Asian Window

By Mark Corcoran / ABC News

A CCTV still shows security personnel gathering around a truck, on fire at right, that tried to crash through the barrier at the Marriott hotel in Islamabad. (Reuters TV)

The Marriott, as American diplomats and spies were fond of saying, was “the real deal”.

Hollywood may have created “Rick’s Café” of Casablanca fame – a fictional world of intrigue – but the characters who inhabited the Marriott were playing out a real life drama, a latter day version of the “Great Game” to control Southwest Asia.

It often seemed that Pakistan was run from this hotel to the strains of the incessant hotel muzak.

This was a neutral ground for competing politicians, diplomats, warlords, drug lords, peddlers of nuclear weapons technology, and perhaps a few who fell into all those categories.

In a single day, I could exchange nods across the foyer with military strongman General Pervez Musharraf, who’d tried to convince me that his coup overthrowing civilian rule was necessary, or observe charismatic cricket star turned politician Imran Khan glide in to work the room, never failing to charm visiting Western journalists – despite the fact that so many of his countrymen had written him off as a political failure.

Alcohol was a tool of the trade even in an Islamic state such as Pakistan. At first it was brought to my room in a brown paper bag – after I filled out a government form declaring myself to be an unstable foreign alcoholic.

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