by Bruce Riedel
In the wake of the embassy attack, U.S.-Pakistan relations were at their nadir. Many in the U.S. government believed that Zia had deliberately encouraged the attack and then done nothing to halt it. Carter, more charitably, gave Zia the benefit of the doubt. Then, just when U.S.-Pakistan relations were at rock bottom, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, rescuing the relationship. Carter would have to eat crow and make up with Zia.
THE RUSSIAN BEAR AND ZIA UL-HAQ
Mohammed Zia ul-Haq transformed Pakistan and altered the course of the country’s future more than anyone had since Jinnah. Zia can also be rightly called the godfather of the modern global Islamic jihad movement. He was born in Jalandhar (now in India) on August 12, 1924. After joining the British army in India in 1944, he fought with Indian forces in Italy against the Nazis as part of the British Eighth Army. Between 1962 and 1964, he received training as a tank commander in the United States at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and he served as a tank commander during Pakistan’s 1965 war with India.
In 1967 Zia was posted to Amman, Jordan, as part of a Pakistani military advisory group that was helping Jordan to recover from defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel. Over the next three years, he would distinguish himself in supporting the Hashemite government in its fight with Palestinian guerillas led by Yasir Arafat. Zia helped plan the king’s battles with the fedayeen and even commanded some of the Jordanian forces fighting the Palestinians in the civil war that engulfed Jordan in September 1970, the notorious Black September, when King Hussein defeated the Palestinians and drove them out of the kingdom. According to the king’s brother, Prince Hassan, Zia became a “friend and confidant of His Majesty, King Hussein. He was a well-respected figure, a professional soldier, and … he not only advised on military tactics, he also earned the respect and trust of the jundis [soldiers].”3 Zia probably exceeded his authority as a Pakistani general, but he built a very strong relationship with the Hashemites. His role in Jordan also made him famous at home.4
Unlike the earlier generation of Pakistani military dictators, Zia was an Islamist. He aligned himself with the country’s Islamic political party, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI); he depicted himself as a pious Muslim; and he took steps to Islamize the army. He sought and received the endorsement of Islamic extremists, who enthusiastically praised the new regime.5 Officers were encouraged to join communal prayers with their troops, and for the first time, promotion boards for officers reviewed their moral and religious behavior in addition to their performance of their normal military duties. The foremost expert on the Pakistani army today, Shuja Nawaz, concludes that “Islamization was the legacy he left Pakistan.”6
Zia was ambitious. He declared at the height of the Afghan war with the Soviets in the 1980s that
we have earned the right to have a friendly regime in Afghanistan. We took risks as a frontline state, and we won’t permit it to be like it was before, with Indian and Soviet influence there and claims on our territory. It will be a real Islamic state, part of a pan-Islamic revival that will one day win over the Muslims of the Soviet Union; you will see it.7
One measure of Islamization under Zia was the growth in the number of Islamic schools (madrassas) in Pakistan. Zia recognized diplomas granted by the madrassas as equivalent to those from universities. The number of such schools grew enormously on Zia’s watch, as did their influence throughout the country. In 1971 there were 900 madrassas in Pakistan; by 1988 there were 8,000 official religious schools and another 25,000 unregistered ones.8 The army’s role in Pakistani society also expanded. Ayub Khan had begun a process whereby retiring army officers were given state land in rural areas to improve their retirement pensions and to encourage rural development. Zia expanded that program and also began to give favored officers prime pieces of property in Pakistan’s growing urban areas. The practice would continue, and by 1999 the armed forces as a group owned the largest share of urban real estate in Pakistan.9
In addition, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence grew. Zia’s handpicked choice for director general in 1979 was a Pashtun, Akhtar Abdur Rahman, better known simply as General Akhtar. He hated publicity and the press and avoided being photographed. Akhtar, whom his own subordinates described as “a cold, reserved personality, almost inscrutable, always secretive,”10 was a gifted intelligence officer, and he knew the Afghan world well.11 He developed close working ties to many of the Afghan mujahedin leaders, especially fellow Pashtuns, and organized them into political parties to give more legitimacy to their struggle. Akhtar also built strong ISI links to the CIA and the Saudis. He was the first director general of the ISI that I met with.
