Pervez Musharraf’s legacy in Pakistan

The following is an article I originally wrote when Pervez Musharraf passed away last year – at the time, publication complications eventually wore it out. This 2023-24 season marks some twenty years since a major civil war began in Pakistan under Musharraf’s watch, so I’ve published it here since it is too long for most outlets. Bism Allah.

It is hard to find a figure who attracts views as vehement and conflicting as General Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani dictator who passed away in exile in February 2023. To some Pakistanis, he was the dashing commando who presided over relative growth and reform; to others, he was a belligerent dictator who mounted a coup, ignited civil war, and wrecked the very reforms he claimed. To many foreigners, he was a benign autocrat who controlled supposed societal radicalism; to others, he was a double-crosser who played both sides of the American-foisted war on terror. To yet others, he was a blustering bully who sold his compatriots to the dungeons of the same war on terror that soon consumed Pakistan. That each of these statements contains some truth epitomizes the complicated but enduring impact that Musharraf left.

I have a personal as well as academic fascination with Musharraf, with whom my family has several links: my grandfather had been his army instructor, whose younger brother was both a colleague and a relative-by-marriage. That marriage had also brought another common relation, a Musharraf lieutenant of a very different cast: Shahid Aziz, formerly commander of Pakistan’s ground forces during Musharraf’s regime, an early loyalist who became increasingly and publicly embittered with his old friend. Musharraf therefore was and remains a regular feature in our family talks, and like many Pakistani families, he polarized opinions in mine.  

Background

As a junior officer, Musharraf acquired notoriety as a daring commando — an identity to which, when everything else failed, he would always retreat. He relished his reputation as a “soldier’s soldier,” and amid the often contradictory bluster he would profess in power, his attachment to the army seems the most sincere.

Along with Pakistan’s wars against India, Musharraf had experience fighting the 1970s Baloch insurgency in which Balochistan supremo Akbar Shahbaz, haughty chieftain of the Bugtis, sided with Islamabad against his local rivals. This contributed to a proxy conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan, each government backing the others’ insurgents before falling to military coups, that prefaced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan against which Pakistan’s then-military dictator Mohammad Ziaul-Haq played a major role, backed by the United States. Zia’s ambitions, which included spreading mujahideen resistance to Indian-occupied Kashmir, eventually diverged from a Washington more focused on containing Moscow, so that when he was killed in a plane crash, many Pakistanis suspected American involvement.

Years later, Musharraf claimed to have loathed Zia’s top-down “Islamization” that had purportedly wrecked the fabric of Pakistani society — a claim that became especially fashionable after 2001. In fact, political Islam was not the invention of Ziaul-Haq – both the early Pakistan movement and even civilian opposition to successive rulers had been replete with promises of contemporary Islamic revivalism. Instead the damage that he left had little to do with Islam and everything to do with the common dictatorial tactic – used by the likes of Iraq’s Abdul-Karim Qasim and Yemen’s Ali Saleh – of playing off different segments of the body politic in order to maintain supremacy, so that these fissures long outlasted the dictatorship itself. Coupled with the weaponry that flushed the country, courtesy supplies to the Afghan insurgency, and increased sectarianism linked partly to the Saudi-Iranian rivalry, this meant that much of Pakistan was wrought by violence during the 1980s and 1990s.

Despite the domestic turmoil of the 1990s, the Pakistan military pursued its foreign policy with relative freedom. These included supporting Muslim resistance in Kashmir, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. But Pakistan found that the militants they backed were difficult to control. The Afghan militants who conquered Kabul in 1992 proceeded to confound Pakistan’s expected tutelage in vicious internecine disputes; such was the confusion that often different officials would support different Afghan factions. This problem was, as Islamabad saw it, partly solved through the takeover by the more cohesive Taliban movement led by Umar Mujahid, seen as a “correction” of the vaunted jihad. Pakistan was one of the three countries to officially recognize the Taliban government, putting it at odds with other regional states and eventually the United States.

