A gift for fiction

Tunku Varadarajan reviews Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's book.

The book is not so much an autobiography as a highly selective auto-hagiography, by turns self-congratulatory, narcissistic and mendacious.

And yet, at a certain level, the general deserves our thanks, for no one can possibly read "In the Line of Fire" and maintain the illusion that Gen. Musharraf offers a template for enlightened rule--unless, of course, one is Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary, who cooed these words at a recent love-in for the general at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York: "There is a very, very good chapter in this book about economic policy. I suggest to President Musharraf when he finishes in Pakistan he should come and govern here for a while."