The Duel Read Online Free Page A

general of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency, and asked him politely where the prisoner was being kept. Pervez replied that he had no idea and had never even heard of Basit. The chief justice instructed the police chief to produce Basit in court within forty-eight hours: “Either produce the detainee or get ready to go to jail.” Two days later Basit was produced and then released, after the police failed to present any substantial evidence against him. Washington and London were not happy. They were convinced that Basit was a terrorist who should have been kept in prison indefinitely, as he certainly would have been in Britain or the United States.
    The Supreme Court then decided to consider six petitions challenging Musharraf’s decision to contest the presidency without relinquishing his command of the army. Even though parliament had passed the President to Hold Another Office Act in 2004 to circumvent a challenge to Musharraf’s decision to stay on as army chief while president, the Supreme Court had accepted an appeal against this decision, saying that the language of the amended law was not in conformity with the constitution. There was also the question of term limits: Pakistan’s constitution permits the president only two terms in office. Musharraf had assumed the presidency in June 2001. This was followed by a referendum in 2002 that he claimed was a “democratic mandate” and therefore, his opponents argued, constituted a second term. An added problem was that he was over sixty and, according to government rules, should therefore have retired as chief of army staff. Having done so, he would then have faced a two-year bar on any government employee seeking elected office. Unsurprisingly, there was much nervousness in Islamabad. The president’s supporters threatened dire consequences ifthe Court ruled against him. But to declare a state of emergency would have required the support of the army, and at that stage, soon after the Karachi killings, informal soundings had revealed a reluctance to intervene on the part of the generals. Their polite excuse at the time was that they were too heavily committed to the “war on terror” to be able to devote resources to preserve law and order in the cities. They would later, with a bit of encouragement from the U.S. embassy, change their minds.
    A S THE JUDICIAL crisis temporarily ended, a more somber one loomed. Most of today’s jihadi groups are the mongrel offspring of Pakistani and Western intelligence outfits, born in the 1980s when General Zia was in power and waging the West’s war against the godless Russians, who were then occupying Afghanistan. It was then that state patronage of Islamist groups began. One beneficiary was the cleric Maulana Abdullah, who was allotted land to build a madrassa in the heart of Islamabad, not far from the government buildings. Soon the area was increased so that two separate facilities (for male and female students) could be constructed, together with an enlarged Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque. State money was provided for all this, and the government was the technical owner of the property.

    During the 1980s and 1990s this complex became a transit camp for young jihadis on their way to fight in Afghanistan and, later, Kashmir. Abdullah made no secret of his beliefs. He was sympathetic to the Saudi Wahhabi interpretation of Islam and during the Iraq-Iran war was only too happy to encourage the killing of Shia “heretics” in Pakistan. Shia constitute 20 percent of the Muslim population in Pakistan, and prior to Zia’s dictatorship there was little hostility between them and the majority of the Sunnis. Abdullah’s patronage of ultrasectarian, anti-Shia terror groups led to his own assassination in October 1998. Members of a rival Muslim faction killed him soon after he had finished praying in his own mosque.
    His sons, Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Abdul Aziz, then took control of the mosque and religious schools. The