The Tough Guy Outsider Who Loves to Be in Control

A few days after taking power in the autumn of 1999, General Pervez Musharraf called his first press conference in the garden of Army House, the colonial era mini-mansion which is the residence of the commander of the world's second largest Muslim state's land-based armed forces.

The general walked out of his home in his army fatigues with his campaign medals, parachutist's wings and commando flashes proudly on display, and advanced across the perfect lawns towards the media. Suddenly his media officer intercepted him. After a swift exchange, the general returned indoors and five minutes later, clad in light brown slacks and a stripy shirt, he gave his first interviews.

The question of which persona best suits Pervez Musharraf has been posed many times throughout his eight-year rule. Is he a ruthless military dictator desperately clinging to power? Is he a successful general seeking the stability that will allow his troubled country to make a successful transition to true democracy? Indeed, should he actually, as his fiercest detractors in the USA and in India claim, be wearing neither shirt nor uniform but the black turban of the Taliban?

The questions are now more pertinent than ever. The main reason Musharraf felt compelled to suspend the constitution and effectively mount a second coup - this time from within the president's palace rather than outside it - is rooted in this vexed question of roles.

Before last month's presidential polls, in which Musharraf won a further five-year mandate, opponents asked the supreme court to examine whether the president's candidature was indeed constitutional, given the fact that he was still chief of army staff at the time of the vote. The judges did not rule immediately, postponing their decision to this week.

Informed by the intelligence services that the judgment was likely to go against him, Musharraf, acting as chief of army staff, acted first and suspended the constitution, though he has not so far dissolved the provincial and national assemblies as he did back in 1999.

The president-general says his actions were in order to end "political interference" by the judiciary and to counter the risk of extremist terrorism. The former justification barely holds water; the second is largely window-dressing for international consumption.

The year has not been a good one for Musharraf. There was bloody violence at a mosque in the center of the capital, Islamabad; riots in the city of Karachi; a slap administered by Pakistan's courts following a clumsy bid to sack the nation's chief justice; the tumultuous and carefully-negotiated return of Benazir Bhutto and the carnage of the bomb attempt on her life. There has been a string of assassination attempts, military failures against militants and growing discontent in the army.

With his international stock plummeting as fast as the Karachi stock exchange today, the 65-year-old career soldier and president was looking more fragile than he has done for a long time - thus the last-ditch bid to hold on to power that was rapidly slipping away. Not that he would admit it.

"The president does not do 'fragile'," says one official who worked closely with Musharraf. "He was a commando after all. He's all about keeping the momentum, keeping his enemies on their toes. He's in perpetual motion. Frankly, it's exhausting."

Musharraf was born in Delhi, five years before the bloody partition of 1948 that saw the former British imperial south Asian possessions split into India and Pakistan. His family - lower middle class, educated, comfortable but not rich - were among those who, passing the corpses strewn along the train tracks and roads, were sufficiently fearful of their future in a majority Hindu state to move to the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

He was thus a 'mohajir', not a native of Pakistan, and thus something of an outsider in his new homeland. Musharraf's first interviews that afternoon in 1999 in the grassy grounds of Army House were to the BBC and Turkish television - in fluent Turkish. He passed much of his childhood in Ankara, where his bureaucrat father was posted, and learned both the language and a profound admiration for the Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the general who, through persuasion, wily politics internally and externally, physical force and sheer strength of character, created the modern, secular state of Turkey.

Returning to Karachi at 13, Musharraf, something of a tearaway with a taste for firecrackers, was enrolled at a Catholic missionary school where, according to the not entirely immodest memoir published last year, In The Line Of Fire, he learned to fight. "Without thinking, I punched the bully hard," Musharraf breathlessly says. "A fight ensued, and I really thrashed him. I became known as a tough guy whom you don't mess with."

Unsurprisingly, his memoir recounts that the future president excelled at sports and, though his academic record was less than perfect, "winning a spot [at Pakistan's military academy] was a cinch." In 1965 he saw action in a war against India and was again in combat six years later against the same enemy. Musharraf's acknowledged bravery in battle did much to off-set continuing problems with discipline and he rose steadily through the ranks to take command of an infantry division in 1991, becoming one of the few senior officers from Pakistan's 'mohajir'. He was made Chief of the Army Staff in 1998. Though a purely military post, in a country ruled by the army for more than half its short history, no general is apolitical.

Musharraf came to international attention in 1999 when India and Pakistan fought a short but bloody war in the high Himalayas over a range of dusty mountains above a scruffy Kashmiri town called Kargil. The exact role the general played in the provocative deployment of Pakistani paramilitaries across the frontier into India and in the fierce fighting that followed is unclear but many say that the whole venture was his idea. Whoever lay behind it, the war, which brought the two nuclear-capable nations to the brink of war, ended with a fairly ignominious withdrawal of Pakistani troops under massive international pressure.

But the conflict, which from close quarters resembled a border scrap fought amid soaring peaks under a bright blue high altitude sky, was just the prelude. Just months after its end, prime minister Nawaz Sharif, corrupt and incompetent, made an ill-judged bid to fire Musharraf while he was out of country and prompted a coup - bloodless and largely welcomed in Pakistan. Sharif tried to divert a civilian plane carrying Musharaf back to Pakistan to India. The general ordered the pilot to continue. With a few minutes of fuel remaining and hundreds of passengers on board the plane circled Karachi airport, while allies of Musharraf took control. Finally the plane landed and, in the small hours of the morning, TV screens across Pakistan flickered back into life after a blackout and the nation's 150m inhabitants saw their new leader, in combat fatigues, explaining, as all military coup leaders do, that the Army had taken control for the good of the nation and for a temporary period.

The men in khaki were back in power. Ironically, an almost-identical scene played out on Saturday as Musharraf once again explained himself to the nation. But, back in 1999, what sort of a man was the new boss? Confident, affable, often charming, and, with his taste for dogs, whisky and the occasional cigarette, he was hardly puritanical. Journalists turning up at Army House to interview the President-General would find his wife sitting on the sofa eating pizza and watching films. Polite too, sometimes icily, but always with the courtesy learned from parents who invited their son's important visitors to drop by for tea at their own humbler home.

In short, Musharraf is from the 'Sandhurst wing' of the Pakistani army, not the 'Jihadi' or Islamist wing. "A nationalist, a patriot, a soldier, but not an Islamist," says one senior Pakistani ex-officer. A speech made months after taking power outlined his vision of a "moderate Islam" that denounced extremism, welcomed the rights of women (one of his earliest acts was to enforce a minimum quota for female MPs) and pledged economic progress and peaceful relations with the West.

A self-admitted "economic half-literate", the technocrats around the president have pushed through a program of liberal reforms that have pushed growth rates to 10% - though little of that has trickled down to the 50% of Pakistanis who do not even have safe drinking water. Under his rule, the number of television channels has exploded and the press has remained relatively free, though it has come under pressure recently and there is dark talk of a new ordinance to restrict it in the comings days.

Musharraf appears far from willing to relinquish his position just yet. With the ten-year anniversary of the coup approaching and the constitution once more suspended, his initial pledge of a "temporary interruption of democracy" appears somewhat less than convincing. The president has shown again and again that he is a risk-taker. The state of emergency is possibly his greatest gamble yet. If he fails to impose his will, and to keep power, he has no obvious exit strategy.

When the Observer asked Musharraf if it was good to be in control on that afternoon in the garden of Army house eight years ago, the general thought for a second and then smiled. "Yes", he said. In the tumult of the near-decade since, some things remain unchanged.