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"FacebookPinterest\n\nAt 28,000 feet, just a few of us awake in the business-class cabin, lit in our mise-en-sc\u00E8ne by spotlights and self-satisfied in our slipper socks, I decide to play a game with myself. I write down everything I know about the current situation in Pakistan, where this plane will land in six hours and thirty-seven minutes.\n\nI literally do this, with pen and paper; this isn't some kind of journalistic device. I start with the stuff you're supposed to know if you know anything about what's going on in Pakistan: Pervez Musharraf is our partner in the war on terror, but we don't completely trust him; there's a place called Waziristan, where Osama bin Laden lives; Pakistan has become a global leader in suicide bombings; there was one not a month ago in some city I can't remember the name of, in a mosque on a holy day, where more than fifty people were killed; a fruit stand in Karachi exploded during rush hour last week, pulverizing more people, sending the city into a panic. This information is dark as pitch, deeply attractive, nauseating. I feel my nuts shrivel a little. The seat-belt notice chimes. A Pakistani guy near the galley in weird pajamas and an airline blanket wrapped around his neck like a giant ascot brushes his teeth with a little twig. There's a journalist or diplomat awake across the plane, watching Balls of Fury and rubbing a little silver cross on a chain.\n\nI also know, to sketch it out broadly, that there was supposed to be an election in early January. That we in our country believe that these were very important elections. That we are worried about Pakistan as a state that could go rotten, that Musharraf is possibly turning into a character we are frightened of, one in the long line of allies upon whom we've lavished money and power only to have them foment something lethal in the world that may come back to poison us. That he didn't seem eager to see these elections happen. I know that we had been thinking that Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister, exiled for eight years, would fly back to save Pakistan. She stood in for democracy and freedom, maybe because Musharraf didn't want her back. Somehow we knew that when she returned in October, she would be in danger. And she had hardly left the airport when a man detonated himself near her motorcade and killed more than a hundred people. Everyone knew it was going to happen, and then it happened, more terrible than you could have imagined. And then they killed her. They said they were going to kill her, they tried to kill her, and three weeks ago, as she was leaving a rally, they actually killed her. After she died, the people rose up and torched whole cities.\n\nThe elections are scheduled for a month from now. No one knows if they'll happen, what Musharraf will do, who will be killed, if there will be open revolt, if the country will actually cease to cohere. It's impossible to time a cataclysmic event\u2014even a local one, even when it's been building for a long while and there is rumbling in the volcano and the geologists have made their measurement\u2014but the numbers here seem stacked in favor of mayhem in one way or another.\n\nThe plane lands in Islamabad, and suddenly I'm just a scared American asshole in business-class slipper socks with a carton of cigarettes to bribe the locals with, which no one will care about or want. The doors open, and the first gust of Pakistani air violates the cabin, the smoke-filled air of a country where stuff is always burning: garbage, leaves, wood fires. It's early in the morning and still mostly dark. A man is squatting at the edge of the tarmac wearing one of those Afghan hats you see in National Geographic photo essays on the Taliban, staring at those of us who descend the gangway. He looks like he could be taking a crap. I try to remember the name of the province Benazir Bhutto is from, like that will somehow prove I have some business being here, but I can't make the word appear. What an idiot.\n\nJanuary 22: possibly a civil war, maybe some assassinations\n\nAt my hotel, I meet my fir, a man named Shahnawaz who used to be employed as a government bureaucrat but has been out of work for a while. His hair looks slept in, and he's wearing sandals and an overcoat. He has a kind face, mild, more than a trace of melancholia. He drives me around Islamabad in an old black Toyota Corolla. The streets in the nicer sections have trees, and there are some large houses, but the place feels provisional, halfhearted. Intricate slums are built into wedges of unclaimed parts of the city; gullies flow thick with wastepaper and plastic bottles. I'm driven past a cricket pitch that looks like the track at an underfunded high school, where the men and women of society walk for ercise; on a given afternoon, you might see the head of the intelligence agencies there, the spokesmen for political parties, industrialists, women senators power walking in white Reeboks trailing long scarves. In these sections, every balustraded house peers out from behind high walls; every important government post sits wrapped in concertina wire with only slits for windows; men in security uniforms stand at gates with scarves and blankets pulled up to their eyes and their hands on cold metal guns, kicking at gas heaters. There's a pervading sense of a place under curfew, everyone inside and peeking between blinds. At one end, the city trails off into dense, half-built neighborhoods on dusty ruined land; at the other sits the great white tin can of the Shah Faisal mosque, the largest in Pakistan, looking like the offspring of the Mormon Tabernacle and the Staples Center. And beyond that are the Margalla Hills, scrubby, filled with glib pink-assed rhesus monkeys spoiled on Pringles and remnants of take-out containers, and, not a hundred miles beyond, the tribal areas and the Afghan border.\n\nThis afternoon I have meetings with two political-talk-show hosts, Hamid Mir and Talat Hussain. You can count them among Pakistan's first media celebrities. They do the news, yes, but they're famous as talking heads who opinionate against Musharraf. In conversation, they talk about events in shorthand. The events of March 9. The events of May 12. The events of November 3. The government put the chief justice of the Supreme Court in jail. They suspended the constitution. A prominent opposition leader was assassinated. Islamic militants openly fought with the armed forces of Pakistan on the streets of the capital. And all of that happened in the past year. The onslaught of information overwhelms the circuits. But I had to have known about November of last year, when Musharraf threw out the constitution, arrested the judges, declared a state of emergency, and took down the media, made all the television sets in Quetta and Multan and Hyderabad and everywhere else go dark. I had to have known about that, right?\n\n\"They didn't tell us it was going to happen,\" Talat says. His office is on the fourth floor of a concrete office block with no lights in the stairwells and stray cats outside and vines of black electric wires nesting over the facade. \"They threw a big black beam onto our beam and completely blacked out our transmission.