The World's Toughest Job

By Johanna McGeary

If ruling coup-prone Pakistan is perilous in the best of times, consider the current plight of Pervez Musharraf. The general who seized power exactly two years ago to domestic acclaim now sees his effigy burned in the streets. The self-appointed President who favored the Taliban has turned his back on a Muslim neighbor. The military ruler shunned by the West has cast his lot with Washington. After two years of mollycoddling religious extremists, he has vowed to move "swiftly and firmly" if they protest his new policies too violently. Now he must navigate a country with enough enriched uranium for 50 nuclear bombs between the hard demands of Western allies and the howls of rage from anti-American citizens.

With his unflinching decision to join America's war on terrorism, Musharraf initiated one of the most dramatic U-turns in Pakistan's history. Now he sits on a powder keg. Makeshift bunkers have sprouted around embassies and government buildings in the capital of Islamabad. Heavily armed riot police ringed the city of Quetta near the Afghan border, where angry protests all last week left five people dead. Soldiers huddled behind sandbags and armored-personnel carriers patrolled the streets in restive Peshawar while young men shouted for jihad. Militants roamed through the port city of Karachi, burning, looting and clashing with police as they chanted, "Osama, nuclear power of the Muslim world!" As Muslim sympathizers of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban whipped up fury in the streets, Musharraf's show of force kept the protests under relative control. This time.

The dangers for Musharraf in the events set off by Sept. 11 are everywhere to see, yet there are opportunities too. He has an unprecedented opening before him to remake a failing state into one where extremism might no longer flourish. And he seems determined to take it. For the first time in his short reign, he is directly confronting the religious radicals who shape so much of the country's domestic and foreign policy to a radical agenda. "This is a battle for the heart and soul of Pakistan," says Chris Smith, senior research fellow at King's College London Center for Defense Studies. "He has taken a decision to stem the tide of the forces of radical Islam." Says Andrew Kennedy, Asia director of London's Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies: "He's either going to win big or lose big."

First he must weather the gathering crisis that could flash into ungovernable riots at any provocation. Last week he agreed to let U.S. forces use two Pakistani air bases, while assuring his countrymen they would be used only for logistics, not combat. Although Washington forewarned him, the President will take heat from all sides now that the U.S. has issued a freeze order on the assets of the Rabita Trust, a three-decade-old Pakistan charity reportedly enjoying support from top officials, including Musharraf. The U.S. said Rabita's secretary-general was a founder of bin Laden's al-Qaeda.

In the face of it all, Musharraf is moving vigorously to tilt the odds his way. Besides deploying heavy security forces to contain demonstrations, he put three of the most virulent extremist leaders under house arrest. His most significant actions took place inside the army's barracks. He renewed his term as military chief "indefinitely." And he shook out top generals partial to the Taliban or its brand of fierce Islam who might try to undermine his new policies. Just about everyone was taken off guard, only a few hours before the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began, when Musharraf smoothly purged three key generals who had engineered the October 1999 coup that brought him to power. He replaced the vice chief of staff with Lieut. General Muhammad Yusuf Khan, a moderate general whose friends call him "Joe." He kicked upstairs to a ceremonial post a key corps commander considered sympathetic to the ideological extreme. He replenished the upper ranks with loyal officers more ready to side with the Taliban's enemies.

Most startling was the premature retirement of trusted friend Lieut. General Mahmoud Ahmad, chief of the formidable Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, widely regarded as the country's invisible government. As a staunch patron of pro-Taliban policies, Ahmad is thought to have opposed Pakistan's new alliance with the U.S. Musharraf had reason to fear that segments of the ISI might thwart promised cooperation with U.S. intelligence. And it is said that Musharraf hit the roof when an ISI-linked jihad group devoted to wresting Muslim Kashmir from Indian control took responsibility for a blast in the Indian city of Srinagar two weeks ago that killed 42. The target and the timing--just when Musharraf was fending off accusations that Pakistan sponsors terrorism and asking Washington to take a more balanced view of the Kashmir dispute--couldn't have been worse.

The new boss of ISI, Lieut. General Ehsan ul- Haq, is regarded as moderate, professional and without political ambition. But some wonder if he is ruthless enough to overhaul an agency still filled with Islamic sympathizers. ISI, says a diplomat, "has to be cut down to size."

Still, the sweep was a decisive consolidation of Musharraf's power and a first step toward reversing more than two decades of Islamization in the 550,000-man army. It's now less likely anyone inside the military can sabotage or ignore Musharraf's pro-Western policies, leaving him freer to pursue his oft-stated goal of transforming Pakistan into a progressive Islamic state.

Musharraf has done more in the past few weeks to set his mark on Pakistan than he managed during the previous two years. He often said he was catapulted to power by a quirk of fate. When his predecessor, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, tried to fire him as army chief, loyal cohorts arrested Sharif, and Musharraf declared himself the new chief executive. His first months in office were marked by contradiction and lack of vision. He required a personal loyalty oath from high court judges but spoke fondly of "consensus." His promises of economic revival and "true" democracy to replace his elected predecessor's "sham" democracy petered out.

