A Dictator for all Seasons
by Michael Schaffer
AUGUST 15, 2008 TAGS:
Sunday, August 17 marked the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, dictator of Pakistan, scourge of the Communists and — although his American allies didn’t talk about it much at the time — patron of the Islamists. The cause of the airplane crash that killed Zia, much of his military brass, and U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel remains unclear; in classic South Asian fashion, blame has been variously assigned to the CIA, the KGB, the Mossad, India, Afghanistan, rival Pakistani generals, and the Bhutto family, among others. That all of them had plausible motives says a lot about the deeply religious autocrat who ruled Pakistan for 11 tumultuous years. That Zia’s reign remains a major subject of contemporary history, a key to the events that dominate contemporary news, says even more.
Among Americans, it’s a good bet that Zia is better known today than he was on the 1988 afternoon when his C-130 Hercules crashed into the desert floor near the Punjabi town of Bahawalpur. At the time, the death was seen as an intriguing mystery, but hardly a crisis: The war in neighboring Afghanistan was effectively over, with the Soviet Union having agreed months earlier to remove the troops whose invasion had turned Zia into Washington’s front-line Cold War ally; the revolution in next-door Iran, with its slogans about death to America, also seemed more or less exhausted thanks to a war of attrition with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Thus the traumatic reports from Pakistan were quickly pushed from U.S. headlines that week by news of George H.W. Bush’s selection of Dan Quayle as his running mate. Overseas events featured little in that fall’s presidential election, hinting at the country’s coming turn away from the world.
We all know what happened next — an obscure fundamentalist movement, a rogue mountain state, a nuclear test, 9/11 … and all of a sudden the political jockeying of Pakistani generals was very important in Washington. Since 2001, the shorthand version of that history has been treated almost like a geopolitical parable, a cautionary tale of unintended consequences, duplicitous clients, and the dangers that lurk when a complacent victor lets its attention drift. Perhaps that’s one reason why, two decades after his still-unexplained demise, Zia is enjoying something of a posthumous pop-culture moment. With his waxy Victorian moustache, his creepy fundamentalist politics, and his freewheeling role in the Cold War, he’s played for laughs in Hollywood, for chills in popular history books, and for some magical combination of the two in a brilliant new novel. Quite a fate for a guy once written off as a mediocrity whose lack of political ambition made him a safe bet for army chief of staff.
Notwithstanding his local reputation as a puritanical dullard, Zia was an alluring literary subject well before the fiery Aug. 17, 1988, wreck. One of the two main characters in Salman Rushie’s 1983 Shame is a not-so-subtle caricature of the general, with a symbolism-laden purple prayer bruise on his forehead and a mentally disabled daughter serving as the magical-realist tale’s beastly deus ex machina. But Rushdie’s novel deals with how the man he calls Raza Hyder came to power. As the blowback from the real Zia’s romance with Washington came into focus over the past decade, the more interesting magical-realist story was the one about how he wielded that power.
The story had the added advantage of being true, which made it significantly more interesting to readers wondering how today’s geopolitical threats came into being. From books about the rise of the Taliban to tomes about nuclear proliferation, the late general is everywhere. In Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, Zia is the dark figure atop a government that plays its American patrons for fools. In Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark’s investigation of A.Q. Khan’s nuclear scheming, he’s the charmer who helps Washington delude itself about Islamabad’s atomic plans. The two subjects represent the respective prehistories of the only two reasons the economically backwards, chronically misruled Islamic state remains big news in the era of free-trading globalism: the terrorists next door and the bomb at home. Zia’s story was intertwined with both. No wonder his name has appeared in the New York Times nearly twice as many times in the seven years since 9/11 as it did in the decade before the attacks.
History books, even about pressing contemporary subjects, are one thing. When a long-dead dictator finds himself rubbing elbows with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts in a hit movie, that’s an entirely different level of notoriety. The Zia from the film version of Charlie Wilson’s War, played by Om Puri, was less menacing than the journalistic version of the general. But whether travelling to distant corners of Texas or denying Hanks’ hard-drinking Texas congressman a whiskey at his Islamabad palace, he’s instead cast as the Great Game exotic, the colorful local with whom our idealistic heroes must make common cause in the name of victory. It doesn’t take a foreign-affairs PhD to know that cause is unlikely to stay common for long.
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Which brings us back to Zia’s death, the subject of Mohammed Hanif’s uproarious A Case of Exploding Mangoes, released to critical acclaim this May. An editor for the BBC’s Urdu service, Hanif describes a Pakistan that is a cross between Catch-22 and Midnight Express, giggling at bureaucratic absurdities one minute, depicting political dungeons the next. His American characters are no less whipsawed by hierarchy, with Raphel being called away from a romantic dinner with his wife when Zia telephones to report that CIA chief William Casey has, unbeknownst to Washington’s own ambassador, arrived for a visit. (I do wish, though, that Hanif had shown a draft to an American, who would have smiled with recognition at the Yankee-abroad tradition of the embassy Fourth of July party, but might also have noted that said party would not, for obvious reasons, have featured a screening of a recently concluded NFL playoff game). Even that football-and-beer enhanced escape into Americana, though, isn’t off-limits to the dangerous characters inhabiting Hanif’s Pakistan: Among those at the party is a lanky Arab named “OBL,” who wishes people would take him a bit more seriously.
