PAKISTAN - Bordering on the abyss

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Times, UK

In supporting America against the Taliban, Pakistan's leader is taking an almighty risk, says Michael Sheridan

Bordering on the abyss

It was just hours after the attacks in New York and Washington, the Muslim scholar recalled, when two senior officers of Pakistani military intelligence arrived at a dusty compound of mosques and classrooms on the outskirts of Peshawar.

This collection of buildings, scattered along the great road built by the British Raj across the northwest frontier, is an incubator for the Taliban. It hosts 1,200 religious students from Afghanistan and Pakistan, many destined for the ranks of the holy warriors across the border.

The boys were already celebrating the carnage in America when the officers drew up in an unmarked car. The visitors wasted no time in getting to the point. Pakistan's survival was at stake, they informed the clerics. Its nuclear weapons facilities and its missile systems were at that moment under threat. A nation founded on the basis of Islam faced destruction if anyone made a wrong move in the hours and days ahead.

For that reason, the officers said, everyone should mask his true feelings and avoid giving any provocation to the United States. The nation was on the brink of disaster and General Pervez Musharraf, its military ruler, faced the hardest decisions any Pakistani leader had confronted in 30 years, they said.

The clerics obliged, up to a point, for Islam provides for dissimulation by the faithful in the event of a threat to their religion. When foreign visitors called later on, the students tried to look solemn. But they chattered delightedly in Urdu and Pushtu about the vengeance of the godly on America.

The mood of nominal protest changed on Friday when mass demonstrations took place in which three people were shot dead and dozens were arrested. At the biggest display of anger, in Lahore, 20,000 people waved flags and banners and in Peshawar 5,000 witnessed the burning of an effigy of President Bush.

One man was shot when police opened fire on a mob trying to ransack a cinema. A fourth man died of a heart attack while defending his store against looters.

The nightmare scenario for Pakistan has almost arrived. It is a doomsday reckoning that has lain in the folders of policy planners in western capitals for several years: a bankrupt, turbulent country of 140m people, armed with nuclear weapons, falls into the hands of fundamentalists.

Bill Clinton risked Osama Bin Laden's terrorists to come here in person last year, precisely because he wanted to defuse the risks on the subcontinent, accepting the view of the State Department official who called the region "the most dangerous place on earth".

Clinton came and went safely - so fearful were his protectors that America's secret service flew a decoy jet into Islamabad airport - but the danger has not gone away. In Pakistan, the West is playing for enormous stakes, probably as high as those it played for and lost in the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The rationale is simple. Pakistan has the bomb. So does its rival, Hindu-dominated, multi-religious, democratic India. Both nations tested their weapons in 1998, breaking a taboo that had lasted more than a decade.

After western experts evaluated the results, a senior British source later confided that "we reckon the Pakistanis have the better bomb". And, as ranting newspaper columnists in Pakistan seldom cease to remind us, it is an Islamic bomb.

So worried were the British and Americans (along with the other declared nuclear powers) that they immediately sought to help both nations avoid a calamity. It turned out that neither India nor Pakistan possessed the sophisticated command, control and liaison systems that evolved to protect the cold war powers from a mistaken launch.

Within months of the tests Britain quietly dispatched Sir Michael Quinlan, a senior civil servant whose brainpower was credited with fashioning Britain's nuclear deterrent policy, on a visit to Delhi and Islamabad. Quinlan, a devout Roman Catholic, had developed a morality of deterrence that he used to confront anti-nuclear protesters at home. He explained to the generals and politicians how nuclear weapons could be managed as part of a nation's arsenal without ever resorting to their use.

India and Pakistan may lack many things, but neither has a shortage of formidably clever administrators and soldiers. Quinlan's lessons were digested with interest and were evidently understood by Musharraf. Soon after seizing power in 1999, he dispersed Pakistan's nuclear and missile assets and broke up the clique of scientists and military men who had controlled the programme.

For more than two years the West has watched warily while tensions between Pakistan and India ebbed and flowed. Musharraf talked tough at home, but when he went to a summit at the Taj Mahal in Agra, the Indians were surprised to find a competent, pragmatic man at the peak of his authority and in command of his brief. War talk receded.

