into a progressive, secular future. Gwadar, in many ways, was the cornerstone of Musharraf's vision, and one that he hoped would project his legacy across the Arabian Sea. Musharraf claimed to envision "history being made" when he publicly announced his plan to build a deep-sea port at Gwadar in March 2002. "There is no doubt that Gwadar port, when operational, will play the role of a regional hub for trade and commercial activity. The people of Gwadar and Makran" -- the coastal belt of Baluchistan -- "will get ample job opportunities which will raise their standard of living."

According to the plan, Majid Sohrabi's town [Sohrabi is mayor] would become a seaside metropolis in thirty years with skyscrapers, fancy resorts, and docks big enough for the Queen Mary II. (Two weeks before I arrived, the first five-star hotel opened, showcasing two glass elevators.) [ . . . ]

Baluchistan's social development indicators were terribly low, even compared to other provinces of Pakistan. Just 20 percent of people had access to safe drinking water, compared to 86 percent elsewhere in the country. Only 15 percent of women could read. Health care facilities were underequipped, understaffed, and unsanitary. Though the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel, perched atop a cliff, was meant to be seen as a beacon of Gwadar's future course, many residents viewed it with disdain, as a cruel reminder of their own penury. Locally owned hotels stocked their bathrooms with plastic pails of water so guests could bathe when the taps ran dry. Electricity and running water were scarce commodities throughout the province.

(pp. 76-77):

Politics and culture in Baluchistan revolved around the tribe. So even though Akhtar Mengal presided over the Baluchistan National Party, had previously served as the chief minister of Baluchistan, and had been elected to the National Assembly in 2002 (a position he held until a few weeks before our meeting in October 2006), he derived the bulk of his authority from being the sardar, or chief, of the Mengal tribe. The Mengals numbered approximately one hundred thousand people in southern Baluchistan. As the sardar, Mengal managed private courts, jails, and militias. "Our tribal system, if not misused, is the quickest and easiest justice that people can receive," explained Akhtar Mengal's father, Ataullah Mengal, one day at his home in Karachi, Tribesmen resolved their disputes through a jirga, or tribal council, which ruled on everything from adultery to robbery to murder.

Although the jirga was a long-standing tradition, the sardars were not. In the course of colonizing the subcontinent, the British had empowered local chiefs along the restive frontier regions to handle daily matters. When Pakistan assumed control of the Baluchi areas, it continued with this ruling scheme. A 1968 ordinance declared 95 percent of Baluchistan under tribal law, maintained through jirgas, tribal militias, and sardars. (The remaining 5 percent was to be governed according to Pakistan's legal code.) The arrangement benefited both Pakistan's new government and the sardars. The sheer expense of Baluchistan rendered futile any pretensions of administering it from far away, but the sardars could act as surrogates, or so figured the central government. In turn, the sardars enjoyed the freedom to rule their lands according to their own personal whims, accountable to no one. But it would only be a matter of time before Islamabad felt compelled to cut the sardars down to size.

(pp. 77-78):

But in February 1973, Bhutto dissolved the Baluchistan Provincial Assembly. His justification? An alleged discovery of a weapons stash, totaling some three hundred Kalashnikovs and forty-eight thousand rounds of ammunition, in the Iraqi embassy in Islamabad. Bhutto claimed that the weapons were destined for Baluchistan. The Iraqis, he argued, hoped to kick-start a transnational rebellion among the Baluchi tribes in Pakistan that would spill over into the Baluchi-populated areas of Iraq's archenemy, Iran. "The whole thing was such a cock-and-bull story," Ataullah Mengal told me one day at his home in Karachi. "Bhutto was a victim of a severe inferiority complex. He just wanted to prove to himself that he was the most powerful." To display his intolerance for dissent, Bhutto threw Ataullah Mengal and two other leading nationalists in jail.

When the news reached tribesmen that Bhutto had thrown their beloved sardars into prison, bands of guerrillas grabbed their weapons and, for years afterward, they battled the Pakistani army. The shah of Iran, fearing now that the insurgency would indeed inspire his Baluchi population, donated $200 million and thirty Huey helicopters to buttress the eighty thousand Pakistani soldiers already deployed in Baluchistan.

The Baluchis never stood a chance, armed with only Lee Enfield .303 bolt-action rifles, a World War I-era weapon. "Back then, if you had 50 rounds of ammunition, you were a rich man," the elder Mengal said. "Then, after five or six shots, the gun would get all hot and stuck." More than five thousand Baluchi fighters and three thousand Pakistani military personnel died in the four-year insurgency; while the Pakistani army struggled and was ineffective in any fights against India, it has displayed a penchant for ruthlessly crushing domestic rivals.

(p. 79):

In 2005, another wave of agitation and insurgency swept across Baluchistan. This time, however, the guerrillas replaced their antique Lee Enfield rifles with Kalashnikovs, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Musharraf blamed the violence on three tribes and their "anti-development sardars"; he accused them of inciting violence in Gwadar and the gas-rich districts so that they could preserve their dying, tribal traditions -- and specifically their individual claims to power. The "anti-development sardars" were Ataullah Mengal and his son Akhtar, Khair Baksh Marri and his son Balach, and Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti. "The sardars have been pampered in the past," Musharraf said. "But no more. The writ of the state will be established in Baluchistan."

