







Friday

HE CLICKS his fingers, catches the beat and, with an unselfconscious shimmy, takes the floor. Swiveling on black patent leather, he locates his lady and, rather sweetly, they bob together, in a rhythmic two-step.

There's no denying it: General Pervez Musharraf may be no snake-hips, but he's got some moves. And he's got timing. As the music starts to fade, he inclines his head to Sebha, his wife of almost forty years, and they retire to their chairs.

Once reclined, Pakistan's military ruler pops a large cigar into his mouth and smiles on the scene—a small wedding-party in Lahore. As recorded on videotape by a pal of mine, whose tipsy giggles form part of the sound-track, General Musharraf looks relaxed. He waves at the bridegroom. He shakes a young admirer by the hand and pats him on the back.

Perhaps only a glass of whisky, the general's favourite tipple, it is said, is absent from a happy scene. Alas, General Musharraf cannot drink booze in public.

The video is entertaining but yields no surprises. In public and in private, General Musharraf is an average sort of man. He is affable and sensible. Though not the brightest general in the corps, he can usually spot good advice. He lacks the charm of his predecessor, General Zia ul-Haq; but nor is he cruel like Zia.

This is creditable. But it does not justify General Musharraf's self-appraisal. In July he said he must stay on as Pakistan's president and army chief because he was “indispensable”.

Perhaps the general should behave in politics as in disco—and quit before it gets embarrassing. His country almost certainly does not need him. It wants to see the back of him. Even government ministers say so.

Reuters

If he were to retire now to his easy-seat, General Musharraf might be thought of kindly in the years ahead. When he grabbed power, Pakistan's reputation was bad even by its standards. No government had completed its term for a decade. The economy was a wreck.

The mayhem that followed 9/11, soon after, made matters worse. It alerted the world to Pakistan's deep support for the Taliban—and to many fundamentalist maniacs of its own.

At the time, General Musharraf's straightforwardness was what was required. For dropping the Taliban and aligning Pakistan with America, he has been called courageous. I'd call it a no-brainer.

In his domestic policy, too, General Musharraf has mostly trod a decent middle-line. He has made the economy his priority. He has tried to make peace with India. Most Pakistanis supported his policies on both counts.

But support for General Musharraf's policies is not quite the same as support for him. He is probably not charismatic enough to be genuinely popular. And besides, he is a military ruler. This means, his good policies came at a cost, to Pakistan's democratic institutions—its courts, Parliament and the electoral commission. All have been bullied and subverted as the general has grappled for power.

Having experienced military dictators before, Pakistanis are wise to all of this. They appreciate a clutch of good policies; but would prefer good institutions. And ironically, out of the current crisis, one of these, an independent judiciary that upholds the constitution, threatens to emerge.

It is ironic because it is a direct result of General Musharraf's blundering. Had he not made such a hash of trying to sack Mr Chaudhry, there would have be no public support for the judges. And without that support, they would not now be trying to hold General Musharraf to account.

The music is fading. General Musharraf's chair is beckoning. But, being an ordinary man, he may just keep shuffling on.

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Thursday

WHEN I think of young Muslims getting radicalised, I think of Omar Sheikh. He is the Pakistani-Briton waiting to hang in Pakistan for killing Daniel Pearl, an American journalist. By chance, I had heard of Omar a long time back.

He was a slight friend of a good friend of mine; they met at the London School of Economics (LSE). Their backgrounds were not dissimilar: both were the sons of men who had left Lahore to seek their fortune. And having made it in England, they spent their time harping back to Pakistan. That was where their religion, and their culture, was—let neither boy forget it.

I remember my friend mentioning Omar at the time. He quite admired his seriousness, especially about Islam. But he felt sorry for him, too. I think he found him slightly unhinged. And when Omar turned up at the LSE, after a vacation in Bosnia to recruit willing hands for the Jihad there, well, that was enough for my friend.

In the years that followed, I remembered Omar. After all, he was getting famous: for kidnapping some British tourists in India, for being handed over by India to Pakistan—in Kandahar, via the Taliban!

But when Omar kidnapped Daniel Pearl in 2002, I had more or less forgotten about him. It was a slightly awful book, entitled “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?”, by a French writer, Bernard-Henri Lévy, that reminded me.

Mr Lévy reckoned Omar was working for Pakistani's Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). Maybe he was. But with its absurdly terrifying descriptions of Pakistan, with a fundamentalist killer on every corner, Mr Lévy's was not a serious book—though it was better than the autobiography of General Pervez Musharraf that came out last year. The general reckoned Omar was working for MI6.

When I moved to Pakistan in 2003 I fell in with a crowd who had also known Omar. A bunch of rich Punjabi swells, a privileged, frivolous lot, I met them through my LSE pal. But they didn't know Omar from the LSE. They knew him from Aitchison College.

