Way back in the ’00s, I said, more than once, “The job of president of the United States is very hard. The job of prime minister of Israel is very hard. Hardest of all, however, may be the job of president of Pakistan.”

Permit me a memory of Pervez Musharraf. I will quote from a piece I wrote in 2004, reporting from the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Musharraf, I said, “has arrived in the Alps fresh from two attempts on his life.” In his remarks to the gathering, and in his bearing, “he is the picture of sang-froid.”

Questioned about the assassination attempts, Musharraf said the following:

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“I fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban on our western border. I deal with Kashmir and extremism on our eastern border. And I’m fighting extremists and terrorists in the middle of the country. So I step on a lot of toes. As for the assassins, I consider them occupational hazards. Fortunately, I have nine lives and I haven’t used them all up yet.”

That was a paraphrase by me, but very close. And in my report, I said, “I wonder how many of the rest of us would be so cool.”

On February 5, this was published in the New York Times: “Pervez Musharraf, Former Military Ruler of Pakistan, Dies at 79.” The subheading read, “Mr. Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup in late 1999 but resigned under threat of impeachment in 2008. He drew fire for his ties to Washington.”

The obit was written by Alan Cowell and Stephen Kinzer, two veteran foreign correspondents, retired from the Times. (Obits of important figures are usually written, in substance, well in advance.)

In a Times obit, the opening paragraph seeks to capture what is important to know about the deceased: the essence. In the case of Musharraf, we get,

Pervez Musharraf, the onetime military ruler of a nuclear-armed Pakistan who promised critical support for Washington’s campaign against Al Qaeda after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but faced growing resistance at home in a land seething with anti-Western passions, died on Sunday in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He was 79.

That is perfect. The obit at large is first-rate. The life and times of Pervez Musharraf are very complex — subject to oversimplification and obfuscation. Cowell and Kinzer have done a masterly job with their task.

They say,

. . . Mr. Musharraf’s efforts to maintain a measure of democracy while ruling as an authoritarian, and to promote secularism in a country where religious radicals wielded broad influence, brought him few friends and a growing roster of enemies.

By the time he suspended the Pakistani Constitution and imposed emergency rule in late 2007, the patience of President George W. Bush, who had once called him a “courageous leader and friend of the United States,” was wearing thin.

Musharraf was born in 1943, in Delhi. (This was pre-Partition, of course.) His father was a diplomat, for the new state of Pakistan, and Pervez did some of his growing up in Turkey.

Write Cowell and Kinzer,

His time in Turkey, then regarded as the most secular country in the Islamic world, left a deep impression, and he later cited Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Western-oriented founder of the Turkish Republic, as his “most admired person.”

About the early part of Musharraf’s tenure as leader of Pakistan, the obituarists say this:

Some changes that followed Mr. Musharraf’s coup were immediately palpable. Crime dropped sharply. Police officers stopped pulling cars over to demand bribes. Even airport taxi lines became orderly. And Mr. Musharraf embraced liberal economic policies that impressed business leaders and led to remarkable economic growth.

“Paradoxes” is an interesting word — a good word — when it comes to Musharraf and Pakistan. The obituarists write,

Mr. Musharraf’s time as president highlighted many of the paradoxes of his land. American officials became increasingly frustrated with what they viewed as his refusal to crush terrorist groups that maintained bases and training camps in tribal areas of Pakistan. That the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was widely believed to be living in those areas after his escape from Afghanistan in 2001 only intensified American anger.

Bin Laden was, indeed, living in Pakistan, and we did not get him until 2011.

Have some more:

. . . every time Mr. Musharraf made even a tentative effort to crack down on foreign fighters from the Taliban and Al Qaeda, radicals and fundamentalists at home, often led by religious leaders, staged mass protests. Denouncing him as a lackey of the Bush administration, adversaries nicknamed him “Busharraf.”