(pp. 84-85):

More than a thousand years before the creation of Pakistan, the Baluch people parted from their Kurdish brethren in the mountains of modern-day Syria, Turkey, and Iran and migrated to modern-day Baluchistan. Like the Kurds, the Baluchis lived beyond the borders of today's nation-states.

Baluchi nationalism emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century when Naseer Khan, the sixth Khan of Kalat, expanded his unified control over the Baluchi-speaking regions of modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and ended three hundred years of tribal feuding. The map of "Free Baluchistan" pictured in the Armed Forces Journal article corresponded, more or less, with the borders of Kalat during the reign of Naseer Khan. Naseer Khan had raised an army of thirty thousand men. This both shored up his authority and crushed any of the lower khans' ambitions to gain power. Naseer Khan was once described as "a most extraordinary combination of all the virtues attached to a soldier, statesman or prince" by Sir Henry Pottinger, an English spy who journeyed through Baluchistan disguised as a Tatar horse trader. When Naseer Khan died in 1794, the Baluch kingdom had reached its zenith; the "Great Game," pitting Russia and England against each other for control of Central Asia, was just heating up, and both countries considered Baluchistan a prize piece of real estate.

The British managed to secure allegiance from the Khan of Kalat in 1876 (pp. 85-87):

Over the next seventy years, the British ruled Baluchistan from New Delhi. They recognized, early on, that controlling the hinterlands would be problematic, so they propped up a few sardars who could keep their respective areas under control. To institutionalize this policy, the British divided Baluchistan into two parts: "British Baluchistan" and "Baluchistan." British Baluchistan encompassed the region borderng Afghanistan, populated almost entirely by Pashtuns; Baluchistan consisted of the remote, sparsely populated areas populated by Baluchis.

By early 1947, the British were trying to figure out how they could leave the subcontinent without inciting a civil war. One of the challenges was determining what to do with the more than seven hundred "princely states" scattered throughout India. Like the arrangement hammered out between Sandeman and Khodadad Khan, the British government had wrestled land concessions from hundreds of other khans, princes, and maharajas. Now, with independence looming, the royals wanted assurances that they wouldn't be swallowed by another colonial power: Pakistan or India. Ten days before the Partition of India, the British viceroy notified the reigning Khan of Kalat that Kalat would gain full independence. (Burma had proclaimed its independence a decade earlier.) On August 11, the Khan of Kalat announced the formation of its new state, called Kalat; the New York Times printed a story with an accompanying map of the following day. Soon thereafter, the Khan went to work, forming a bicameral government in Kalat, with one house formed from elected representatives, and the other from sardars.

But Baluchistan fell apart before long, a throwback to the era of feuds and fractures that prevailed before Naseer Khan arrived in 1749. By 1948, three swaths of territory -- including the coastal region of Makran -- had already seceded from Kalat and joined Pakistan. During a long discussion one night at his home in Quetta, Noori Naseer Khan, the historian, showed me a cutout from a political cartoon published in March 1948. The cartoon showed the Khan of Kalat with his legs and arms hacked off, squirming around on the floor. The severed limbs symbolized Makran and the other two defected regions. Dreams of a unified, independent Baluchistan, the picture suggested, were in their death throes even then.

Once Makran peeled off to join Pakistan, the Khan of Kalat convened a council of seven members to decide the fate of Baluchistan. The historian Noori Naseer Khan, who was a member of the Khan's family, attended that meeting. He was twenty-nine years old. He argued that, on the heels of Partition and the radical reeducation about Islam that preceded it, the Baluchis were in great danger if they insisted on their independence. Baluchis are also muslims, but they consider themselves Baluchis first. And during this phase of history, as Pakistan marshaled the forces of religious identity to forge a new state, expressions of separate, ethnic-based identities were discouraged. "The Muslims of India -- Pashtuns, Bengalis, Punjabis, Sindhis and Mohajirs -- have been pumped up, and are full of Islam," he told the council. "In the name of Pakistan, they will massacre all of us. Therefore, under duress, I accede to Pakistan." By the end of that month, the council had heeded his advice; the Khan of Kalat folded his empire into Pakistan. Losing Makran isolated Kalat from its access to the Arabian Sea and eventually forced the Khan of Kalat to integrate into Pakistan.

(p. 87):

Baluchistan hardly seemed a prize. Its long coastline was a great asset for trade, but otherwise, the climate was unbearably harsh. Temperatures in the summer often exceeded 120 degrees, and in the winter they dropped well below freezing. A water expert in Quetta once told me that there had been no substantial rainfall for almost eight years, and the water table, already one hundred feet below the surface, was falling between three and four feet annually. A U.S. Geological Survey once described Baluchistan as the closest thing on earth to Mars.

(p. 91):

Chinese investment supplanted Pakistan's lack of oil wealth; Beijing covered the bulk of Gwadar's start-up costs. Besides providing most of the initial $250 million needed to dredge the harbor and build two berths, the Chinese had also sent six hundred engineers to Gwadar. "Their role has been comprehensive," said Mohammad Rajpar, a Karachi-based shipping magnate who also advised government ministers on Gwadar. "The Chinese brought all of their own labor -- from engineers to bathroom scrubbers. They aren't even letting the Baluch sweep the floors, citing 'security concerns.'"

