BOOK REVIEW OF ZAHID HUSSAIN'S 'FRONTLINE PAKISTAN: THE PATH TO CATASTROPHE AND THE KILLING OF BENAZIR BHUTTO'





Winston Churchill once defined Stalinist Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Had he been living today, Pakistan might have appeared to him as a set of matrushka dolls, each containing a secret wrapped in a conundrum inside a puzzle.


Just as the Soviet empire that so disturbed Churchill is no longer the authoritarian Gulag camp that once stretched 'from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic', the matruskha dolls one buys from street-hawkers nowadays are more than simply concentric sets of robust red-cheeked Russian matriarchs in flowered folk costumes. Tourists now are offered a range of options – the Soviet leadership with Marx and then Lenin on the outside with Putin inside, or the parallel dark leadership of Fidel Castro enveloping Qaddafi and deepest within, Osama Bin Laden.


Reading Mr Zahid Hussain's Frontline Pakistan - a layered analysis of Musharraf's Pakistan post 9/11 - is akin to opening such a set of images. There is always more within than what appears on the outside.


Mr Hussain is a journalist by profession. In Pakistan he worked for Newsline (in his words, a 'fiercely independent magazine'), and from Pakistan he has been a stringer for The Times, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Over the years, because he is reporting to a primarily Western audience, he has unconsciously begun to perceive Pakistan through the eyes of his liberal readership, rather than allowing the reader to view Pakistan though his own South Asian eyes.


Hussain's book is divided into three parts. 'The first part looks at how Musharraf came to throw in his lot with the Americans after 9/11, and why this was a momentous decision. The second part uncovers the forces ranged against him: the jihadists and their allies. The third part looks at the battle between them – how it is being fought and who is winning.' The subtitle to the book: The Path to Catastrophe and the killing of Benazir Bhutto is unfairly misleading. The chronology of the book ends at September 2006, more than a year before Benazir Bhutto's tragic assassination. However, it does confirm a truism in South Asian politics – dead leaders (preferably martyred ones) can always be relied upon to provide a living for the living.


Of the three segments of Zahid Hussain's book, the first is perhaps the easiest to unravel. Who on the morning of that 11 September took the fateful decision to commit 160 million Pakistanis to America's defensive war against terror? Was it the former President General Pervez Musharraf alone as the country's civilian-cum-military Supremo? Musharraf contends both in his memoirs In the Line of Fire and in subsequent interviews that the decision was his alone. He consulted his Corps Commanders only after the event. They knew as clearly as the Americans did that he had no other choice.


The innermost reality appears to be that on another equally key issue - how Pakistan would support the US? - Musharraf was pre-empted by his own subordinate Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, then head of ISI. Still in Washington two days after 9/11, General Mahmood was handed a sheet of paper by Richard Armitage (US Deputy Secretary of State), listing seven demands that were to be met by Musharraf's government. Perhaps 'demands' is too strong a word; they were in fact an ultimatum. On his own, without bothering to consult Musharraf, General Mahmood accepted all of them with an alacrity that surprised even Armitage.


"Don't you want to discuss this with your President?" Armitage asked him.


Mahmood replied with more bravado than truth: "I know the President's mind." So did Musharraf. Within three months of his return, Mahmood was removed by Musharraf.


The second theme of Zahid Hussain's book – the identification of the jihadists and their allies - is infinitely more disturbing. This disquiet stems from the Lego-brick alliances between Pakistan, the Americans and the Saudis. The latter preferred to pay and watch rather than play and pay for the consequences, in the holy war against the godless Soviets in Afghanistan, and again in the unholy war against the over-zealous Taliban in the same theatre of war.


Hussain recounts how, during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, the US and its acolyte Saudi Arabia financed the mujahideen, matching dollar for dollar to defeat the troubled rouble. He exposes the support provided to madrassas in Pakistan amounting to almost $1.5 billion, ostensibly from charitable donations, but it is clear that such a sum (equivalent to the Pakistan Government's annual direct income from tax revenues) could not have emanated from purely private largesse.


The Wahabi-sponsored Lashkar-e-Taiba is as good an example as any of the way in which such organizations were spawned in vitro from donors who wished to remain anonymous. Established in the 1990s during General Zia ul Haq's regime to provide cannon fodder in the Afghan war, it outlived its original purpose but not its enduring utility. Banned by Musharraf's government in 2002, it camouflaged itself superficially by adopting the title Jamaat-ud Dawaa, and then re-directed its energies to Pakistan's eastern theatre of instability – Jammu & Kashmir. It relies heavily on funding from Saudi sources, which might explain why President Bush (according to a recently revealed report) told Prime Minister Blair that he 'wanted to go beyond Iraq' , i.e. to include Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as future targets.


The most intractable set of these militant matrushkas to unlock is the identity of the terrorists and of their financial supporters. Zahid Hussain goes as far as he can – further than Daniel Pearl could in Karachi – in singling out features in a shadowy twilight world of terrorism. He names Ayman al-Zawahiri 'a bespectacled, 52 year old eye surgeon' from an upper crust Egyptian family, becoming 'one of the world's most wanted terrorists'. Or Naeem Noor Mohammed Khan, a 28 year old computer expert, hidden in Karachi who operated Al Qaeda's nerve centre. Or Gun Gun Rusman Gunawan, an Indonesian operative who spent four years in a madrassa in Karachi before becoming a terrorist. (Could it have been in his genes? His brother was the mastermind behind the Bali bombings.)


What the lay reader finds hard to comprehend is how such persons - many from affluent backgrounds - become such committed and determined terrorists, prepared at the click of a switch to shed their own blood, mixed with that of their innocent victims. How do these amoeba-like units divide and multiply into other independent groups? Are they in fact like those drug dealers whose hierarchy allows handlers to know the identities of those under their immediate control and the name of their own supervisor, but never the identities of their peers or of other members of the organization? It is management using Chinese walls that are rarely, all too rarely breached. [Contd.]





Book Review in The Political Quarterly, Vol. 80, No.1. pp.147-149.