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The big official secret of the NRO deal, brokered by the United States between then President Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto, has been revealed in full detail by its sponsor, the former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in her memoirs named ‘No Higher Honor’. She admits everything and reveals how she toiled for many sleepless nights to bring Musharraf and Benazir together in 2007
Rice recalls a meeting in 2001: ‘Putin suddenly raised the problem of Pakistan. He excoriated the Pervez Musharraf regime for its support of extremists and for the connections of the Pakistani army and intelligence services to the Taliban and al-Qaeda… Those extremists were all being funded by Saudi Arabia, he said, and it was only a matter of time until it resulted in a major catastrophe.’
It was obviously shocking for the sole superpower to be updated on a serious world affair by the president of Russia. The reader needs a quick assurance and gets one: ‘We of course knew of the connections between Pakistan and the Taliban,’ Rice writes, ‘and had been hammering Islamabad, as the Clinton administration had to break its ties with Taliban.’
Still, she was ‘taken aback by Putin’s alarm and vehemence’ and ‘chalked it up to Russian bitterness toward Pakistan for supporting Afghan mujahideen… Putin, though, was right: the Taliban and al-Qaeda were time bombs that would explode on September 11, 2001. Pakistan’s relationship with the extremists would become one of our gravest problems. Putin never let us forget it, recalling the conversation time and again.’
One aspect in Rice’s account, that could allow for a bit of happy analysis, is when she compares the extremely tense Pakistan-India situation after the attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001 with the events following the terrorist strike in Mumbai in November 2008. After the parliament attack, the two countries were on the brink of war which was only avoided with some deft but decisive handling. Post-Mumbai’ while Pakistan was ‘terrified’ though unable to acknowledge the local links of the Mumbai militants’ the Indians did not want a war. Instead, they wanted Pakistan to take some action against the backers of the Mumbai attackers.
Lok Sabha election was due in a few months’ time. If, conventionally, hostility towards Pakistan was regarded as a useful plank for garnering votes, the Congress government did not see merit in promoting war hysteria for electoral gains in this case.
What prompted this change? General Pervez Musharraf’s regime had taken steps to help India calm Kashmir and there may have been an understanding in New Delhi that Mumbai, for all its atrociousness and gore, could be the work of an off-shoot of the Pakistani establishment and not an act carried directly by the Pakistani state. Also, the Indian economy was on the fast track. An altogether new lifestyle had taken root in the country which a war, or even war-mongering, could jeopardise.
“On Thursday morning, September 13, 2001, I stood looking at myself in the bathroom mirror. How could this have happened? Did we miss something?†Rice writes in the introduction to her book. A few paragraphs later, she says: “in 2008, toward the end of our time in office, a terrorist attack took place in Mumbai, India. I travelled to India to lend support to the Indian government and to defuse tensions between India and Pakistan… I came face to face with the Indian national security advisor… He, M. K. Narayanan, had the same shell-shocked look that I remembered seeing in the mirror after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
I took his hands. ‘It is not your fault.’ I said.
There are no marks for guessing where, in Dr Rice’s estimates, the fault lay.
One Pakistani who does get some respect from her is General Kayani whom she called on after she had met President Asif Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani post-Mumbai. Finally, I went to meet the chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani. Our military liked him and considered him honest and effective. He was the one person who, even if he couldn’t accept responsibility, understood that Pakistan would have to give an accounting of what had happened.
The two came face to face in the United Arab Emirates in July 2007. That was a few months after, according to Rice, Musharraf had initiated the move for an alliance with Bhutto ‘at a time when he was struggling with his fight with the judiciary. Bhutto sought assurances: withdrawal of corruption cases, removal of the law that barred a person from a third term as prime minister, a guarantee that Musharraf will shed his military uniform before the general election. Musharraf was wary and the deal took time amid flurry of calls to and from the American secretary of state. As I shuttled from phone call to phone call, I asked myself again and again if I was doing the right thing. Power-sharing arrangements are fraught with difficulty because, in general, the parties don’t really want to share power.’ Also, having fretted over the potentially fickle partners of the latest power-sharing deal in Pakistan, she chips in with the following line for the benefit of those wedded to the principles of rhetoric: ‘I was also concerned that I might be interfering in the democratic process.
At the beginning of 2007, Musharraf had asked for help in bridging his differences with Bhutto… It seemed a long shot, but if the two rivals could come to a power-sharing arrangement, it would shift the weight of politics towards the moderates and undermine the Islamists, as well as Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister who, more so than other prominent figures in Pakistani politics, was suspected of maintaining close ties to the militants… By early October, there were four outstanding issues: when would Musharraf shed his military uniform (before or after the elections); would Bhutto and her party colleagues be immunized in the multiple corruption cases against them (including the one against her husband); could she become prime minister despite a constitutional prohibition against a third term’ and finally, would Musharraf support her return to Pakistan before the elections?
Bhutto was suspicious of Musharraf’s motives and he of hers. A phone call would bring us one step closer to a deal, only to have the next call unravel what had been accomplished. Benazir kept saying that she had to bring her party conference along because they didn’t want a deal with Musharraf. I argued that she had to do it for the good of the country’ only an alliance between the two of them would allow elections to take place in a stable environment… I went to bed at about midnight, only to be awakened at 12:41 am by Musharraf. Well, I had said he could call anytime. I called Bhutto at 4:58 am and relayed the latest offer. The next morning, I talked to each of them one more time. They had a tentative deal’ not firm but detailed enough that Bhutto would be permitted to return to Pakistan to stand in the parliamentary elections that would be held by mid-January.
