Decision Points

with the cricket bat. I didn’t master the game, but I did pick up some of the lingo. At the elegant state dinner that night, I opened my toast by saying, “I was fooled by a googly, *** otherwise I would have been a better batsman.”

    Playing cricket in Pakistan.
White House/Eric Draper
    My meetings with President Musharraf focused on two overriding priorities. One was his insistence on serving as both president and top general, a violation of the Pakistani constitution. I pushed him to shed his military affiliation and govern as a civilian. He promised to do it. But he wasn’t in much of a hurry.
    I also stressed the importance of the fight against extremists. “We’ve got to keep these guys from slipping into your country and back into Afghanistan,” I said.
    “I give you our assurances that we will cooperate with you against terrorism,” Musharraf said. “We are totally on board.”
    The violence continued to grow. As the insurgency worsened, Hamid Karzai became furious with Musharraf. He accused the Pakistani president of destabilizing Afghanistan. Musharraf was insulted by the allegation. By the fall of 2006, the two were barely on speaking terms. I decided to step in with some serious personal diplomacy. I invited Karzai and Musharraf to dinner at the White House in September 2006. When I welcomed them in the Rose Garden, they refused to shake hands or even look at each other. The mood did not improve when we sat down for dinner in the Old Family Dining Room. Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Steve Hadley, and I watched as Karzai and Musharraf traded barbs. At one point, Karzai accused Musharraf of harboring the Taliban .

    A tense Rose Garden welcome for Pervez Musharraf (
left
) and Hamid Karzai.
White House/Eric Draper
    “Tell me where they are,” Musharraf responded testily.
    “You know where they are!” Karzai fired back.
    “If I did, I would get them,” said Musharraf.
    “Go do it!” Karzai persisted.
    I started to wonder whether this dinner had been a mistake.
    I told Musharraf and Karzai that the stakes were too high for personal bickering. I kept the dinner going for two and a half hours, tryingto help them find common ground. After a while, the venting stopped and the meeting turned out to be productive. The two leaders agreed to share more intelligence, meet with tribes on both sides of the border to urge peace, and stop bad-mouthing each other in public.
    As a way to staunch the flow of Taliban fighters, Musharraf informed us that he had recently struck a series of deals with tribes in the border region. Under the agreements, Pakistani forces would leave the areas alone, while tribal leaders would commit to stopping the Taliban from recruiting operatives or infiltrating into Afghanistan.
    While well intentioned, the strategy failed. The tribes did not have the will or the capacity to control the extremists. Some estimates indicated that the flow of Taliban fighters into Afghanistan increased fourfold.
    Musharraf had promised Karzai and me—both skeptics of the strategy—that he would send troops back into the tribal areas if the deals failed. But instead of focusing on that problem, Musharraf and the Pakistani military were increasingly distracted by a political crisis. In March 2007, Musharraf suspended the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who he feared would rule that he was violating the law by continuing to serve as both president and army chief of staff. Lawyers and democracy advocates marched in the streets. Musharraf responded by declaring a state of emergency, suspending the constitution, removing more judges, and arresting thousands of political opponents.
    Pressure mounted on me to cut ties with Musharraf. I worried that throwing him overboard would add to the chaos. I had a series of frank conversations with him in the fall of 2007. “It looks ugly from here. The image here is that you have lawyers being beaten and thrown into jail,” I said. “I am troubled by the fact that there is no apparent way forward.” I strongly suggested one: set a date for free elections, resign from the army, and lift the state of emergency.
    Musharraf made each of those commitments, and he kept them. When he scheduled parliamentary elections, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returned from exile to compete. She ran on a pro-democracy platform, which made her a target of the extremists. Tragically, she was assassinated on December 27, 2007, at a political rally in Rawalpindi. In February