Ordinarily, the Chinese prefer to stay abreast and out of other countries' domestic squabbles, but in Baluchistan, they were thrust into the center of an insurgency. Hard-core Baluchi nationalists blamed China for cooperating with Islamabad's "colonial project" in Gwadar. In May 2004, a massive car bombing in Gwadar killed three Chinese engineers as they were traveling from their hotel to the worksite. Terrorists had killed and wounded Chinese engineers in Baluchistan in 2003, 2006, and 2007.

China's activity also concerned the United States, since a functional port in Gwadar would further expand China's economic profile and access to markets, particularly oil ones in the Middle East. [ . . . ] By establishing a listening post and a naval presence in the Indian Ocean, the article continued to say, "many Pentagon analysts believe . . . that China will use its power to project force and undermine U.S. and regional security."

(p. 97-98):

Following my trip in October, Musharraf's regime continued to crack down on the Baluchi nationalists. When the Khan of Kalat left the country to file his case at the Interanational Criminal Court in The Hague, the intelligence agencies called him and warned him not to come back. Akhtar Mengal, who had detained the MI agents in his house, was arrested. Shakeel Ahmed Baluch, my guide in Gwadar, called me one morning from his jail cell during a short stint in prison. Hasil Bizenjo, who had arranged my trip to Gwadar, went missing for several days, abducted by the agencies.

I should have known better than to think that I would make it in and out of Gwadar, untouched by the agencies. Later, for weeks after I returned to Islamabad, ISI goons visited my house on a regular basis. They typically stopped by during daytime, and would inquire from my guard who I was, what I was doing in Pakistan,a nd what I had been doing in Baluchistan. For foreign journalists, traveling to Baluchistan was radioactive: go once, and you were affected forever. The night before I was planning to make a return trip in late November to meet Aga Suleiman Dawood, the Khan of Kalat, in Kalat, I received a rash of phone calls from an unlisted number, with someone on the other end calling himself churro, or "dagger," and repeatedly expressing his need to meet me in person. The calls, I suspected, were mere harassment by the intelligence agencies, intended to deter me from going to meet Dawood. They worked. The next day, I called Dawood and told him that something just didn't feel right about making this trip. I hated caving in to such fears but on the empty, remote road from Quetta to Kalat, too many possibilities existed for a car "accident" or a random, hostile checkpoint.

6. "What Was Wrong With Pakistan?" (pp. 102-103):

For years, the Western media had designated Bangladesh as an "international basket case," citing Henry Kissinger's notorious description of the Muslim-majority nation of more than 170 million. Development indices routinely ranked Bangladesh in the company of destitute African countries; the UN Human Development Index placed Bangladesh between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Swaziland.

The country had developed in an environment of catastrophic violence, which some historians have gone so far as to define as a genocide. Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, in his 1933 treatise "Not or Never; Are We to Live or Perish For Ever?" proposed that present-day Bangladesh become an independent Muslim state called Bangistan. But when Pakistan formed in 1947, rather than enjoying independence, the region integrated into Pakistan, referred to as East Pakistan or the East Wing.

Twenty-four years later, Bangladesh split. The rulers of united Pakistan, all of them hailing from "West Pakistan," refused to acknowledge the results of the 1970 elections. In those polls, the Bengali nationalist party Awami League triumphed. Its vote count should have allowed it to form a majority in the parliament, and its leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, should have been made prime minister. When the West Pakistani elite stalled the formation of the parliament, the East Pakistanis agitated for autonomy, if not all-out independence. In March 1971, the Pakistani army, clinging to the idea of a "greater Pakistan" and determined to suppress Mujib and his followers, launched a military operation in East Pakistan. The army failed. Within a year, an independent Bangladesh had formed.

During Bangladesh's independence struggle, the United States sided firmly with West Pakistan. At the time, the military government in Islamabad was negotiating a rapprochement between the United States and China. Former president Richard Nixon would soon travel to Peking to meet with Mao Tse-tung, solidifying the so-called Sino-Soviet split in the Communist World. India and the Soviet Union, meanwhile, backed the Bangladesh independence movement. The conflict, in other words, quickly boiled down to cold war politics, irrespective of democratic considerations or gross human rights violations. In April 1971, as the West Pakistani government used Islamists as shock troops against Bengali citizens, Kissinger sent a cable to West Pakistan's serving military dictator, thanking him for his "delicacy and tact" in handling the situation.Washington feared that Leftist and Communist extremists would overrun Bangladesh. Here we were, thirty years later, with Washington and the Western media worried that the same country was exceedingly vulnerable to its opposing ideological current: radical Islamism.

(p. 108):

On December 16, 1971, the Pakistani army surrendered at Dhaka's Ramna Racecourse. Bangladesh emerged from the war in an independent -- and fiercely secular -- state. The 1972 constitution declared the four pillars of Bangladesh: "Nationalism, Socialism, Secularism, and Democracy." The constitution also banned Jamaat-i-Islami and all religious-based parties.

Bangladesh lasted just five years as an officially secular state. In November 1975, one of the heroes of the independence movement, a general named Ziaur Rahman (the husband of Khaleda Zia, head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party), seized power after a rapid succession of military coups and countercoups, prompted by the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of the nation, in August 1975. Ziaur Rahman -- no relation to Sheikh Mujibur -- needed political allies. So in 1977, he scratched "Secularism" as one of the country's pillars, lifted the ban on religious-based parties, and welcomed Jamaat-i-Islami back into the mainstream.

