NEWSWEEK: Were you prepared for the huge response to your book when it was published in 2003? Mariane Pearl: Well, it wasn’t something I was writing to be successful, so I had no expectations. It was so personal, I didn’t know if it was something people would want to read. But I think you touch people’s hearts if you’re writing from that place within yourself.
Often people write books about painful experiences to find a sense of closure. Was that your objective? When I started writing this book I was still pregnant, so it was kind of an emergency for me. I knew I had to write it for my son, Adam, and for Danny. But it felt like I had just came out of hell and now I had to go back in. I’ve never tried to really “heal.” I was more preoccupied with how to un-break my life and how to answer what had happened to me.
In March, the federal government released a statement from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay, claiming, in graphic detail, that he personally killed Danny. How did you react to that? [Attorney General] Alberto Gonzales called to tell me that he was releasing [the confession] to the press, and I told him, “This is just PR.”
Because Gonzales was under investigation for the firing of eight U.S. attorneys? Right. Gonzales was in trouble, and he was trying to look like he was doing a good job with terrorism, and that’s the only reason he released it when he did, and I told him so. This was not news. [Mohammad] had been saying that for a long time. I felt very sad because someone like Khalid Sheik Mohammad can have a gruesome, graphic description of a murder and every [media outlet] is going to pick it up.
What did you do? I wrote a statement and sent it, but this is a repeated struggle. All you can do to oppose what [Mohammad] does—or what Gonzales does, for that matter—is show dignity. Dignity is the opposition.
Why did you want to have a film made of “A Mighty Heart”? I didn’t want to do a movie. I just didn’t think it was right. It took me a while to agree to meet some studio producers.
Why? The only way I was going to do a movie was if someone understood why I wrote this book in the first place. I was also worried that Danny would be turned into a saint, or that everything was going to be oversimplified. I see how people deal with issues related to terrorism, and it’s very hard for people to embrace complexity. And, when I started meeting with producers, my fears were confirmed. One told me, “This is a great political thriller.” I thought, “No way.”
Brad Pitt ended up producing it. How was your meeting with him different? First of all, we were contemporaries. He understood that this was a serious time in history and that we all needed to do something about that. And he had actually read the book, and he understood why I wrote it. We had the same intention.
Do you feel you and Angelina have shaped each other’s worldviews? We have very passionate conversations. [Laughs.] I always learn from her, and I never walk out of a conversation with Angie without learning something. She doesn’t acknowledge borders so much, and neither do I. It’s a voluntary view of the world. She’s capable of respecting other cultures while remaining herself.
What was your reaction when she said she wanted to play you? She didn’t ask me. I asked her.
Really? We had talked a lot and shared a lot of things. We had known each other for about a year, and I just felt that she understood my heart. That is what I wanted. I thought, “If somebody is going to play me, I don’t care that she looks like me.” It’s about something much more important. I asked her because I trusted her.
When she was preparing to play you, what kinds of questions did she ask? We had very open-heart talks. We talked about our relationships with our mothers. Everything that was important to me I told her, so it was very intense. But she didn’t ask me about anything that’s in the book, anything she didn’t need to ask me about. She was very protective that way. When she started shooting the film, though, I decided not to go to the set, so she was on her own a lot. The other actors got to talk to their real-life counterparts more.
Why did you not want to go on set? I felt it would probably be harder for her if I was around, and it would be difficult for me. I absolutely had no desire to control anything. When I decided to trust them, I trusted them entirely.
Angelina said she had a tough time perfecting your accent. [Laughs.] She said, “I love you, but your accent drives me crazy!” I’m not even aware of all the difficulties she went through, and that’s not having to do with skin color or accent. To be friends with someone and then have to embody the most difficult thing in her life, that’s not easy.
Speaking of skin color, there was a lot of uproar about Angelina playing you because she’s white. Some people think a woman of color should have played you. I am Cuban, but I’m also Dutch. Should a Dutch person play me? It’s not about skin color, it’s about how a person behaves that matters. Aren’t we past this?
