ISLAMABAD (AP) — General Pervez Musharraf, who came to power in a bloodless coup and then led Pakistan reluctantly to support the United States’ war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, has died, officials say. know Sunday. He was 79.
Musharraf, a former special forces commando, became president following a series of military coups that have rocked Pakistan since its founding amid the bloody division of India in 1947. ruled a nuclear-weapon nation following a 1999 coup d’etat due to tensions with India, a nuclear proliferation scandal, and an insurgency by radical Islamists. He resigned in 2008 while facing possible impeachment.
Late in life, Musharraf lived in self-imposed exile in Dubai to avoid criminal charges, although he attempted to return to politics in 2012. But that didn’t happen as his ill health tormented those in need. last year of life. He maintains the fatalism of a soldier after avoiding the violent death that always seems to stalk him when Muslim militants twice target him for assassination.
Musharraf once wrote: “I have faced death and defied it several times in the past because fate and fate have always smiled on me.” “I just pray that I have more than nine lives of a cat.”
In June 2022, the Musharraf family announced that he had been hospitalized for weeks in Dubai while suffering from amyloidosis, an incurable condition that causes protein to build up in the body’s organs.
“Going through a difficult period when there was no recovery and organs malfunctioned,” the family said. They later said he also needed access to the drug daratumumab, which is used to treat multiple myeloma. That bone marrow cancer can cause amyloidosis.
Shazia Siraj, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani Consulate in Dubai, confirmed his death and said diplomats were providing support to his family. The Pakistani army also sent condolences.
“May Allah bless the departed soul and give strength to the bereaved family,” an army statement said.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif also offered similar condolences in a short statement.
“May God give his family the courage to bear this loss,” Sharif said.
Pakistan, a country nearly twice the size of California along the Arabian Sea, is now home to 220 million people. But it was the border with Afghanistan that would soon capture the attention of the United States and dominate Musharraf’s life less than two years after he took power.
Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden launched the September 11, 2001 attack from Afghanistan, sheltered by the country’s Taliban rulers. Musharraf knew what was coming next.
“America will surely react violently, like a wounded bear,” he wrote in his autobiography. “If the culprit turns out to be al-Qaida, then that wounded bear will head straight for us.”
On September 12, then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell told Musharraf that Pakistan would be “with us or against us.” Musharraf said another US official had threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” if the country chose the latter option.
Musharraf chose the former. A month later, he stood beside then-President George W. Bush at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to declare Pakistan’s unwavering support for Pakistan in fighting with the United States against “terrorism in all its forms. consciousness wherever it exists.”
Pakistan has become a key transit point for NATO supplies heading to landlocked Afghanistan. That was the case despite Pakistan’s powerful Interagency Intelligence agency backing the Taliban after it came to power in Afghanistan in 1994. Before that, the CIA and other organizations had transferred money and weapons. through the ISI for Muslim fighters fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan saw Taliban fighters flee across the border back to Pakistan, including bin Laden, whom the US would kill in 2011 at a compound in Abbottabad. They regrouped and the Pakistani branch of the Taliban emerged, starting a year-long insurgency in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The CIA began flying armed Predator drones from Pakistan with permission from Musharraf, using the runway built by the founding president of the United Arab Emirates for falconry in the Balochistan province of Pakistan. The program has helped repel militants but has seen more than 400 attacks in Pakistan alone kill at least 2,366 people – including 245 civilians, according to think tank New America Foundation. Foundation is based in Washington.
Although Pakistan under Musharraf conducted these operations, the militants thrived as billions of US dollars poured into the country. That led to suspicions that still plague the United States’ relationship with Pakistan.
“After 9/11, then-President Musharraf made the strategic move of abandoning the Taliban and supporting the US in the war on terror, but neither side believed that the other had lived up to expectations. from that decision,” said a 2009 US cable from there -Ambassador Anne Patterson released by WikiLeaks, describing what has become the diplomatic equivalent of a loveless marriage.
“The relationship is one of codependency that we reluctantly acknowledge – Pakistan knows that the US cannot ignore it; the US knows that Pakistan cannot exist without our support. .”
But Musharraf’s life will be at stake. Militants tried to assassinate him twice in 2003 by targeting his convoy, first with a bridge bomb and then a car bomb. That second strike saw Musharraf’s vehicle lifted into the air by the explosion before hitting the ground again. It ran to safety just on its rim, Musharraf pulling out his Glock pistol in case he needed to fight to get out.
