It is hardly as though Musharraf was hard done by. A man of modest talents, he was treated extremely well by the army and, like a number of his predecessors, decided he wouldn’t mind becoming president of Pakistan, but without the inconvenience of elections. So he seized power from the kleptocrat Nawaz Sharif in a coup in 1999, though he can’t even bring himself to acknowledge that, calling it ‘a counter-coup’ instead.
Musharraf has survived a couple of assassination attempts, though it doesn’t appear to have taught him humility. He boasts that ‘unlike most leaders, I am also a soldier, chief of the army staff and supreme commander of my country’s armed forces. I am cut out to be in the midst of battle.’
At a summit in Kathmandu in 2002, he famously extended his hand to the prime minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. ‘A loud gasp of awe (and I daresay admiration) went through the hall, full of stuffy officialdom, that the prime minister of “the largest democracy in the world” had been upstaged.’ Why he puts that expression in inverted commas is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it has something to do with being a military dictator.
The book is dedicated to ‘the people of Pakistan’, those unfortunates who have to endure the tedious, painful cycle of democratically elected politicians who are monsters of venality alternating with autocratic generals who come to power at the barrel of a gun. The proceeds of In the Line of Fire will, presumably, be going somewhere else.
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