Pervez Musharraf

Pervez Musharraf was born on August 11, 1943 in Delhi, then part of British India, into an educated Urdu-speaking family ^[1]. His father, Syed Musharrafuddin, worked in the foreign service, and his mother, Zarin, held a university degree at a time when few women in the subcontinent did. When British India was partitioned in 1947, the family joined the vast migration of Muslims to the new state of Pakistan, settling in Karachi ^[2].

His childhood took an unusual turn in 1949 when his father was posted to the Pakistani embassy in Ankara. The family spent about seven years in Turkey, and the young Musharraf learned Turkish and later spoke of his admiration for Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the secularizing founder of the Turkish republic ^[1]. That early exposure to a Muslim country governed on secular lines left a mark he acknowledged throughout his career.

Back in Pakistan, he studied at Saint Patrick's High School in Karachi and Forman Christian College in Lahore before entering the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul in 1961 ^[2]. Anyone tracing who was Pervez Musharraf before the presidency finds a restless, athletic student, more drawn to sport and mischief than scholarship, who nonetheless committed himself fully to soldiering.

Commissioned into an artillery regiment in 1964, Musharraf saw combat the following year in the 1965 war between Pakistan and India, receiving a gallantry award for his conduct ^[2]. He served again in the 1971 war that ended with the secession of East Pakistan as Bangladesh. Over the following decades he joined the elite Special Services Group commandos, commanded infantry and artillery formations, and taught at military staff colleges in Pakistan and Britain ^[1].

Promotion came steadily. By the mid 1990s he was a lieutenant general commanding a corps, and in October 1998 Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif appointed him chief of army staff, promoting him over more senior officers ^[3]. Within months the two men were on a collision course. In 1999 Pakistani soldiers and militants occupied heights around Kargil in Indian-administered Kashmir, triggering a limited war with India. The operation, widely attributed to army planning under Musharraf, ended in a Pakistani withdrawal under international pressure, and Sharif and the general blamed each other for the debacle ^[3].

The rupture came on October 12, 1999. While Musharraf was flying home from Sri Lanka, Sharif attempted to dismiss him and reportedly denied his commercial airliner permission to land. Army units loyal to the general seized the airport and government buildings, and Musharraf took power in a coup that cost no lives ^[4]. He suspended the constitution, styled himself chief executive, and in June 2001 assumed the presidency ^[1].

The defining moment of any Pervez Musharraf biography arrived on September 11, 2001. Pakistan had been one of only three states to recognize the Taliban government in Afghanistan, yet within days Musharraf agreed to American demands for basing, intelligence sharing, and logistical support for the campaign against al-Qaeda ^[5]. He later wrote that Washington had left him little choice, but the alliance also brought billions of dollars in aid and the lifting of sanctions imposed after Pakistan's 1998 nuclear tests ^[5].

The partnership carried heavy costs at home. Pakistani forces entered the tribal districts along the Afghan border for the first time in decades, fighting militants who answered with a campaign of bombings across the country. Musharraf himself survived at least two assassination attempts in December 2003, when bombers struck his convoy near Rawalpindi ^[4]. His government also weathered international embarrassment in 2004 when Abdul Qadeer Khan, the metallurgist celebrated as the father of Pakistan's bomb, confessed on television to selling nuclear technology abroad; Musharraf pardoned him but kept him under house arrest ^[3].

Relations with India swung between crisis and cautious hope. After a 2001 attack on the Indian parliament brought the two nuclear-armed neighbors close to war, Musharraf pursued a peace process from 2004 that produced a ceasefire along the Line of Control in Kashmir and back-channel talks that came closer to a settlement than any effort before or since, though no agreement was signed ^[3].

Assessments of Pervez Musharraf achievements usually begin with the economy. During the middle years of his rule Pakistan recorded some of its fastest growth in decades, foreign reserves rose, and foreign investment increased, helped by debt relief and aid that followed the post-2001 alliance ^[2]. Supporters credited his technocratic cabinets, including the banker Shaukat Aziz as finance minister and later prime minister, with stabilizing an economy that had been near default in 1999 ^[3].