7. "We Have Accepted the Challenge" (p. 120):

For two months, Pakistan's lawyers had been marching in protest against Musharraf's suspension of Chaudhry, the chief justice. The protests represented a momentous turn. Until then, Musharraf had sailed along, without any major bumps, for eight years. When previous challenges to his rule emerged, the intelligence agencies quickly defanged them and moved on. The opposition leadership languished in exile. But now, the lawyers poured into the street, undeterred by Musharraf's massive security apparatus. They downloaded anti-Musharraf slogans as ring tones for their cell phones, and organized through bar associations. They weren't acting at the whims of a single leader, but on this shared belief in a cause. Chaudhry, in their minds, personified this cause: the rule of law.

While plenty of other top judges had been forcibly retired in the past, Chaudhry was the first one who refused to cower. He had challenged the ruling establishment vigorously over the preceding months with probes of high-level corruption. His court even questioned some of the central tenets of Pakistan's cooperation with the United States in the War on Terror, such as the hundreds of missing persons suspected to be in the custody of the intelligence agencies over allegations of terrorism. In his autobiography, Musharraf admitted receiving bounties from the United States for detaining and handing over certain suspects. Chaudhry had ordered the agencies to either release or formally try these men.

8. "The Blood of Our Martyrs Will Not Go to Waste" (pp. 134-137):

[Red Mosque strategist] Ghazi recognized this vulnerability and took to taunting Musharraf. One morning, Ghazi stopped long enough between relaying messages on his walkie-talkie to articulate the two options facing Musharraf. "We want an Islamic revolution," he said. "Now, either the government does it, or the people do it themselves. If the government does it, it will be peaceful. If the people have to do it, it will be bloody. We are demanding a peaceful revolution, but it depends on the government's attitude. Time and again they have threatened to launch a military operation on Lal Masjid. We are ready for this," he said, as a young fighter, with a wispy beard and a Kalashnikov, ran into the room and whispered something into Ghazi's ear. "We are armed."

Everyone, according to Ghazi, was fed up with Musharraf, with the army, and with the entire existing system. "If we are killed, it will only give more momentum to our movement. The government knows this. And that's why they aren't coming." [ . . . ]

Over time, however, I got the impression that Ghazi was getting bad advice. Kidnapping policemen on patrol? He was pushing his luck. The decision by his band of vigilantes to take nine people hostage, six of them Chinese women, from a massage parlor across town seemed plain mad. Ghazi and his boys claimed that the women were providing massages to men (a jihadi no-no) and performing other "un-Islamic activities." Ghazi's bearded shock troops overpowered three guards at the parlor, took the ladies from inside, and brought them back to the Red Mosque. The women were released the next day, albeit significantly more clothed than when they had arrived. But the Chinese government wasn't willing to overlook the kidnapping so easily. Beijing had recently invested hundreds of million of dollars in the port city of Gwadar, as well as having built the Karakorum Highway that connected northern Pakistan to western China. The Chinese pressured Musharraf to do something against the mosque. They wanted some assurance their citizens wouldn't be kidnapped again.

A few days after the masseuses' release, police and paramilitary Rangers encircled the mosque once again. A crackdown finally felt imminent. On July 3, Rangers laying concertina wire at the end of the street facing the Red Mosque came under fire from militants hiding inside. One Ranger died. Police and Rangers fired back and chucked tear gas over the mosque's walls. Militants wearing ammunition vests, holding Kalashnikovs, and sporting gas masks, soon emerged from the pink walls and ran into the surrounding roads. Some took up positions behind sandbag bunkers. Others walked boldly in the streets, waving their weapons and firing at anyone within sight.

Mosque leaders used the loudspeakers to egg on the militants. They beckoned them to wage jihad, threatened the government, and instructed the Taliban to be brave. They also encouraged anyone who would listen to join them in fighting. Across the street from the mosque, militants overran an office and torched the complex housing the Ministry of Environment. The building, along with all the cars in the parking lot, burned for days.

That afternoon, I headed in the direction of the thick plume of black smoke rising from the Ministry of Environment. On the way, I passed two hospitals, where crowds were gathering in front hoping for news about relatives who had suffered injuries around the mosque. Ten people including the Ranger and news cameraman, died by the end of the day. Dozens of others were wounded. "The army is shooting the girls of Pakistan!" an elderly man in the neighborhood exclaimed, referring to three female madrassa students reported killed. [ . . . ]

That evening, as the sun set and gunfire pierced the sky, the government's resolve hardened and they shut off the power to the whole area around the Red Mosque. Musharraf and his advisers sat in a meeting, hashing out the details for the impending military operation. By dawn, armored personnel carriers rolled down the streets of Islamabad and elite commandos moved into positions nearby. The government imposed a strict curfew. The standoff had begun.

Packs of gun-toting militants, meanwhile, roamed the streets in front of the mosque in the pitch black, guarding it from attack. The PA system crackled to life. "We are ready for suicide attacks. The blood of our martyrs will not go to waste."

(pp. 140-141):

Ghazi and Aziz's father, Maulana Abdullah, founded and ran the Red Mosque for decades. It was the first mosque in Islamabad after the new capital was created in the early 1960s. Abdullah mentored the mujahideen during jihad of the 1980s. The Red Mosque became a way station for fighters transiting in and out of combat. Ghazi was a clean-shaved college student at the time. "The concept of jihad was not so clear to me back then," he told me. Yet the tales of ambush and intrigue tickled his imagination.