\" After November 8, the government began reinstating TV networks\u2014the international networks first, then the networks that hadn't offended the regime, and then other networks once they had agreed to suspend certain shows and personalities like Talat Hussain and Hamid Mir. Talat was brought back on the air only eight days ago and only under certain conditions.\n\n\"First, they don't want live shows,\" he says. \"So the show is called Live with Talat Hussain, but the show is taped. And direct attacks on Musharraf, direct attacks on the army, direct attacks on the judges that he has appointed, these are all no-go areas. But they constantly change the goalposts. One day it's your topic that bothers them. Another day it's your body language. Body language has been mentioned as the reason to shut down my show more often than not.\"\n\nAs part of my introduction to Pakistani politics, I spoke to Hamid Mir, who is still banned from television. We sat in his office while he laughed at my questions\u2014How naive you are\u2014not because my questions were specifically naive but because Musharraf was so manipulative, so cynical, that it would be impossible to be anything but naive.\n\n\"Mr. Musharraf told to my CEO,\" Mir said laughing, \" &#145;Mr. Mir is not being careful in his private conversations.' So I am paying the price of my private conversations, like this one between you and me.\"\n\n\"You're saying they're monitoring your private conversations?\" I say.\n\nAnother man is in the room with us. He's filling in as host until Hamid is allowed back. This man says, \"It might sound very surprising for you, very shocking. But this is a part of the world where everybody believes in absolute power. With you, Bush can bomb the world, but he can't arrest somebody in New York and get away with it. Here we can't bomb the world, but we can arrest whomever we want.\"\n\nIn Talat's office, we talk about his family. He's married to his first cousin, and his daughter goes to a modern private school that is under threat\u2014no more progressive education, no more going to school without head scarves\u2014almost every Westernized school in the country has received such threats. \"Even as journalists, we don't know what's going on,\" Talat says. \"That's a starting premise. There are conspiracy theories in Pakistan because there are conspiracies in Pakistan. Before Benazir was killed, all theories about her being killed were conspiracies.\"\n\nWhen we're done talking, I ask them for their informed predictions about the upcoming elections.\n\n\"The best-case scenario is also in a way the worst-case scenario,\" Talat says. \"A couple of leaders get killed. Musharraf tries to impose emergency again, for the third time. The politicians gang up against him and say no. There's chaos on the street, forcing the army chief to ask Musharraf to go.\"\n\nMir says, \"He will rig the election. And this time you will not see only protest. This time you will see some kind of civil war.\"\n\njanuary 23: unfunny political humor\n\nI'm not going to get too deep into it, but you should know the general political landscape we're talking about here. There will be an election for Parliament on February 18. And the makeup of the Parliament will decide not only who the next prime minister will be but whether Pervez Musharraf gets impeached. Musharraf was \"reelected\" president of Pakistan five years ago, in a contest in which his was the only name on the ballot. He was still in the military at the time, which, according to the Supreme Court, made his appointment unconstitutional, and so he had the chief justice fired (also arguably unconstitutional) and put under house arrest. Musharraf has been in power since 1999, when he engineered a bloodless coup while in a holding pattern on a jet that the government had barred from landing. Confusing, which is the point. Don't fight the confusion; acquiesce and it will start to make sense.\n\nThree major parties are running in this election. The first supports Musharraf. The second was founded by the man Musharraf deposed when that plane landed, Nawaz Sharif. After Musharraf evicted Nawaz from office, Musharraf had him arrested and imprisoned. Then he had Nawaz deported to Saudi Arabia to live in exile. This past year the Supreme Court ruled that Nawaz would be allowed to return. But when his plane landed, Musharraf had him deported again. Nawaz flew in again three months later, and this time he was allowed to stay. Then Musharraf rejected Nawaz's application to stand for election. So Nawaz is currently running a campaign for an election in which he is not actually a candidate. The third party is, of course, Benazir Bhutto's Peoples Party. And just for the record, it was Nawaz Sharif who succeeded her in 1990, and when he did, he put Benazir's husband in jail. For, you know, allegedly killing Benazir's brother. Oh, and also because he was charged with corruption. Oh, and to connect another loop, or I guess tie that loop into a knot and tie that knot into another knot, Nawaz came of political age under a military dictator named Zia ul Haq, who had Benazir's father hanged. And Musharraf allowed a McDonald's to be built near the spot where his hanging occurred. Which isn't far from where Benazir herself died, in Rawalpindi.\n\nSo technically, this election is a power struggle between three people, none of whom are actually running for office: Nawaz, because Musharraf wouldn't let him; Musharraf, because he's already president and has never really run for any office in his life; and Benazir Bhutto's widower, because he's standing in for his wife, who is dead. You kind of have to laugh about it, until you realize that it really, really is not funny.\n\njanuary 24: killing the monster you made (and then resurrecting him)\n\nWe wait until after evening prayers to interview the Imam. We park in front of the mosque and watch men hurry up the walk, jumping out of their shoes and doing ritualistic ablutions in the concrete troughs outside. The sun has just set, but there's still light in the sky, jaundiced and low.\n\nIn a few minutes, a man knocks on the Corolla window. He bends over and looks at us. He has a long, stiff beard that goes horizontal with his head. What are we doing here, sitting in the car, watching this mosque? We have an interview with the Imam. He looks at Shahnawaz, my fir and driver, and he looks at me. Then he smiles and says okay and walks back toward the mosque.\n\n\"Two men sitting in a car, watching this mosque,\" Shahnawaz says. \"We are either from the security agencies or we're Shia thinking about blowing it up. This place has a history of sectarian violence.\"\n\nThis place is called the Red Mosque, but it's been painted beige by the government, to make a statement that it's a different mosque now. When people discuss the political trouble now coming to a head for Musharraf, they sometimes say that it began here in earnest in July; that the almost full-scale war being fought between Islamic militants and the Pakistani army in the tribal areas began here; there's even a theory that what happened here led to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.