WASHINGTON, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf is on a three- month race against time to stay alive in order to purge his army's senior command. And the most ruthless, determined terrorists in the world are out to kill him before that deadline.
On March 23, the annual reassignments of top Pakistani Army commanders are announced. Musharraf agreed in his epochal deal with parliamentary parties Tuesday to step down as army commander at the end of March in order to continue as constitutionally approved president. But before he does that, South Asian intelligence and diplomatic sources say, he is determined to purge the Islamist hard-liners in the army command and the mighty, shadowy Inter-Service Intelligence organization who hold real power in Pakistan.
That is why there have been two serious, well-coordinated attempts on the life of the president of Pakistan within two weeks. And there are likely to be more.
The attacks against Musharraf on Dec. 14 and Dec. 25, U.S. intelligence analysts say, reveal an exceptionally well-organized confident, and technically professional terrorist force. The capabilities it has already displayed compare favorably with those al-Qaida exercised when it hijacked airliners and flew them into the towers of the World Trade Center and the E-Ring of the Pentagon.
Both attacks involved significant numbers of plotters and high coordination, but Pakistani and U.S. intelligence had no advance warning of either of them. By contrast, the plotters were extremely well informed about the routes and timing of Musharraf's motorcades on both occasions. And on both occasions they struck with impunity in the heart of Rawalpindi, the traditional garrison city stronghold of the Pakistani army since independence.
Both plots revealed access to large quantities of explosives and skill at preparing them. The second attack, highly significantly, revealed that the plotters could draw on a reservoir of idealistic, suicide bombers just as Hamas and Islamic Jihad has been able to do in their attacks against Israeli civilians.
It was also striking that both attacks followed the "sentence of death" that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two, passed on Musharraf on Sept. 11, 2003 to "celebrate" the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
The threat now facing the president of Pakistan is almost unprecedented in modern history. Not since the Secret Army Organization, or OAS repeatedly tried to assassinate French President Charles De Gaulle in the early 1960s for pulling France out of Algeria has any head of state or government anywhere faced anything like it.
De Gaulle survived, thanks to the outstanding efficiency of French security and counter-intelligence. In 1963, French intelligence chiefs who had successfully protected their president against the OAS onslaught were appalled at the sloppiness and amateurishness other U.S. secret service "bubble" around President John F. Kennedy. But their warnings were laughed off by the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Intelligence. JFK was assassinated a few months later.
Possibly the nearest parallel to the determination of Pakistan's hard-line Islamists and the al-Qaida international terrorist organization to assassinate Musharraf before he can purge hard-liners sympathetic to them from key command positions in the army was the fate of Czar Alexander II of Russia in 1880-81. The parallels are not reassuring ones.
Like Musharraf, Alexander had just approved a radical reform package that would create a new foundation for constitutional government, hopefully undercutting the popular support for extremist terrorists. And the Narodya Volya, or "People's Will" terrorist organization was determined to assassinate him before the reforms could be approved.
Like Musharraf, the "liberator czar" who had freed Russia's serfs survived one professionally planned and daring assassination pilot after another. Like Musharraf, he was stalked by professional demolitions experts and fanatical suicide bombers. His train was bombed. His own kitchen within the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg was blasted to smithereens.
Finally, a suicide bomber threw a powerful grenade at the czar's carriage. The czar was unhurt because the carriage, a personal gift of Emperor Napoleon III of France, was heavily armored. But against the pleas of his courtiers, Alexander insisted on disembarking to comfort those wounded in the attack. Then a second suicide bomber charged forward with another grenade and blew the emperor's legs off. He died in agony a few hours later.
The liberator czar's awful death plunged Russia into a century of horror. His grieving son and grandson turned their backs implacably on moderate reform and headed on a collision course with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Musharraf as army chief of staff, one of the instigators of the Kargil "mini-war" of may 1999 and beneficiary of the military takeover in October of that year did more arguably than any other man to set Pakistan on the road to extremism and fanaticism. Since 9/11 he has appeared to try, at least fitfully, to reverse direction from that dire precipice. But unlike Czar Alexander, he must survive the wrath of the fanatics first. It will not be easy.