Ghazi grew close with Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Akhtar commanded Pakistan's first jihadi group, Harakat ul-Jihadi Islami (HUJI). (Benazir Bhutto's posthumously published book fingered Akhtar for his role in the October 2007 bombing of her motorcade that left more than 140 people dead.) Ghazi craved a life of adventure for himself, and asked his father for permission to join Akhtar at a camp in Afghanistan. [ . . . ]

[In 1998] Ghazi received an invitation from his father to accompany him on a trip to Kandahar. Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the longtime family friend and leader of HUJI, wanted to introduce Abdullah and his sons to Osama bin Laden. "My father was curious to know what his opinions were," Ghazi said. Akhtar belonged to a small circle of non-Afghans close to Mullah Omar, the Taliban, and bin Laden, and said he could facilitate the meeting.

Abdullah and Ghazi (Aziz didn't join them, for reasons I never fully understood) flew to Quetta, and then drove across the border into Afghanistan, and on to Kandahar. Bin Laden greeted them when they arrived. A few months earlier, bin Laden had declared war against the United States, and just weeks later would order the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Now, the Saudi suggested that Abdullah and Ghazi get some rest. He promised to meet them at dawn prayers the following morning. The next day, "from breakfast until late night," Abdullah and bin Laden swapped ideas, while Ghazi, still beardless, listened. One day in the presence of bin Laden, Ghazi said, was enough for Abdullah. He was convinced by Osama's ideas."

After the meeting with bin Laden, Abdullah and his younger son returned to Islamabad, encouraged by their new friendship and equipped with new ideas. In his weekly sermons, Abdullah exalted bin Laden, his philosophy, and his new organization, al-Qaeda. The intelligence agencies and authorities might have ignored Abdullah had he been preaching at a provincial mosque, but he attracted a flood of attention as imam of the largest mosque in Islamabad.

In October 1998, less than three months after his meeting with bin Laden, an assassin, who Ghazi claims to have been in the pay of the ISI, popped out from behind a wall and emptied two magazines of ammunition into Abdullah. Ghazi's father collapsed in a pool of blood and died underneath a young dogwood tree. Bin Laden sent a letter of condolence.

(p. 149):

On the fifth day of the siege, I visited Shireen Mazari, the director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad and holder of a doctorate degree from Columbia University. Mazari had become a minor celebrity for her anti-American, anti-Indian, anti-NATO opinions, which she coupled with fervent Pakistani nationalism and an unrivaled predilection for conspiracy mongering. She wore her hair short like a female golfer, and died it in a spectrum of magenta, fuchsia, lime green, and canary yellow, depending on the day, her mood, and her outfit. The most curious thing about her was not her hair, but the fact that she had decided to host me as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad during the two years I lived in Pakistan. By hosting me, she agreed to sponsor my visa, give me an office, and outfit me with business cards. Meanwhile, Mazari detected a CIA plot behind every bomb, riot, and sneeze in Pakistan.

(pp. 153-154):

The decision to storm the Red Mosque marked another turning point for Musharraf and for Pakistan. Throughout the spring of 2007, people on Pakistani television often compared a critical day or event as "another 9/11." I had already heard it mentioned after March 9, the day Musharraf suspended the chief justice, and again after May 12, the day of the riots in Karachi. I heard it again throughout July, as the Red Mosque laid in ruins. But in a conversation I had with a young professional Pakistani man two days after Operation Silence ended, I realized that he had something else in mind when he made the comparison to September 11, 2001. Back in 2001, the United States had made a major investment in Musharraf, based on his promise to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda living on either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. In recent years, however, Washington's confidence in Musharraf had flagged. The raid on the Red Mosque, this bright computer scientist told me, would "re-up" Washington's confidence in Musharraf. It might even add another few years to his regime.

The Taliban insurgency immediately intensified. For years, the pro-Taliban fighters living inside Pakistan, near the Afghan border, had been primarily focused on Afghanistan. They now flipped their attention and initiated a ferocious campaign of suicide bombings, ambushes, and roadside bombs against military convoys traveling in FATA and NWFP. By the end of the month, more than three hundred people had been killed. By the end of 2007, the number of suicide attacks in Pakistan jumped to an all-time high of more than fifty. Local Taliban took over the shrine of a nineteenth-century mujahid in the Mohmand Agency, and renamed it Lal Masjid. Like Ghazi, they showed little respect for tradition.

(pp. 154-155):

The government reopened the Red Mosque in late July. They had painted it a soft yellow, in hopes of starting anew. They appointed a compliant imam to lead the weekly prayers. He was ushered, under heavy security cover, to the entrance of the mosque.

Hundreds of Ghazi's dedicated followers had beat the new imam there to block him from entering. The militants climbed onto the roof carrying buckets of paint, leaned tall, wooden ladders against the lemon chiffon-colored dome, and began rolling brushes soaked in the signature Pepto-Bismal pink onto the walls.

The imam turned back and refused to take the job.

