Pervez Musharraf, former Pakistan president, dead at 79 after years in exile

General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless coup and then led a reluctant Pakistan to help the US fight in Afghanistan against Taliban fighters who were backed by his nation even as Islamist militants twice targeted him for assassination, has died, officials said. Week. He is 79 years old.

Musharraf, a former special forces commando, became president through a series of military coups that rocked Pakistan since it was founded amid India’s 1947 partition. He ruled the nuclear-armed country after a 1999 coup through tensions with India, a nuclear proliferation scandal and an Islamist insurgency. He resigned in 2008 when he faced possible impeachment.

Later in life, Musharraf lived in self-imposed exile in Dubai to avoid criminal charges, although he attempted a political comeback in 2012. He maintained a soldier’s fatalism after avoiding the brutal death that always seemed to stalk him.

“I have faced death and defied it many times in the past because destiny and fate have always smiled on me,” Musharraf once wrote. “I just pray that I have more than nine cat lives.”

Withdrawn on 9/11

Musharraf’s family announced in June 2022 that he had been hospitalized for several weeks while suffering from amyloidosis, an incurable condition that sees proteins build up in the body’s organs.

“It’s a difficult stage when you can’t recover and your organs don’t work,” the family said. He later said he also needs access to the drug daratumumab, which is used to treat multiple myeloma. Bone marrow cancer can cause amyloidosis.

Shazia Siraj, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani Consulate in Dubai, confirmed the death and said diplomats were offering support to the family.

Pakistan, a country almost twice the size of California in the Arabian Sea, is now home to 220 million people. But it would be the border with Afghanistan that would draw US attention and dominate Musharraf’s life less than two years after he seized power.

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden launched the September 11, 2001 attacks from Afghanistan, protected by the country’s Taliban rulers. Musharraf knew what to do next.

“America would have reacted violently, like a wounded bear,” he wrote in his autobiography. “If the perpetrator is al-Qaeda, then the wounded bear will attack us immediately.”

‘With us or against us’

On September 12, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told Musharraf that Pakistan would be “with us or against us.” Musharraf said other American officials threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if it chose the latter.

Musharraf chose the former. A month later, he stood by then-President George W. Bush at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to express Pakistan’s unwavering support for the war with the United States against “terrorism in all forms anywhere.”

Pakistan became an important transit point for NATO supplies to landlocked Afghanistan. This is despite Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency having supported the Taliban after they came to power in Afghanistan in 1994. 1980s Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The US-led invasion of Afghanistan saw Taliban fighters flee across the border back into Pakistan, including bin Laden, who was killed by the US in 2011 at a compound in Abbottabad. They regrouped and the Pakistani Taliban emerged, starting a years-long insurgency in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The CIA began flying armed Predator drones from Pakistan with Musharraf’s blessing, using an airstrip built by the founding president of the United Arab Emirates for falconing in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. The program has helped defeat militants but has seen more than 400 strikes in Pakistan alone killing at least 2,366 people – including 245 civilians, according to the Washington-based think-tank New America Foundation.

Although Pakistan under Musharraf launched the operation, the militants are still flourishing as billions of American dollars flow into the country. That led to suspicions that still haunt US relations with Pakistan.

US-Pakistan: marriage without love

“After 9/11, then President Musharraf made a strategic change to ignore the Taliban and support the US in the war against terror, but neither side believes that the other has met the expectations of that decision,” the US cable 2009 from now on. – Ambassador Anne Patterson published by WikiLeaks said, describing what has become the diplomatic equivalent of marriage without love.

“The relationship is one of mutual dependence that we recognize – Pakistan knows the US cannot leave; the US knows Pakistan cannot survive without its support.”

But Musharraf’s life will be on the line. Militants tried to assassinate Musharraf twice in 2003 by targeting his convoy, first with a bomb planted on a bridge and then with a car bomb. The second attack saw Musharraf’s vehicle lifted into the air by an explosion before touching the ground again. It is a race for safety in its only rim, Musharraf pulls a Glock pistol if necessary to fight his way out.

It wasn’t until his wife, Sehba, saw the car covered in gore that the scale of the attack dawned on her.

“He was always calm in the face of danger,” he said. But then, “she screamed uncontrollably, hysterically.”

Run west

Born August 11, 1943, in New Delhi, India, Musharraf is the middle son of a diplomat. His family joined millions of other Muslims in fleeing west when Hindu-majority India and Muslim Pakistan split at independence from Britain in 1947. The partition saw hundreds of thousands killed in riots and fighting.

Musharraf entered the Pakistani army at the age of 18 and began his career there when Islamabad fought three wars against India. He would launch his own attempt to seize territory in the Himalayan region of Kashmir in 1999 before seizing power from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Sharif ordered Musharraf’s dismissal because the army chief had returned from a visit to Sri Lanka and denied the right to land his plane in Pakistan, even though it ran out of fuel. On the ground, the army seized control and after he landed Musharraf took over.

But as ruler, Musharraf came close to striking a deal with India over Kashmir, according to US diplomats at the time. He is also working for a rapprochement with his long-time rival Pakistan.

Another major scandal emerged in his administration when the world discovered that the famous Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan, long associated with the country’s atomic bomb, had sold centrifuge designs and other secrets to countries including Iran, Libya and North Korea, making tens of millions of dollars. The plan has helped Pyongyang sustain nuclear weapons, while the centrifuge of Khan’s plan is still spinning in Iran amid the collapse of Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.

Musharraf said he was suspicious of Khan, but it wasn’t until 2003 that CIA director George Tenet showed him detailed plans for a Pakistani centrifuge sold by the scientist that he realized the seriousness of the incident.

Khan would confess on state television in 2004 and Musharraf would pardon him, although he would be put under house arrest after that.