January 24, 2001Rawalpindi / Lahore / Islamabad04:15 Hours
The first reports arrived before dawn—fragmented, breathless, inconsistent in detail but consistent in implication.
Something had moved inside Pakistan.
Not in parliament. Not in a mosque alone. Not in a newspaper column.
On the street.
General Pervez Musharraf stood at the edge of the briefing table while the duty officer spoke too quickly and the phones kept ringing. In the corridor outside, aides moved with the quiet urgency of people who understood the difference between political heat and operational fire.
A stadium had been set alight.
Not a symbolic banner burned. Not an effigy.
A stadium—steel, concrete, seats that had carried thousands of cheering bodies—reduced to smoke and panic while the city watched.
And then, before the shock could settle, came the second strike:
A players' bus had been attacked on the road—stones, shouting, sudden violence that lasted minutes and left fear that would last far longer.
No fatalities were confirmed in the first wave of reports. But the message had been delivered with brutal clarity:
We can reach your symbols. We can touch your heroes. We can turn your "peace league" into a national humiliation.
The Wrong Kind of Mullah
By sunrise, the Intelligence Directorate had separated noise from signal and brought Musharraf the part that mattered.
"These are not the old Saudi-funded clerical circuits," the senior officer said, choosing his words carefully. "Different pattern. Different handlers. Different money."
Musharraf didn't need the lecture. He had watched the same faces appear across different crises—men who spoke like religious purists one day, human rights activists the next, and street organizers the day after that. Their talent was not ideology.
Their talent was infiltration.
He took the file and flipped through it—photos, names, associations, a web of "civil society" fronts and extremist sermon networks that rarely touched each other unless someone paid them to coordinate.
He didn't say "CIA" like a slogan. He said it like a conclusion he had reached too many times to dramatize.
"Foreign-paid spoilers," he said flatly. "Clean clothes. Dirty work."
Mahmood, standing close, said what had to be said.
"They're trying to force you into overreaction, Sir. If we crack down publicly, they'll call it dictatorship. If we do nothing, they'll escalate."
Musharraf's jaw tightened.
"And if the league continues here," he replied, "they will keep attacking until the crowd turns on us for failing to protect what we ourselves created."
He looked at the stadium images again. Blackened stands. A field scarred by smoke. The SPL—his most successful soft-power weapon—suddenly looking fragile.
This wasn't just vandalism.
It was a bid to collapse a narrative.
The Quiet Panic
In Lahore, players woke to security advisories and rumors. Some called family members. Some tried to sound calm and failed. Team managers began asking the kind of questions that had no good answers:
Can we guarantee safe travel?Can we guarantee safe exits?Can we guarantee we won't be filmed panicking?
On television, the anchors were already splitting into camps. Some demanded "iron action." Some called it "inevitable backlash" against cultural dilution. Some hinted, carefully, that "outside forces" might be feeding the fire.
The public response was worse than anger.
It was uncertainty.
People can survive anger. Anger is a direction.
Uncertainty is a fog—and fog is where mobs form.