US and Saudi efforts saved former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif from the hangman's noose after the coup by General Pervez Musharraf, according to former US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott.
Sharif's fate, Talbott writes in his book Emerging India, remained in doubt for 14 months after being sentenced to death on the charge of attempting to murder Musharraf.
"After strenuous behind-the-scenes intervention by the United States, with considerable help from the Saudis who threatened to cut off Pakistan's access to cheap oil, Musharraf lifted the death sentence and allowed the two Sharif brothers and their families to go into exile in Saudi Arabia," Talbott writes.
He says former US president Bill Clinton had instructed the National Security Council to marshal whatever influence the US government had to persuade Musharraf to commute the sentence.
In Washington, Talbott says, there was a sense of bleak anti-climax.
"We felt as though we were watching a remake of a bad movie with an unhappy ending. Twenty-one years earlier, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq had overthrown Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and had him hanged on a charge of murder, despite an outpouring of appeals for clemency from around the world, including from President Jimmy Carter," he recalls.
Sharif, Talbott says, committed his "final blunder" as prime minister when "he provided a pretext for the military coup that the then external affairs minister Jaswant Singh had predicted in his talks with Talbott by trying to force Musharraf into exile by preventing the plane that was bringing him home from Sri Lanka from landing in Pakistan, thus prompting the army to rebel."
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