Men Who Make Peace

Behind every successful summit there are backroom boys who hack their way through seemingly insurmountable impediments. As the world lavished praises on Pervez Musharraf and Atal Behari Vajpayee for giving peace a chance, those in the diplomatic inner loop knew the spectacular outcome of a joint statement, issued on January 6 by both India and Pakistan, could not have been achieved without the ingenuity and diligence of Brajesh Mishra and Tariq Aziz Warraich.

Secretary general of the National Security Council (NSC), Tariq Aziz is to the Pakistan President what national security advisor Brajesh Mishra is to Vajpayee. Aziz is Musharraf's confidant, his eyes and ears, his fireman who douses political conflagrations, and his principal navigator in the choppy waters of international relations. Both also share a bureaucratic background: to Mishra's career in the Indian Foreign Service is Aziz's in the Central Board of Revenue.

Perhaps the similarity of their backgrounds explains the excellent rapport Aziz and Mishra managed to strike, slicing the layers of hostility of the last two years and establishing the key principle of simultaneity on terrorism and Kashmir—the touchstone of the Islamabad deal between India and Pakistan. Sources in Islamabad's foreign office say Aziz and Mishra held clandestine meetings in London in May 2003, following Vajpayee's April 18 speech in Srinagar, offering a hand of friendship to Pakistan. Says one senior official, "They're believed to have kept in touch since then and, of course, met again when Mishra 'suddenly' arrived in Islamabad on January 1. The Indo-Pak joint statement reflects the tight language of diplomacy that took note of the contentious issues and used words that neither offended the other side nor was subject to freewheeling interpretations."

The Indo-Pak detente has catapulted Aziz from the shadows into the media limelight. His considerable influence in government is now no longer stuff of rumour or conjecture; no less a person than Musharraf credited him publicly for the joint statement the two countries issued on January 6. And now foreign officials reveal that Aziz has been undertaking, over a considerable period of time, hush-hush trips to Washington, discussing extremely important matters with top US officials. His visits goaded Pakistan's ambassador to the US, Ashraf Jahangir Qazi, to even complain to Musharraf that the embassy in Washington was being deliberately kept out of the US-Pak process.

Perhaps Qazi was oblivious of Aziz's clout. Working silently in the anonymity of the President's office, first as Musharraf's principal secretary and now as NSC's secretary general, Aziz has enabled his boss to tighten his grip over domestic politics, cut deals with the recalcitrant Opposition, and convince the disbelieving Indians about Islamabad's intent to curb terrorism. But the limelight has its disadvantages: sources say from the time the joint declaration was issued in Islamabad, the security cordon around Aziz has been bolstered to protect him from the wrath of vengeful jehadis. For a man who loves horses—he's the chairman of the Lahore Race Club—risks and rewards are the two sides of an adrenaline-driven life.

Aziz has indeed come a long way from his days in Lahore's Foreman Christian College in the early '60s. Son of a sessions judge, Aziz belongs to a farming family of Bhalwal in Sargodha, Punjab. It was at college that he befriended Peji, aka Musharraf, who was his batchmate. And when Aziz decided to contest the students' union election, Peji campaigned furiously for him. In 1967, Aziz joined the civil service (income tax); Musharraf opted for a career in the army. The two college friends, though, kept in touch, as if conspiring with fate to create history together.

The twist in their relationship came in August 2000, nearly 10 months after Musharraf deposed then prime minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup. Musharraf appointed Aziz, who had already superannuated from the civil service, as his principal secretary. Deceptively nondescript, he performed with aplomb super-secret tasks: it was Aziz who negotiated the exile deal between Musharraf and the incarcerated Sharifs.

Soon his name began to invoke awe in the corridors of power. They knew Musharraf listened to Aziz; his worldview was also his boss'. In the months before the general election in October 2002, he was responsible for the split in Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League (PML), and for midwifing the PML (Quaid-e-Azam). Personal ties played a role here as well: PML(Q)'s president Chaudhary Shujaat Hussain is his friend. In one stroke was splintered the Opposition votebank in the electorally crucial province of Punjab.

With the election throwing up a hung Parliament, and the six-party alliance—Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA)—registering spectacular gains, Aziz opened a channel of communication with the two most important religious leaders, Qazi Hussain Ahmed and Maulana Fazlur Rehman. These two were not only bitterly opposed to Musharraf for his U-turn on Afghanistan, they were also adamant about the President relinquishing the post of army chief. The mma held out for more than a year, acquiescing in just a week before Vajpayee's trip to Islamabad. And it was Aziz who, ensconced in the NSC now, cut what's now being called the 'mullah-military' deal—Musharraf promised to retire from the army in October 2004, and the mma voted for a resolution confirming him as President. It imparted legitimacy to Musharraf, and enabled him to wriggle out of the constitutional logjam.

Aziz apart, another person who was involved in the backchannel diplomacy between India and Pakistan was the Inter Services Intelligence Chief, Lt Gen Ehsanul Haq. Foreign office sources say Mishra's discreet meetings in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, ahead of the SAARC summit, included parleys with Haq and a few other generals—the vice chief of staff Gen Muhammad Yusuf, Musharraf's principal secretary Gen Hamid Javed, the chief of general staff Gen Tariq Majeed, and, of course, Aziz.

Diplomatic sources say Lt Gen Haq was given the task to ensure that the Kashmir issue during the SAARC summit wasn't to stray beyond the 'Line of Control'—Pakistan wasn't to talk about the right of self-determination of Kashmiris, and the LoC was to serve, until a lasting formula had been agreed upon, as the international border.

Sources say it was a secret meeting between US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Haq in Washington that led Vajpayee to make peace overtures in April last year. Vajpayee, they claim, offered the hand of friendship after Washington communicated to him the ISI chief's assurances that violence across the LoC would be stopped and the training camps of militants dismantled. Before visiting the subcontinent in May, Armitage stopped over in London where he met Mishra and Aziz. Later, in Islamabad, Armitage quoted Musharraf to declare at a press conference, "If there are any militant training camps in Pakistan today, these would not be there tomorrow." His confidence, sources say, stemmed from Gen Haq's assurances.

The manner of Haq's appointment as ISI chief itself provides a clue to his ideological moorings. Post-9/11, Musharraf sent a delegation of Pakistani mullahs headed by Mufti Shamzai to Kandahar to persuade the maverick Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, to hand over Osama bin Laden to the US. The delegation was accompanied by then ISI chief Lt Gen Mehmood Ahmed. Instead of pressuring Mullah Omar, the delegation congratulated him for his resistance to US pressure.Later, the delegation told Musharraf it had failed in its mission. But a US mole in the delegation spilled the beans, and Washington mounted pressure on Musharraf to replace Lt Gen Ahmed.

It was then that, on October 7, 2001, Musharraf appointed Lt Gen Haq, then corps commander in Peshawar, as the new ISI chief. The aim was to change the ISI's image from being a 'potentially fundamentalist' outfit to a liberal and moderate one. A Pashtoon officer who shares Musharraf's westernised worldview, Lt Gen Haq was required to weed out the beards, as the Islamic extremists are known inside the agency, and ensure the ISI remained obedient to Gen Musharraf—and didn't oppose Islamabad's shift in its Kashmir and Afghan policies. It's his appointment, sources say, that has helped allay the West's fears about the ISI.

Haq's litmus test has come now. For, on him rests the onerous responsibility of ensuring that Pakistan-based jehadis do not shatter the hope the Indo-Pak joint statement has engendered.