In the end, fittingly, it turns out that Hanif’s answer to the Zia assassination mystery is, more or less, that everybody did it. Like a good JFK assassination yarn, the president is hit from a dozen improbable angles all at once. Twenty years after your death, it’s nice to be wanted — even by assassins. Zia, I suspect, would be pleased with his ongoing posthumous fame, an indication that his country remains dangerous, a place to be wooed or feared or reckoned with. His impoverished countrymen, though, would probably be a lot better off were they part of that vast majority of global citizens who live in countries whose contemporary leaders, let along long-dead presidents, remain unknown to the world.
Among Americans, it’s a good bet that Zia is better known today than he was on the 1988 afternoon when his C-130 Hercules crashed into the desert floor near the Punjabi town of Bahawalpur. At the time, the death was seen as an intriguing mystery, but hardly a crisis: The war in neighboring Afghanistan was effectively over, with the Soviet Union having agreed months earlier to remove the troops whose invasion had turned Zia into Washington’s front-line Cold War ally; the revolution in next-door Iran, with its slogans about death to America, also seemed more or less exhausted thanks to a war of attrition with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Thus the traumatic reports from Pakistan were quickly pushed from U.S. headlines that week by news of George H.W. Bush’s selection of Dan Quayle as his running mate. Overseas events featured little in that fall’s presidential election, hinting at the country’s coming turn away from the world.We all know what happened next — an obscure fundamentalist movement, a rogue mountain state, a nuclear test, 9/11 … and all of a sudden the political jockeying of Pakistani generals was very important in Washington. Since 2001, the shorthand version of that history has been treated almost like a geopolitical parable, a cautionary tale of unintended consequences, duplicitous clients, and the dangers that lurk when a complacent victor lets its attention drift. Perhaps that’s one reason why, two decades after his still-unexplained demise, Zia is enjoying something of a posthumous pop-culture moment. With his waxy Victorian moustache, his creepy fundamentalist politics, and his freewheeling role in the Cold War, he’s played for laughs in Hollywood, for chills in popular history books, and for some magical combination of the two in a brilliant new novel. Quite a fate for a guy once written off as a mediocrity whose lack of political ambition made him a safe bet for army chief of staff.
Notwithstanding his local reputation as a puritanical dullard, Zia was an alluring literary subject well before the fiery Aug. 17, 1988, wreck. One of the two main characters in Salman Rushie’s 1983 Shame is a not-so-subtle caricature of the general, with a symbolism-laden purple prayer bruise on his forehead and a mentally disabled daughter serving as the magical-realist tale’s beastly deus ex machina. But Rushdie’s novel deals with how the man he calls Raza Hyder came to power. As the blowback from the real Zia’s romance with Washington came into focus over the past decade, the more interesting magical-realist story was the one about how he wielded that power.
The story had the added advantage of being true, which made it significantly more interesting to readers wondering how today’s geopolitical threats came into being. From books about the rise of the Taliban to tomes about nuclear proliferation, the late general is everywhere. In Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, Zia is the dark figure atop a government that plays its American patrons for fools. In Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark’s investigation of A.Q. Khan’s nuclear scheming, he’s the charmer who helps Washington delude itself about Islamabad’s atomic plans. The two subjects represent the respective prehistories of the only two reasons the economically backwards, chronically misruled Islamic state remains big news in the era of free-trading globalism: the terrorists next door and the bomb at home. Zia’s story was intertwined with both. No wonder his name has appeared in the New York Times nearly twice as many times in the seven years since 9/11 as it did in the decade before the attacks.
History books, even about pressing contemporary subjects, are one thing. When a long-dead dictator finds himself rubbing elbows with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts in a hit movie, that’s an entirely different level of notoriety. The Zia from the film version of Charlie Wilson’s War, played by Om Puri, was less menacing than the journalistic version of the general. But whether travelling to distant corners of Texas or denying Hanks’ hard-drinking Texas congressman a whiskey at his Islamabad palace, he’s instead cast as the Great Game exotic, the colorful local with whom our idealistic heroes must make common cause in the name of victory. It doesn’t take a foreign-affairs PhD to know that cause is unlikely to stay common for long.
Which brings us back to Zia’s death, the subject of Mohammed Hanif’s uproarious A Case of Exploding Mangoes, released to critical acclaim this May. An editor for the BBC’s Urdu service, Hanif describes a Pakistan that is a cross between Catch-22 and Midnight Express, giggling at bureaucratic absurdities one minute, depicting political dungeons the next. His American characters are no less whipsawed by hierarchy, with Raphel being called away from a romantic dinner with his wife when Zia telephones to report that CIA chief William Casey has, unbeknownst to Washington’s own ambassador, arrived for a visit. (I do wish, though, that Hanif had shown a draft to an American, who would have smiled with recognition at the Yankee-abroad tradition of the embassy Fourth of July party, but might also have noted that said party would not, for obvious reasons, have featured a screening of a recently concluded NFL playoff game). Even that football-and-beer enhanced escape into Americana, though, isn’t off-limits to the dangerous characters inhabiting Hanif’s Pakistan: Among those at the party is a lanky Arab named “OBL,” who wishes people would take him a bit more seriously.
In the end, fittingly, it turns out that Hanif’s answer to the Zia assassination mystery is, more or less, that everybody did it. Like a good JFK assassination yarn, the president is hit from a dozen improbable angles all at once. Twenty years after your death, it’s nice to be wanted — even by assassins. Zia, I suspect, would be pleased with his ongoing posthumous fame, an indication that his country remains dangerous, a place to be wooed or feared or reckoned with. His impoverished countrymen, though, would probably be a lot better off were they part of that vast majority of global citizens who live in countries whose contemporary leaders, let along long-dead presidents, remain unknown to the world.
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