The other military aim, directly contradicting Washington, was the nuclear race with India. In the 1980s, shared hostility toward the Soviets had prompted the United States to turn a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear program, even vetoing an Israeli plan to scupper it. After the Cold War ended, Pakistan was no longer a “frontline state,” and Washington, now a global superpower in no small part thanks to Islamabad’s support in Afghanistan, levied harsh restrictions that galled the more because they contrasted so starkly with indulgence toward India. This was most obvious when both countries, India first, launched nuclear tests in May 1998: the “world’s biggest democracy” received the feeblest of protests, with Washington soon taking a pro-India stance, while Pakistan was browbeaten. The “Islamic bomb” celebrated in Pakistan drew more alarm abroad in an age when “Islamic fundamentalism” replaced communism as Washington’s bane. This fed a mistrust by their supposed allies in the Pakistani establishment, particularly the military, that was not often appreciated by outsiders.

War and Coup

By this point prime minister Nawaz Sharif was firmly in control. This conservative industrialist-turned-politician, first promoted by Ziaul-Haq, was renowned for trying to coopt or coerce institutions; after subduing the presidency and judiciary, he turned to the military and selected Musharraf, wrongly assumed to be politically isolated as a Muhajir in a mainly Punjabi and Pashtun officer corps. It was a spectacular misjudgement: unlike his immediate predecessors, Musharraf was an ambitious adventurer, his hawkishness toward India winning him early support within the army and without. Unusually for soldiers of his generation, however, Musharraf shared Nawaz’s concern about placating Washington: the United States, he had announced in his first meeting as army commander, was a reality that Pakistan had to contend with.

Yet in May 1999 Musharraf directly disregarded Washington with a sudden attack on strategic highpoints in the Kargil region. The operation required no little nerve: it was the first and perhaps final time that nuclear powers would directly go to war. A tactically brilliant maneouvre proved a political and strategic blunder. The prime minister had been informed, but given a benign view of the risks. Musharraf apparently felt that a fait accompli would internationalize the Kashmir issue, but he also presumed that airforce commander Pervaiz Qureshi, a former roommate who had played a decisive role in approving the nuclear tests, would back him up. Instead, Qureshi refused to escalate the issue to the point of no return – a long view that in the short run exposed the soldiers in the heights to Indian airpower. Nawaz hurried to Washington to explain the Pakistani position but, much to the army’s disgust, quailed under Bill Clinton’s stare. Eventually the entire Rawalpindi corps, led by lieutenant Mahmud Ahmed, was drawn into the war, but forced to withdraw with heavy losses.

After the Kargil failure, Sharif and Musharraf circled each other. The prime minister felt that he had been manipulated by the army into a costly misadventure, the army commander felt that the government had buckled, and both were right. It was Sharif who blinked first. In October 1999, when Musharraf was returning from a professional trip, he decided to purge the army commander in the clumsiest fashion possible, barring his flight from landing. But Musharraf’s army loyalists were well-placed: Rawalpindi corps commander Mahmud Ahmed and ground commander Muhammad Aziz, his two main lieutenants at Kargil, controlled troops at the capital, his in-law Shahid Aziz led operations, and the trio forced Nawaz to resign in a bloodless coup. Cleared to land at Karachi by corps commander Muzaffar Usmani, Musharraf took power.

Early on Musharraf courted an initially receptive public by setting up a military-controlled anti-corruption board and increasing support to Kashmir’s resistance, but the latter, exhausted by squabbles and a decade’s repression, was locked into a bloody stalemate. Meanwhile, the judiciary only recognized him on the condition of a prompt election. Musharraf would coopt politicians — often opportunist defectors from Sharif and Bhutto’s parties — to his Quaid League: its platform was a vague mix of broad patriotism and immediate loyalty to the palace, and the entrenched politicians it attracted contrasted starkly with his promise to clean up corruption.

Adding to Musharraf’s domestic troubles was the country’s relationship with the world’s sole superpower. The United States’ hostile reception to the coup doubled Pakistan’s isolation and provoked in him a desperation to placate Washington that would define his rule. So unreceptive was Clinton that in July 2000, Musharraf had to appeal to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to put in a good word. 

