To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan - Hardcover

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INTRODUCTION

LAND OF THE PURE

The cops came for me on a cold, rainy night. Four of them, hoods pulled over their heads, stood in the driveway of my home in Islamabad.

"Are you Mr. Nicholas?" one asked.

I nodded.

The senior officer who did all the talking was tall, clean-shaven, and looked familiar; we had met a few weeks earlier at an antigovernment student protest.

"What’s the problem?" I asked, my tone sounding partly curious, and yet anxious. Why would the police come to my house three times in one afternoon? When they had stopped by the first two times, I had been out, and was alerted to their visits by our chowkidar, or guard.

Now it was raining hard. We stepped under a cloth awning that covered part of the driveway to get out of the rain. The sound of water rushing off the end of the awning and splashing loudly into puddles made it difficult for me to hear.

"I have orders to take you and your wife to the airport," the officer said. "Your visas have been revoked."

What?

The officer repeated himself and added, "You must leave Pakistan immediately." He handed me a piece of paper. The document, printed on Ministry of Interior letterhead and covered with signatures from representatives of various police and intelligence units, stated in clear, concise language: my wife, Rikki, and I were being deported.

I looked up from the paper and stared at the officer, stunned but not wholly surprised. For a while, I had suspected that something was amiss. I knew, for instance, that my phone was being tapped. A friend had told me that whenever he called me, the conversation always began with three distinct beeps, the signature sound of a wiretap coming to life, and as of a couple weeks earlier, I had not been able to receive calls from the United States. Moreover, just a day earlier, an intelligence agent from the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, showed up in the flesh. He relayed a message through our chowkidar that Rikki and I were "living in Pakistan illegally"—and that I was "writing against Pakistan."

The cloak-and-dagger shenanigans and subtle intimidations related to a story I had written for the New York Times Magazine profiling a new, more radical generation of Pakistani Taliban. I had spent months traveling to regions under their control, and had even passed an afternoon inside a Taliban-run camp. I expected a certain amount of harassment from the intelligence goons, as they often paid courtesy visits to foreign journalists who had reported on sensitive subjects from sensitive areas. Fanatic rebels in the North-West Frontier Province certainly met this condition. Dealing with the agencies seemed to be as much a part of the job as securing a visa, arranging interviews, and actually writing the stories. But a visit from the police suggested something official—and far more serious—than the normal spook routine.

I asked the officer for a minute to consult with Rikki and ran upstairs with the deportation notice in hand. We had been living in Pakistan for nearly two years, renting a two-bedroom apartment in a large house owned by a Pakistani family. We considered Pakistan home. Rikki attended the International Islamic University, the first non-Muslim American to ever enroll. She also worked as the nutritionist at a five-star hotel in Islamabad, where her obese clients included cabinet ministers, prominent businessmen, and senior bureaucrats. Whatever problems she encountered at the university could usually be resolved with a simple phone call from one of her clients at the hotel. So when I burst through the door, out of breath, ranting about how the police were prepared to bundle us off to the airport in the next hour, Rikki promptly yet calmly replied, "Have you called Majed?"

Majed, whose real name I can’t disclose, was probably Rikki’s largest client. During their first session, Majed told Rikki that he could reduce the amount of food he ate, but that he would have trouble cutting back on the four or five scotches he drank every night while playing bridge with his buddies. I assumed his bridge partners comprised an influential bunch; Majed, who was himself related to the prime minister at the time, had been in and out of government for years. He had told Rikki to call him at any hour, that no favor was too large. "Call him," she now urged.

"Majed? Hi, it’s Nicholas. Sorry to bother you tonight, but I have a small problem. There are four police officers standing in my driveway right now, and they say that our visas have been canceled and they going to kick us out of the country."

"Huh?" he replied, sounding slightly preoccupied. I rehashed the details. He related the story, in Urdu, to someone else on his end. He came back on the line. "Listen, I am playing bridge with Tariq Aziz," Majed said in a calm, unflappable tone. (At the time, Aziz was President Pervez Musharraf’s national security adviser.) "Why don’t you give the phone to the seniormost officer, and I’ll give the phone to Tariq. Don’t worry. He’ll take care of it."

I handed the phone to the tall, clean-shaven officer and told him who was waiting on the other line. I thought about flashing a smug grin, but realized it might seem cocky—and a little premature.

The officer lifted the phone to his ear. He introduced himself. Aziz did the rest of the talking.

"Yes sir," the officer said into the phone. "Yes sir...Yes sir...Yes sir...Yes sir..."

The officer returned my phone and apologized for the disturbance. Then he and his hooded colleagues turned, walked down the driveway, and disappeared into the dark, rainy night. I ran back up the metal stairs that led to our second-floor apartment and, having thrown open the door, announced: "Majed came through. Big time."

Connections meant everything in Pakistan. If you knew the right people, things worked out. If you didn’t, you wound up on a one-way flight to Dubai on a rainy Tuesday night. But connections were a double-edged sword, and knowing the wrong people could land you in more trouble than knowing the right people could get you out of. Besides folks like Majed, I also knew plenty of rebels in Baluchistan and Taliban fighters in the North-West Frontier Province, too. Majed’s bridge partners, in other words, had saved us from packing our entire apartment into suitcases that night, but the deportation notice, covered with signatures from this-and-that intelligence agency, suggested that the state machinery had been set into motion against us. According to official government correspondence, we were living in Pakistan illegally. And wandering around without valid papers was foolhardy and stupid, if not outright dangerous.

We woke up the next morning to more rain. Low clouds spread across the verdant mountain ridge outside our windows.

I called Majed again. He had just gotten off the phone, trying to find more about our case.

"I can’t do anything more," he said. "This is way above my head. We asked the police to leave you alone, but this is above them, too. You should really leave the country for a bit."

"Did anyone give any reason for why this is happening?"

"They said something about the Taliban, your trips to Baluchistan, and your coverage of the Red Mosque. But that’s all I know," he said.

I hung up and bought the first two available seats on the next outbound flight. Forty-eight hours later, on the morning after my twenty-ninth birthday, we were soaring above the Hindu Kush Mountains—and out of Pakistan.

I went to Pakistan in February 2006, hoping to learn something about this troubled, nuclear-armed country, and about myself. I wanted to become a journalist, but most newspapers were closing their foreign bureaus, not...