Chowrangi

The entire crowded airport came to instant attention. It was as if, yes, I had openly, right there, lit an opium pipe.

“Quickly.” My general hissed. “Close that bag. Quick step!” he ordered his staff. And we marched out of that airport while all airport staff and baggage handlers averted their eyes in that singularly Pakistani way, eyes raised, unseeing, as if in quick consultation with Allah.

Out on the street in that teeming city, of course, you could spot a heroin drug dealer in the shadows of almost every corner.

The general and his men later, happily, in barracks, enjoyed my whiskey. And I apologized for my brashness. I even, as a favor to my host during my month’s stay in Pakistan, took myself to a private corner of a nearby mosque (removing my shoes first, of course,) declared myself an “alien addict” and submited to a lecture by a minor imam on the evils of drink so that he would award me a bottle of the most terrible rum I have ever tasted. Which I dutifully turned over for the use of my hosts.

Pakistan has its mysterious ways, which – sometimes I wonder if our State Department notices – are not necessarily our ways. Our latest gift to them, given by the Bush administration, includes 14 F-16 jet fighters, with the promise to shift more than $200 million in counterterrorism funds to upgrade the country’s current fleet of F-16s.

Even the Democrats (Joe Biden leading and Barack Obama cosponsoring) seek to triple non-military aid to Pakistan over the next five years, while conditioning the military aid on certification that the Pakistani will spend that money on counterterrorism efforts.

The theory goes that Pakistani tribesmen on the Afghan border, with the central government in Islamabad in shambles, and the military equipment going immediately (except for show parades, of course) to the ever-ongoing blood struggle against India over Kashmir, will turn these shiny new American planes and war toys to seeking out possibly the most honored hero in all of Pakistan, Osama Bin Laden.

When the latest Pakistani Prime Minister, Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, visited Washington recently and gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations —where he was roundly and soundly questioned, I should say – he tried to underline Pakistan’s “commitment” to the War on Terror by saying, “This is not Charlie Wilson’s War, this is Benazir Bhutto’s war.

What?

“Charlie Wilson’s War” was a middling American movie about a Texas senator’s quest – a failure eventually – to bring peace to Afghanistan by uniting the tribes in the 90’s. Benazir Bhutto’s plan, on the other hand, was a proposal to equip Pakistan with nuclear weapons to take total tough control of the region .

“My people,” Bhutto told me in 1987 when I was in Pakistan to interview her “feel that the government is controlled by the United States. Once the United States distances itself, that feeling against America will go. We should be strong enough to stand on our own feet.”

Her almond-shaped eyes didn’t bink once as she spoke this way.

Benazir Bhutto, who got her BA from Radcliffe, her MA from Oxford, and her Ph.D from years in the Sukkar prison seldom blinked.

“In the attempt to save Afghanistan,” Bhutto warned in that steady, soft voice,” do not lose Pakistan.”

I was to travel with her for two weeks. At the end I asked her if she were afraid, just a little.

“I have been surrounded by violence much of my life,” she said. “I cannot live my life being afraid.”

Yet there was barbed wire on the top of the high wall surrounding her compound as I left her to return to Karachi’s teeming streets.

That was 20 years ago. Benazir Bhutto was assassinated just before Christmas last year. I find it passing strange that she of the tough-minded stance, unbowing to American control, should be invoked by yet another Pakistani prime minister, in town to beg this week for more American guns.