It’s ironic that this film hit that particular nerve, considering that it’s so much about cross-cultural unity. You had so many different races of people helping you search for Danny after he was kidnapped. To me, it’s a story about Danny being held by extremely intolerant people, and yet we, in that house in Pakistan—Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim—came together to find him. It’s as if two visions of the world were fighting each other. That’s how I see it. That’s how I wrote it. So yes, it’s way deeper than the color of your skin.
We talk about the “war on terror” a lot since 9/11. Are we fighting the right battle? Has your view of how we should fight terrorism changed? That’s a complex question, and there are two layers to it. One is political, which is complicated and depressing. With politics and governments there are always compromises. It’s just not clean. The second layer is personal. Terrorism is a psychological weapon, even though it uses physical means. It stops you from claiming the world as your own. It stops you from relating to other people. It creates fear and hatred. The only way to fight terrorists, as a citizen, is to deny them those emotions. That is the only thing terrorists don’t expect. Everything else they expect: retaliation, bombing, attacks. All of that is exactly what they want. Deny them fear, and they lose. I know that requires a lot of self-control, but if we don’t exercise self-control, I don’t think you can secure any kind of peace.
Yes, but how do you get the average person to see that? I’m not saying everybody has got to start understanding that. It’s about the incarnation of that attitude. I write a column for Glamour magazine and I travel the world and write about people who are doing exactly that. I have to say, a lot of them are women—ordinary women, who are role models. It just takes one person, one leader, to do that, and it has the power to make people think.
It’s a pretty noble reaction to terrorism, especially considering what happened to you. I’m not saying this because I’m a nice person. [Laughs.] It’s not forgiveness that motivates me. It’s revenge. Terrorists expect retaliation. It’s very easy to want to hurt someone who has hurt you. The one thing they’re not expecting is my happiness. That’s true revenge. And when I see Adam, and I see how happy he is, I think, “I’m winning.” But it’s not like happiness is something worry-free. I’m in a battle here. A world vision shaped by people who don’t want you to claim the world as your own can squelch the purpose of an entire life. Confronting AIDS in Africa or poverty in India, and when you see children suffer—it’s hard emotionally—but that’s your work as a human being. How could I live all this time without having any idea that it was going on? I’m more afraid of being in a bubble than I am of wide-open spaces.
What was it like for you to see this film for the first time? Very difficult. It’s very, very close to my experience, so it’s difficult for me to be objective. But what I can feel is the respect and the friendship that I have felt from everyone involved in the movie, from day one. I was right to have trusted them.
With the book, and now the movie, you have to keep talking about this period of your life. After five years, does some part of you want to put it on a shelf and move on? It’s not that I enjoy talking about what happened to Danny. I don’t like to be thrown back into the most difficult moments of our story. But that’s not my story with him. I married him, and we had a really beautiful relationship, and we have a beautiful son. So I have much more than his death in my life. I knew that the way he was killed could hijack the person he was. My victory, I think, is that Danny is present, in a lively way, in my life and in Adam’s.
You were five months pregnant with him when Danny was kidnapped. Adam is 5 years old now. What’s he like? He’s great! [Laughs.] I’m not claiming any objectivity. He looks a lot like Danny. He has the same sense of humor, the same sense of joy, and he’s a very wise little boy. Danny was very serious about being silly, and Adam is very silly.
I heard that Brad and Angelina’s daughter, Zahara, has a crush on him. [Laughs.] Definitely. Which is really cool, because I love Z. They look very cute together. It’s perfect.
title: “Talk Transcript Sean Smith On Angelina Jolie” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-20” author: “Cheryl Hinkle”
This is in keeping with the tone of director Michael Winterbottom’s taut, almost documentary approach to the search for Danny Pearl (Dan Futterman), who vanished in Karachi while pursuing a lead on a story about the shoe bomber Richard Reid. Following closely Pearl’s memoir, John Orloff’s screenplay unfolds like a police procedural. We are as much in the dark as Mariane as the investigation frantically proceeds, headed by the Pakistani counterterrorism expert known as Captain (Irrfan Khan, of “The Namesake”).