Pandemonium swept through the neighborhood. Policemen watched, helplessly, as the militants recaptured the mosque. Down the road, another crowd of policemen guarded a cluster of shops and tea stalls. In the melee, a suicide bomber slipped into the crowd of policemen. He detonated himself, sending detached body parts flying in every direction, and killing more than a dozen people.

The militants hoisted the black flag with the crossed swords from the roof of the Red Mosque. The mosque was theirs again, and they bellowed for all those below to hear: "Ghazi! Ghazi! From your blood the revolution will come!"

9. "If You Don't Let Us Live in Peace, We Won't Let You Live in Peace" (p. 159):

I went to Swat to see how the Taliban ran things. In the middle of July, as the Red Mosque lay in ruins, a young firebrand from Swat declared jihad against the Pakistani government on his illegal radio station. The upstart's name was Maulana Fazlullah. In the ensuing weeks, Fazlullah's suicide bombers targeted police checkpoints and military convoys. They bombed anyone Fazlullah desired, and anyone who dared oppose the Talibs. Swat, a summertime getaway for thousands of tourists every year seeking a break from the heat and humidity choking the lowlands, was known as the "Switzerland of South Asia." Now it looked more like Armageddon than the Alps.

(pp. 160-161):

For centuries, Swat had resisted outsiders' control. Traditionally a local chief, known as amir during the British era and as wali during the Pakistani era, ruled over the valley, insulated from colonial dictates. During the Raj, the British termed Swat a "princely state," one of about seven hundred spread across the sprawling British Empire in South Asia. The designation involved regularly handing the amir a bag of cash, and the amir, in return, pledging his allegiance to the crown.

The chief had been in no hurry to crap this arrangement, and it continued after Pakistan was formed in 1947. Swat joined the federation in 1969, under the vague moniker of a Provincially Administered Tribal Area, or PATA. In northwestern Pakistan, there were three major modes of governance. In the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), tribal customs trumped all laws besides one permitting collective punishment. In the "settled" areas of the North-West Frontier Province, people lived according to Pakistani laws drafted and imoplemented in the national assembly. PATA rules floated somewhere between the two. In 1985, PATA was scrapped. According to Iqbal [Khan], that year also heralded the beginning of TNSM, as they scrambled to replace the half-witted hybrid of tribal and colonial codes -- a confusion that continues today -- with a single, clear, and implacable one: sharia.

10. "This Barbed Wire Stands in the Way of Democracy" (pp. 174-175):

The capital had stirred with rumors for months that Musharraf might declare a state of emergency, or perhaps even martial law. Musharraf had never looked more uneasy. Benazir Bhutto had returned from exile two weeks earlier, with the backing and support of the United States and the United Kingdom. Musharraf was no longer the only one with a direct line to the White House. The pro-Taliban insurgency continued to spread. On October 18, terrorists displayed their lethal reach when a suicide bomber killed himself and more than 140 others on the day Bhutto returned from exile. Musharraf banked that he could convince the United States to support a martial law regime in the name of fighting terrorism.

But the real reason for Musharraf's apprehension centered around his nemesis, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry. Musharraf had suspended Chaudhry, the chief justice, back in March, yet street protest and political pressure eventually forced Musharraf to cave. In July, Chaudhry was restored to the highest bench. He quickly got back to work tormenting Musharraf. In his biggest case yet, he had begun proceedings that questioned the validity of Musharraf's reelection bid, scheduled for November 15. News leaked out that the judges' decision would go against Musharraf.

On the night of November 3, Musharraf decided to do something about Chaudhry for good and announced a state of emergency. He suspended the constitution and pulled all the private TV channels off the air. The last televised image on Geo, the leading private channel, showed a document drafted by the Supreme Court judges before their imminent removal, declaring the emergency illegal and unconstitutional.

11. "Made Like a Sandwich" (pp. 192-193):

Maulana Fazlur Rahman (no relation to Maulana Fazlullah in Swat) was exactly the sort of "political mullah" whom Mohammad portrayed as running scared. Over the past year, the JUI [Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam] chief had tried to disassociate himself from the new generation of Taliban wreaking havoc not only across the border in Afghanistan, as they had for years, but also increasingly in Pakistan. At the same time, Rahman tried to persuade foreign ambassadors and establishment politicians that he was the only one capable of dealing with those same Taliban. (He later denied ever offering [Maulvi] Noor Mohammad a chance to enter the election; he added that JUI had already expelled the Taliban guru "on disciplinary grounds.")

Meanwhile, some Islamists maintained that Rahman had sold them out. That spring, a rocket whistled over the sugarcane fields that separate Rahman's house from the main road, before crashing into the veranda of his brother's home next door. No one was hurt. A few months later, Pakistani intelligence agencies discovered a hit list, drafted by the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, with Rahman's name on it. "The Maulana is being made like a sandwich: the government thinks he is the militants' man, and the militants think he is the government's man," one of Rahman's childhood friends told me. "But in fact, more and more he is no one's man."

(pp. 199-200):

Musharraf's government claimed the increasingly frequent bombings were evidence of Talibanization creeping east from the Afghanistan border. The local militants blasted shops selling un-Islamic CDs, cable TV operators, massage parlors, and other sites they considered havens of vice. A newspaper editor in Dera Ismail Khan showed me a letter he had received, signed by the Taliban, warning him not to print anything that defamed the mujahideen. They threatened the blow up his office if he didn't comply.