AFP

Omar Sheikh: class warfare

A red-brick public school in the heart of Lahore, “Pakistan's Eton” is how it is sometimes described. Aitchison's main sport is tent-pegging: driving a lance through a peg from a galloping horse. Thus did British officers practice spearing pigs in the days of the Raj. But it was an unlikely sport, and an unlikely school, for Omar—at this time a 14-year-old budding arm-wrestling champ from the east end of London.

Then again, Omar's dad had moved back to Pakistan for a spell and he wanted the best for his son. The best was Aitchison and he could afford it.

How Omar had got on at the school, however, my swell Punjabis wouldn't or couldn't tell me. Most had shared a classroom with him, during the three years he spent there. But none of them had much to say about him. They clearly considered Omar an embarrassment.

And they had treated him as such—according to the account I heard over dinner in Islamabad last night, from another Aitchison boy of their year. He knew my rowdy friends, but he was not like them. A witty Wildean type, he said he was studious at school. Not much of a tent-pegger, I imagine.

In class, this new acquaintance of mine, let us call him Shah, sat next to Omar Sheikh. They were friends, of a sort. Shah thought Omar was basically all right. Even if he felt sorry for him and for his type.

That is, he felt sorry for the dozen Pakistani-Britons in that year at Aitchison. They were all sons of working-class Pakistanis who had emigrated to England and done well. They had been dispatched to Aitchison to be the Pakistani gents that their fathers never were. But of course, class doesn't work that way.

These working-class Pakistani-Brits were despised by the local tent-peggers. They scorned the interlopers' self-made fathers. They sneered at the boys sincere religiosity.

Omar was the king of these losers. If any tent-peggers dared laugh at Omar, he punched their lights out

The effect was devastating. The young Brits grouped together under siege. They were miserable and always bottom of the class. Reacting to the sneers, they grew beards, and grew even more religious. Shah said that one later tried to kill himself.

And Omar, he was the king of these losers. If any tent-peggers dared laugh at Omar, he punched their lights out. The truth is complicated. It always is. But, who knows, maybe this was when Omar got radicalised.

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Wednesday

WHEN conversing with a Pushtun, it is interesting to observe how he massages his feet. Indeed, it is hard not to do so. Seated cross-legged and bare-footed, the traditional Pushtun loves nothing more than to sip a glass of sweet green tea with one hand and caress the soles of his feet with the other.

It is a gesture designed to convey how entirely at ease with the world he is. Or, at least, that is its effect—as now, in the lodgings of the honourable Maulana Nek Zamin, member of Pakistan's national assembly for North Waziristan. Lining the walls are two dozen turbaned Pushtuns, bearded, impassive and administering the public pedicure that is their inalienable right.

I have called on Mr Zamin for a break from Pakistan's crisis-ridden national politics. This is appropriate, because Mr Zamin and his fellow Waziristanis can only loosely be described as Pakistani. Their semi-autonomous area, part of a tribal region that hugs the border with Afghanistan, is outside the bounds of Pakistan's regular criminal law. Political parties may not operate there – which is one reason that the tribes almost invariably elect Islamists, like Mr Zamin, to Parliament.

Another reason is that North Waziristan is the main refuge of the Taliban, those religious students turned holy warriors, who launch attacks into Afghanistan from its mountain remoteness. America says that al-Qaeda is well-organised among them.

Over the past month, in an effort to soothe his ally's fears, General Musharraf has redoubled military efforts against these militants, especially in North Waziristan. More than 60 soldiers and 250 militants are said to have been killed.

Yet Mr Zamin and his friends will hear no talk of violence and hate. From the moment I enter the room—to a solemn hand-shake from each of its occupants, plus a bearish embrace from the hulking maulana—they seek to make clear that they are a peace-loving lot.

“There are no Taliban in North Waziristan,” says Mr Zamin, with a kindly shake of his hennaed beard. “But what are these Taliban? They are the students of our madrassas—just as you have students at your universities of Oxford and Cambridge.”

This is not an original gambit. Across northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, the Pushtun territory, bearded men repeat the line with baffled indignation. And maybe some of them do see no distinction between scholarship and suicide-bombing. But I doubt it.

Anyway, I am not trying to find out how many Taliban there are in North Waziristan. I assume Mr Zamin will not tell me, even if he knows. My questions to him are less controversial. I ask whether Pakistan should rebuild the peculiar civil administration that British colonialists bequeathed to the tribal areas, and which seems to have dissolved in the current conflict. In addition, I'd like to know what parts of Pakistan's constitution the maulana would introduce to his region.