Winterbottom (“In This World,” “Welcome to Sarajevo”), who favors a handheld, vérité style of camerawork, has always been expert at gritty atmospherics. Shooting in Karachi, often in the very locations where the tragedy unfolded, he refuses to tart up an already riveting tale with Hollywood melodramatics. If this sometimes means that we are as confused about what is going on as the participants, so be it. Though we know the outcome, we still hang on every false lead, hoping against hope, like Mariane, that the story will have a different outcome. (Mercifully, the murder itself is not shown.)
Winterbottom’s aversion to sentimentality doesn’t mean you won’t be moved by “A Mighty Heart.” Jolie’s piercing cry of grief when she gets the news of Danny’s death cuts right into your heart. But like many of Winterbottom’s movies, it falls a step short of its full potential. Its tact is both its strength and its weakness. The climax feels rushed: it’s the rare movie these days that feels too short. The intriguing supporting players—Mariane’s friend and fellow journalist Asra (Archie Panjabi), whose house becomes headquarters for the search; the American security agent Randall Bennett (Will Patton), who seems perversely excited by the danger; the Journal editor (Denis O’Hare), who flies to Mariane’s side, and the dedicated Captain, whose relationship to Mariane is more fleshed out in the book—are all characters we’d like to know more intimately. Winterbottom gets the feel of reality pitch-perfect, but his British reticence prevents him from making the risky leap from a documentary surface into a deeper kind of art.
title: “Talk Transcript Sean Smith On Angelina Jolie” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-24” author: “Brendon Otero”
The next morning, her bodyguards in jail, Jolie is in a 21st-floor hotel suite on the western edge of Mumbai, where she’s set to shoot her final scene of “Heart” as Pearl’s widow, Mariane. It will not happen. Jolie, wearing a wig of dark curls and brown contact lenses, sits cross-legged on the floor with four of her fellow actors. Her body is still, but there’s anger in her voice. “We’ve become so eager to accuse people of being racist, but I would rather they make up almost any other story—about me sleeping with someone, anything—but that,” she says. “It’s not only a crazy accusation, but it’s the most insulting thing you could say about me, that I would employ someone who would be disrespectful to someone’s race or would harm a child. They take care of my kids.” On the other side of the city, Brad Pitt, one of the film’s producers, has gone to the police station to try to get the men released. Plans are in the works for him to be interviewed that evening by Barkha Dutt, a.k.a. “the Indian Oprah,” to de-escalate the situation (Hollywood’s version of fighting fire with fire). Jolie sighs. “People can just hate back and forth, and I understand my own country’s irresponsibility with our foreign policy sometimes, but can’t we please try to be open-minded, and see that there are some of us who are trying?” Within an hour, the hotel management will shut the film down. Protesters have threatened to surround the building. Jolie’s square-shouldered security guard appears by her side and tells her, under his breath, “We need to move you now.” Calmly she gathers her belongings, and then turns to a NEWSWEEK reporter. “OK,” she says with a smile. “Let’s run!”
The irony is that “A Mighty Heart” is, in essence, a plea for international understanding. Four months after 9/11, Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was in Karachi, Pakistan, with Mariane, who was five months pregnant with their first child. He was working on a story about a possible Karachi connection to “shoe-bomber” Richard C. Reid when, on Jan. 23, 2002, he was kidnapped by Qaeda members. After releasing a series of increasingly disturbing photos of Pearl in captivity, they beheaded him on a videotape that would be leaked to the media and broadcast to the world. The film is based on the best-selling book of these events, written by Mariane and former NEWSWEEK editor Sarah Crichton. Jolie plays Mariane as she and a team of Wall Street Journal editors, Pakistani counterterrorism experts, FBI agents and others struggle to unravel the tangled terrorist network and find Danny. It is also a film about Mariane’s decision, in the wake of Danny’s murder, to not seek retaliation or blame Muslims for his death. “To me, it’s a story about Danny being held by extremely intolerant people,” Pearl says from her home in Paris. “And yet we, in that house in Pakistan—Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim—came together to find him. It’s as if two visions of the world were fighting each other.”
