Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  Bob Gates is a cool customer, and he did not lose his composure. He knew his message was not going to be well received. It had been America’s message to India and Pakistan for more than a decade; I had heard it and the responses to it over and over again. From the end of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan until 9/11, the nuclear issue had dominated American diplomacy in South Asia. It came to dominate the bilateral agenda and sometimes forced every other issue off the menu at high-level meetings. Nonproliferation was the centerpiece of American policy to deal with India and Pakistan. Two presidencies were dominated by the nonproliferation issue, those of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, despite their efforts to broaden the discussion.

  And the policy largely failed. America proved powerless to stop India and Pakistan; both tested devices in May 1998 and blew their way into the nuclear club. But America did help prevent the two from using their nuclear arsenals against each other. From 1990 to 2000 India and Pakistan lurched from crisis to crisis, fighting one small war and almost going to war several other times. In each crisis, Washington would be a key player, keeping the worst—nuclear war in South Asia—from happening.

  BUSH PREOCCUPIED; PAKISTAN BETRAYED AGAIN

  George Bush was better prepared for the foreign policy challenges of the new post–cold war world than almost any other president. He had been director of the CIA, ambassador to China and to the United Nations, and vice president of the country; as vice president, he had visited South Asia in May 1984. He was well traveled and knew almost every world leader. America was indeed fortunate to have such an experienced hand in the Oval Office. The world was transformed on his watch, and he guided America through the transformation with great skill. The Soviet army left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989. Shortly after it began leaving, the Warsaw Pact nations in Eastern Europe crumbled along with the Berlin Wall. The cold war was over, and within three years the Soviet Union had vanished. At the same time, there was major unrest in China and Iraq invaded Kuwait, an action that was followed by a UN–sanctioned war to liberate the emirate. Given all the global change it is not surprising that South Asia got only limited attention from the Bush White House. No member of his cabinet visited South Asia in the first two years of his term. Vice President Dan Quayle made one short visit to India in May 1991 for the funeral of Rajiv Gandhi; Bush himself never went. In his memoirs, written with his brilliant national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, India is mentioned only once and Pakistan not at all.

  India also was changing. After Rajiv lost his bid for reelection in December 1989, a coalition Indian government was formed, led by V. P. Singh. Since 1971 New Delhi had looked to Moscow as its most important foreign friend, and now, as the Soviet Union collapsed, India struggled to find its foreign policy ground. The Indian economy was badly damaged by the loss of Russian markets and then by the rise in oil prices brought on by the war in Kuwait. Spare parts for India’s Soviet-supplied jets, tanks, and other equipment became hard to acquire in the confusion surrounding the breakup of the USSR. Most important, Zia’s investment in building an insurgency in Kashmir had finally paid off. A major insurrection against Indian rule erupted in 1989, and soon the Indian government was confronted with angry young Kashmiri Muslims, backed by the ISI, who were fighting for their freedom.

  After Zia’s death, Pakistan too was in turmoil. The army chose not to put forward a new military dictator and to allow elections instead. Just after Bush’s election victory in November 1988, Pakistanis voted for a new prime minister. The contest was between two leaders who would dominate Pakistani elections for the next quarter-century; indeed, they were the only two serious candidates on the top of the Pakistani ballot for the next quarter-century. The loser in 1988 was the army’s preferred candidate, Nawaz Sharif, a Punjabi industrialist who had been groomed by Zia to be a future leader. Benazir Bhutto, Zulfikar Bhutto’s daughter, was the winner. At thirty-five years of age, she became the first woman elected to run Pakistan. A Harvard graduate, she knew America better than any Pakistani leader before or since. She later said that her four years at Harvard were the happiest of her life, and that was almost certainly true. When she was a child, her father was arrested, tortured, and hanged. She herself spent six years either under house arrest or in prison. For a time she was in solitary confinement in a windowless cell in the Sindh desert, which she described in her first memoir as an “oven.” In 1984 Zia finally let her go into exile, but the next year her brother Shahnawaz was poisoned in Nice, France, allegedly by an agent sent by Zia. In 1987, a year before her election, she married Asif Ali Zardari, a wealthy businessman with a reputation for corruption and ruthlessness. Her other brother, Murtaza, died in Karachi in 1996 in a shootout with the police; her own niece suspects that her husband was responsible.1

  Benazir and Bush met early into their new jobs in February 1989, at the funeral of the emperor of Japan in Tokyo. Bush was impressed by the young prime minister and eager to continue America’s entente with Pakistan to help it make the transition into a stable, healthy democracy. Benazir was invited to the White House for the first state visit of a foreign leader during the Bush administration, and when she arrived in early June 1989, finishing the Afghan project started by Reagan and Zia was at the top of the agenda. Bush welcomed Benazir publicly by praising that joint effort, but he stressed that “the job is not done.”2 The war in Afghanistan was expected to end quickly, with the Russians leaving. The CIA and ISI expected that the communist government in Kabul would then collapse quickly and that afterward America and Pakistan would help install a new government in Kabul to help bring stability to South Asia. It did not work out that way.