\n\nThe Red Mosque, like a lot of mosques in Pakistan, is a government mosque built and funded by the state. Its radicalism is part of the great dynasty of Zia ul Haq, military dictator and father of the Afghan jihad. Last July, the mosque was run by two brothers, sons of its founder. The brothers had questionable politics vis-\u00E0-vis the militants. Police found a large cache of explosives in one of the brothers' cars, but he was forgiven after intervention by Zia's son (a government official), who will appear again in this drama. In Pakistan everyone reappears.\n\nThe government was monitoring the sermons, and it was increasingly troubled by them\u2014vehemently anti-West, anti-Musharraf, pro-militant. There were problems with the head of the female madrassa there, a charismatic and ambitious woman named Ume Hassan. She and her students took over the public library adjacent to the mosque, making it part of the madrassa, because the only true education is an Islamic education. The madrassa students started kidnapping people\u2014a few women they believed were running a brothel, several supposedly corrupt police officers, some Chinese nationals from a massage parlor\u2014and subjecting them to Islamic justice: Repent or be dealt with; change your ways. (They decided to, you know, repent.) It was a parallel justice system, just like the Taliban were creating out in the hinterlands near the Afghan border, only this was in the capital, a short walk from Musharraf's house. They believed they were starting a movement that would overthrow the government.\n\nIn July, the government rolled in with personnel carriers and assault vehicles. The loudspeakers at the mosque broadcast a call for the neighborhood, the nation, to rise up and overthrow Musharraf. For fifteen hours, there was a firefight in the middle of Islamabad, on the boulevard in front of the mosque, on the side streets where low-level bureaucrats live in single-story unadorned brick bos trimmed with damp and must. The media poured into the area en masse in TV vans and little Japanese sedans with press stickers. A photographer was shot and killed in the crossfire and a cameraman was paralyzed by a bullet to the spine. Talat Hussain and Hamid Mir broadcast from behind walls, inside hotel rooms, for hours and hours. The nation tuned in on all channels.\n\nBy morning the government had cordoned off the entire neighborhood. For ten days, no one was allowed in or out. The mosque brothers were on the phone to the media, the government, the police, their families, almost the entire time. An overabundance of dialogue from all quarters. There were as many as 4,000 students inside, and the mosque brothers reached a series of agreements to let the children out, and then the women, and then some men. Zia ul Haq's son Ijaz was one of the main negotiators.\n\nThe deadline passed, and the government sent in its elite commando unit. Twenty hours later, the mosque was engulfed in white flames. Almost everyone inside was incinerated.\n\nThere's another knock at the Corolla window. The lights are up in the mosque when they bring us inside. There are dirty white walls, fluorescent lights. We sit on the floor in a room where four or five men in their twenties study Korans on little wood carrels. They are students, mostly from rural areas. They shake my hand and look at me expressionless, as if I were a computer from the year 3046. After we're offered tea, the Imam comes in and sits down next to us.\n\n\"I was made the head of this mosque in October,\" he says. \"The surviving brother who led the mosque is in jail. I am his nephew. The whole community, the family, they all decided that I will be the new head of the mosque.\" He has a young, fat face, a bushy beard, a black turban. He has absolutely no nervous energy; he just sits, issues labored breaths, and radiates heat like a tiger that's been tranquilized.\n\nWhen the mosque first reopened, the government installed an Imam it had selected\u2014a man more in line with the quote-unquote enlightened tolerance that is the official policy of the Musharraf regime. But at his first Friday sermon, the worshippers shouted him down and physically threw him out. I ask how the government came to install the nephew of the very man whom it had brought in the army to remove seven months ago.\n\n\"The government was asked by the Supreme Court to give evidence of what led to the military operation,\" he says. \"They did not even want to rebuild the mosque, but they did not want Pandora's box opened if they were to give evidence. They would rather have me here than open those files.\"\n\nThe government says that just over a hundred people were killed, mostly hard-core fighters\u2014that they found heavy weapons, currency, foreign passports from Al Qaeda types. I walked through the neighborhood around the mosque earlier today and asked people what happened. One man said 5,000 people were killed. A man with a religious beard selling school supplies in a narrow stall said 1,000 and that most of their bones are under the turned earth where the women's madrassa used to be. People saw the handiwork of Mossad, the CIA, the Pakistani intelligence agencies. Ijaz ul Haq says that some surprising things were found inside the mosque after the operation. \"Now, nobody knows this, but the body was found of a guy who was not circumcised, and there was an Indian passport also. A guy with a Pakistani ID card and an Indian ID card?\" He gave me a knowing look. \"This was never leaked\u2014because, I believe, the government thought that this would create a diplomatic crisis.\"\n\nWhen I ask the Imam about what may have actually happened, he says, \"We are reluctant to talk at this point. We are afraid.\"\n\nBut the problem isn't that people won't talk. It's not that there's not enough information here in Pakistan. It's that there is too much information. An overabundance of material, too much conversation, too many players. So that whatever truth we may come to know could never, ever feel very satisfying. You will never be given access to the evidence, but you will be inundated with conversation about it. It's the product of a place where everyone is trying to control events by deploying a never-ending stream of privileged conversations and misinformation and opinion.\n\n\"Before this Red Mosque operation, it was only the religious people who were in favor of the movement,\" the Imam says. \"But afterward, even the moderates and the liberals are turning toward Islam. The judiciary, the politicians, they've shown their support. They have been inspired by the operation. It has changed everything.\"\n\nThe day the mosque reopened and the new Imam was thrown out, there was a suicide bombing not 500 yards away, killing at least thirteen people at a market, mostly army. This initiated a policy of direct conflict with the military, like the suicide bombings of air force officers in Lahore or the raids on police and military posts in the tribal areas that are happening now almost daily.\n\nI ask the Imam what he thinks is going to happen in the election.