As Wendy Chamberlin, the new American ambassador, arrived to take up her post in Islamabad this month, it looked as if the Pakistan problem might just be heading for the "manageable" file.

The ambassador, a solid career diplomat, had not even had time to present her credentials to Musharraf before the New York skyline erupted and it was time to tear up the policy papers.

That ceremonial engagement turned into an immediate show of friendship. Musharraf used the presentation of credentials to send the first signal to his own people that Pakistan would line up with the Americans. Chamberlin - probably the best protected American envoy in the world today - headed back to her embassy, a fortress ringed by barbed wire and troops, to report the news to Washington.

Musharraf, according to a senior diplomatic source, had already made up his mind before the ambassador called. "He was in contact to say to the United States, 'Tell me what you need and what we can do', before he was asked," the source said.

To Pentagon planners, Musharraf can do a lot in terms of providing air bases, intelligence, seaports and facilities. To the White House and its international allies, however, the single most important thing he can do right now is to stay in power.

At one point last week Pakistan looked so rocky that some officials in Washington openly questioned whether Musharraf could survive.

However, Chamberlin already knew that the military had made draconian plans to stay on top of the situation. All over the country men from the security services were making calls such as the one outside Peshawar. They have infiltrated the coalition of 13 religious parties and militant groups that last week called for defiance of America.

The Musharraf military system has proved far more sophisticated than, say, the average Middle Eastern regime in using political cunning to win domestic support. Afghanistan is not a popular issue with many Pakistanis.

The Soviet invasion of 1979 and Pakistan's role as a base for the mujaheddin (see panel) left the country awash with guns, drugs and refugees long after the West's victory over communism was in the history syllabus.

Pakistan has a far greater concern than the Taliban and their deluded Afghan utopia. It has unfinished business with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir. For most Pakistanis, that is the remaining national cause left over from the agonised partition of British India in 1947. Afghanistan's eternal intrigues come a distant second.

Musharraf used this argument to convince the corps commanders, who are crucial to his power base. Then he turned it upon the critics. If we go against America on Bin Laden's behalf, the government argued, we will risk defeat and national disaster.

Quoting the Koran, Musharraf reached over the heads of the mullahs to tell Pakistanis that they had to choose the lesser evil. "Showing strength without wisdom is a kind of foolishness," he told them.

Musharraf is running an almighty risk. Imran Khan, the former cricket star turned politician, summed up his predicament accurately last week.

"I wonder if the Pakistani army can start shooting its own people," he said. "It is one thing when certain fundamentalist groups exploit a crisis. It is quite another if people all over Pakistan start reacting to what they feel is a huge injustice. In that event, General Musharraf will be unable to do anything."

Musharraf has so far shown every sign of playing the politics with more skill than many expected of a straight-talking military man with a rumoured penchant for fine malts. Some of the sharpest minds in the Pakistani elite have rallied to his side.

America has also played its hand with unaccustomed skill, admit several Pakistani officials. There has been no public admission of a quid pro quo. But everybody knows that Pakistan is staggering under $38 billion (£26 billion) of external debt and has dismally failed to live up to almost every International Monetary Fund programme ever devised for it.

Musharraf has the chance to cement himself in power, to achieve a new balance with India, to gain economic breathing space and to call the bluff of Pakistan's firebrand clergymen once and for all.

There is every sign that Washington is ready to treat Pakistan as generously as it did Turkey and Egypt in the Gulf war of 1991. Last week the American embassy in Islamabad sought $30m in immediate funding for programmes in the country: have $40m (£27.5m) at once, said its paymasters. Sanctions on Pakistan and India, imposed after the 1998 tests, are under review.

A great deal hangs in the balance: the future of Pakistan's nuclear deterrent, peace on a subcontinent that is home to more than 1 billion people, the future map of central Asia. The troops in battledress and the machinegun nests that appeared around Islamabad airport on Friday said it more clearly than words can: Musharraf's gamble is in deadly earnest and the die has been cast.

-- Anonymous, September 23, 2001


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