But I might as well ask whether Osama bin Laden is using his spare room. “The issues of North Waziristan,” the maulana repeats like a mantra, “can only be solved when the Western troops leave Afghanistan.”

Fair enough. I only have one more question. Can the maulana tell me anything about two corpses, allegedly of American spies, that according to newspaper reports turned up in North Waziristan yesterday? Pausing for a moment's reflection, he shakes his head. The maulana knows nothing about this. Around him, his bearded companions shake their heads and fondle their feet.

These corpses were found without heads. They did not have any arms either. As I say so, a quietness falls on the maulana's parliamentary digs. Each bearded man stares carefully forwards, avoiding his neighbour's eye.

I complete the report: “Nor did they have any legs.” And the maulana's men can no longer help themselves. Bearded smirks and muffled laughter ripple about the room. The maulana smiles and says: “There must have been some personal and political differences!” And the laughter continues. They like a good joke in North Waziristan.

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Tuesday

I USED to hate Islamabad, where I lived for a few months in 2003. A concrete new city, after a stringent grid design, it was built in the 1960s to exclude anything unseemly, chaotic or poor—which is to say, most of Pakistan.

Islamabad is Abuja, but without the Nigerians, who can never bore. It is Brussels, but without the old buildings and beer. There is nothing much here but government and diplomacy. Islamabad may be the most boring capital in the world.

Yet at least it is easy to get around. And, living as I do now in smoggy, log-jammed Delhi, I appreciate this fact. Breezing in along the airport road—past a notorious fibre-glass model of the Chagai hills, where Pakistan tested its nuclear bombs in 1998—I do not mourn the absence of any rickshaw, bus or truck. The city is open and approachable, as indeed, for the most part, are the bureaucrats, politicians and diplomats that it contains.

Nonetheless, even several days of engaging conversation here can leave you little the wiser about what is going on. Very often, your interlocutors don't know the truth either. Or else, as with American diplomats alarmingly often, they may think they know, but it turns out that they don't. The generals and intelligence chiefs of the Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI), who tend to rule Pakistan, as currently, do give interviews. But rarely do they give much away.

That leaves most of the country's 160m people playing an extravagant guessing game about what is afoot. Ample rumour, mystery and smug allusion are a result of this. Here are a few Pakistani favourites:

Q: Why did the ambulance ferrying Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the country's founding father) to hospital, as he was dying, break down? A: The Indians/Americans/ISI fixed the engine. Q: Why did a plane carrying Zia ul-Haq, a cruel army ruler of the 1970s and 80s, crash? A: The Americans/Indians/ISI blew it up. Q: Who destroyed the World Trade Centre in 2001? A: The Israelis. Or the CIA. Or maybe India did this one too, though I have yet to be told as much.

Where conspiracy theorising is a national habit, a certain amount of damn foolish conversation is unavoidable. By and large, however, Pakistanis are first-rate company. In particular, they rarely exhibit the prickly nationalism of their Indian cousins, which can be a turn-off for foreign guests. In its place, I often find, is a rather beautiful kindred sense, transcending frontiers of race and nationality, of wondering what the hell is going on.

Such is the mood at a party thrown by a friend, let us call him Sohail, at which many Pakistani journalists are gathered. The soirée is held upstairs while Sohail's brother, a successful arms dealer, gets his accountant drunk downstairs. The current political crisis, unsurprisingly, is hotly discussed. Plenty of wine and whisky ensures that, for about ten hours, this conversation never fades.

Naturally, there is no consensus on what is happening in Pakistan. But in Sohail's house, and other hideouts of Pakistan's chattering classes, this seems to be the most common view:

General Musharraf has had it, though his American friends don't know it.Benazir Bhutto, by appearing to cosy up to an unpopular military dictator, may have done herself and her party great harm.Nawaz Sharif, a late runner in this election contest, has profited from her error. In exile, he has thunderously ruled out co-operating with General Musharraf. All of a sudden, he is looking good for the election. Always assuming—though no Pakistani does assume this—that an election is held.

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Monday

SOMETHING is eating Aitzaz Ahsan. He is a new star, a hero of a trampled-upon democracy—the most popular man in Pakistan, some say. With an election looming, Mr Ahsan, a lawyer and member of the opposition Pakistan People's Party (PPP), should be pitching for greatness. So why, sitting in his charmingly chaotic chambers in Lahore, amid stacks of paper smelling faintly of mildew in the monsoon air, does Mr Ahsan look so glum?

First, some background. Mr Ahsan acted for Pakistan's chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, in a legal stand-off with General Pervez Musharraf that may have changed Pakistani history. In March General Musharraf tried to sack Mr Chaudhry. It seems he wanted a pliable top judge, which Mr Chaudhry, a vain and stubborn man, was not. But, in an act of civilian defiance previously unknown in Pakistan, Mr Chaudhry refused to go.