There’s little question that America changed after September 11, 2001. The world, with all its inequities and anger, was suddenly much closer, and we no longer had the luxury of ignoring it. News became more serious and more global, and it seemed for a time that shift would become permanent. Yet paradoxically, the past six years have also seen an explosion in superficial celebrity coverage, as if Lindsay Lohan were a morning-after pill for Iraq. What distinguishes Jolie from every other star of her generation, indeed from every other public figure, is that her journey mirrors both this shift in national consciousness and the schism in media sensibilities. Since 2001, she has evolved from a carnal libertine into a 32-year-old mother of four and good-will ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, visiting populations in crisis in Sierra Leone, Darfur, Thailand, Ecuador, Pakistan and elsewhere. She attends the World Economic Forum. She donates one third of her salary to charity. Oh, and one more thing: she fell in love with Pitt. This combination makes her perhaps the only person alive who is manna to both The New York Times and Us Weekly. She is an unprecedented 21st-century entity, a tabloid star with international credibility, a “soft news” icon commanding respect in a hard-news world.
She also draws a lot of fire for crossing that line. Even after six years, Jolie is suspected of being a dilettante, a “celebrity tourist” to global crises. It’s a charge that irritates those closest to her. “What would she have to do to prove that she’s sincere?” says Pitt’s producing partner, Dede Gardner. “Should she give more money? More time? It’s a black-hole debate. When people judge anyone’s sincerity, I just think, ‘Oh, yeah? What are you doing?’ " Still, does Jolie really understand complex global issues, or does she just show up for a photo op wherever the UNHCR sends her? “She’s absolutely serious, absolutely informed,” says former secretary of State Colin Powell. “Her work with refugees is not something to decorate herself. She studies the issues.” Powell has spoken with Jolie several times over the years, and they’ve been honored together at benefits for refugee causes. There is, he says, no sanctimony about her. “For her, it’s not about saving the world, it’s about saving kids,” he says. “She doesn’t need this. This needed her.”
It’s difficult to spend time with Jolie and remain dubious. “When I first started doing this, I thought I could save everybody,” she says. “I was sure that there had to be a simple solution. Now I’m still in the field as much as possible, but spending more time in Washington. You can fight forever to open a tiny shop or vocational training center—and that’s fantastic—but if the trade laws stay as they are, it’s not really going to help.” In April, Jolie and Pitt funded Global Action for Children, a Washington lobby that advocates funding for AIDS orphan programs and education for children in refugee camps. Earlier this month Jolie was invited to join the Council on Foreign Relations, the elite club for the American foreign-policy establishment. It’s no room for lightweights. Her fellow members include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Jimmy Carter, Diane Sawyer and Bill Clinton. “She has evolved in her understanding of where she can make the biggest impact,” says her philanthropic adviser, Trevor Neilson. “Her strategies have become extremely sophisticated, and it’s clear that she is now a serious player on international issues.”
Amid all that, it’s easy to forget she’s an actress with an Oscar (“Girl, Interrupted”). While Jolie’s priorities have shifted in recent years, that evolution hasn’t been reflected on screen. With the exception of the little-seen drama “Beyond Borders,” Jolie has continued to act in fantasy roles that rely on her sexual allure, such as “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” “Original Sin,” “Alexander” and “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.” These films have helped fund her advocacy work, but they haven’t moved the needle on her career. “A Mighty Heart,” which opens June 22, does. Shot for less than $20 million by British director Michael Winterbottom (“The Road to Guantánamo”) in a raw, documentary style that has become his trademark, “Heart” is a soul-rending depiction of Mariane’s struggle to find her husband, and her refusal to let his killers define his life. It is a movie without melodrama or movie-star lighting, and it allowed Jolie to deliver the most delicate, powerful and human-scale performance of her career. This is no fantasy role; this is a real woman. “It’s probably the most difficult character I’ve ever played,” Jolie says. “The emotion is so raw and so constant. Mariane was calm, focused, organized, but I would have been hysterical, driving the streets of Karachi like a crazy person.”
