Sunil Sethi: What Pakistani leaders write

AL FRESCO

Military dictators who, by definition, ought to regard the sword as mightier than the pen should always be advised to desist from pouring their hearts out in print. Or so it must seem to Pervez Musharraf today. Having shed his uniform, he is now parading as a "father figure" to the new democratically elected dispensation that is about to take power in Pakistan.

There could be no more embarrassing book on earth for the strongman than his memoir In the Line of Fire, published two years ago. Skip the boring bits. These are the chapters in which, having discarded the personal pronoun for the royal "we", he gives a statistics-laden recital about how he turned round his country's economy, reduced poverty and unemployment and even managed to fill up "our few hotels that had been nearly empty during the dreadful decade of democracy". The delicious parts are where the general thinks he's not only writing a thriller but living one. And ace villain "" a slimy, power-mad Goldfinger to Musharraf's heroic, hand-on-the holster James Bond "" is Nawaz Sharif. Among the many pejoratives Musharraf uses to describe Nawaz Sharif is "paranoid".

"Why did Nawaz Sharif commit political suicide," asks Musharraf, who as chief of army staff ousted the prime minister in the 1999 coup. Was it because of the blame game over Kargil ("he blamed the army and tried to make himself look clean") or because Nawaz Sharif thought that "being the son of immigrant parents, I would ... feel insecure and vulnerable and do his bidding."

Today, in a spectacular reversal of fortune, Musharraf as "father figure" must do the bidding of his "sons" Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari. There are other stories in his tale that must haunt him. Musharraf says that in 1988, when he was serving at GHQ in Rawalpindi and Benazir Bhutto was prime minister, a friend of Asif Zardari called on him to ask whether he would like to be Benazir's military secretary. Musharraf asked his boss, who refused permission. "This was another time my career was saved," writes Musharraf, praising Allah. "Had I become her military secretary I would have gone down with her and her government."

God must be wary of the number of times Pakistani leaders ask to be saved. He must also be tired of the memoirs they write. Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy & the West is the title of a new book by Benazir Bhutto. Miraculously, Benazir's editor and collaborator says she handed in the final manuscript in the morning of the day she died.

As the crusading champion of democracy in Pakistan, Benazir had less time on her hands, but her book beats Musharraf's as an exercise in self-aggrandisement. Long insufferable accounts of how, as prime minister, she pumped up foreign investment, and slogged on promoting education, health, housing, sanitation, infrastructure, and women's rights; ghost-written comparisons between moderate and orthodox Islam; and silly chapters, which prove nothing, on why democracy has foundered in Islamic countries and the "clash of civilizations".

Unlike Musharraf, Benazir's life reeks of noblesse oblige. The Bhuttos were the great modernisers of Pakistan and the years of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's leadership were a "renaissance era for my country". Her succession would have run smoothly were it not for intriguing generals and Talibanised ISI bosses who hounded her and jailed her husband on false charges. She is cautious on Musharraf: to him "the army uniform was like a second skin". But after her jubilant return to Pakistan last October she knows "that the same elements of Pakistani society that had colluded to destroy my father...were now arrayed against me..."

Like Musharraf, Benazir is fond of frequently discarding the personal pronoun for the autocratic "we". There must be something intrinsically undemocratic about leaders who spin out fairy tales in the belief that they are ordained saviours of their country. Nawaz Sharif hasn't given us his story yet but the publishing firm Simon & Schuster, with a profitable side line in Pakistani memoirs, must be eagerly waiting for his manuscript.