He is exactly as I described him. And although I can’t know for sure exactly what sort of foolishness occupied his mind at the time. I do know what he did, why he did it, how he did it.
And ‘it’ involved a poorly planned and unprovoked conflict in which our men were slain all while we couldn’t support them properly because him and his Gang of Four imbeciles made our official stance to be that these are non-state actors, so when Indian bofors and Mirages came knocking on their positions, and when they began running empty on ammunition and food, we had to watch helplessly. He did not inform the army properly, and any of the other branches of the armed forces and civilian leadership, all kept in the dark until it was too late. He in his folly often lies about the truth of Kargil, he says Nawaz lost the war, when in fact it was him and his co-conspirators that in a state of panic, beseeched Nawaz to go to the US and ask them to intervene. After that, given the circumstances and poorly thought planning, the final chapter involved an unconditional withdrawal, in which our men were killed while attempting to withdraw, yet we couldn’t do or say anything in response.
Post-Kargil, everyone and their dog knew that either Musharraf gets court martialed, or there’s martial law. The latter happened to prevent the former. Musharraf removed an elected government, broke his oath to the constitution, imprisoned an elected PM, dissolved assembly, and suspended the constitution. He then asked judges to validate his dictatorship, and when they refused he had them imprisoned. Then he made the remaining judges break their oaths to the constitution and take new oaths to him under PCO. He also tried his best to keep Nawaz in prison mostly on trumped up charges, perhaps he wanted to make another Bhutto out of him, this part is uncertain. As for his record in the war on terror, political record and his subservience to the US. I need not elaborate, what I’ve said here is enough of a damning indictment.
So it seems that I don’t know everything and I don’t know what it was like being in his shoes, but I do know enough to say that was indeed a warmongering fool, a shameless dictator and a traitor general.