Cheering up slightly, Mr Ahsan proffers, unrequested, a few photographs of the scenes that ensued. After filing a challenge to his marching orders in the Supreme Court, Mr Chaudhry went on a grand tour. That is, he accepted invitations to address various of the country's bar associations. For this was not—you understand—a political protest.

Nonetheless, Mr Ahsan made sure that Mr Chaudhry visited, on the same day, every bar association to be found along Pakistan's main roads. In a twenty-hour crawl from Islamabad to Lahore—ostensibly to address bar associations en route – over 100,000 people turned out to cheer Mr Chaudhry.

Mr Ahsan displays photographs of that day. The chief justice—or “CJ”, as Pakistanis call him—is barely visible behind a wind-screen strewn with pink rose-petals. A few lawyers, in their funereal uniform of black jacket, black tie and white shirt, dance upon his car's bonnet. A throng of thousands presses in from the sides, waving Pakistani flags, PPP flags, the flags of all Pakistan's put-upon political parties.

Mr Ahsan suffered that day. He says he lost 8 pounds (3.5 kg) in sweat, after the car's air-conditioner became choked with petals. Yet he looks well on it—in a chiselled photo of himself superimposed upon another of the flag-waving throng, using a dreamscape technique popular in Communist regimes and Bollywood.

The photo shows Mr Ahsan microphone in hand, denouncing General Musharraf's rule. And indeed, it was he who took the CJ's battle to the masses. Mr Chaudhry, his lawyer concedes, is not much of a public speaker. Mr Ahsan is. And for this reason alone, no one won richer congratulations than he last month when the CJ was reinstated by his peers. So why the long face, Mr Ahsan?

AFP

Mr Chaudhry's petal-strewn progress

For one, rather like Maximus Decimus Meridius (Russell Crowe) in the film Gladiator, Mr Ahsan may have made himself a little too popular for his caesar's liking. His caesar is Benazir Bhutto, the PPP's leader, a former prime minister and the exiled daughter of the party's martyred former leader, Zulfiqar Ali.

Well, that is the conjecture, widely-believed in Pakistan. What is certain, however, is that even as Mr Ahsan was denouncing the “dictatorship” of General Musharraf, Ms Bhutto was negotiating a power-sharing deal with him.

Here is a glory of Pakistani politics. Even during two stints at the helm of Pakistan, Ms Bhutto, the leader of Pakistan's biggest and most liberal party, was willing to co-operate with the generals who man its guns. Now marooned, a fugitive in Dubai for almost a decade, she has looked ready to compromise again—if General Musharraf would only let her clamber back on-board.

America and Britain, important allies of the general, like the look of this accord. They want General Musharraf to remain in charge, at a time of Islamist strife in Pakistan. But they also want him to have more plausibly democratic and liberal support. That is to say, Ms Bhutto.

And here is another glory. Ms Bhutto, educated at Harvard and Oxford, sells herself as a die-hard liberal. And no doubt, in her personal beliefs, she is. Yet most liberal—which is to say, Westernised—Pakistanis, who mostly vote PPP, nonetheless grimace to hear her name.

There is nothing liberal about Ms Bhutto's running of her party, which she lords over like the Sindhi feudal leader that she is. During her eight years of absence from Pakistan, it has fallen into decline. Yet she has refused to countenance handing power to another leader.

Nor did Ms Bhutto's performance in power do much to inspire confidence. Even enemies of General Musharraf—of whom there are now many in Pakistan—tend not to demur when he accuses her of having looted the country.

Yet the problem for many liberal Pakistanis is the other guy—Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's other exiled ex-prime-minister. As leader of the opposition Pakistan Muslim League party (Nawaz), Mr Sharif presided over regimes that were about as corrupt as Ms Bhutto's, and more vindictive.

On his watch, dissidents were locked up and beaten. At the time that Mr Sharif was removed by General Musharraf in a coup, in 1999, he was trying to introduce sharia law—of which he was to be the final arbiter.

Now both Ms Bhutto and Mr Sharif are contemplating returning to Pakistan. And General Musharraf is looking weaker by the day—not least because of the judgements that the CJ has been dishing out. Last week, for example, he decreed that Mr Sharif was free to return home from exile, though General Musharraf had said he was not.

If Mr Sharif does return—and he says that he will do so within days—Ms Bhutto might quickly follow him. There might then be no deal between herself and General Musharraf. Instead, there will be more showers of pink petals and heady talk of democracy restored. That would be good for Pakistan, most of its inhabitants agree. But Mr Ahsan will not be alone in his discomfort.