A Turning Point?

Musharraf’s politics transformed after the September 2001 attacks that launched the world into America’s Global War on Terror. Indeed his reported first reaction was to relocate nuclear warheads in trucks, a move taken by longstanding confidante Khalid Kidwai. This has long been portrayed in Washington as a preventative move against terrorists seizing nuclear weapons, but it is far likelier that it was American subterfuge that was more feared than any terrorists; some of Musharraf’s inner circle who I know still believe that Washington intended to take the opportunity to defang Pakistan’s arsenal. Offend though this may American ears, such thoughts even in the Pakistani corridors of power were the result of years of suspicion and frustration over the nuclear issue, and help explain subsequent policy. Pakistan would continue to deflect future American attempts to track the nuclear assets for years. Some relatives even today claim that the concessions he made were “necessary evils” against the greater danger of risking nuclear assets against a ravenous Washington.

More directly, Musharraf expected an injured Washington to lash out at Afghanistan and potentially even, as India openly hoped, Pakistan. He first sent to Afghanistan Mahmud, then trying to reason in Washington with deputy foreign minister Richard Armitage, who imperiously dismissed the Pakistani spymaster as an Islamist ideologue and would later be accused by Musharraf of brutish threats. Accompanied by Islamic preachers – including today’s mufti Taqi Usmani – Mahmud tried to convince Umar to extradite Bin Ladin, but the Taliban emir considered himself in no position to make such a move. As Musharraf told it, he had tried to help Umar help himself, and the Taliban emir had obtusely refused. It was here that he made a sharp U-turn on Pakistani policy and presented himself to the United States as an unconditional supporter.

Musharraf quickly cultivated a personal bonhomie with Washington. The dictator’s liberal lifestyle, pro-American pronouncements, and hard-charging bluster were exactly the combination that George Bush valued in the war on terror. Among the American officials Musharraf charmed were generals Colin Powell, who saw him as a fellow soldier-statesman, and Tommy Franks, fond of ruminating about military rule in a post-terrorism United States and perhaps seeing him as an analogy. The United States ended Pakistan’s isolation, pledged major aid, and gave Musharraf a long leash because, as he convinced them, he needed room to maneuver in a country hostile to the American adventure.

To show commitment, Musharraf made a dramatic military purge: when most lieutenants balked at supporting the Afghanistan invasion, he promptly sacked the most conscientious objectors— spymaster Mahmud, who was slandered as having betrayed his brief, and army second-in-command Usmani, two key players in the 1999 coup —  while others were largely sidelined to sinecures. American doubts were further assuaged by snatching and turning over large numbers of prisoners, largely civilians, who were often subjected to sadistically imaginative forms of torture, in the new prison at Guantanamo Bay.

There were limits to Musharraf’s concessions. Just before the invasion, he sent his new spymaster, General Ehsanul-Haq, to caution once more against drawing the Taliban into the crosshairs of a war against al-Qaida. It was too little too late to move a Washington gnashing at the bit for public revenge, but Musharraf’s personal links did ensure that Bush would initially not push too hard, reluctant to embarrass his new friend before a Pakistani public obviously hostile to the war. Large numbers of Taliban would reorganize in Pakistan, and their main headquarters in Balochistan would remain off-limits to the American airstrikes for which Musharraf was elsewhere increasingly accommodating.

But this was not done out of affection: unlike his sympathetic colleagues, Musharraf saw the Taliban strictly as insurance assets to be corralled in a way that Pakistan had not done previously. Even such pro-Pakistan Taliban networks as the Haqqanis would be subjected to periodic arrests, mistreatment, and threats to keep in line: in an early warning shot, their ambassador, Abdul-Salam Zaeef, was abducted and sent to Guantanamo. Such moves discomfited even Musharraf’s seasoned lieutenants, but for the moment, they stayed silent.