\n\n\"We have no position on the candidates,\" he says. \"We totally oppose democracy. It has done no good to Pakistan. We favor the foundation of a true Islamic system. That will bring positive change to society.\"\n\nThis is the state of affairs at the Red Mosque, which, I remind you, is funded by the government. The nephew reads the sermons his uncle writes. Ume Hassan lives semi-underground not far from the mosque. The students, thousands of them, were held for a day or two and then released. Ijaz ul Haq is running for Parliament in this election. The surviving brother, who had been caught wearing a burka trying to escape with the women, is in jail near Rawalpindi and, according to some newspapers, is close to negotiating his release. No one in Pakistan ever really disappears. They're just backstage, catching their breath, doing a costume change, waiting for the next absurd scene.\n\nfebruary 1: inventing the election\n\nFor days and days, I have been speaking to people who despise Pervez Musharraf: television reporters, operatives from the Pakistan Peoples Party, aides to the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, waiters in biryani houses, gas pumpers at gas stations, Pashtun laborers who squat by the side of the road cradling pickas, waiting for someone to hire them to dig a ditch for thirty-seven cents an hour.\n\n\"He's a dog,\" the owner of a pirated-DVD shop told me.\n\n\"He's a child,\" a prominent lawyer said.\n\n\"He's a very insecure man, and he's a goner,\" Talat Hussain said.\n\nIt's partly political, that everything is Musharraf's fault, but it's more than that. It's a kind of orthodoxy. There is a desperation to the belief that if this one man would only disappear, the sun would rise the following morning over a totally different place. Musharraf has argued for himself as the only power in Pakistan, and so in all aspects of life\u2014the bombs, the skyrocketing price of flout, the state of the judiciary\u2014people see his reflected image. Members of the civil society quoting John Marshall and Imams of extremist mosques, socialists and newspapermen, they all have the same refrain, which they shout back and forth to each other at any of the hundred rallies that might happen in a week: Go, Musharraf, go.\n\nEvery one of them, though, would say that he doesn't know what is going to happen in the election. In the very tone of the chorus of vitriol against Musharraf, you can hear a sense of futility. In Pakistan, the leader doesn't leave because he's lost support. The leader leaves because the military shows up, or because he's dead. The infamous military dictator Zia said to a reporter once, \"I've discovered that gaining power is much easier than giving it up.\"\n\nThere's no logic in Musharraf's staying in power now\u2014that's what the newspapers and the policy experts say. But he has his own logic\u2014the logic of going on television and saying that Benazir died because she was careless; the logic of officially claiming that the chief justice, who is confined to his home by security forces, is free to move as he likes; the logic of killing a hundred people to remove an Imam from a mosque, only to install his nephew. It's a logic understood, and even partially formulated, by a man named Humayun Gauhar.\n\nGauhar is seated at his desk when his servant shows me in. There is half a cigar between two big, soft fingers. He is in a set of fine gray wool Pakistani pajama clothes (they're called shalwar kameez), and he is enormous. It's a languid, pampered obesity that he is comfortable in. He has coffee and tea brought in, lights the cigar with a lighter that blinks red and plays a Shakira song.\n\nGauhar is the ghostwriter of Musharraf's autobiography, the one Musharraf toured America not two years ago promoting. He is an adviser to Musharraf about policy and the media. He was rumored to be in line for the post of interim prime minister under Musharraf, a rumor possibly spread by himself. And he is a personal friend of Musharraf's. Gauhar shows me the first issue he did of a business magazine called Blue Chip, on whose first cover is Pervez Musharraf.\n\n\"He said to me, &#145;I wish we had a magazine like Forbes that I could be proud of and show when I am abroad,' \" Gauhar says. \"I said, &#145;I can publish this magazine, but you will have to be on the cover of the first issue.' So he said, &#145;Not only will I be on the cover; I'll write the story.' \"\n\nHe says he and Musharraf see each other socially quite often.\n\nWhat's he like? I ask.\n\n\"He finds it difficult to lie or hold back the truth, so he tells you everything. He is softhearted to a fault, which then creates problems for him. Like, for instance, with the Red Mosque. He should have moved immediately. He kept saying, &#145;No, but there are innocents inside\u2014women and children.' \"\n\nWhen I ask him about Pakistan being the most dangerous country in the world, he says it's America\u2014who's killed more people in the past ten years than America?\n\n\"The best strategy I think for America in Pakistan,\" he says, \"and for those interested in defeating Al Qaeda, is get hold of Mullah Omar. Reassure him, &#145;We're not going to capture you. We're not going to kill you.' Tell him, &#145;This is how you have to do it. This is how you run your country.' The first thing he has to do is throw out Al Qaeda. Say, &#145;We will not stop you. We will even give you aid.' \"\n\nInstall Mullah Omar?\n\n\"You don't have to install him. He'll get installed anyway. It's inevitable. The only thing we can do is install him faster.\"\n\nWhen Gauhar finishes his coffee, he presses a little button, like a doorbell but mounted on his desk. Somewhere in the house, a bell sounds. He presses it again and again, and the buzz sounds again and again. A man runs into the room, small, in leather slippers, and produces a short bow. He's got to be 70 years old. Gauhar says, \"Coffee,\" and the servant runs again, out of the room.\n\nGauhar then talks for a long, long time, a self-propelled political narrative about a Pakistan that most people are too blind to see. He talks in a personal way, as if you two are the only people who understand how crazy the world really is. Inside his brain are stories and plots. Inside his brain is information, some of it privileged: archives, figures, demographics, history that he can scoop out and mold into compelling shapes. The story of the election, he says, is completely different from what anyone else will tell you.\n\n\"By my calculations, [Nawaz Sharif's party] wins fifty, fifty-five seats maximum. Probably less. The Peoples Party and [the party that backs Musharraf] are neck and neck. I see them both having ninety plus, maybe one hundred plus. To make life difficult for Musharraf, they need to impeach him [which requires more than a two-thirds majority]. That will be very difficult.\"\n\nHe's laying the groundwork here. There is a logic, he's saying, for Musharraf to not lose. If Musharraf survives the election, maybe, he wants this story out there ahead of time so that the results will make sense when they come in.