He also loosened the state's grip on broadcasting. Private television news channels, licensed for the first time under his rule, multiplied rapidly and transformed Pakistani public debate ^[4]. Under the banner of what he called enlightened moderation, he promoted a softer image of Islam abroad, increased reserved seats for women in legislatures, and backed changes in 2006 to the Hudood Ordinances, the Zia-era laws governing rape and adultery cases that rights groups had long condemned ^[2].

Each achievement had a shadow. The media he freed eventually turned on him, and he restricted it during the 2007 emergency. Growth slowed sharply near the end of his tenure amid power shortages and inflation. And critics charged that the army under his command played a double game, accepting American money while elements of the security establishment tolerated the Afghan Taliban's regrouping on Pakistani soil, an accusation he always denied ^[5].

The unraveling began in March 2007 when Musharraf tried to remove the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Lawyers in black suits marched in cities across the country, and the protest movement swelled into a broad challenge to military rule ^[4]. That July, security forces stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad after a long standoff with armed clerics and students; more than one hundred people died, and militant violence surged afterward ^[3].

In October 2007 Musharraf won a presidential vote in parliament while still army chief, a maneuver of contested legality. When the Supreme Court appeared ready to void the result, he declared a state of emergency on November 3, suspended the constitution a second time, dismissed dozens of judges, and detained lawyers and opposition figures ^[4]. Under intense pressure at home and from Washington, he resigned his army commission that month and lifted the emergency in December.

Two blows finished his presidency. Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister who had returned from exile under an amnesty his government issued, was assassinated at a rally in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007, and many of her supporters held his government responsible for failing to protect her ^[5]. In the February 2008 elections his allies were routed. Facing impeachment by the new coalition, Musharraf resigned the presidency on August 18, 2008 and soon left for London and Dubai ^[1].

Musharraf married Sehba in 1968, and the couple had a daughter, Ayla, and a son, Bilal ^[2]. Colleagues and journalists described him as informal and self-assured, fond of canasta, cigars, and his dogs, and untroubled by the criticism his lifestyle drew from religious conservatives. His memoir, In the Line of Fire, published in 2006 while he was still president, offered his own combative account of the coup, Kargil, and the alliance with Washington ^[6].

Exile did not end his ambitions. He founded the All Pakistan Muslim League and returned home in March 2013 hoping to contest elections, but courts barred his candidacy and instead he faced a cascade of prosecutions: over Bhutto's assassination, the death of the Baloch leader Akbar Bugti, the Red Mosque operation, and the 2007 emergency ^[4]. In 2016 he was allowed to travel to Dubai for medical treatment and never came back.

In December 2019 a special court convicted him of high treason for the 2007 subversion of the constitution and sentenced him to death in absentia, the first such verdict against a former army chief in Pakistan's history; a provincial high court later annulled the tribunal itself ^[5]. By then he was gravely ill with amyloidosis, a rare disease in which abnormal proteins accumulate in organs. He died at the American Hospital Dubai on February 5, 2023, at the age of 79, and was buried in Karachi ^[1].

Musharraf remains among the most argued-over rulers in Pakistan's history. To his defenders he was a modernizer who steadied the economy, opened the airwaves, advanced women's legal standing, and nearly achieved a Kashmir settlement. To his critics he was the fourth general to strangle Pakistani democracy, a leader whose emergency rule, judicial purges, and alliance-driven wars fed the militancy that scarred the following decade ^[3].

His rule also altered institutions in lasting ways. The lawyers' movement he provoked helped entrench a more assertive judiciary, and the treason verdict of 2019, whatever its later fate in the courts, set a precedent that a former army chief could be tried for overturning the constitution ^[5]. The private news channels born under his licenses remain central to the country's politics.

Among basic Pervez Musharraf facts, a few carry the weight of his story: born in Delhi in 1943, a migrant of Partition, a commando who rose to command the army, the author of a coup in 1999, America's ally after 2001, and a former president who died in exile in 2023 ^[1]. Few careers compress so much of Pakistan's turbulent relationship between its soldiers and its constitution into a single life ^[4].