That Musharraf was able to change direction so sharply was partly because India had tried to capitalize on the markedly anti-Muslim international environment of the day to implicate Pakistan. This threat helped Musharraf rally behind him segments of society, and the military, who might have otherwise objected. In December 2001, an attack on India’s parliament was blamed on a Pakistani militia, and some half-million Indian troops pitted on the border against the Pakistani army. The crisis also meant Musharraf could ban many militant groups, with varying effects; some reemerged, with a nod and wink, under new labels, while others broke up and proceeded to try and force a return to the previous policy through pointedly grotesque acts. In so doing, they fed Musharraf’s narrative for Washington that he was a one-man bulwark against radicalism.

The long-awaited election was carefully controlled: while a coalition of pro-Taliban Islamists won in the largely Pashtun northwest province abutting Afghanistan, the Quaid League prevailed in the other provinces. In Musharraf’s home province Sindh they did so after the dictator’s alliance with the once-hostile Muttahida Qaumi Movement, whose candidate Ishratul-Ibad Khan became a long-standing governor-general. In the cornucopia of militia-backed parties rampant in Sindh, Muttahida had been the most formidable, with a reputation for thuggery that even Musharraf recognized. Elections, though, were beside the point: as his agreement with Muttahida showed, Musharraf was able to concentrate power to a remarkable extent. Prime ministers could be promoted and dismissed based on his personal assessment, and he would eventually get a parliamentary stamp for the fait accompli of centralized power.

Such personalized power helped begin another policy reversal: negotiations with India. This was conducted, initially in secret, by Musharraf’s Tariq Aziz, the culmination of a longstanding belief that the United States as guarantor held the key to the Indo-Pak competition. The fact that Washington had given India a marked preference since the Cold War ended seems not to have crossed his mind: if he thought that his personage would countermand this, he proved quite wrong. Though a council of Pakistan-backed Kashmiri groups acquired diplomatic status in some international forums — and Musharraf insisted that this was the result of the Kargil adventure — in fact, this meant little as they were effectively sidelined at a negotiating table inherently skewed in India’s favor.

Nukes and Militants

Coupled with other concessions, this looked flatly like treason to not only the sidelined militant groups but also much of an army that had, after all, spent most of its existence in conflict with India. This combination was fertile ground for al-Qaida’s influence to spread. Ensconced in northwest Pakistan’s Pashtun borderlands, al-Qaida leaders made contact with disaffected militants and army officers. A case in point was Ilyas Kashmiri: this commando-turned-militant now turned his ire on Musharraf, whose knack for “soldier’s soldier” bravado he ironically matched, and cultivated his network of army sympathizers. In December 2003, even as he watched the American capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with morbid fascination, Musharraf narrowly survived two assassination attempts linked to Ilyas.

This preceded a mortifying crisis that Musharraf would see as the biggest of his career, which jeopardized both relations with Washington and Pakistani control over its nuclear assets. His Libyan counterpart Muammar Qaddhafi had been sufficiently intimidated by Saddam’s fate to abandon his own nuclear ambitions, and in the process reveal Pakistan’s role in having helped Libya as well as Iran and North Korea. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the most bombastic scientist from Pakistan’s nuclear program, was an easy scapegoat, but his domestic reputation also precluded Musharraf from turning him over to Washington, instead maintaining a house arrest that proved embarrassing for everybody concerned.

Both because of militant threats and to assuage misgivings, Musharraf permitted American spies and airstrikes access to Pakistan’s far northwest. He also sent the army into a region that he always maintained, with near-colonial contempt, could only be controlled with blunt force. Al-Qaida was, admittedly, canvassing support; however, the division-sized expeditions that Musharraf sent into this historically autonomous region from spring 2004 were quite gratuitous, and the consequent upheaval only increased militant appeal. Several adventurers, misleadingly referred to as “Taliban” on account of their professed sympathy for the ousted Afghan regime, emerged to fight the army to a standstill in the Waziristan region, painting themselves as local defenders of the Pashtun outback against a treacherous army.

