Dangerous Commission

• Share

Three times, the enemies of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf have attempted to take him out. They tried blowing up his motorcade twice last December. In August, police in Islamabad arrested 10 men who had an arsenal of rockets smuggled from the tribal territory along the Afghanistan border. According to the police, the plan was to launch murderous attacks during Independence Day celebrations on Aug. 14, hitting Musharraf, his Cabinet and the U.S. embassy. And that close shave came only 15 days after a suicide bomber tried to blow up Shaukat Aziz, a Musharraf ally who was sworn in as Prime Minister on Aug 27.

But there is nothing in Musharraf's demeanor that shows he is rattled. With his confident, square-shouldered gait, Musharraf, 61, moves like a veteran prizefighter. When he met TIME correspondents in his Islamabad salon recently, Musharraf strode across an ornate Persian carpet clutching a memo with the names of 30 al-Qaeda suspects whom Pakistan has helped to nab over the past two months. This, said Musharraf, was Osama bin Laden's "second string" of terrorists: "We know who is whom and who is where. We've broken their backs." He claimed that a lode of al-Qaeda computer disks captured in July showed that the group's leaders have contingency plans to shift operations away from the hinterlands of Pakistan to Somalia and Sudan. And just last week, Pakistan's military said it launched an air and ground attack against a suspected al-Qaeda training camp in the tribal area of Waziristan, killing more than 60 recruits and their Uzbek and Chechen trainers.

In Musharraf's deadly bout with al-Qaeda, the latest round has decisively been his. But a victory bell isn't expected soon. Bin Laden is still at large. "There is a perception that we have Osama hidden somewhere," the President said, "and we'll bring him out close to the American elections. We can't. We don't have any idea where Osama is." Al-Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, announced on a video released last week that holy warriors, or mujahedin, were winning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pakistan has arrested more than 550 al-Qaeda suspects and delivered most to U.S. investigators, but Musharraf's own intelligence officers say that dozens of the virulent, well-organized cells are still out there—and they want the President dead.

So Musharraf's seat is still a hot one. By cracking down on his main foe, al-Qaeda, Musharraf is also creating new enemies at home. After months of prodding by the U.S., Musharraf has clamped down on some of the country's 13,000 registered madrasahs, or seminaries, which are al-Qaeda's richest recruiting ground in Pakistan. A prominent imam at Islamabad's Lal Mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz, disappeared on Aug. 13 after police captured bin Laden's former chauffeur, who had borrowed the religious leader's car, according to police. The Arab driver was allegedly involved in the Independence Day rocket plot. "This is significant," says one Washington official. "Pakistan's engagement in the war on terror is all the more visible with these detentions." The crackdown, which began in earnest in August, has enraged the deeply conservative, Islamic sector of Pakistani society.

"My opponents say I'm America's lackey," Musharraf complains. "But I don't have the personality of a lackey. I thought this country was going down, getting destroyed." The President's aides say that Musharraf's tougher tack on homegrown extremists is, if anything, a sign of his own convictions, not a response to Washington. His brushes with death, they say, have infused Musharraf with a sense of destiny. "He's had these miraculous escapes," one aide commented, "And now he genuinely thinks he's the chosen man for Pakistan."

Musharraf has no doubt that al-Qaeda ordered the three assassination attempts. The mastermind, he says, was a Libyan named Abu Faraj Farj who is hiding "somewhere in the mountains," probably near Afghanistan. But Musharraf has been forced to delay taking on domestic extremists because of their complicated history with the Pakistani government and army. Some militant organizations now allied to bin Laden were once clandestinely funded and supported by Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to wage war in Afghanistan and Indian-controlled Kashmir. (In the case of the Kashmir conflict, Pakistan has always denied giving anything but moral support to the cause of Kashmiri self-determination, but militants who have fought there insist they had support from the military.) And when young Pakistanis were recruited for fighting in either Afghanistan or Kashmir, they were pumped up with the promise of serving in a holy war to free fellow Muslims from Soviet or Indian rule.