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Musharraf promises to share some secrets from the war on terror, but in terms of what it reveals in this area In the Line of Fire is a disappointment. He reels off details about various operations to nab al-Qa’eda terrorists which in a nutshell prove that Pakistani intelligence is rather good at monitoring mobile phone calls. He says little or nothing new about Osama bin Laden, glosses over Islamabad’s long-standing support of terrorist groups in Kashmir and is hypocritical about relations with the Taleban in Afghanistan, a country that Pakistan has done so much to undermine and destroy over the years. The most he says about the interrogations which have provided so much intelligence on al-Qa’eda — which would make fascinating if grisly reading — is to call them ‘dark arts’. It is the nearest he comes to admitting torture as official state policy.
What the president doesn’t really explain, or try to, is why Pakistan produces such an awful lot of terrorists. He’s occasionally interesting at the tactical level, rarely on the strategic.
He tends to be revealing only unintentionally, as for instance when he displays hilariously unstatesmanlike pettiness while recalling the autumn of his military career:
I was third in seniority of lieutenant generals, though this happened because of some manipulation by the former army chief General Waheed Kakar to give the advantage of first position to Ali Kuli, whom he wanted to promote. If not for this unfair manipulation, I would have been first in line.
It is hardly as though Musharraf was hard done by. A man of modest talents, he was treated extremely well by the army and, like a number of his predecessors, decided he wouldn’t mind becoming president of Pakistan, but without the inconvenience of elections. So he seized power from the kleptocrat Nawaz Sharif in a coup in 1999, though he can’t even bring himself to acknowledge that, calling it ‘a counter-coup’ instead.
Musharraf has survived a couple of assassination attempts, though it doesn’t appear to have taught him humility. He boasts that ‘unlike most leaders, I am also a soldier, chief of the army staff and supreme commander of my country’s armed forces. I am cut out to be in the midst of battle.’
At a summit in Kathmandu in 2002, he famously extended his hand to the prime minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. ‘A loud gasp of awe (and I daresay admiration) went through the hall, full of stuffy officialdom, that the prime minister of “the largest democracy in the world” had been upstaged.’ Why he puts that expression in inverted commas is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it has something to do with being a military dictator.
The book is dedicated to ‘the people of Pakistan’, those unfortunates who have to endure the tedious, painful cycle of democratically elected politicians who are monsters of venality alternating with autocratic generals who come to power at the barrel of a gun. The proceeds of In the Line of Fire will, presumably, be going somewhere else.
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