"Ninety-eight percent of the threats and attacks are just people settling old scores," the intelligence officer told me that night, over tumblers of SoCo on the rocks. The Pakistani Taliban, rather than being a unified, hierarchical organization, were more a loose collection of gangs operating as part of the Taliban franchise. Any bandit could grow a beard, don a black turban, call himself a Taliban, and act with impunity. (The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, an umbrella outfit subsuming most of these gangs under the control of Baitullah Mehsud, wasn't formed until the middle of December 2007.) "The militants know that Fazlur Rahman's government will not dare to do anything against someone wearing a black turban," the intelligence officer said. Rahman and his colleagues couldn't afford to discard the support of their base by throwing "Taliban" into jail. After all, they had campaigned in support of the Taliban in Afghanistan five years earlier.

12. "No Mercy in Their Hearts" (p. 206):

Yet even bigger things than winning an election occupied [Awami National Party leader Asfandyar Wali] Khan's thoughts. The international image of his people, the Pashtuns, needed to be rehabbed, as well as the very structure of their culture. "At this moment, if you talk about Pashtuns, the world thinks he is a terrorist, has a beard to his navel, hair to his shoulders, and holds a Kalashnikov," said Khan. "Islamic fundamentalism is destroying the basic fabric of Pashtun society." Pashtuns, who numbered more than twenty-five million, had been renowned as fierce fighters for centuries. They lived along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and had repelled British armies, Sikh armies, Soviet armies, and now American, NATO, and Pakistani ones too. Almost all of the Talibs were Pashtuns.

Khan argued that Pashtuns were not naturally brash, militant people -- that this was an impression that had been created by the Taliban. His grandfather, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, had even earned the nickname "Frontier Gandhi" for his role in leading the Pashtuns in a nonviolent resistance movement against the British Raj during the 1930s and '40s. The elder Khan's organization became known as the Red Shirts, which explained the ANP's current color scheme. Ghaffar Khan had opposed the Muslim League, the main group lobbying for the creation of Pakistan, and supported Gandhi's Congress Party instead. He believed the guiding rationale for the creation of Pakistan, that religious identity should determine the country where a person lived, was flat wrong. Yet he wasn't exactly a pluralist either. Ghaffar Khan contended that ethnic identity was most important for establishing one's identity, and he called for the creation of an independent Pashtunistan. A year before the birth of Pakistan, fellow Muslims physically attacked him -- leading to his hospitalization -- for being, in their minds, anti-Muslim, underscoring the long-running tension between ethnic nationalists and Islamists.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto (p. 211):

The government scrambled to deflect the accusations, but the incompetence of the investigation undermined its position. An FBI special agent familiar with Pakistan told The New Republic, "Hundreds of photos [of the crime scene] should have been taken. All the blood stains and bomb residue should have been swabbed, and shell casings and bomb fragments should have been mapped to 'freeze frame' the scene." Instead, the site was hosed down and cleared of debris.

A bumbling government spokesman said that Bhutto had died from hitting her head on the sunroof lever, not from being shot oat close range by an assassin or finished off by a suicide bomber. Though the assertion struck many as outrageous, the medical reports later corroborated the claim. There were apparently no bullet wounds. The PPP refused to allow an autopsy, which could have answered many questions.

The biggest question -- who did it? -- lingered. The most plausible culprit, and the one fingered by the government, was Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. Mahsud had reportedly said back in October, as Bhutto planned her return from exile, that he would "welcome her with his men," though he later denied having said this.

The government produced a phone tape of Mehsud taking credit for the assassination, but a journalist later established that there was no phone service where the tap allegedly occurred.

(pp. 213-214):

Peter Bergen, a journalist and terrorism analyst at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., described the magnitude of Bhutto's assassination as "the Kennedy assassination and 9/11, rolled into one." Terrorists had proven that one attack could destabilize a nuclear-armed country of 160 million people. Like the bullet that killed Lincoln, Kennedy, or Dr. King, the blast also destroyed a sense of progress and hope. After two previous terms in office, hampered by allegations of corruption, I had wondered whether Bhutto could come back a third time and lead Pakistan down the road to prosperity. Judging by the past, she and her party's populist rhetoric simply didn't mesh with their actions, namely their record of corruption. But her presence meant more than her deeds. And without an educated, liberal woman vying for power, one less obstacle now stood in the way of Pakistan becoming the bigoted basket case its naysayers often described it as.

Bergen's comparison to the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 was apt in yet another way. A flood of conspiracy theories followed. The most serious one placed Musharraf or one of his cronies in the middle of the conspiracy, ordering the hit. But that didn't make sense to me. How could he have gained from this? Maybe, he hoped, his domestic and international supporters would redouble their demand for a strongman in light of the ensuing chaos. In reality, Musharraf slid further out of favor with the West and lost more popularity at home. And if the intelligence agencies had worried that Bhutto's party might win the elections, the PPP now seemed almost guaranteed to sweep the poll, carried by a sympathy vote.

The economic damage resulting from the assassination was startling. The Karachi Chamber of Commerce printed a statistic that roughly $130 million in revenue disappeared every day in Karachi alone when strife paralyzed the city (and its port), not including damages to property. In 2007, I witnessed the city in this state for at least ten days. After the assassination, foreign investors' confidence eroded even more. Some stores stayed closed for more than a week, with both merchants and shoppers taking cover from the sounds of sporadic gunfire.