\n\n\"Mr. Zardari [Benazir Bhutto's widower] says, &#145;If the Peoples Party doesn't win, the election's rigged, and then all bets are off and I won't be able to control my people.' You take these statements together, what is he saying? &#145;If we don't win, we will break up the country.' \"\n\nHe gives me a look: These are the kinds of barbarians we're dealing with.\n\n\"How would he do that?\" he says. \"Ask him. He's a moron. I don't think he has that capability.\"\n\nfebruary 9: the mullah and his iphone\n\nWe light out of Islamabad first thing in the morning for the provincial city of Mardan, supposedly the next Talibanized city in the North-West Frontier Province. Islamabad unbuilds itself as we head out of town. First the trees disappear, then the curbs, then walls around the buildings, and then the buildings themselves. We merge onto the motorway and move into the valley leading west toward Afghanistan. Men in orange suits sweep the breakdown lane with twig brooms. Slag hills roll toward the horizon from the road. There's a landfill that's not really a landfill, just heaps of garbage with bristly grass growing on them. The sky is always white\u2014something in the air, dust or smoke or smog, draining the color from everything, the entire nation looking as if it's been bled to death.\n\nIn Mardan, the Pakistani Taliban have already bombed CD shops, threatened barbers who shave beards. It started three months ago, when men with rocket launchers attacked police outposts. Then strangers with sophisticated communications equipment like the Taliban use were spotted on the outskirts. Just yesterday the police raided the house where some militants were hiding, and two policemen were killed.\n\nWe pass through parts of Mardan that look like sections of Islamabad that have outgrown the original grid\u2014concrete bos with stores inside, minibuses covered in bangles and stuffed with women, a white horse, stained brown at the haunches by grime, pulling a cart piled ten feet high with toilets. On the outskirts of town, the roads lose their asphalt, just thick slabs of shifting mud with open sewers running at the sides.\n\nI visit an independent candidate at his rural compound and talk about the Talib who come door-to-door collecting money for their noble war. I meet the mayor of the district, who is trying to get the federal government to pay attention to what's happening. Later, in the afternoon, we wait in the car in front of a small mosque for Maulana Shuja ul-Mulk. The maulana is a member of Parliament and the provincial secretary for JUI (Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam). The party supported the Taliban, has founded more madrassas in Pakistan than any other organization, and has as its principal tenet the enforcement of strict Sharia law. The maulana is at this mosque to take part in the celebration of a group of students who've memorized the entire Koran. The service is ending, and in the street are little girls in long flowered dresses, wearing plastic jewelry and red lipstick and purple eye shadow. The boys stand separately. Someone's handed out neon green taffy that's frothing out of everyone's mouths like they're cartoon zombies. The older boys, 18 or 19 years old, with serious looks on their faces, keep an eye on us in the car.\n\nWhen the maulana finds out there is a foreigner waiting on the street, he sends out a man with an ancient machine gun who says it's not safe for me and shows me in through the back of the mosque compound. We're seated on the floor with the maulana, in a white turban, and the mullah of the mosque, in a black turban, and some political operatives. Madrassa students keep coming in through the door and sitting in obvious, slack-jawed awe at being in the same room with the maulana.\n\nNo one speaks. Then the maulana says, \"What is scarier to an American, a white turban or a black turban?\" Everyone laughs.\n\nI say, \"Black turbans are way way scarier!\" Everyone stops laughing.\n\nWe talk for a while about the elections. He's confident that he'll win, even though he's not favored. I tell him about my conversation at the Red Mosque, and that according to the Imam, the true Islamists should boycott the elections, about how the Pakistani Taliban have spoken out against democracy here.\n\n\"It's baseless that the Taliban are undemocratic,\" he says. \"They want democracy. Even now Hamid Karzai could not contest an election against Mullah Omar.\"\n\nYou think the Taliban will return in Afghanistan?\n\n\"Hamid Karzai, despite all the backing from the West? He is faltering. That is why he is sitting down with the Taliban. They are the indispensable part of the society. You must deal with them.\"\n\nBut aren't they causing all this violence just a few miles away, in the tribal areas, where everyone lives under threat of death one way or another?\n\n\"What is happening in the tribal areas is all because a dictator is deciding everything.\" Again: the Musharraf defense.\n\nAnd what about the recent events here in Mardan, the quote-unquote Talibanization that's supposedly been afoot?\n\n\"The attacks on the CD shops, the DVD shops\u2014that's not the Taliban. They are not local people. Taliban means &#145;students.' Look all around you. All these people you see, they are the Taliban.\"\n\nHis cell phone rings, and from between the folds of the blanket he wears wrapped against the cold appears an iPhone. Which I didn't even know you could buy in Pakistan. He shows me some pictures of his kids, doing that pinching motion you see on the iPhone commercials. When I told the local bureau chief for Talat's channel that I was coming to visit the maulana, he said, \"I like him. He's one of the good political mullahs. Because he's corrupt. Much easier to deal with!\" He came into power a modest man, but now he owns a shopping center and drives a new Toyota four-by-four. This is maybe why support for the so-called political mullahs is disappearing.\n\nIf there's no Taliban here, I ask, then who killed those two policemen just yesterday not twenty minutes from here?\n\n\"Those were just criminals,\" he says.\n\nI know that what he's saying isn't true. I've met the grandfather of one of the militants who was killed. He said his grandson was an Islamic militant. He did not approve, but he still visited with him in the middle of a firefight with the police. \"He was lying on the floor, bleeding from his leg,\" the grandfather told me, working his bony jaw. \"But he spoke very politely and asked after my family and my health.\" Imagine that: Let's stop the war on terror for a minute\u2014I'll go in and talk to my grandson while he's bleeding to death and ask him to come out. He will be polite, refuse to surrender, and later be killed.