Driving the streets of Mumbai isn’t easy, either, but for different reasons. Jolie is tucked into the back seat of a silver SUV, traveling home to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, across town from the hotel where she and the “Heart” crew were shooting. There’s still no word on her bodyguards, and the incident weighs on her. “It just feels like we’re drowning in a lot of confusion about each other,” she says. “There’s so much anger, and then you look around the streets here and there’s so much imbalance and sadness. The focus is off.” In this city of 18 million—almost double the population of Los Angeles—a reported 43 percent live in shantytowns and slums. Women plead for rupees on every block near the hotels. At stoplights, boys bang on taxi windows, selling trinkets or begging for rice. “I’ve never been around such extreme wealth next to such extreme poverty, and so much of it,” she says. “It’s hard to understand how it has gotten so bad.” As we wait in traffic, a boy knocks on the window. He’s selling books. She hands him a few protein bars. “Did you see what book he was selling?” she asks, as the SUV crawls forward. “Thomas Friedman’s ‘The World Is Flat’.” She waits for the irony to register. “The first chapter is about outsourcing in India.”
Jolie has a gift for intimacy. She smiles frequently, and her body language is relaxed and open. Fame tends to erect a scrim between actors and the rest of the world. When everyone wants something from you—an autograph, a photo, a movie, a million dollars, a quote—it’s an understandable defense. But there’s nothing guarded about Jolie. She does not evade questions or speak cautiously. She seems like a woman who feels safe in the world, and safe in herself. “She expresses how she feels, honestly,” Gardner says. “And she expects the same of everyone around her.”
That candor caused quite a stir when Jolie exploded into the national consciousness nine years ago playing a self-destructive bisexual model in “Gia.” The daughter of actress Marcheline Bertrand, who died in January, and actor Jon Voight, Jolie had a penchant for knives and tattoos and treated every interview as a therapy session. Then there was the marriage to Billy Bob Thornton, the matching vials of blood, the very public sex life. You get the picture. “Yeah, I did have my wild times,” she says with a laugh. It can be difficult to reconcile the Jolie of today with the hellion of yesterday. “We all go through enormous changes,” Gardner says. “The truth is, who doesn’t look back at who they were at 20 and say, ‘Who the f— is that?’ " Fair enough. But it’s Jolie’s duality—the serious advocate and the sexual icon—that is at the crux of the cynicism about her. Good girls—smart girls—aren’t supposed to look like bad girls. She’s not playing by the rules. Then again, when Paris Hilton’s arrest is top news all day on cable, it’s clear that serious journalism isn’t playing by the rules anymore either. Jolie understands that. She lives it. And years ago she decided that if the media were going to follow her no matter what she did, she might as well do something worthwhile. “When I was famous for being just an actress, my life felt very shallow,” she says. “You’ve done nothing of any social relevance, and yet you have all these people interviewing you. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. You’re just trying to find yourself.” She pauses. “Traveling really did save me. I was just … happier. It was feeling that I was doing the right things with my life.”
It’s easy to see why Mariane Pearl and Jolie became friends when they met two years ago. “We have very passionate conversations,” Pearl says. “I never walk out of a conversation with Angie without learning something.” After Danny’s murder, Pearl made a quietly revolutionary decision about how she was going to live, and the life she was going to give to their son, Adam. “Terrorism is a psychological weapon,” Pearl says. “It stops you from claiming the world as your own. It stops you from relating to other people. It creates fear and hatred. The only way to fight terrorists, as a citizen, is to deny them those emotions. Deny them fear, and they lose.” Suggest that this is a noble position, and she laughs. “I’m not saying this because I’m a nice person,” she says. “It’s not forgiveness that motivates me. Terrorists expect retaliation. The one thing they’re not expecting is my happiness. That’s true revenge. And when I see Adam, and I see how happy he is, I think, ‘I’m winning’.”
