The secret life of a doomed hotel: remembering Islamabad's Marriott

By Mark Corcoran of ABC's Foreign Correspondent

It's hard not to get emotional and very difficult to play the dispassionate journalist as I sit here, watching the Marriott Hotel burn on my computer screen courtesy of online news. Initial reports say rescuers still can't reach the upper floors. How many colleagues, friends, acquaintances lie buried in the wreckage is unclear.
It's the holy month of Ramadan, and the suicide truck bomber struck in the evening, just as hundreds of people would have been gathering to break the daily fast. Having attended such gatherings at the hotel, I suspect most of the crowd would not have been the Western infidels so detested by the extremists, but Pakistanis - and Muslims.
For me all roads once led to the Marriott, in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan. For six years the hotel was like a second home - as I worked on assignments in Pakistan or stopped off in transit on my way back to Australia from the madness of neighbouring Afghanistan.
Architecturally, the hotel building was unremarkable, 1970s vintage. But location is everything, and the Marriott was minutes away from the National Assembly, the Prime Minister's residence, Government bureaucracy and the headquarters of Pakistan's all-powerful spy agency, the ISI.
The billing as Islamabad's first five-star luxury hotel was somewhat overstated. The aesthetic of the place was no different to thousands of anonymous business hotels the world over. But that's my perspective. Outside the glass doors, the view from the street - where most of Pakistan's 170 million people live - the Marriott was, for many, an enduring symbol of everything that was wrong with their corrupt, dysfunctional nation.
What made this hotel special for the privileged few was the commodity being traded day and night in the foyer, cafes and restaurant: information.
Information, as they say, is power, and in Pakistan, power is a life and death struggle.
The 'real deal'
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.
Later, hotel management discretely opened a windowless basement bar - one of the few venues in the capital to serve alcohol. Occasionally I'd disappear into this gloom for a quiet drink with the army officers-turned spies who were running Pakistan's secret wars in Afghanistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir. Many had embraced the extremist zeal of the militants they sought to control and exploit - yet they still enjoyed a scotch or a beer when I was paying.
Staggering back to my room, I'd be kept awake at night by the blaring music from the hotel function centre out the back, as Pakistan's leading families cemented alliances by marrying off their sons and daughters in colourful, elaborate weddings.
Then there was the hotel staff. Many had spent most of their working lives at the Marriott. They were happy to join in the theatre and tip me off when a "player" would swing in through the front doors, with a self important entourage armed to the teeth, all ignoring the screeches of the metal detector.
Nothing was impossible for them. Once, caught without transport while covering the fighting between Pakistan and Indian troops on Kashmir's "Line of Control", I was offered a hotel courtesy car, complete with uniformed chauffer. The elderly driver usually took diplomats wives shopping. Instead he found himself dodging Indian artillery fire on a mountain road with an increasingly anxious ABC crew. Implacable throughout, he only briefly displayed a flicker of anger when I attempted to apologise for getting him into this mess. "But I'm an Afridi" - he replied. This brief statement of tribal identity said it all: born and raised on the fierce border with Afghanistan, near the Khyber Pass, there was nothing he'd seen on my little expedition that was going to rattle him. But he chided, "You must pay for bullet holes or damage to hotel transport."
Survival instincts
I write this tonight from the safety of a suburban home in Australia. The floors and attic are filled with vibrantly coloured Afghan and Pakistan rugs bought from the carpet wallahs who ran the rug shops along the Marriott's ground floor arcade.
The real bargains lay far from the hotel, in their warehouses off in the backstreets. Most of the traders, like the owner of the Marriott, were from Islam's Ismaili sect: astute, outstanding businessmen and great survivors.
For the price of a rug and a few hours of my time sitting on a warehouse floor, I'd receive endless cups of tea and political tip-offs that often proved remarkably accurate. After all, the carpet business runs on good intelligence and the carpet wallahs live and work in one of the toughest markets in the world.
I only hope that their survival instincts didn't fail them on Saturday night.
Change for the Marriott came after 9/11. As the Americans gathered their forces to invade Afghanistan, the hotel became media headquarters of the world.
Hundreds of foreign media established a surreal Tower of Babel in the hotel. TV networks fought for space on the roof to erect plywood studios, guests slept on stretchers three to a room. The function centre became a paying dormitory - and the room rate, like the punditry, seemed to escalate on a daily basis.
As CNN anchors shared their insight with the world from their rooftop plywood stage, South American journalists down in the foyer, watching the broadcasts on TV, transcribed every word before relaying back to anxious readers back home.
The foyer transformed into the theatre of the absurd. There was the chic French TV crew kitted out in the flowing robes of traditional Pakistani shalwar kameez; and the American reporter complaining that he couldn't bring his gun into the hotel.
With the fall of Kabul the circus moved on, but the Marriott had changed.
After 9/11 the security barriers went up outside the hotel, but no one seriously believed it would stop a determined teenager on a one-way ticket to martyrdom.
I began to demand rooms at the back of the building, off the ground floor, but not so high that I couldn't climb down in an emergency. For many Marriott regulars, it was a case of not if, but when, it would be attacked. In 2004 an explosion in the foyer wounded several people, then last year, a security guard died after challenging a suicide bomber at the gate.
The Marriott Hotel was also the place where I formed friendships with Pakistani journalists, academics and human rights activists, all striving to explain the chaos of their nation to the world. Many live close to the hotel. They would have certainly heard the bomb go off - if they were fortunate enough not to have been caught in the blast.
As the chaos recedes, they will get on with the business of explaining the how's and the why's of this atrocity. They'll infuriate the Islamic extremists who tolerate no criticism of their absolutist world.
Unlike me, a privileged visitor, they choose to continue living and working in Pakistan, facing the constant threat of the assassin's bullet or bomb - over the safer, quieter life of exile. They are some of the bravest people I know.