And the secular-minded general--who is known to enjoy his pet dogs, regarded in Islam as unclean--failed to tame the religious extremists who had burrowed so deeply into the country's institutions. He repeatedly looked weak when he ran up against them. He caved in to Islamic protesters who opposed his plan to amend the country's draconian blasphemy law. His government rushed to appease a cleric with a heavy following among retired military men who threatened to storm Islamabad if Musharraf did not enforce Shari'a, Islamic law. He kept silent when mullahs in the Northwest Frontier instructed local men to forcibly marry--code for rape--women working for aid agencies.

Those days are over, the way Musharraf is talking now. In a speech just after the Sept. 11 attacks, Musharraf told the nation, "The lesson is that when there is a crisis situation, the path of wisdom is better than the path of emotion." In case that was too subtle, he said, speaking of the fundamentalists, "There is no reason why this minority should hold the majority as hostage." That is a sentiment no Pakistani leader in 20-odd years has dared articulate. Those who know Musharraf say he now acknowledges that Pakistan made a mistake in propping up the Taliban as an ally for so long. For the first time he explicitly condemned the attack in Srinagar as "terrorist" and followed up with a call to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee suggesting talks. Says political scientist Rifaat Hussain: "After Sept. 11, national interest is in, and ideology is out."

The drastic turnaround looks out of character for an affable career officer who never showed a great taste for confrontation. Musharraf was the second of three boys born to a career diplomat in India four years before its independence. When partition in 1947 separated mostly Hindu India from mostly Muslim Pakistan, the secular-minded Muslim family migrated to Karachi. Then a diplomatic posting took them to Turkey for six years, where Pervez learned fluent English and Turkish. Outgoing and fun, he attracted a broad circle of friends. He excelled at cricket and until recently loved a fast game of squash, and he gravitated toward a military career.

Once commissioned to an elite artillery regiment in 1964, he began a steady rise through the ranks, fighting in two wars against India, until he earned a general's stars. In 1998 Prime Minister Sharif appointed him chief of staff, expecting a malleable seat warmer--only to find himself unseated by Musharraf a year later. After Sharif's conviction for hijacking in April 2000, the new military ruler showed a degree of mercy rare in such circumstances, sending Sharif and his family safely into exile in Saudi Arabia later that year.

Musharraf's battle to reshape Pakistan is a lonely one. No political party backs him: he has consistently poured scorn on the parties' established leaders. His anticorruption drive, his jailing of politicians for abuse of authority, his categorical statements that he wants to introduce a new political class at the expense of the old, have all alienated established politicos who see him only as a threat.

Now he counts on his new friends in the West. Washington hopes to keep him secure with money. Since Musharraf threw in his lot with the U.S., President Bush has won authority from Congress to remove sanctions imposed after Pakistan's 1998 nuclear test. Bush expects to get another waiver of additional sanctions that were slapped on after Musharraf's coup. A ban on military sales to Pakistan has been lifted, and a new agreement eases the immediate burden of $329 million in debt on which Pakistan had defaulted. Washington has pledged $50 million in aid, Japan has come up with $40 million, and the E.U. has matched that. Pakistanis remember, however, that Washington's largesse has proved fickle in the past, when their support was no longer a strategic asset.

Yet Western goodwill is at the core of the Pakistani President's great gamble. "I'm thinking of Musharraf very much in terms of Anwar Sadat 30 years ago," says a senior U.S. official, recalling the Egyptian President who first made peace with Israel. "That's both because of the boldness of what he's doing and because of the enormous risk he's taking. No doubt people are gunning for him." For Sadat, it didn't turn out well: he was killed in 1981 by Islamic militants now connected with the al-Qaeda network. These dangerous days Musharraf is no longer likely to show up, as he has in the past, with little fanfare at Islamabad restaurants to dine with his family. Already there is talk of fatwas, or religious orders, calling for Musharraf's death. The general has been put under heavy security, and his public appearances have been curtailed.

Last week Musharraf called on Washington to keep military operations against Afghanistan "short and targeted." He told Pakistanis he had "definite assurances" the visible part of the campaign, broadcast in night-lit explosions over Afghan cities, would end quickly, "in one or two days" if possible. While President Bush voiced sympathy for Musharraf's desire to calm protests, he denied that Pakistan received any such guarantees. "I don't know who told the Pakistani President that," Bush said. Allied spokesmen reiterated that the campaign could take weeks, even years. Other officials who have heard Musharraf's pleas that a long conflict could jeopardize his control say the Pakistani leader was voicing what he wanted to hear. Under the circumstances, no one could blame him for wanting his current trial over as quickly as possible.

--Reported by Hannah Bloch and Syed Talat Hussain/Islamabad, Massimo Calabresi/Washington, Jeff Chu/London and Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi

With reporting by Hannah Bloch and Syed Talat Hussain/Islamabad, Massimo Calabresi/Washington, Jeff Chu/London and Meenakshi Ganguly/New Delhi