The variability among these insurgents, and the fact that Islamabad viewed their Taliban namesakes as assets, led to a confused policy. Thus corps commander Safdar Hussain would follow campaigns in Waziristan with public ceasefires signed with local commanders, such as Naik-Mohammad from the Wazir clan and Ubaidullah Baitullah from the Mahsud clan, whom he praised but politely insisted confine their war to Afghanistan. Others, such as Gul Bahadur and Mohammad Nazir, maintained a complicated and entirely transactional relation with the state that depended on local dynamics barely understood or countenanced in Islamabad.

Waziristan was not the only part of western Pakistan to burst aflame. Musharraf had reached out to India, but with such few guarantees besides the promises of a pro-India Washington that New Delhi leapt at Pakistan’s exposed underbelly. In a broad sense, this included systematic attempts to isolate Pakistan on the international scene, with systemic mass disinformation a favored strategy. More directly, the Afghanistan invasion had brought in a security establishment at Kabul with longstanding ties to India and hostility toward a Pakistan seen as essentially pro-Taliban. A set of India-backed bases on Afghanistan’s border with Balochistan were set up to support a bubbling insurgency led by the fickle Bugti chieftain Akbar, who had supported Pakistan in the 1970s but now spied an opportunity from unrest against the military regime.

Musharraf responded with the same bombast — blunt threats and force — as in Waziristan. He entrusted his protégés, Nadeem Ijaz and Hamid Rabnawaz, to a repression conducted, because it did not fit the American-approved war on “radical Islam,” in far more secrecy than in Waziristan. Such tactics as mass bombardment backfired and swelled the opposition’s ranks. So did the death, seen by his supporters as martyrdom, of Akbar in an explosion during negotiations with the army in the summer of 2006. Amid widespread outrage in Balochistan, Musharraf was unrepentant, incongruously accusing the old opportunist of a suicide attack.

Locked in

Musharraf was by now firmly locked into “war on terror” mode even as his principal liaisons — the United States as prospective suzerain, and the Taliban as prospective asset — were heading to a standoff. In 2004 he attempted to pathologize opposition to the contradictions of his rule by highlighting supposed societal radicalism that was placed under such politically convenient labels as “Talibanization” —–a fatuous word, ironically originating among Pakistan’s regional rivals in the 1990s, that in Islamabad’s cooptation sought to blame Taliban influence for problems that long predated them, such as sectarianism and militancy. 

Musharraf’s proposed solution was “enlightened moderation,” a buzzword that claimed to reimagine Islam in a way amenable to the American war on terror. Equally absurd claims, such as reducing militancy to the supposed stupor of Islamic madrasas, which the government attempted to control through incompetent officials, polarized society. And a braggadocious autobiography, produced largely for American consumption, succeeded more in antagonizing Pakistanis, replete with tasteless boasts about collaboration in the war on terror and incongruous claims that Sharif’s purge against him had been a “coup.”

Yet, the Taliban were increasingly relied on, not only to countermand Kabul’s India-propped subversion, but also solve disputes that partly arose from Musharraf’s policy. Taliban leaders were repeatedly wheeled out to negotiate on Islamabad’s behalf with Pakistani militants in the northwest . In spite of their resentment toward Musharraf, the Afghan insurgency recognized the need for a Pakistani fallback to fight at home and thus repeatedly pled against any attack on Islamabad — only to be kicked in the teeth, once a gesture was required to alleviate American suspicions; this, in turn, enabled the Pakistani insurgency to freely disregard their Afghan counterparts’ caution.

The starkest of several examples of this bizarre quadrangle came after a who’s who of Taliban leaders, including today’s interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, helped Pakistani governor-general Ali Aurakzai negotiate a ceasefire with the insurgency at North Waziristan. An indignant Washington responded by effectively sabotaging the ceasefire with an airstrike killing some eighty people, at a Bajaur seminary. Embarrassed at the ensuing outcry, Musharraf tried to cover it up by taking credit, and imprisoned in squalid conditions Taliban second-in-command Ubaidullah Akhund, who had helped negotiate the ceasefire on his behalf, to impress a visiting Dick Cheney. Mahsud adventurer Baitullah tapped into Taliban indignation, trapping a convoy of Pakistani troops and securing in return the release of Sirajuddin’s imprisoned relatives. Under such circumstances, it became difficult for the Taliban to protest with any credibility at their Pakistani namesakes, who would embark on a spree of increasingly wanton violence over the next few years.