\n\nfebruary 14: fatty bumbola rules the world\n\n Shahnawaz, my fir, takes me to a party at the home of a prominent person in Islamabad. A barbecue, with an open bar. Cars are parked on the grass at his front gate. There are maybe thirty people inside. The women are seated on the sofas with glasses of wine; they have magnificent eye shadow and big sexy breasts partially unleashed. All the men are drinking Johnnie Walker Black and water and smoking Cuban cigars. Shahnawaz asks a man in a little white tudo for two drinks, and then he introduces us. He is, Shahnawaz says, the most famous bartender in Islamabad; if you have a party with the right kind of people, it's incumbent upon you to hire him. He probably knows more secrets about the ruling class than any actual member of the ruling class. Then Shahnawaz introduces me around. Two men from the American embassy, a military attach\u00E9 and his subordinate, named Spike. \"I was just saying that being here now is like being in France during the French Revolution or in Moscow in 1917,\" says the military attach\u00E9, an upright, blunt-voiced blond man from Ohio made from whole milk, creatine, and military-conduct manuals. One young industrialist tells me, \"The party season has really been truncated this year. There would be GTs [that's what people here call get-togethers] like this, much crazier than this, all the time. No one has been in the mood, I guess, since Benazir's assassination.\"\n\nThen Shahnawaz introduces me to Fasal, a wealthy young man in a velvet blazer said to be very close to Benazir's widower, Zardari. I heard a story about how Fasal became friends with Zardari: He went to Zardari's corruption trial for days and weeks; they finally spoke\u2014at first just a greeting, then more\u2014and soon Fasal was visiting him in jail. This is the jail where Zardari had two servants, fine antique furniture, food made by the cooks at his house and delivered daily.\n\n\"You're from New York,\" Fasal says. He takes out a pack of Marlboro Lights. \"I used to visit Mr. Zardari when he was living there in the Helmsley.\" Zardari lived in the Helmsley hotel for a while, after he'd been in prison for eleven years, and had left the estate in England, where he built a replica town pub to hang out in, all supposedly funded with a goodly ill-gotten portion of Pakistan's former federal budget.\n\n\"Do you live near the meat district?\" Fasal says. He's talking about the meatpacking district, which is filled with people you always suspect of being corrupt foreign figures in exile. \"Mr. Zardari loves the meat district.\"\n\nI notice Shahnawaz slipping out the door and standing in the fog of his breath in front of the picture window. He's been ruminative all night; you can look at him and tell he's seeing the world in poetic terms. I come out, and we sit in our overcoats and watch the guards at the house across the street. I say that Islamabad seems like a city built on secrets. There's a tension here, and yeah, maybe it is because any building of any significance is bracing for some sort of bombing. But it also seems to be part of the civic architecture, a city invented by a ruling class hiding from view, ashamed of what it's doing and always worried that someone will find out.\n\nThen Shahnawaz tells me his story, the reason he is working for me instead of at some other job, and probably the reason that he's dreamy and detached. Shahnawaz comes from a famous family in Pakistan. His uncle started the Peoples Party with Benazir Bhutto's father and was also a well-known feudal lord. (His ex-wife wrote a famous tell-all book called My Feudal Lord.) His mother is standing for senate election now. A few years ago, Shahnawaz was working in a prominent government job, with a car and a driver, and writing an anonymous gossip column on the side. He wrote an article about a general he referred to as \"Fatty,\" which those in the small circuit of people at parties like these may have identified as an army officer who was known as Fatty Bumbola. It was about a rumor Shahnawaz had heard about how Fatty had come to possess large tracts of very valuable government land. Fatty Bumbola read the story, and he was angry. He was embarrassed. And he ercised his power. Shahnawaz was fired from his government post; he was trailed by intelligence agents. When he went to interview for new jobs, an intelligence agent would follow up with a visit to the interviewer. And since then he's been more or less unemployed.\n\n\"So yes,\" Shahnawaz says, \"it's a place with secrets. A lot of the houses around here are intelligence-agency safe houses. I was interrogated in one not far from here, near the Dutch embassy. That's a famous street for safe houses. Though every street is famous for something like that.\"\n\nfebruary 14, 10:45 p.m.: pakistan is out there somewhere\n\nI'm in my hotel, getting ready for bed, when I'm visited by a lawyer named Athar Minhallah, the de facto head of the movement to restore the chief justice. He's brought me a bottle of wine wrapped in paper from the bootleggers, because I've said that I miss drinking wine. I pour him a glass of the scotch I picked up in the duty-free shop. Out on the streets, local kids are drag racing like they do every night. He tells me he was at a rally for the imprisoned chief justice just yesterday and that he was beaten by the police and arrested. Then the lights go out. There are a few hours of power outage every day in Islamabad. We sit in the dark. Athar talks about golf in longing, meandering sentences. And then about Cambridge, where he went to school. And then about scotch. And then about Cambridge again; and I get the sense that if there were a heaven for Athar Minhallah, it would be along those stony walkways and coxswained waters. Then we just sit quietly.\n\n\"The elites are nauseating,\" he says. He clinks a ring against his glass. \"I am part of them, but they are the cancer of this nation. All of the wealthy and educated, they want only to preserve their own power at the expense of the state. And they think they know Pakistan because they have money and a house in Islamabad and another in their home village. This isn't Pakistan, here in Islamabad. Pakistan is out there somewhere.\"\n\nfebruary 15: inside the assassination machine\n\nTen thousand men are waiting for the arrival of Nawaz Sharif on a dirt pitch in the city of Attock, an hour west of Islamabad. There's a holding fence in front of the stage. On one side of it are a dozen police commandos with machine guns; on the other are the supporters of Nawaz Sharif. The election is in three days. Nawaz Sharif is now, according to political oddsmakers, the number one assassination target in the country, and people seem tense. There's a clotting at the gateways to the pitch, where police are letting people in very slowly. The rumor in the crowd is that the government is holding people up so that the rally appears small.\n\nChants go up, spread through the crowd, die out. The faces are from a completely different encyclopedia of faces than the one I know. Candidates speak: men in lifts, men with hair dyed deep red with henna, men with mustaches that I knew heretofore only from the Emerald City of Oz.\n\nAnd then a commotion at the back of the stage, an SUV pulled up nearly to the stairs, a crush of men, and you can see the top of the head of Nawaz, passed up the crowded stairs as if through an esophagus. He climbs onto a block, faces the audience, and clears his throat. The podium has a steel frame that surrounds him on three sides, and at the top a layer of bulletproof glass three inches thick. He appears to be giving his stump speech from inside a tollbooth.\n\nNawaz shouts in Urdu: \"From Karachi to Khyber there is total chaos and insecurity. For one reason: the dictator!