**PROLOGUE: PAKISTAN AGAINST ITSELF **
From the tinted glass window of his speeding Mercedes Benz, President Musharraf could see a van racing towards his motorcade from the opposite side of the road, crushing to death a policeman who tried to block its way. It was a national holiday on 25 December 2003, and the road was deserted. Within seconds the van blew up with a huge explosion after hitting a security car at the tail end of the convoy. It was dark all around. The driver involuntarily pressed the brakes. ‘Accelerate. Don’t stop,’ the President shouted at him. The car had moved just 150 yards when another vehicle rammed into the car just behind him detonating 60 pounds of high explosives. The President’s car was trapped between the two explosions. Three of the tyres on the armour-plated presidential Mercedes were burst by the impact. Blood and body parts covered the vehicle. The driver pressed the accelerator and drove home on a single tyre. The assailant almost got him. ‘It was very close,’ the President later recalled. He was saved, perhaps, because a third bomber could not reach the assigned place in time.
It was the second attempt on Musharraf’s life in less than two weeks. Both attempts had taken place in Rawalpindi, the seat of the Pakistani military headquarters. The fact that explosives were placed under a bridge along the route of Musharraf’s motorcade, and that the terrorists’ vehicles were able to access his convoy in a zone where, supposedly, not the slightest movement could escape detection, was baffling. The assailants chose the same spot for both attacks. The route was used nearly every day by General Musharraf as he travelled from his residence to his presidential offices in Islamabad. Security was always tight when he travelled, with roads closed to allow his long motorcade to pass rapidly. It was even more vigilant on that day as Pakistan’s tiny Christian community celebrated Christmas. In both the attempts it was clear that the perpetrators had the assistance of experts and were given tracking and other devices not usually available to local terrorists. Having travelled to Islamabad hours before for a dinner he had hosted, Musharraf attributed his survival to ‘Allah’s blessings, his mother’s prayers and the nation’s goodwill’.
There was little doubt, however, about who was behind the attack. Professionally planned, it bore all the hallmarks of international terrorists, for whom General Musharraf had been a marked man. By official admission, it was the fourth attempt on General Musharraf’s life since 13 September 2001, when he decided to throw Pakistan’s lot in with the US war on terror. By unofficial accounts this might even have been the fifth or sixth such attempt. The General had been the beˆte noire of many people and groups out there, but especially the Islamist extremists.
Musharraf had put his own survival at stake by deciding to curb Islamic militancy after 9/11. Security around him had been tightened. His movements were kept secret and his travel route often changed because of growing fears of his meeting the fate of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian President who was assassinated by an Islamic militant after he made peace with Israel. The President became one of the most stringently protected men in the world. All traffic was stopped on his travel routes at least half an hour before he passed. The entire route was cleared by bomb disposal squads. But when it came to suicide bombing coordinated by insiders, one could not do much.
The assassination attempts right in the centre of Army Headquarters could not have been possible without inside contacts. The country’s intelligence agencies could not possibly be unaware of the identity of the groups and their ringleaders. Musharraf had tried to rein in his intelligence organizations, but with mixed results. Some of the ‘ideologized’ operatives were sidelined, but many more remained in important places from where they could continue to help the militants. It eventually emerged that it was soon after the US attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 that some 20 Islamic militants, many of them Afghan and Kashmir war veterans, had gathered at a house in Islamabad to discuss a plan to assassinate Musharraf for allying with the United States. The meeting was apparently organized by Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Amjad Hussain Farooqi, the two protaganists of the December 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane. Among the participants were two Pakistani army soldiers belonging to the elite special force.
Read the rest here:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/publicity/hussainexcerpt.html
About the Author
Zahid Hussain is the Pakistan correspondent for the Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.
Sounds very interesting. Anyone read it?