The then-lieutenant Ali Shah was a Punjabi, like the majority of Pakistanis, and presumed, as did his parents, that he would make a “good” marriage, possibly to the daughter of a senior officer, which would help his career, or a rich merchant, which would help his bank balance.
He would have been lucky to do either, for he was not an exciting man. He was one of those obeyers of orders to the letter, conventional, orthodox, with the imagination of a chapati. But in those jagged mountains, he met and fell in love with a local girl of startling beauty named Soraya. Without the permission or blessing of his family, he married.
Her own family was pleased, thinking a union with a regular army officer would bring elevation in the great cities of the plain. Perhaps a large house in Rawalpindi or even Islamabad. Alas, Musharraf Ali Shah was one of life’s plodders, and, over thirty years, he would plod up the rankings to finish as lieutenant colonel, clearly going no higher. A boy was born in 1980, to be named Zulfiqar.
Lieutenant Ali Shah was in the Armored Infantry, getting his commission at twenty-two in 1976. After his first tour on the Siachen, he returned with his heavily pregnant wife and was promoted to captain. He was allocated a very modest house on the officers’ patch in Rawalpindi, the military concentration a few miles from the capital of Islamabad.
There were to be no more behavior shocks. Like all officers in the Pakistani army, fresh postings came up every two or three years and were divided into “hard” and “soft.” A posting to a city like Rawalpindi, Lahore or Karachi counts as soft and is “with family.” Being sent to the garrison of Multan, Kharian, Peshawar in the throat of the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan or the Taliban-infested Swat Valley counted as hard and are for unaccompanied officers only. Through all these postings, the boy Zulfiqar went to school.
Every Pakistani garrison town has schools for the offspring of officers, but they come in three levels. At the bottom come the government schools, then the army public schools and, for those with family funds, the elite private schools. The Ali Shahs had no money outside the very modest salary, and Zulfiqar went to army schools. They have the reputation of being well run, employing many officers’ wives as teachers, and they are free.
The boy matriculated at fifteen and passed on to army college, taking engineering on his father’s orders. This was the skill that would grant automatic employment and/or a commission in the army. That was in 1996. The parents began to notice a change in their son in his third year.
The now-major Ali Shah, of course, was a Muslim, practicing but not passionately devout. It would have been unthinkable not to attend mosque every Friday or join in the ritual prayers as and when required. But that was all. He habitually dressed in uniform for prestige reasons, but if he had to dress in mufti, it would be the national dress for males: the leg-tight trousers and long, front-buttoned jacket that altogether make up the shalwar kameez.
He noticed his son began to grow a straggly beard and wear the fretted skullcap of the devout. He prostrated himself the required five times a day and snapped his disapproval when he saw his father taking a whisky, the tipple of the officer corps, and stormed out of the room. His parents thought the devotions and intense religiosity were a passing phase.
He began to steep himself in written works about Kashmir, the disputed border territory that has poisoned relations between Pakistan and India since 1947. He began to veer toward the violent extremism of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group later responsible for the Mumbai massacre.
His father tried to console himself with the thought that his son would graduate in a year and either enter the army or find a good job as a qualified engineer, a talent always sought after in Pakistan. But in the summer of 2000, he flunked his finals, a disaster his father put down to abandoning his studies and poring over the Koran; that and learning Arabic, the only permitted language in which the Koran may be studied.
This event marked the first of a series of blazing quarrels between the son and his father. Maj. Ali Shah pulled s
uch strings as he was able to in order to plead that his son had been unwell and deserved a chance to take the finals again. Then came 9/11.
Like virtually the entire world in possession of a television set, the family watched in horror as the airliners slammed into the Twin Towers. Except their son Zulfiqar. He rejoiced, he noisily jubilated, as the TV station repeated the spectacle over and over again. That was when his parents realized that along with extreme religious devotion, a constant reading of the original Jihadist propagandists Sayyid Qutb and his disciple Azzam, and a loathing of India, their son had developed a hatred of America and the West.
That winter the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, and within six weeks the Northern Alliance, with enormous U.S. Special Forces help and American air power, had toppled the Taliban government. While the Taliban’s guest Osama bin Laden fled over the Pakistan border in one direction, the Taliban’s one-eyed and bizarre leader Mullah Omar fled into the Pakistani province of Balochistan and settled with his high council, the Shura, in the city of Quetta.
For Pakistan this was a long way from an academic problem. The Pakistani army and indeed all the armed forces are effectively ruled by the Inter-Services Intelligence branch, simply known as the ISI. Everyone in uniform in Pakistan walks in awe of the ISI. And the ISI had created the Taliban in the first place.
More, an unusually large percentage of ISI officers were of the extremist wing of Islam and were not going to abandon their creation, the Taliban, or al-Qaeda guests, to become loyal to the U.S., though they would have to pretend to. Thus began the running sore that has bedeviled U.S.-Pakistan relations ever since. Not only did the senior ranks of the ISI know that bin Laden was in that walled compound in Abbottabad; they built it for him.
In the early spring of 2002, a high-ranking ISI delegation went to Quetta to confer with Mullah Omar and his Quetta Shura. They would normally not have deigned to invite the humble Maj. Ali Shah to accompany them but for one thing. The two senior ISI generals spoke no Pashto; the mullah and his Pashtun followers spoke no Urdu. Maj. Ali Shah spoke no Pashto either, but he had a son who did.
The major’s wife was a Pathan from the wild mountains of the north. Her native tongue was Pashto. Her son was fluent in both tongues. He accompanied the delegation, intoxicated by the honor. When he returned to Islamabad, he had the last of the furious rows with his ultra-conventional father who stood ramrod-backed, staring out of the window, as his son stormed out. The parents never saw him again.
• • •
The figure that confronted Mr. Kendrick Sr. when he answered his front door was dressed in uniform. Not full dress, but neatly pressed camouflage, with unit flashes, rank tabs and decorations. He could discern that his visitor was a colonel in the Marines. He was impressed.
That was the idea. Working at TOSA, the Tracker hardly ever wore full kit because it drew attention, and in his new environment that was something he avoided at all costs. But Mr. Jimmy Kendrick was a janitor for a local school. He tended the central heating system and swept corridors. He was not accustomed to Marine colonels on the doorstep. He had to be overawed.
“Mr. Kendrick?”
“Yes.”
“Colonel Jackson. Is Roger at home?” James Jackson was one of his frequent aliases.
Of course he was at home. He never left home. Jimmy Kendrick’s only son was a grievous disappointment to him. Suffering from acute agoraphobia, the boy was terrified of leaving the familiar embrace of his attic hidey-hole and his mother’s company.
“Sure. He’s upstairs.”
“Could I have a word with him? Please?”
He led the uniformed Marine upstairs. It was not a large house; just two rooms down, two up, and an aluminum ladder to a loft space. The father called up into the void.
“Roger, someone to see you. Come on down.”