According to the Daily Mail, General Pervez Musharraf, who served as president of Pakistan from 1999 to 2008 and who was installed in that position without using force, passed away at the age of 79.
Although Pakistan had previously supported the Taliban, controversial military commander General Musharraf pushed Pakistan to work with the US to combat Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Two times, radical Islamists attempted to assassinate him.
After Pakistan was established in 1947 as a result of the brutal Partition of India, the former special forces commando was elected president in the final of several military takeovers.
He oversaw the nuclear-armed nation through a lot of turmoil after seizing power in a coup in 1999, including tensions with India, an atomic proliferation crisis, and an uprising by Islamic extremists.
When he could have been ousted from office in 2008, he resigned instead.
He visited the UK at some point while he was president. During this time, Tony Blair served as prime minister and unexpectedly joined forces with NATO and the US in the war against terrorism.
Even though he attempted to return to politics in 2012, Musharraf fled to Dubai for self-imposed exile to escape prosecution.
His family reported that he had spent weeks in the hospital in June of last year due to amyloidosis, an incurable condition in which proteins accumulate in the organs.
He had passed away, and diplomats were assisting his family, according to Shazia Siraj, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani consulate in Dubai.
Gen. Musharraf once wrote, “I have confronted death and defied it several times because destiny and fate have always smiled on me.
“I only pray that I have more than the proverbial nine lives of a cat.”
Pakistan, a country with about 220 million people, got the attention of the US about two years after it took power because it borders Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, planned and carried out the September 11 attacks from Afghanistan, where the Taliban protected him. General Musharraf knew what would happen next.
In his autobiography, he wrote, “America was sure to act violently, like a wounded bear.
“If the perpetrator turned out to be al-Qaeda, then that wounded bear would come charging straight toward us.”
On September 12, Colin Powell, then the US secretary of state, told Musharraf that Pakistan would be “with us or against us.”
Another American official said that if Pakistan chose the second option, the US would bomb it “back into the Stone Age.”
Gen. Musharraf went with the first one. A month later, he joined then-president George W. Bush at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to reaffirm Pakistan’s resolve to fight alongside the United States against “terrorism in all its forms wherever it exists.”
Even though Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency had helped the Taliban get into power in Afghanistan in 1994, it became an essential place for NATO supplies to pass through on their way to Afghanistan, which is landlocked.
Before that, the CIA and other groups used the ISI to send money and weapons to Islamic fighters who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.
During the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, Taliban fighters crossed the border into Pakistan, where we killed them in 2011.
They got back together, and the Pakistani Taliban grew out of them. This started a rebellion that lasted for years along the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
With Musharraf’s permission, the CIA started sending armed drones from Pakistan. They used an airstrip built by the first president of the United Arab Emirates in Pakistan’s Balochistan province for falconry.
The programme helped push back the militants, but the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, says that more than 400 strikes in Pakistan alone killed at least 2,366, including 245 civilians.