A few days after taking power in October 1999, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf called his first press conference in the garden of Army House, the colonial-era mini-mansion which is the residence of the commander of the world's second-largest Muslim state's land-based armed forces.
The general walked out of his home in his army khaki, campaign medals, paratrooper's wings and commando flashes proudly on display, and advanced across the perfect lawns toward the media. Suddenly, he was intercepted by his media officer. A swift exchange, the general returned indoors and five minutes later, now clad in light brown slacks and a striped shirt, he gave his first interviews.
The question over which habit best suits Musharraf has been posed many times throughout his eight-year rule. Is he a ruthless military dictator desperately clinging to power? Is he a successful general seeking the stability that will allow his troubled country to make a successful transition to true democracy? Indeed, should he instead, as his fiercest detractors in the US and in India claim, be wearing the black turban of the Taliban?
The question is now more pertinent than ever. Last week's visit of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband to Pakistan attests to Musharraf's status as a key global player. After bloody violence at a mosque in the center of Islamabad, riots in Karachi, a slap administered by Pakistan's courts after a clumsy bid to get rid of the nation's top judge, approaching elections and a string of failed assassination attempts, the 63-year-old career soldier and president is looking more fragile than for a long time.
Not that he would admit it.
"The president does not do `fragile,'" one official who worked closely with Musharraf said. "He was a commando after all. He's all about keeping the momentum, keeping his enemies on their toes. He's in perpetual motion. Frankly, it's exhausting."
Musharraf was born in New Delhi, four years before the bloody partition of 1947 that saw the former British imperial South Asian possessions split into India and Pakistan.
outsider
His family, lower middle-class, educated, comfortable but not rich, were among those who, passing the corpses along the train tracks and roads, were sufficiently fearful of their future in a majority Hindu state to move to the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan. He was thus a mohajir, not a native of Pakistan, and so something of an outsider in his new homeland.
Musharraf's first interviews that afternoon in 1999 in the grounds of Army House were to the BBC and to Turkish television -- in fluent Turkish. Musharraf spent much of his childhood in Ankara, where his bureaucrat father was posted, and learned both the language and a profound admiration for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk who, through persuasion, wily politics internally and externally, physical force and sheer strength of character, created the modern, secular state of Turkey.
Returning to Karachi at 13, Musharraf, something of a tearaway with a taste for firecrackers, was enrolled at a Catholic missionary school where, according to the autobiography In the Line of Fire published last year, he learned to fight.
"I became known as a tough guy whom you don't mess with," he wrote.
Unsurprisingly, his memoir recounts that the future president excelled at sports and, though his academic record was not perfect, "winning a spot [at Pakistan's military academy] was a cinch."
In 1965 he saw action in a war against India and was again in combat six years later against the same enemy. His acknowledged bravery did much to off-set problems with discipline and he rose steadily through the ranks to take command of an infantry division in 1991, becoming one of the few senior officers from Pakistan's mohajir minority in an army dominated by those with roots in the eastern Punjab province. He was made chief of the Army Staff in 1998. Though a purely military post, in a country ruled by the army for more than half its short history, no general is apolitical.
Musharraf came to international attention in 1999 when India and Pakistan fought a short, bloody war in the Himalayas above a scruffy Kashmiri town called Kargil. The exact role the general played in the deployment of Pakistani paramilitaries across the frontier into India and in the fighting that followed is unclear but many say the venture was his idea. Whoever lay behind it, the two nuclear-capable nations came close to all-out war and it ended with a fairly ignominious withdrawal of Pakistani troops under massive international pressure.
But the conflict was just the prelude. Just months after its end, then prime minister Nawaz Sharif, corrupt and incompetent, made an ill-judged bid to fire Musharraf while he was out of the country and prompted a coup -- bloodless and largely welcomed in Pakistan.
Musharraf was flying back to Pakistan in a civilian plane which Sharif tried to divert to India. The general ordered the pilot to continue.