\" His voice is almost gone from speaking constantly for the past thirty-six hours. The crowd says: \"Go, Musharraf, go!\"\n\nThe man next to me says to the man next to him, \"If there are no riots on Tuesday, then let's meet at the Islamabad Club for lunch.\"\n\nI don't hear much of the speech before I'm hustled down into Nawaz's Land Cruiser so that when he finishes they can hustle him into the car and speed off immediately. There are thermoses of tea in the back, and containers of what smells like chicken. I wait for a while and then feel the car get jostled, then rocked more. The door opens, and he is deposited inside. The driver takes off, police trucks in front and behind us. This is statistically one of the five most likely moments\u2014end of the campaign, leaving a rally\u2014for Nawaz to get blown up, though he seems at worst resigned to whatever will happen. (It's the perfect situation for a reporter such as myself: enough danger to write about while not requiring any actual courage.)\n\nHe wipes the sweat off his head with his paisley scarf, and then he opens his mouth. But only a gravelly frog sound comes out. \"Urgh.\" He marshals his saliva and whatever mucus is in his sinuses to lubricate his voice. \"Okay,\" he says. \"The rally, what are you thinking of it?\"\n\nHe sounds, what with the raw throat and the backward-structured English, exactly like Yoda. I tell him it seemed pretty tense, with all the security and him talking out of a tollbooth.\n\n\"It was never like that before,\" he says. \"I said it to the people: I don't like to be talking to you with this barrier in between. I never had this much distance between the stage and the people.\"\n\nDo you have any sense of where the threat is coming from?\n\n\"I don't believe any personal vendetta. But I believe Musharraf considers me as his number one enemy.\"\n\nThe cars and buses ahead of us are waved over by the police, who point at the shoulder of the road with their black guns. People shout and wave when they see it's Nawaz; through the bulletproof car it sounds like they're underwater. I point out that just five miles from where we are now is the jail Musharraf locked him in for more than a year.\n\n\"The fort where I was held is about 500 years old,\" Nawaz says. \"And they put me in a small dungeon. They built a wall outside my room so I could not see the sun. They kept me in such a state for about fourteen months. This is how he treats the prime ministers of this country.\"\n\nIs it true that Musharraf tried to have you put to death?\n\n\"He was trying my case, and he wanted to secure capital punishment for me. God saved me. Otherwise he was bent upon destroying me and to hang me.\"\n\nNawaz has made the restoration of the judiciary his first principle. He says this without my asking, because he knows it'll play well with me, the American democracy freak convinced that the one way for the world to succeed is for everyone to look like us. \"Our first priority is to reinstate the judges. To restore the judiciary to the status of November. And to abandon the role of military in politics. These are our primary objectives.\"\n\nHe does not mention that he himself had the Supreme Court stormed by military forces when he was in power. I ask him what he'll do about the militancy. And he turns the question around, like every question, to make it about Musharraf. \"These problems have always cropped up whenever there is a dictatorship in this country. They never posed any problems under democracy. These are the so-called fruits of dictatorship that we are seeing at this time.\" The one plank of his political platform is \"Go, Musharraf, go.\" Because Musharraf is of course the root cause of every problem. It's normal politics, but played at an extraordinary frequency.\n\nI think to myself: If Musharraf is gone, and things are still bad, what will they do then?\n\nfebruary 18: we are too happy for democracy\n\nThe streets in Peshawar, the capital city of the North-West Frontier Province, are completely empty. There were rumors in the hotel this morning that everyone was afraid to go outside because it's election day, and it looks like those rumors are true at eight thirty in the morning. At the intersection where yesterday a horse fell and lay sideways still harnessed to his cart while rickshaws and bicycles and minibuses and army jeeps parted around him, today there is nothing. Over at the Government College School for Boys, where there's a men's polling station, there's almost no line. Are you frightened to be out in Peshawar, I ask the men who are here, where they bomb and mortar on a normal day? \"We are Pashtun men, and Pashtun men have no fear!\" At the girls' school around the corner, a woman in a green burka is about to drop the first vote cast today into a plastic bin under a diagram of a covalent bond. After two hours, only ten women have voted. At the customs house nearby\u2014termed a sensitive polling station\u2014they're letting only four people into the voting room at once, after a thorough search. Some election observers from Europe watch them from a corner in bright blue flak jackets. A reporter for Talat's channel says that seven of the villages around Mardan have completely boycotted the election. He says that two and a half hours into the election, not a single woman in the tribal areas has voted.\n\nWe drive out of Peshawar. From the car window you can see again and again incredible beauty chockablock with extraordinary ugliness, trays of perfect oranges sold from a dirty gutter, an intricately carved bed with a man asleep on it sitting in a field of rubble, a hole in the earth filled with garbage where twin girls play with a ball. We pass the monument to the first nuclear test, a hill rendered in metal, a version of which sits in every city.\n\nNot far away, in the village of Sherpao, I visit former interior minister Aftab Sherpao. Besides Musharraf, he has the single most prolific history of being a suicide-bomb target in Pakistan\u2014he's survived two of them, at close quarters, in the past six months. He is relegated by security concerns to his compound, though it's election day and he's running for office. He sits on a plastic chair under a great white tent with his face in his hand. The tent, big enough for 500 people, is empty.\n\n\"I've been here at my compound for the last couple of days,\" Sherpao says. \"And you know how the situation has been over here. This district has witnessed three major suicide attacks, two against me and a third against another political party. I haven't been able to canvass in the way I should have. I still had my workers, so hopefully the results will be positive, though there has been a low turnout all over.\"\n\nI ask him about the attacks against him. \"One was on the twenty-eighth of April, which was in a public meeting in Charsadda. When I was going back to the car, there were a number of people surrounding me\u2014they wanted to talk to me\u2014and suddenly this thing happened. This man came, and he blew himself up. Well, I didn't see him. But evidently he was about five or six feet away from me. When I got up and looked, it was real mayhem. There were bodies lying all over. The second one was on Eid day, and we were praying in the mosque. And this was a bigger incident in the sense that there were fifty-three casualties and 147 injured. It's just outside here, in my village. Both cases, the attacks harmed people who were close to me. Close associates. My son was critically wounded.