At Zia’s direction, Akhtar vastly expanded the size and strength of the service. According to one estimate, the ISI went from a staff of 2,000 in 1978 to 40,000 employees and a billion-dollar budget by 1988.12 It came to be seen in Pakistan as omnipotent, listening in on every phone call, planting informants in every village, city block, and public space. Politicians were on its payroll, and its enemies simply disappeared. Much of its growth was designed to keep Zia in power, but much of it was also to wage jihad. As one of Akhtar’s deputies would later say, “The ISI was and still is probably the most powerful and influential organization in the country”; he also remarked that Akhtar was “regarded with envy or fear,” even by his fellow officers.13 In short, Zia gave Pakistan an “incendiary mix of despotism and Islamization.”14
Events outside Pakistan gave Zia more opportunity to Islamize the country. First was the revolution in Iran, Pakistan’s western neighbor. In 1978 the Shah’s government was toppled in an Islamic revolution that swept Iran and surprised the world, and it had ripples in Pakistan. Pakistan has a large Shia minority, perhaps as many as a quarter of all Pakistanis (Jinnah was one), and the Shia revolution next door heightened sectarian tensions within Pakistan. Iran began supporting Shia dissidents inside Pakistan. At first Zia tried to appease them and bargain with Tehran, but when that failed, he used force. Zia and the ISI supported the growth of anti-Shia Sunni groups like Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (the Army of the Prophet’s Companions), which attacked Shia mosques and religious festivities to intimidate the Shia community into quiescence.15 The Iranian revolution also removed a key American ally in the region. It had seemed to many Cold Warriors that Moscow must have had a hand in the revolution, although in fact it was as surprised as everyone else. The unexpected demise of the Shah’s Iran made events in its eastern neighbor, Afghanistan, suddenly seem more important.
Afghanistan had had a very uneasy relationship with Pakistan since 1947. Under the Raj, the border between Afghanistan and British India—the so-called Durand Line—was drawn unilaterally by the British and imposed on the Afghans in 1893. Named after the British officer who drew it, Henry Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary for India, the line divided ethnic Pashtuns—the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan—from their fellow Pashtuns in what would become Pakistan. No Afghan government, not even the Taliban, has ever recognized the legitimacy of the line, which stretches for 2,640 kilometers, and Afghanistan pressed for a revision of the border as the British prepared to leave India. When Pakistan refused to change the border, Afghanistan voted against allowing Pakistan a seat in the United Nations. Afghan governments also supported calls for an independent Pashtunistan to be carved out of Pakistan, in effect expanding Afghanistan all the way to the Indus River and even to the Indian Ocean by gobbling up Baluchistan as well.
In 1978, Marxist officers in the Afghan army overthrew the neutralist Afghan government of President Daoud and began to import communist ideology and politics into the country. Large parts of the rural countryside rose in rebellion. Many of the rebels had long had contacts with Pakistan’s religious parties, especially the Jamaat-e-Islami, and with the ISI. Zia openly favored the rebels, and Akhtar’s ISI began arming and helping them. The Afghan communist government first appealed to Moscow for arms and advisers and then for Russian troops. Initially, Moscow was reluctant to get into what appeared to be a grow
ing civil war and a possible quagmire. But as the situation deteriorated, the Soviet leadership decided that it must intervene to save a client state. On the eve of December 25, 1979, the invasion began: 85,000 Soviet soldiers entered the country, and the borders of the Soviet bloc advanced to Pakistan’s western frontier. However, Moscow still showed signs of ambivalence about the project. The Soviets could have put many more troops into the fight if they chose to do so. While they had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 with a 250,000-man army, they were fighting in Afghanistan, a much larger and more challenging country, with a smaller force.