The beginning of the end

So far, Musharraf’s contradictory policies had impacted the relative periphery of western Pakistan. In July 2007, matters reached a head at the capital when Abdul-Rasheed Ghazi, a bin-Ladin sympathizer whose family had once been backed by the state, mounted an “Islamic revolution” by garrisoning students and weaponry at their distinctive red mosque in Islamabad, prompting commandos to surround the building. Negotiations by, among others, Taqi Usmani and Saudi imam Abdul-Rahman Sudais made no headway and a stray shot prompted a crackdown. The bloodshed could not be kept out of the spotlight. Overnight anger boiled over, with a cornucopia of militants attacking or taking over parts of northwest Pakistan while taking the fight to the rest of the country in extremely bloody terrorist acts.

Musharraf’s focus was by now on survival. Having long alienated the conservative segment of Pakistani society, he had also recently alienated the liberal chattering classes by suspending chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry over, depending on who one asks, either the judge’s personal conduct or investigation into the Balochistan bloodshed. This provoked mass lawyer protests against Musharraf, well-received in his target constituency of Washington, that forced him onto the back foot. While grievances against Musharraf were organic, however, the episode also proved a springboard for the prime ministers of the 1990s, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. Benazir’s many lobbyists in Washington particularly beat Musharraf at his game of telling the United States what they wanted to hear, portraying a suitably secularist, avowedly democratic, photogenically female leader who would combat radicalism more comprehensively. 

Under American pressure, Musharraf handed over army command to spymaster Ashfaq Kayani, and removed corruption charges so that both Benazir and Sharif returned to Pakistan. This was the last straw: among the lieutenants who now left his side was his and our relative Shahid Aziz, who resigned from the anticorruption board and mounted a series of broadsides against the scrabbling dictator. Long a critic of the invasion of Afghanistan, Aziz had still persisted with Musharraf because he saw him as preferable both to the dynasts and the very real Indian threat. Yet, with India very much on the upswing and the dynasts back in the running, none of these excuses held anymore.

Benazir, welcomed home by one of the massive bomb blasts that now caused havoc across Pakistan, mistrusted the army and claimed that Musharraf should be held responsible for any harm to her. If this was meant as insurance to assure the dictator’s good behavior, it also exposed her to another angle of attack. In December 2007, Benazir was publicly assassinated in Rawalpindi, the subsequent public sympathy for a “martyr” who had predicted her own murder helping her husband Asif Zardari to an easy victory in the election. Opinion remains split on the culprit, with cynical rumours often blaming a paranoid Musharraf or an unscrupulous Zardari. The real answer was probably Baitullah, who presumably found in Benazir’s words an opportunity to hit Musharraf where it hurt: in the eyes of his American backers. Though Baitullah denied involvement, a posthumous book by his lieutenant, Nur-Wali Asim, takes credit.

Coupled with the war in Afghanistan, this condemned Musharraf to a Washington already irritated at the relative limits he maintained on their operations in Pakistan. Shorn of military command, political power, and foreign support, in 2008 Musharraf fled abroad. He would make a brief return to participate in the 2013 election, only to flee again on health grounds after Kayani, who had pursued the army’s balancing act with far greater tact, declined to back him.

Many American reflections still see Musharraf as a backstabber ultimately to blame for their defeat in Afghanistan because he did not crack down sufficiently hard on the Taliban. Such was the suspicion that after Musharraf’s ouster, his aide and last spymaster Nadeem Taj, who had been with him from the start, was dismissed amid heavy US pressure: only once before, in 1993, had the United States removed a Pakistani spymaster. On that occasion the charge had been “Islamic fundamentalism,”, and the fact that Washington targeted a Musharraf confidante indicates that they had similar suspicions about the purveyor of “enlightened moderation.” This must have particularly dismayed a man who had put so much effort into charming Washington.