Back in Peshawar, rioters burned cars -- and anyuthing else flammable and available -- throughout the night. The morning after the assassination, I headed to the bazaar to find that, besides the indispensable and fearless butcher and milk shops, all other businesses were boarded up. You could hear footsteps in the alleys of the usually hectic market. Children played cricket in the empty streets. One money exchanger sat on a stool in front of his shop, resting a shotgun across his lap in case vandals tried to loot his store.

(p. 217):

With election day and the chance to seek revenge through democracy still weeks away, many of Bhutto's angry, grieving supporters in Sindh continued to seek revenge through vandalism. When I arrived in Karachi on New Year's Eve, the seaside metropolis was finally limping back to normal after four days of intense rioting and looting. It felt like the first day after a blizzard, but instead of snowdrifts there were blackened husks of vehicles. More than nine hundred cars, buses, and trucks had been torched in Karachi alone. Countless private shops and government buildings had been razed throughout Sindh. The Indus Highway, running north and south through Sindh, looked like an apocalyptic repo lot, lined with burning cars stretching for hundreds of miles.

Epilogue: "The Fear Factor Spoils the Fun": returning to Pakistan in August 2008, with Zardari's PPP government in power (pp. 222-223):

The violence had continued and the entire security calculus changed since I left. Bombers now targeted embassies and cafés. In the spring, terrorists had attacked a pizza place in Islamabad popular with foreigners, leaving the impression that no place was safe anymore. Our friends had stopped going out. Meanwhile, in NWFP and FATA, the Taliban and al-Qaeda battled with Pakistani security forces, attacking checkpoints, munitions factories, and military bases. The militants' tactics became even more macabre: one day in late February, they killed a police officer, waited until later that day when mourners gathered for his funeral, and struck again with a suicide bomber, killing another forty people. Grassroots efforts to challenge the Talibs were violently discouraged, too. In March, a suicide bomber detonated himself among a council of elders gathered to draft a strategy against the militants, killing forty-two people.

The PPP-led government, ostensibly hoping to separate the local Talibs from the "irreconcilable" al-Qaeda elements, tried to negotiate with the militants. The government claimed that it was not negotiating from a position of weakness, but they didn't fool anyone. The Talibs had the upper hand. Baitullah Mehsud, the warlord in South Waziristan, accused by American and Pakistan intelligence of Bhutto's assassination, invited several Pakistani journalists to his jihadi compound for a tour and press conference one day, an act that reminded everyone of the government's ineffectiveness against him. Maulana Fazlullah, the Taliban chief in Swat, was less brazen, but nonetheless still alive, shuttling between Bajaur, Dir, and Swat. Abdul Rashid Ghazi's disciples threatened a newspaper editor with death for publishing cartoons that maligned Ghazi's sister-in-law, suggesting that she taught jihad in her classrooms at Jamia Hafsa. Just weeks earlier, thousands of their female madrassa students had congregated at the Red Mosque and vowed to produce "babies for jihad."

One of the new government's biggest challenges was reigning in the intelligence agencies, particularly the ISI, which continued to operate beyond the purview of the elected leaders. A week before I arrived, the PPP-led government announced its plan to wrest the ISI from the army, thus placing the spy agency under the command of the Interior Ministry, a civilian-run institution. But days later, the government reversed its decision, caving in to pressure from the military. The incident proved that while a president in a business suit may uniquely symbolize the replacement of a military dictatorship, the military's two main intelligence agencies, ISI and Military Intelligence (MI), remained the true arbiters of power -- regardless of who was the president or prime ministery.

Amid the escalating insecurity and confusion, local and international investors feared the worst and fled with their money. The economy was tanking. The rupee had lost nearly fifty percent of its value against the dollar since January. The price of gasoline had jumped above $5 a gallon, in a country where most annual incomes are capped at $1,000. The composite index of the Karachi stock exchange had fallen more than 40 percent since April. Electricity shortages led to rolling blackouts; in the heat of summer, lights and air conditioners shut down for four, five, sometimes six or more hours a day. Hordes of beggars -- previously unseen in Islamabad -- now loitered around busy intersections. Women shrouded in black rags clicked their fingernails against the glass of passing automobiles and extended an upturned palm.

(pp. 236-237):

When my wife and I had been kicked out in January, I had left feeling jealous of anyone who got to stay, to watch, to live in this fascinating country as it wrestled against military dictatorship, vied to enact the rule of law, and struggled to form a single, unified national identity. I was particularly envious of all the foreign journalists who had not been kicked out, who could still travel anywhere in Pakistan, doing their work. Why did I have to go home? But I also knew all along that I should be able to get back. Stay away a few months and let the air clear. That's all it would take, I thought.

This time was different. I left in a bulletproof car. I knew, sitting in Dubai, that unfortunately I was done with Pakistan for a while. I needed a lot more time away from the intelligence agencies. And I had left most of my optimism about Pakistan back at the urs. Really, what was there to look forward to? Musharraf was gone, but the military was still in control. Elections had brought a democratically elected civilian government, but average Pakistanis felt no more empowered than before. Despite the populist rhetoric of the PPP, poor people still couldn't afford basic commodities like wheat and tea, never mind "luxuries" like electricity. Pakistan stood on the verge of bankruptcy, in almost every sense.

posted 2009-10-16