By Saeed Shah/The Wall Street Journal
Islamabad, February 5 Pervez Musharraf, the military ruler who emerged as a key U.S. ally in the wake of the September 11 attacks, has died at 79, according to Pakistan’s military.
Mr. Musharraf, a retired general, had been battling a longtime illness in Dubai, where he lived in exile, according to his family.
Mr. Musharraf seized power in 1999, ruling until he was ousted by a political opposition in 2008 after international support for him waned and cracks in support among Pakistan’s military brass began to appear.
Mr. Musharraf became Pakistan’s fourth military ruler since the country was formed in 1947 following a 1999 coup he led against then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Mr. Sharif was jailed and then sent into exile. The military coup was widely condemned internationally and Mr. Musharraf found himself isolated diplomatically.
On Sunday Nawaz Sharif’s younger brother, Shehbaz Sharif, the current prime minister, expressed condolences to the Musharraf family.
“May the departed soul rest in peace,” Mr. Shehbaz Sharif said on Twitter.
Mr. Musharraf initially found himself isolated on the world stage amid wide international condemnation of the military coup that brought him to power.
His status as an international pariah came to an end with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S. Washington suddenly needed Pakistan’s ruler to provide logistical support for the American invasion of neighboring Afghanistan, which launched in October of that year. U.S. financial aid was pumped into Pakistan in the following years.
In his 2006 autobiography, Mr. Musharraf wrote that a senior U.S. official told him Pakistan would be “bombed back to the Stone Age” if he didn’t comply. Washington denied making such a threat.
An alliance took shape that would define the leader’s rule with then-President George W. Bush calling him “a strong defender of freedom.” That included use of Pakistan’s airspace, bases and roads to ferry supplies to Afghanistan.
Tens of billions of U.S. aid dollars would flow into Pakistan as jihadists angry with the alliance unleashed a ferocious terrorist campaign inside the country. Multiple assassination attempts were made on Mr. Musharraf. Toward the end of his rule, in 2007, an even more concerted campaign of violence kicked off, leading to years of attacks on markets, mosques and military bases. Thousands of Pakistanis were killed.
Pakistan worked with the U.S. to hunt down dozens of senior al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, killing them with American drone strikes or taking them away to secret detention facilities. That included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, who was captured in Pakistan in 2003.
However the trail of the top target, al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, ran cold. It was after Mr. Musharraf left office that U.S. Special Forces found and killed the al Qaeda chief in northern Pakistan in 2011. Islamabad denied any knowledge of his presence, a position that was supported by Washington.
Mr. Musharraf allowed the Taliban to direct its insurgency in Afghanistan from Pakistani soil, even while formally supporting the U.S. war and secretly allowing Washington to use two Pakistani bases—which the U.S. used to fly drones to target al Qaeda and other jihadists on the fringes of Pakistani territory.
Years after leaving office, he told The Wall Street Journal that the Taliban provided a hedge against the influence of India in Afghanistan.
“There are enemies of Pakistan that have to be countered,” he said in 2015.
Mr. Musharraf was picked as army chief by then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1998, a decade after democracy had returned to Pakistan. But growing distrust between the two—fueled by Pakistan’s failed operation to seize a part of the disputed Kashmir region held by India—led Mr. Sharif to fire him in 1999, as the army chief was flying back to the country from a foreign trip. The army immediately set in motion the coup, staging the takeover by the time the plane landed.
Mr. Musharraf became Pakistan’s fourth military ruler since the country was formed in 1947. Over the course of his nine-year rule, during which he made himself president while remaining army chief, Mr. Musharraf failed to accomplish two of his goals: Cleaning up Pakistani politics and putting the country’s dismal economic trajectory on a better path.
Mr. Musharraf liked to portray himself as a proponent of what he called “enlightened moderation.” The previous military ruler, Gen. Zia ul Haq in the 1980s, had pushed an intolerant version of Islam in the country. Mr. Musharraf, in first photo opportunity after the coup, came before the cameras with his two little Pekingese pet dogs in his arms—dogs are considered unclean by many strict Muslims. The press was mostly free and, later on in his rule, he allowed private news stations to flourish.
It was on Pakistan’s other border, with archenemy India, where Mr. Musharraf almost had his greatest success. He came close to forging a deal which would have ended decades of hostility.
Mr. Musharraf engaged in covert peace talks with India and—between 2005 and 2006—the outlines of an accord emerged, which would have ended the nuclear-armed standoff.
Mr. Musharraf came to believe that it was the Indian military that ultimately didn’t want a deal, said Humayun Gauhar, a close friend and the ghost writer of Mr. Musharraf’s 2006 autobiography “In the Line of Fire.”
By then, political time was running out for Mr. Musharraf. Opposition arose from lawyers outraged by his ouster of the country’s chief justice in 2007. He later said he suspected power-hungry figures in his own military helped that resistance. As he fought for survival, the India initiative sank.
Under U.S. pressure, Mr. Musharraf agreed to allow former leader Benazir Bhutto to return from exile and run for prime minister. But he intended to stay on as president. While Ms. Bhutto was campaigning in December that year, she was killed in a suicide bombing. Her party, which blamed the military for her killing, nevertheless prevailed in the elections. The new parliament turned on Mr. Musharraf and he stepped down in 2008 to avoid impeachment, going into a comfortable exile.
That didn’t end his political ambitions. He flew back to Pakistan to contest the 2013 parliamentary elections, apparently believing people would welcome him home. No crowds greeted him. An election tribunal disqualified him from standing. Mr. Sharif’s government charged him with treason for violating the constitution. Prosecutors later charged him with involvement in Ms. Bhutto’s murder.
On his way to court for the treason charge, his convoy was intercepted by the military, which took him to a hospital. In 2016, he went into exile again in Dubai.
In 2019, a Pakistani court found him guilty of treason in absentia and sentenced him to death. A pro-military government was in power and the ruling was later quashed on a technicality by a different court.
Write to Saeed Shah at [email protected]