MUSHARRAF’S LEGACY

Among many Pakistanis, Musharraf is remembered in the opposite way: a symbol of the war on terror. This is not an entirely fair assessment – Musharraf’s Americophilia did have its limits, even if these were beyond what most compatriots would consider the pale; it was not he, but the vaunted mujahid Bin Ladin, who had consciously instigated the invasion of Afghanistan, and he was far from the worst regional ruler, or even Pakistani ruler, to profit off the war on terror.

But unlike other regional governments that had welcomed the war – New Delhi, Dushanbe, Tashkent, even Tehran – Islamabad had in 2001 improvised a sharp U-turn to appease a policy it knew was wrongheaded from the start. Musharraf had not only supported the nastier elements of US counterterrorism – abductions, airstrikes, arbitrary extremism indicators – but did with a tasteless relish, gleefully boasting of his role in a way that more politic American collaborators, such as Zardari’s prime minister Yousuf Gilani, who sought out US protection, did not.

Within my family, opinion remains divided, with some backing the bitter criticism of Shahid Aziz. Musharraf’s supporters insist that, far from a “Busharraf”, he had masterfully tricked the “wounded bear” after 2001, that he had kept the Americans in the dark about the Afghan insurgency’s back door in Pakistan, and point out the ire with which he was seen by the end. It is certainly true that Musharraf could have mounted a far more sweeping crackdown after 2001 than he did and that by the time he was gone, the Americans who supposedly puppeteered him were glad to see him out: the supposed democrats who came in his wake were at least as pliable.

Yet this is a selective narrative that ignores the twists and turns of Musharraf’s decisions. Rather than a grand strategy of beating the superpower at its own game, he constantly improvised to events, often with huge sociopolitical costs to which he was stubbornly oblivious. Nearly every plan backfired. He had bet on personal connections to promote Pakistan’s interests even as Washington drew unmistakably closer to New Delhi. In Afghanistan, he had buyer’s remorse after betting on Hamid Karzai to counter Indian influence in 2001. In the northwest, a combination of al-Qaida influence and American pressure escalated a straightforward manhunt into a near-existential civil war. He had come to power on the claim of supporting Kashmiris, only to sideline them in a failed detente with India. Fatally, he had made drastic changes in policy with more attention to Washington’s real or imagined reaction than the effects it would have on society.

If Musharraf was playing the United States, the game went both ways: Washington, recognizing his narrowing base in Pakistan, had the leverage to push him harder. With every year, the dictator isolated himself further in Pakistani society, concessions going from understandable to inexplicable. For instance, nobody —– not Musharraf and, even if he had been more accommodating, Taliban leader Umar —– could have stopped a fuming Washington from making a public example out of Afghanistan in 2001; Pakistan’s decision makes a cynical short-run sense when considering the simultaneous crisis with an India trying to implicate Islamabad. But it had been possible to give ground without throwing hapless bystanders into the Guantanamo grind. It had been possible to hunt terrorists without a military escalation at home that had begun with the intent of impressing Bush. The Taliban, Musharraf had hissed at Mahmud in 2001 and was fond of repeating thereafter in self-justification, were not worth committing suicide; nor, Mahmud might reasonably retort in retrospect, was the United States.

Even with critics, Musharraf’s legacy survives. Imran Khan, whose momentum to the prime ministership began with public denouncements of the American airstrikes that Musharraf had first permitted, borrowed heavily from Musharraf’s kitchen cabinet of talented but politically frail technocrats. The anticorruption bureau that Musharraf founded remains, as detested by the Sharifs as ever. Some of Pakistan still remembers the dictator, if not fondly, as preferable to the dynasts who dominated the next decade..

But most of Musharraf’s schemes failed, setting or entrenching destructive patterns on the way: the mayhem in western Pakistan, airstrikes and assassinations, the entrenchment of personalistic rule behind talk of democracy and patriotism, and the conviction behind it among Pakistani leaders, civilians and soldiers alike, that foreign patronage brings better returns than local legitimacy. As the past two years in Pakistan have shown, where Imran’s government was ousted upon exaggerated hopes of American patronage, this attitude continues to thrive in the Pakistani elite.