Binary threat and fuzzy response

Almost everything in General Pervez Musharraf's autobiography is going to be hotly debated in India, but one thing seems certain: everyone interested in Pakistan, Kashmir, India's foreign policy, terrorism and civil-military relations will read the book cover to cover. Allegedly ghost-written by Humayun Gauhar (the son of Altaf Gauhar, who ghost-wrote Field Marshall Ayub Khan's 1968 autobiography, Friends, not Masters), the voice that booms forth from every page of In the Line of Fire is unmistakably that of Musharraf himself.

The general has never been known for his modesty, and this book is not going to change that. He tells the story of a young boy who defied death in a 1947 train journey to Karachi, travelling through bands of marauding Sikhs to his eventual destiny as the president of Pakistan. Defying death is a recurring theme through Musharraf's saga of machismo, and he recounts in gleeful detail nine separate narrow escapes. One of them was when he fell off a mango tree as a child, and most of the others involved missed air crashes, but that does not prevent him from believing that it was only divine design that delivered him the presidency of Pakistan.

Although Musharraf tells his story in the hectoring tone of a general lecturing his subordinates, the story is a riveting one, a view from the lip of a volcano into the smoking, bubbling crater below. The often-inscrutable relationship between the polity and the army is brilliantly illustrated by Musharraf's description of his elevation to army chief after the enforced resignation of his predecessor, General Jahangir Karamat. Relaxing at home late one evening in October 1998, Musharraf recounts a phone call from Nawaz Sharif's residence, summoning him to the PM's home and ordering him not to tell even his chief. Musharraf obeyed those instructions and was appointed army chief by Nawaz Sharif. A year later, when Sharif tried to sack Musharraf after the Kargil debacle, it was time for ISI Chief Lt Gen Ziauddin to decide whether to obey Sharif or stay loyal to the army. Like Musharraf, Ziauddin found the prospect of promotion too alluring to resist; unlike Musharraf, Ziauddin didn't have God's grace.

Musharraf's account of the ensuing coup, in which he supplanted Nawaz Sharif as the ruler of Pakistan, is the most spellbinding, do-it-yourself description that exists of a modern military coup d'etat.

Another revealing chapter, though not in the way Musharraf meant it to be, is on his "political reform" within Pakistan through the introduction of "grassroots democracy"""very similar to Ayub Khan's "basic democracies"""and the cynical creation of a puppet political party, the Pakistan Muslim League (Qaid-e-Azam), to support the general's agenda. For academics who study civil-military relations, Musharraf's book is a reassuring text that could well be prescribed for students. The general validates every theoretical tenet of praetorian behaviour (actions by military usurpers), especially in his claim to being democratic in his appropriation of the civil institutions that he has supplanted.

But there is cynical contempt in the way he writes about politicians, especially about his prime ministers, Jamali and Shaukat Aziz.

The most disappointing parts of the book are the ones that describe, in excruciating detail, Pakistan's hunt for the Al Qaeda, Taliban and the terrorists who had the gumption to try blowing up the general.

But even in these unremarkable chapters, interesting nuggets keep cropping up""like Musharraf's troubling admission that the lower ranks of even elite military commandos have been infiltrated by jehadi groups, and that the terrorists who tried to assassinate him were trained in terrorist camps in PoK.

Musharraf departs from other military dictators not just in his forthrightness, but also in displaying a penchant for heavy-handed humour. In response to an alleged threat from US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to "bomb Pakistan back into the Stone Age", Musharraf declares his first response, before better sense prevailed, was to tell Armitage to "go forth and multiply, or words to that effect". And after Taliban commander Mullah Omar escaped American troops in Kandahar on a Honda motorcycle, Musharraf advised Japanese PM Koizumi that Honda should advertise showing "Mullah Omar fleeing on one of its motorcycles with his robes and beard flowing in the wind".

Okay, so that may not be every president's idea of humour. But the book is still a cracking good read. Climb onto your Honda and go get it.

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IN THE LINE OF FIRE
A MEMOIR

Pervez Musharraf
Simon & Schuster
Price: Rs 950; Pages: 352