I had no idea who sent the message. My brother? Sean? No, this sender clearly knew me from Pakistan. And what was the project? What had I discussed? I read the text message to my friends, and we pondered the sender. Then, finally, I remembered reading that Nawaz Sharif had flown to London so that his sick wife could have some tests.
“Is this Nawaz?” I replied.
“You are correct,” he responded.
The project. That was funny. Everyone in the car, even the man from the U.S. embassy, agreed that I needed to see this through. And I thought—well, we all did—how hilarious it would be if Sharif actually found an option that worked.
CHAPTER 21
LONDON CALLING
After finally being promised a visa that would allow me to return to Pakistan, I flew to India to write some stories. Nawaz Sharif asked for my number there. He needed to talk about something important, outside Pakistan. One early evening, he called from London. Sharif wondered whether I would be back in Pakistan before Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic holiday at the end of Ramadan. Maybe, I told him. He planned to go to Pakistan for a day, and then to Saudi Arabia for four days.
“I am working on the project,” he said.
“Day and night, I’m sure,” I replied.
Sharif said the real reason he was calling was to warn me that the phones were tapped in Pakistan.
“Be very careful,” he said. “Your phones are tapped. My phones are tapped. Do you know a man named Rehman Malik? He is giving the orders to do this, maybe at the behest of Mr. Zardari.”
Everyone knew Rehman Malik, a slightly menacing figure who was the acting interior minister of Pakistan. He was known for making random word associations in press conferences and being unable to utter a coherent sentence. He also had slightly purple hair.
“Is this new?” I asked. “Hasn’t it always been this way?”
“Well, yes. But it has gotten worse in the past two or three months.”
So true. He had a solution—he would buy me a new phone. And give me a new number, but a number so precious that I could only give it to my very close friends, who had to get new phones and numbers as well.
Very tempting, but I told him no. He was, after all, the former prime minister of Pakistan. I couldn’t accept any gifts from him.
“Sounds complicated. It’s not necessary. And you can’t buy me a phone.”
He said I needed to be careful. We ended our conversation, and he promised to work on the project.
“Don’t be—what is it you say? Don’t be naughty,” he said before hanging up.
Naughty? Who said that? The conversation was slightly worrying. I thought of Sharif as a Punjabi matchmaker determined to find me a man, not as anyone who talked naughty to me.
While watching TV in the Indian coastal town of Mangalore—a misnomer if there ever was one—I found out the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad had been blown up and fifty-four people had been killed. I saw the flames and the destruction and a friend from CNN climbing over the rubble and explaining how bad this was. Normally I would have been upset that I was out of position for such an attack. But this time I was just numb and, in fact, happy I wasn’t there. I had lived at the Marriott for weeks at a time, and even when I lived elsewhere, I had visited several times a week. Like the Serena, the Marriott was an oasis for expatriates and Pakistanis. I had joined the gym there, ate at the Thai and Japanese restaurants, and drank high tea with sources. The bombers exploded their truck at the worst time possible—in the evening, just as the guards sat down to break their daily Ramadan fast with an evening meal. The attack was one of the worst ever in Islamabad and marked a whole new level of sophistication for militants attacking inside Pakistan, a whole new level of cruelty. I had known some of the dead—the front-desk greeters, the people who worked at the metal detector.
I stayed in India longer than I should have. Samad picked me up at the airport.
“Do you want to drive by Marriott?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”
Pakistan increasingly depressed me. I had once hoped that the lawyers could actually change the country and that Pakistanis would finally get the government they deserved. Instead, they got a secondhand trashy veneer of democracy. The political machinations were yet another example of how the country’s priorities were completely upside down. Finally Pakistan had a civilian government, a rarity. But instead of focusing on the real problems in the country—the bad economy, the war, the Pakistani Taliban—the civilian leaders bickered with one another. The military and spy agencies seemed unwilling to abandon the reins of Pakistan and fixated on India rather than homegrown militants. And the rare offensives the military ever announced here showed that the country was only willing to take on a certain kind of militant—the ones attacking inside Pakistan, and never the ones training and planning strikes against international troops and civilian targets in neighboring Afghanistan.
The United States was also to blame, losing massive popularity in Pakistan by supporting Musharraf until almost the end and failing to adequately push nonmilitary aid. America was seen as hypocritical, championing democracy in countries like Iraq or Afghanistan, but not in Pakistan. And the U.S. drone attacks in the tribal areas had provoked a backlash in much of the country. Many Pakistanis blamed the militants’ growing power on the country’s promise to help America, not on the establishment’s decision to play a double game with the militants. Of course, some Pakistanis blamed the militants on rival India, talking of eight—or was it eighty?—Indian consulates in Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan, all fomenting rebellion.
In short: None of this was Pakistan’s fault. The country had a reluctance to look inside, much like a chain-smoker refusing to accept responsibility for lung cancer while blaming it on a nearby factory. That view was dangerous. If Pakistanis didn’t see this war as their war, as a fight for the nation’s survival, then more and more bombs would explode, and the country would continue its downward spiral. If Pakistan didn’t own this war, the militants would keep spreading, recruiting through money, refugee camps, intimidation, religion, tradition, and help from invisible friends. The militants had already set up shop throughout much of the tribal areas, where the government had no influence, and the army had only small sticks and little staying power.
I planned a trip to Afghanistan, where the politics were much less murky, where the suicide bombers were much less effective, to write about alleged negotiations with the Taliban.
That’s why I had to see Nawaz Sharif again. Emissaries from the Afghan government and former Taliban bigwigs had flown to Saudi Arabia for the feasts that marked the end of Ramadan. But they had another goal. Afghan officials had been hoping that the influential Saudi royal family would moderate negotiations between their battered government and the resurgent militants. Sharif, in Saudi Arabia at the time, was rumored to have been at those meetings. That made sense. He was close to the Saudi king. He had supported the Afghan Taliban, when the regime was in power.
I called Sharif and told him why I wanted to see him.
“Most welcome, Kim,” he said. “Anytime.”
We arranged for a lunch on a Saturday in October—I was due to fly to Kabul two days later. Samad and I decided to drive the five hours from Islamabad to Raiwind instead of flying. Samad showed up on time, but I overslept, having been up late the night before. I hopped out of bed and rifled through my Islamic clothes for something suitable because I liked to dress conservatively when interviewing Pakistani politicians. I yanked out a red knee-length top from India that had dancing couples embroidered on it. Potentially ridiculous, but the nicest clean one I had. We left Islamabad.