Zia immediately turned to Saudi Arabia for help and assistance. The Saudis and Pakistanis had a long history of cooperation; Pakistan received significant aid from Riyadh, and many Pakistani émigré workers were employed in the kingdom, including in the Saudi army, navy, and air force. The Saudis had been worried about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan even before the Marxist officers took over. During a visit to Riyadh the year before the coup, their intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faysal, had warned President Daoud of the communist threat. As the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Zia dispatched General Akhtar to Riyadh with an urgent message for the king: Zia wanted Saudi assistance to strengthen the mujahedin, the anti-communist rebels in Afghanistan. According to Prince Turki, King Fahd agreed immediately, and the ISI and Turki’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID) began cooperating to aid the mujahedin. Saudi money began pouring into the ISI, and Saudi authorities also encouraged private citizens to give money to help in the war against the Soviets and to join the jihad. In addition, the Saudi-Pakistani partnership would soon acquire another partner, the CIA.16
Partly in response, Zia dispatched a Pakistani expeditionary force of brigade strength to the kingdom to help it defend itself against its regional enemies. The 12th Khalid bin Waleed Independent Armored Brigade would be stationed in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, near Israel, for more than six years, from 1982 to 1988. Reinforced, it had 20,000 men under command at its peak, and the Saudis paid all of its costs.17 With the money from the Saudis and later from the CIA, the ISI was able to begin training Afghans to fight the Soviets more effectively. The ISI set up training camps along the Durand Line, and Afghans began learning more sophisticated tactics and skills to help them wage jihad. The ISI included instructors from Pakistan’s own special forces, the Special Services Group (SSG), an elite fighting force within the army.
Zia also turned to Pakistan’s other long-time ally, China, and China responded with arms and advisers. By the end of the war, Chinese aid to the Afghans exceeded $400 million and some 300 Chinese advisers had helped train the mujahedin in the ISI camps in Pakistan. A few were trained in camps in China itself.18 Overall, the ISI had trained at least 80,000 to 90,000 Afghans in its camps.19 Among the trainees was a young Afghan from Kandahar named Muhammad Omar, who would later found the Taliban. The Afghans were trained either in short ten-day courses or longer three-month courses. Omar was selected for the longer course in 1985. His ISI trainer would later remember Omar as one of his best students.20
Supporting the Afghans did not come without costs to Pakistan. First, there were the refugees, about 4 million of whom crossed into Pakistan to escape the war and the communists. Entire cities in Afghanistan were depopulated during the war; for example, especially after the Soviets carpet-bombed much of Kandahar to break a mujahedin rebellion, its population dropped from 250,000 to 25,000. The refugees poured into the poorest parts of Pakistan: the Pashtun-dominated Northwest Frontier Province, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and Baluchistan. The burden of caring for them was an enormous drain on Pakistan. Moreover, with the refugees came a Kalashnikov culture. Every Pashtun man carried an assault rifle. The violence and disrupted lifestyles of the displaced refugees bred a lawlessness in the border regions that undermined traditional tribal authorities and the Pakistani government alike. The opium trade from Afghanistan’s large poppy fields added corruption and drug trafficking to the mix.
In addition, the Russians and their Afghan communist allies sought to destabilize Pakistan. The Russian intelligence service, the KGB, and its Afghan client, the KHAD, paid agents to plant bombs in the refugee camps, assassinate mujahedin leaders, and attack the ISI training facilities. They would also try to blow up the arsenals where the ISI stored weapons and ammunition before the supplies got into the mujahedin’s hands. (The most successful attack on an arsenal, which came near the end of the war, rocked the entire city of Islamabad; however, it was the work of India, not KHAD.) Soviet aircraft also intentionally strayed into Pakistani air space to intimidate Zia and the ISI, and the Pakistani air force struck back. Dog fights occurred along the border, some of which risked escalating into a mini air war between the Soviet and the Pakistani air force.21 The Pakistanis were emboldened over time to take the war into the Soviet Union itself. Trained mujahedin units would cross the northern border of Afghanistan to conduct sabotage in Soviet Central Asia, and experts from the SSG would sometimes accompany them on their missions.22