Finally the plane landed and, in the small hours of the morning, TV screens across Pakistan flickered back into life after a blackout and the nation saw its new leader, in combat fatigues, explaining, as all military coup leaders do, that the army had taken control for the good of the nation and for a temporary period. The men in khaki were back in power.
But what sort of a man was the new boss? Confident, affable, often charming, with a fondness for dogs and a taste for whisky and the occasional cigarette, hardly puritanical. Journalists turning up at Army House would find the president-general's wife sitting on the sofa eating pizza and watching films. Polite too, sometimes icily but always with the touch of courtesy learned from parents who invited their son's important visitors to drop by for tea at their humbler home. In short, from the Sandhurst wing of the Pakistani army, not the jihadi wing.
"A nationalist, a patriot, a soldier, but not an Islamist," one senior Pakistani ex-officer said.
A speech made months after taking power outlined his vision of a "moderate Islam" that denounced extremism, welcomed the rights of women (one of his earliest acts was to enforce a minimum quota of female member of parliament) and pledged economic progress and peaceful relations with the West. A self-admitted "economic half-literate," the technocrats around the president have pressed through a program of liberal reforms that have pushed growth rates to 10 percent -- though little of that has trickled down to the 50 percent of Pakistanis who do not even have safe drinking water. Under his rule, the number of TV channels has exploded and the press has remained relatively free -- though it has come under pressure recently.
another side
Yet there is another side to Musharraf. Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks on the US, he was telephoned by then US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage and told, according to the latter, that he was "with us or against us."
Musharraf said Armitage told him that the US would "bomb Pakistan into the Stone Age" if they made the wrong choice. This annoyed Musharraf and he admits that he made his decision (to help the US) on the basis of Pakistan's best interests, not on the basis of who was globally right or wrong.
There are persistent claims that Musharraf has milked Pakistan's position as a supporter of the "war on terror" to obtain massive aid from the US while simultaneously supporting the Taliban.
Actually, the situation is more complicated. There are powerful elements within Pakistan who do support the Taliban on whom, because of a lack of domestic political legitimacy, the president, hated by many jihadis, has been forced to go easy. Equally, there are elements that escape the president's control and a variety of complex and shifting agendas -- even within the country's sprawling security establishment.
No army or government has ever established control of the tribal zones where the Taliban have their bases and al-Qaeda are meant to be hiding, and hundreds of soldiers have died in recent years trying to do so. But equally there is no doubt that few Pakistani military strategists want to see the emergence of a strong, stable and independent Afghanistan with diplomatic and commercial links to regional rivals.
And though he has calmed relations with India since the two countries' nuclear stand-off over Kashmir, he pardoned Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father of Pakistan's bomb" who gave nuclear weapons technology to rogue states, including Iran and Libya. Equally, though hundreds of militants have been handed over to the US, promises to clean up the madrasah where poor Pakistanis receive often hard-line religious education, are unfulfilled.
And finally, Musharraf appears far from willing to relinquish his position just yet. With the 10-year anniversary of the coup not too distant, his initial pledge of a "temporary interruption of democracy" appears somewhat less than convincing.
Musharraf was asked on that afternoon in the garden of Army House eight years ago if it was good to be in control. The general thought for a second and then smiled.
"Yes," he answered.
Some things have remained unchanged.
Musharraf facts
● Best of times:
In 2004, a global poll by a respected US think tank found Musharraf to be the most popular leader in the world, with 86 percent rating him favorably, and 60 percent viewing him very favorably.
● Worst of times:
Musharraf has said he "literally wept" when he heard the "disgusting" news of the surrender of Pakistani troops during the Bangladesh war with India in 1971.
● What he says:
"What we [Muslims] need is introspection. Who are we, what do we as Muslims stand for, where are we going, where should we be headed and how can we reach it? The answers to these questions are ... Enlightened Moderation."
● What others say:
"Unfortunately the regime was unable to deliver on its promise of building a true democracy and instead it exploited the international community's concern about terrorism ... [militants] have thrived under the dictatorship of General Musharraf," said Benazir Bhutto, former Pakistani prime minister, now in exile.
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