It was Pitt who introduced Jolie and Pearl. “Being in the room with those two women is great fun,” he says. “It’s like sitting down with Roosevelt and Churchill.” Pause. “Only much better-looking.” In 2003, Pitt bought the rights to “Heart” through Plan B, the production company he shared with his wife, Jennifer Aniston. Aniston, in fact, told a Vogue writer that she was considering playing Mariane. But by the time the film was ready to be made in 2006, Pitt had divorced Aniston and fallen in love with Jolie. Pitt thought Jolie would be perfect casting for Pearl, but didn’t bring it up. “I knew the part had to be played by someone with Mariane’s strength and understanding of the world, but I didn’t know how to broach the subject,” he says. “It feels a little like Wolfowitz trying to get his girlfriend a job.” When the news broke that Jolie would play Pearl, though, the entertainment press—in a textbook example of post-9/11 media bifurcation—took less than 12 hours to turn a film about the terrorist killing of Daniel Pearl into a celebrity soap opera. The story became that Jolie had “stolen” the part from Aniston, just as Jolie had “stolen” Aniston’s husband. (For the record, Pitt’s publicist said at the time that Aniston was never in line for the part. Aniston’s publicist had no comment.)
The second, and more prophetic, controversy had to do with race. Some black actors, including British actress Thandie Newton (“Crash”), were shocked that Jolie would play Pearl, a woman of Afro-Cuban and Dutch descent. Some blogs went so far as to call it “the new blackface.” The studio releasing “Heart,” Paramount Vantage, insists that Jolie’s makeup was not darkened for the role, and that any complexion variation is caused by the film’s lighting. If they are lying—which is probable—it’s only by a little. In costume and under natural light, Jolie looks, at most, a shade or two duskier than her natural complexion. Regardless, both Jolie and Pearl say they were blindsided by the charges. “I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles [for people of color], but I think they’ve picked the wrong example here,” Jolie says. Pearl is more pointed: “This is not about skin color. I wanted her to play me because I trust her.” She sighs. “Aren’t we past this?”
After a long drive through the streets of Mumbai, Jolie arrives home at her hotel. As she enters the suite, a spectacular view of the Arabian Sea sweeps out before her, as does a much closer view of the debris of childhood—toys, clothes, sofa cushions—strewn across the floor. Jolie says “hello” to the empty room, and Maddox, 5, bolts from the hallway, leaps into her arms, wraps his legs around her waist, and starts talking at record-breaking speed about what a day he’s had and how he did a handstand in the bottom of the pool. Jolie’s eyes never leave his face.
After adopting Maddox from Cambodia five years ago, Jolie, and now Pitt, adopted a daughter, Zahara, from Ethiopia in 2005; gave birth to their biological daughter, Shiloh, last May in Namibia, and this spring adopted a son, Pax, from Vietnam. They plan to adopt more. “We want to have as big a family as we can,” Jolie says. “Our only restriction is making sure we have time for everybody, and we’re finding that we have the ability to do that.” Pitt laughs when the topic comes up. “Yeaaahhh, we do things in extremes,” he says. “But I’ve always embraced big changes, and this feels very natural. It’s just the most fun I’ve ever had.”
It’s a bitter irony that a woman with this family, and this life, is accused of being racially insensitive, but there it is: the gift of a 21st-century global media and the gulf of fear and hatred between East and West that continues to widen. But she and Pitt have become quite skilled at using their wattage to their advantage. That night, Pitt will be interviewed by “the Indian Oprah,” giving him the platform to tell the country that the charges are false, and—voilà!—the following day, Jolie’s men will be released from jail.