It wasn’t until his wife, Sehba, saw the bloodied car that he realized the scale of the attack.
“She was always calm in the face of danger,” he recounts. But then, “she was screaming hysterically, uncontrollably.”
Born on August 11, 1943 in New Delhi, India, Musharraf is the middle son of a diplomat. His family fled to the west along with millions of other Muslims when Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan split during independence from Britain in 1947. This split has seen Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in riots and fighting.
Musharraf joined the Pakistani army at the age of 18 and established himself there when Islamabad fought three wars against India. He launched his own attempt to capture territory in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir in 1999 shortly before wresting power from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.
Sharif ordered Musharraf fired when the army chief flew home from a visit to Sri Lanka and denied his right to land his plane in Pakistan, even as it ran out of fuel. On the ground, the army took control, and after landing, Musharraf took over.
As ruler, however, Musharraf almost reached an agreement with India over Kashmir, according to US diplomats at the time. He also worked to mend the longtime rival of Pakistan.
Another major scandal surfaced under his rule when the world discovered that prominent Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan, long associated with the country’s atomic bomb, had sold designs. centrifuges and other secrets for countries including Iran, Libya and North Korea, earning tens of millions of dollars. USD. Those designs have enabled Pyongyang to arm itself with nuclear weapons, while centrifuges from Khan’s design are still spinning in Iran amid the collapse of Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
Musharraf said he was suspicious of Khan, but it wasn’t until 2003 when then-CIA director George Tenet showed him the blueprint for a Pakistani centrifuge that the scientist had sold that he realized the extent seriousness of what happened.
Khan will confess on state television in 2004 and Musharraf will pardon him, although he will be placed under house arrest after that.
Musharraf later wrote: “For many years, AQ’s lavish lifestyle and stories of wealth, possessions, corruption, and financial generosity paid by the state in general were all too well known. in the social and governmental circles of Islamabad”. “However, these were largely ignored. …In retrospect, that omission was clearly a grave mistake.”
Musharraf’s domestic support eventually eroded. He held erroneous elections in late 2002 — only after changing the constitution to give himself the overarching power to fire the prime minister and parliament. He then turned down his promise to step down as commander-in-chief of the army at the end of 2004.
Rebel anger towards Musharraf increased in 2007 when he ordered an attack on the Red Mosque in downtown Islamabad. It has become a refuge for militants who oppose Pakistan’s support for the Afghan war. The week-long campaign killed more than 100 people.
The incident severely damaged Musharraf’s reputation among the common people and made him an endless hatred of the warriors, who launched a series of punitive attacks after the raid. .
Fearing the judiciary would impede his continued rule, Musharraf fired the chief justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court. That sparked massive protests.
Under pressure at home and abroad to restore civilian rule, Musharraf resigned as commander-in-chief of the army. Despite winning another five-year presidential term, Musharraf faced a major crisis following the December 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto at a campaign rally as she sought to return to the presidency. Prime Minister for the third time.
The public suspected Musharraf of having a hand in the murder, which he denied. A later United Nations report acknowledged the Pakistani Taliban as the main suspect in her murder but warned that elements of the Pakistani intelligence agency may have been involved.
Musharraf resigned as president in August 2008 after ruling coalition officials threatened to impeach him for imposing emergency legislation and firing judges.
“I hope the country and the people will forgive my mistakes,” Musharraf, struggling with his feelings, said in an hour-long televised speech.
He later lived abroad in Dubai and London, trying to return to politics in 2012. But instead, Pakistan arrested the former general and placed him under house arrest. He faces treason charges over the failure of the Supreme Court and other charges stemming from the Red Mosque raid and Bhutto assassination.
The image of Musharraf being treated as a criminal suspect has shocked Pakistan, where army generals have long been seen as above the law. Pakistan allowed him to leave the country for Dubai in 2016 for medical treatment and he stayed there after facing a death sentence that was later reversed.
However, it shows that Pakistan may be willing to change a corner in its history of military rule.
“The resignation of Musharraf is a sad but familiar story of arrogance, this time in a soldier who never turned out to be a good politician,” Patterson, the US ambassador, wrote at the time.
“The good news is that the proven power of the institutions that brought down Musharraf – the media, free elections and civil society – also offers some hope for Pakistan’s future. Ironically, these very institutions became much stronger under his government.”