\"\n\nI ask if he has any idea who was targeting him.\n\n\"We have identified the local facilitators, but they haven't been caught,\" he says. \"So many incidents have happened, there's no focus on it now.\"\n\nAnd what will you do in the future? After the election?\n\n\"Try and survive.\"\n\nAlmost outside Sherpao's door is the local polling station. It's five thirty, and there's a crowd of people trying to get their vote in before the election is over. There's a photographer with me, taking pictures of them engaging in what would appear to have been a successful democratic process. I look up, and there are some men on the low concrete roof, and they've got machine guns. And then suddenly there are half a dozen more men in the courtyard, with machine guns and little fezzes with Sherpao's party logo on them. I'm not sure if you're supposed to have your political party's private armed militia inside the polling station. And by that I mean: You're not. Across the courtyard, fifty men are going ape-shit in a room, tearing up ballots and throwing them in the air, filling out other ballots and putting them into the box. Again: irregular. The photographer's in there taking pictures, and they start yelling at him, and the militia guys come over and box him in as well. They seem to be thinking: Hey, we're just here to protect our right to elect our man without being blown up, but if you take pictures of it, it's not going to look right.\n\nA man is sent over to talk to me and explain this away. \"They are too happy! They are too happy for democracy!\"\n\nfebruary 19: the old bloody dawn\n\nThe results roll in. Pervez Musharraf has suffered an even greater defeat than he could have expected. The Peoples Party gets ninety-four seats, Musharraf's party just forty-two. The big surprise is Nawaz Sharif's party: seventy-one seats, without him even being on the ballot. The pundits are saying Nawaz is the new most important man in Pakistani politics. Meanwhile, in the North-West Frontier Province, the religious parties have been drummed out of the Parliament, replaced by a secular party. Musharraf seemed to have set things up to be able to personally dictate the results\u2014he banned exit polling, for instance, so no one would know what the results should be. But now: total, abject defeat. One theory posits that even with massive tampering, he couldn't muster anything that looked like real support. Another posits that the chief of the army simply said to him: Do whatever you want before election day, but if you pull anything on the day itself, you're gone.\n\nNo one is willing to consider that Musharraf allowed the will of the people to be expressed.\n\nAt Gauhar's house, a servant shows me into the living room. Gauhar's laid out on a stuffed chair, his eyes closed, a servant on a little stool massaging his limbs. He kneads Gauhar's right thigh, and Gauhar releases a sigh.\n\n\"You see, where I went wrong\u2014and everybody else\u2014was the Nawaz faction,\" Gauhar says. \"This is a pro-mullah, anti-America vote. Because this was the only party that was standing firm against America. This Nawaz-led government\u2014Nawaz is a closet mullah, remember\u2014will encourage the Taliban.\"\n\nThe servant moves his stool to Gauhar's left arm, and with his right Gauhar clicks through the election coverage on TV. Talat Hussain, Hamid Mir, a dozen other talking heads, are all on the air, as they have been for two days now, beaming: It was a real election, Musharraf said we weren't capable of democracy, and look at us, the mullahs are out of the Parliament, maybe it was Nawaz's charisma\u2014\n\nGauhar snorts. \"He's not charismatic at all. The one thing that has completely escaped him is charisma. He's hardly articulate.\" Then he turns off the TV and says, in a way, what it comes down to for Musharraf and for Pakistan: \"They can't throw Musharraf out. Nobody has enough seats. It's up to him.\"\n\nThen Gauhar says something that may be a little more revealing about his dedication to democracy than he'd like: \"The U.S. and the West were putting too much pressure on him. &#145;Hold free and fair elections! Let the crooks come back!' It just ruined everything. Because if we had had the same dispensation until 2012, the transition for this country would have been a real transition with roots and foundations. This is just ephemeral. It's not a new dawn, as people are saying. It's the old bloody dawn. The crooks are back.\"\n\nI ask after his interim plans.\n\n\"I'm going on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in five days,\" Gauhar said. The massage man has now moved full circle and is back at the original thigh. \"It's wonderful, that trip. Everything goes out of your mind. You're away from the madding crowd.\"\n\nThe election period is now closing, after the bombings, and the other bombings, and the time when Musharraf wouldn't renew the visas of the people who did a poll he didn't like, and generally more plot than anyone without obsessive-compulsive disorder would have the patience to write down. A catastrophe was averted, though the potential energy for catastrophe is still stored within the system: our old friend Musharraf refusing to go; our other old friend, Nawaz Sharif, appearing singularly motivated to destroy Musharraf; our third old friend, Zardari, appearing willing to make deals in any way that would maximize his power, presumably plotting the details of a rise to power that was interrupted by a jail term and some time at the Helmsley. The old parties are all switching to their new positions. The maulana goes back to being the head of a madrassa, maybe considering whether institutional democracy is really so much better than militancy. Meanwhile, the new government, Nawaz and Zardari, will make it clear that they intend to negotiate with the Taliban and like-minded parties in the border regions rather than conduct a war against them, and that they intend not to be controlled by American security interests. Benazir's press czar is holding court at that popular restaurant in Islamabad where you can't go without seeing at least one person who could put you under house arrest. There's a story about a newspaper columnist who lost his job a decade ago for publishing a court document showing that Nawaz did not in fact try to murder Musharraf as charged. All the people like him, put away for one reason or another by the current regime, now have the chance to rise up from the cryogenic mist while all the current henchmen get ready to take their place. Humayan Gauhar will board a plane for Saudi Arabia, taking the proverbial (and literal) pilgrimage, maybe to reappear at the resurrection of Pervez Musharraf, which, really, couldn't be that far off.\n\ndevin friedman is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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