It’s difficult to imagine that all the noise around Jolie—the paparazzi, the tabloids, the crowds—doesn’t take a toll on her, but she insists it doesn’t. “People can question your choices, accuse you of things, but your real work and your integrity will [win] out,” she says. “All that matters is if I build a strong family, if I’m able to do my advocacy work and if my children are happy.” The sentiment is a little traditional, perhaps, for a lightning rod like Jolie. It’s no rebel yell. But watching her with Maddox, the two of them standing there, foreheads together, framed by the afternoon light, it seems, somehow, like the most radical thing she’s ever said.
title: “Talk Transcript Sean Smith On Angelina Jolie” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-08” author: “Dara Liefer”
There is a simple story line: Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf has abused his authority; he faces massive street protests and should be nudged out in favor of a civilian government. It’s a tempting view. Musharraf is a dictator, and his regime has not been wholly committed to fighting Islamic radicals. The Taliban has reconstituted itself in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and Al Qaeda’s top leaders appear to be ensconced along its border. If there is a central front in the war on terror, it is not in Iraq but in Pakistan.
Now, the complications. Musharraf has, on the whole, been a modernizing force in Pakistan. When he took power in 1999, the country was racing toward ruin with economic stagnation, corruption, religious extremism and political chaos. It had become a rogue state, allied to the Taliban and addicted to a large-scale terror operation against neighboring India. Musharraf restored order, broke with the Islamists and put in place the most modern and secular regime in three decades. Under him the economy has boomed, with growth last year at 8 percent. Despite the grumblings of many coffeehouse intellectuals, Musharraf’s approval ratings were consistently high—around 60 percent.
Until recently. Like many dictators, Musharraf has gone several steps too far. His recent actions—dismissing the chief justice of the Supreme Court and attempting to change the Constitution so he could remain president and still run the Army—were wrong and foolish. Though not unprecedented. Musharraf’s predecessor, Nawaz Sharif, the elected prime minister, dismissed his chief justice in 1997 and tried to amend the Constitution in equally egregious ways in 1999. But Musharraf failed to recognize that perhaps as a consequence of his success, ordinary Pakistanis were becoming less comfortable with military rule. As Indian commentator Shekhar Gupta has suggested, he would have been wiser to give up his uniform and run as a civilian in a free and fair election, which he would have won.
The danger is not that radical Islamists would come to power if Musharraf goes—as several American presidential candidates have claimed. Islamic fundamentalists have never gotten more than 10 percent of the vote in Pakistan. The country’s two main political parties are secular.
The real problem in Pakistan is dysfunction. “A Mighty Heart” accurately shows that Pakistan’s national police forces were trying to find Pearl’s kidnappers. But the central government can claim only limited and divided authority over the country. Provincial governors, local commanders and rich landlords are powers unto themselves. Elements in the government can drag their feet and subvert official policy. Large swaths of the country are badlands where the state’s writ doesn’t run. This is a far more backward country than South Korea or even the Philippines, where the United States helped usher in democracy in the 1980s.
The only institution that works in Pakistan is the military. The Army is mostly professional and competent. It is also vast, swallowing up approximately 39 percent of the government’s budget. In a book published last month, author Ayesha Siddiqa details the vast holdings of Pakistan’s “military economy”—including banks, foundations, universities and companies worth as much as $10 billion. And with or without Musharraf, as Daniel Markey ably explains in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the military will continue to run Pakistan’s strategic policy.
Deeply ingrained in the Army’s psyche is the notion that it was abandoned by the United States in the 1990s, after the Soviets were driven out of Afghanistan. The generals are worried about Washington’s warm overtures to India and fear that soon they will be abandoned again. One explanation for why the military has retained some ties to the Taliban is because they want to keep a “post-American” option to constrain what they see as a pro-Indian government in Kabul. If Washington were to dump Musharraf, the Pakistani military could easily sabotage American policy against Al Qaeda and throughout the region.
Musharraf may be doomed—though were he to choose between the presidency and his Army post, and reach out to the mainstream opposition, he might well survive. Still, it does the United States no good to be seen forcing him out. We cannot achieve our goals—or help Pakistan gain stability—by turning our back on the military. Back in the 18th century, Frederick the Great’s Prussia was characterized as “not a state with an army, but an army with a state.” So it is with Pakistan. A complex reality.
