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Early on in the narrative the author harks back to the beginning
of the Taliban rule when there was "a strange
confluence" of three bed fellows. Benazir Bhutto, the
secular — but ambitious and flawed — first woman prime
minister of the Islamic world; Pervez Musharraf, the secular
general, who was her Director General of Military Operations
(1993-1995) and Osama bin Laden who had re-emerged on the scene
in Afghanistan. Most of the book revolves around the threesome.
Of Pakistan’s
two ex-prime ministers — both twice-elected, both twice
deposed, both now in exile abroad — the author had an intimate
encounter with Benazir Bhutto. A tall, elegant, handsome woman
with "large luminous brown eyes, arched eyebrows and
swanlike neck", she "intentionally" hides her
looks behind owlish glasses, numerous head coverings and bulky
shawls. More, an Oxford and Radcliff educated Benazir has an
extremely well-stocked mind and a "very liberalised"
social life.
Described to her
as "a chameleon: a man who can be anything", Weaver
met Musharraf for the first time in September 2000. He wanted
her, and the world at large, to believe that he was "a
genuine patriot in the mold of Ataturk." More correctly,
she insists, he has launched Pakistan on its present militant
Islamist course.
From small
beginnings way back in 1986, Osama bin Laden led a small group
of a dozen or two men out of a cluster of caves in Afghanistan’s
Paktia province, just a stone’s throw from the Pakistan
frontier. And he has come a long way. He has managed to survive
US cruise-missile attacks, an unrelenting high-tech air
campaign, a succession of political crises, conspiracies and
attempts on his life. Nor was that all. By 9/11 some 5,000 or
more Islamic extremists from as many as 40 countries had trained
in his camps and were waging new jihads in Bosnia,
Tajikistan, and Kashmir and building Al-Qaida networks in
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Algeria and the Philippines,
the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Of the 19 young men responsible
for 9/11 no less than 15 came from Bin Laden’s Saudi Arabia!
Not unlike
Benazir, Bin Laden too was born in a patrician family and is a
western-educated management expert and high-tech engineer. Oddly
though he graduated to preach terror and Islamist politics. His
followers are a diversified lot: some from the madrasas and
barely literate; others, professors, generals, doctors,
economists.
A long time
foreign correspondent with The New Yorker, Mary Weaver is
also the author of A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey
through the World of Militant Islam.
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the wake of New Delhi’s determined bid to improve relations with
its western neighbour and Islamabad’s reasonably positive
response, there is a welcome thaw in an age-old hostility. Whether
this leads to a meaningful dialogue would depend at least partly, on
the policies and politics of Pakistan. For the record though, there
has been no end to false starts and hopes belied.