At first, however, Zia was very cautious. He knew that the risks of fighting a superpower with the world’s largest army were enormous. There was no assurance that Moscow would not invade Pakistan itself or work with its ally, India, to carve up the state. Consequently, for the first few years of the war Zia’s orders to the ISI were to heat up the situation in Afghanistan but not to let it boil.23 Controlling the arms and money going to the mujahedin was the key to keeping the pot simmering just right. The ISI therefore took outside help, money, and arms but was very careful to control how and when the various mujahedin factions received those assets. In the process the ISI could favor some factions over others, and it always favored Pashtuns and Islamic factions at the expense of non-Pashtuns and more moderate elements.24 The man who actually ran the operation for much of the 1980s was Mohammad Yousaf, the chief of the ISI’s Afghan bureau. His two accounts of the war, Silent Soldier: The Man behind the Afghan Jehad and The Bear Trap: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, are the single best pieces on the war from the Pakistani perspective. He describes the pipeline for aid as follows: “As soon as the arms arrived in Pakistan, the CIA’s responsibility ended. From then on it was our pipeline, our organization that moved, allocated, and distributed every bullet that the CIA procured.”25
From the earliest days of the Afghan war, Zia was already planning for the next stage of the jihad, turning east toward India and Kashmir. He turned initially to a political party with which he and the army had long-standing ties, Jamaat-e-Islami. The group had been founded in 1941 by Maulana Syed Abul A’ala Maududi, an Islamist writer who advocated a Muslim state in India and the use of force, or jihad, to get it. Maududi had no sympathy, however, for Jinnah and his independence movement, which he saw as far too secular in outlook. Jamaat-e-Islami wanted an Islamic state. It was an enthusiastic ally of the army in the war against the Bengalis in 1971, a war that helped forge an alliance between the party and jihadists like Zia in the army.26
In 1980 Zia met secretly in Rawalpindi with Maulana Abdul Bari—a leader in the Jamaat-e-Islami and a veteran jihadist who had fought in Operation Gibraltar in 1965—to discuss Kashmir. Zia proposed that the JeI begin preparations for jihad in Kashmir and promised that he would use the war against the Soviets as a means to help build the base for a Kashmiri insurgency. In other words, the Afghan war with the Soviets would also be a training ground to build the cadres for another jihad, against India. Zia promised that some of the American assistance that was earmarked for the Afghan jihad would be diverted to the Kashmiri project and that the ISI would help both.27 Jamaat-e-Islami found, however, that there was resistance among Kashmiris to Zia’s promises of support. Having been let down by Pakistan in 1947 and 1965, many were uncertain that they could trust the ISI. So the new jihad took time to develop. A series of clandestine meetings took place between the ISI and Kashmiri militants from Indian-controlled Kashmir. For security reasons, many of the meetings were held in Saudi Arabia. It was
easier for an Indian militant leader to travel to the kingdom, often under the cover of performing the hajj, than to go to Pakistan, which would immediately invite the scrutiny of Indian intelligence. Zia and General Akhtar were involved directly in the effort. Finally, in 1983 some Kashmiris began to receive training in the ISI’s Afghan camps.28
Zia, Akhtar, and the ISI also reached out to other groups in Kashmir, including the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which had been founded in 1977 in Birmingham, England, by Kashmiris living in the United Kingdom. However, the JKLF was much more interested in achieving Kashmiri independence than in joining Pakistan. At first it was also reluctant to take ISI help, but Akhtar opened talks with the group in 1984, and by 1987 JKLF militants were attending the ISI training camps. Zia and Akhtar also avidly supported another front in India, the Sikh independence movement, which wanted to create a Sikh state called Khalistan. Sikh grievances dated back to partition, when some Sikhs argued for a third state in South Asia for themselves. When their unrest peaked in the 1980s, Pakistan unsurprisingly became a patron of the Sikh independence movement, which the ISI helped by providing arms and expertise. Zia could not resist the temptation to play in troubled waters.
The Sikh rebellion came to a disastrous climax in June 1984, when activists took control of the Harmandir Sahib—the holiest Sikh temple, known popularly as the Golden Temple—in Amritsar. Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian army to regain control, but Operation Blue Star turned into a fiasco, in part because the army underestimated the firepower of the militants. After a twenty-four-hour firefight, at least 500 soldiers, militants, and innocent victims were dead; some believe that the casualties were much higher. A low-level insurgency in the Punjab would continue for another decade, with the ISI stoking the flames. It would also take Mrs. Gandhi’s life.