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By Root 494 0

universal support. But some senior officials had started to doubt Pakistan’s actual intentions. They privately worried that Musharraf and the country’s powerful intelligence agencies were playing a double game—taking Western money and hunting Al-Qaeda, while doing little against their old friends, the Taliban. There was a running joke that whenever a finger-wagging U.S. official visited Islamabad and berated officials to do more, the number-three leader of Al-Qaeda would suddenly be killed or captured somewhere in the tribal areas. (Not only a joke; this happened several times.) The numbers backed the doubters—although more than seven hundred Al-Qaeda suspects had allegedly been arrested in Pakistan, few senior Taliban leaders had been captured. Several top militants had mysteriously escaped custody or been released.

The contradictions created by sixty years of obfuscation in Pakistan played out on a daily basis, in the continual whiplash between secularism and extremism, the contorted attempts to hold this fracturing nation together with Scotch tape and honeyed tongues. Islamic clerics forced me to wear a black abaya showing only my eyes, but then privately asked to see my face and hair. One province banned females on billboards, but a subversive drag queen ran one of the country’s top talk shows. The tribal areas—officially the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, seven tribal agencies and six frontier regions—were theoretically part of Pakistan, but the laws of Pakistan didn’t apply. Islamic militants roamed freely there, but very un-Islamic drugs were sold along the roads, advertised with animal pelts. Alcohol was illegal for Muslims, but most Pakistani men I knew tossed back Johnnie Walker Black Label like eighteen-year-olds at their first college party. The Pakistani military and the three major intelligence agencies, referred to simply as “the agencies,” had run the country directly or indirectly for its entire existence and helped form powerful militant groups, which they now disavowed. And, in a particularly brilliant contradiction, Pakistan was still run by a military dictator, who despite seizing power almost eight years earlier and holding on to it through sham elections, had somehow convinced the West that he was setting up a democracy.

A mother and son holding hands at the Karachi airport summed up Pakistan for me. She wore a black abaya and heavy eyeliner. He wore jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming NO MONEY, NO HONEY.

Given my new penchant for punching at rallies, I knew Pakistan had shortened my fuse. What little restraint I had acquired elsewhere had evaporated, largely over issues of personal space. (I was still a Montanan at heart—preferring few people, lots of open range, and boundary lines meant to be respected.) But I knew I needed to dive into the country. I had to stop resisting Pakistan’s pull, because Afghanistan and Pakistan fed into each other, and I needed to understand how. It would not be easy. Reporting a story here was like trying to find a specific needle in a stack of needles using a needle, an endless attempt at sorting through anonymous quotes from anonymous intelligence sources and anonymous diplomats. Most terrorist plots in the West traced somehow back to Pakistan—as many as three-quarters, according to some estimates. After a plot was linked to someone in Pakistan, journalists like myself predictably converged on the alleged militant’s home village in the middle of nowhere, where the most powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), tried to convince us that what we had been told was wrong, and that this was not the village we were looking for, and that there was no way any terrorist would ever come from Pakistan. Wrong town, wrong country. We weren’t allowed to go to the tribal areas where many militants had supposedly trained, we weren’t supposed to roam free, and we were told that this was all for our safety. The subterfuge here was an art that had been institutionalized.

I blamed India. Everyone here did. To understand Pakistan, India was the key. Why