The conflict reached a climax in July 2007 at a redoubt known as the Red Mosque in Islamabad, the capital, when Mr. Musharraf ordered troops to attack Islamists who held sway there. About 100 people died.

Something else to know about Musharraf and his enemies:

The fundamentalist opposition was a question not only of policies but also of personality. Mr. Musharraf was scorned as having adopted a Western lifestyle. An avid sportsman who favored squash, badminton, golf and sailing, he had a reputation as a bon vivant.

Here is another detail — whose importance will be grasped by anyone acquainted with the Muslim world:

He was sometimes photographed with his two Pekingese dogs, ignoring Islamic teachings that dogs are impure and should not be kept as pets.

One more paragraph:

In his spare time, he played bridge and devoured books on military history. In a land more used to obfuscation, he had “a horrible habit of unexpected candor,” according to Salman Haidar, a former chief of India’s diplomatic corps.

In the ’00s, I wrote a fair amount about Musharraf (because we all did, or many of us did). Most of these articles are unfindable on the Internet, at least by me. But in National Review’s archives, I find two pieces, both of them from Davos. The first, from 2004, I quoted from at the top of this article. I will quote some more:

Musharraf’s persistent theme at the Meeting is “enlightened moderation.” His hope for the Islamic world is that it will “reject extremism in favor of social and economic development.” He conveys that the current struggle is basically one within Islam. Who will win out? The moderates and the modernizers, or the nuts? Abdullah, King Hussein’s kid, who now runs Jordan, says the same: that this is no clash of civilizations — the King is not a Huntingtonian, and neither is Musharraf — but a crisis of Islam. Musharraf says that the Muslims need essentially three things from the United States: that it “heal” the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, Iraq, and Kashmir. Oh, is that all? Why not throw in the common cold, just for kicks?

In 2006, I again reported from Davos, recording the following:

Musharraf talks about a variety of topics during a coffee with journalists: the recent earthquake in Pakistan; the perpetual problem of Kashmir; the War on Terror. He emphasizes that terrorism and extremism are two different things: Terrorism, you can meet by force; extremism, however, is a state of mind, “and you can’t fight it militarily.” But you can try to treat it, before it bursts into violence.

That is an interesting distinction — the one between terrorism and extremism (with terrorism being the more manageable problem?).

Some more:

Someone asks why Pakistan — and India, for that matter — should have an A-bomb, and Iran, not. Musharraf responds that the only reason to have a nuclear weapon is to deter aggression. And “I don’t see a threat to Iran.”

When, rooting through the archives, I read the following, I remembered it very well. A striking moment.

In due course, the room grills him about the recent American raid on al-Qaeda — on Pakistani territory. Wasn’t this a violation of Pakistani sovereignty? say the journalists. Doesn’t this injure the pride of the nation? How can you let Imperial America run amok? Musharraf reflects and says, yes, Pakistan condemns the American raid. Yes, we are jealous of our sovereignty. But what about al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorists on Pakistani soil? Don’t they count as violators? And the United States is helping us be rid of them! Pakistan has captured Sudanese, Chechens, Uzbeks, Arabs . . . If you want to talk about precious Pakistani sovereignty — why don’t you ever consider them?

It may be my imagination, but I think that Musharraf sort of shames the room.

I think he did.

One more excerpt, from my 2006 report:

He later appears on a panel with other leaders from the Muslim world. The subject is what you might call the general crisis. Musharraf maintains that there is no conflict whatever between Islam and modernization. What there’s a conflict between is Islam and Westernization. According to Musharraf, the Islamists are above all obscurantists: They love to equate modernization with Westernization. It isn’t so, he says — and don’t let them get away with it.

Yes, don’t let them get away with it. But they so often do. Counter the obscurantists, whenever and however you can.

In this column of mine, with its quotations, its memories, I have not written an assessment of Pervez Musharraf. There is a great deal to say, and it really ought to be said at book length (although the Times obit gives you an excellent mini-bio). I have gathered some notes, which I trust will interest those who are inclined to be interested in such matters.