  The largest supply depot for the arms used in ISI’s war in Afghanistan was located just outside Rawalpindi at the Ojhri ammunition storage facility. On April 10, 1988, it was racked by a massive explosion. Ten thousand tons of arms and ammunition were expended in a massive series of rippling explosions.3 While most of the arms were for the Afghan mujahedin, the ISI had used the same site to store equipment for the Kashmiri jihad. More than a hundred people died in the disaster, including five ISI officers. In 2012 two former Indian officers told me that it was their service that sabotaged the facility to punish Pakistan for helping the Kashmiri and Sikh rebels. The Indian intelligence service believed that the destruction of the stockpile would set back the ISI Kashmir campaign and cripple the ISI.4 That did not work out as planned either.

  In Srinagar, the capital of Indian Kashmir, the crowds blamed India and riots broke out, the opening salvo in what would become a rapidly building insurgency against the presence of the Indian army.5 It was a harbinger of how Zia’s jihad would now spread east, as he had always wanted. Among his last acts before his death, in 1988 Zia ordered the ISI to step up support for the Kashmiri insurgency. Benazir inherited from Zia two jihads along with an army and an ISI that were outside her control and deeply suspicious of her. She in turn was deeply suspicious of the ISI and the army, which she despised from her years in prison and in exile after her father’s execution. She felt her election victory had come despite a concerted effort by the ISI, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Osama bin Laden to back her opponent, Nawaz Sharif, and defeat her.6 After she was in office, the ISI told her that the mujahedin would sweep to victory quickly once the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan in 1989, and the CIA gave President Bush the same estimate.7 However, the communist government in Kabul, which did not fall from power until 1992, would actually outlive the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

  One reason was a strategic miscalculation by the new ISI director, Hamid Gul. Gul decided that because the Soviets were gone, the mujahedin should shift from guerilla to conventional warfare. The first target would be the city of Jalalabad, on the road from the Khyber Pass to Kabul. The American ambassador to Pakistan, Robert Oakley, endorsed the idea. The siege that followed was a terrible mistake. The Afghan communist army held off the mujahedin, and the stalemate led to bitter recriminations within the mujahedin factions. After the
debacle, Bhutto engineered Gul’s removal from the ISI leadership, firing him just before her visit to Washington. Gul would go on to be a public advocate for the Taliban, the Kashmiri insurgency, and Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, he would claim that the attacks were the work of the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, and an excuse for the American intervention in Afghanistan.8 Just before her assassination in 2007, Bhutto claimed that he was plotting her murder.9

  While the Afghan insurgency stalled, the Kashmiri insurgency blossomed, much of it the result of indigenous Kashmiri anger at years of heavy-handed oppression by India. In 1988, 1989, and 1990, the bottled-up anger of the Kashmiri Muslim population exploded into riots and violence, incidents of which rose from 390 in 1988 to 2,100 in 1989 and to almost 4,000 in 1990.10 Hafiz Saeed’s Lashkar-e-Tayyiba began setting up its infrastructure inside Kashmir, and its camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan trained hundreds of militants;11 according to one estimate, 200,000 militants went through its training camps in the ensuing two decades.12 The ISI had to play catch-up to regain control of the movement. The insurgency was dominated at first by the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, which was dangerously independent of the ISI. Zia’s clients, the Jamaat-e-Islami and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, were still relatively small players struggling to expand their sphere of influence. Indeed, “what the ISI wanted to prevent, above all else, was the creation of a separate state in Kashmir that would include both the Pakistani and Indian controlled sections of Kashmir, which was precisely the JKLF’s goal.”13 As many as 180 different splinter groups sprouted up in Kashmir to fight the Indians, and the fracturing of the insurgents ultimately helped the ISI regain control of the insurgency. The ISI moved quickly to support the dozens of new groups, which the JKLF had found very difficult to control, and gradually moved to isolate the JKLF and take over. It set up an umbrella group, Hizbul Mujahedin, to unite the pro-Pakistan elements and then cut off aid to the JKLF. The JKLF tried to appeal directly to Benazir to overrule the ISI, but the ISI blocked any communications between the insurgents and the prime minister. The insurgent factions began to fight not only the Indians but each other, and the infighting became violent. In the end, the ISI succeeded in gaining effective control of the militants, although it never fully controlled all elements of the insurgency.14

  Some of the ISI’s insurgents would become famous figures in their own right. Perhaps the best example is Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri. Born in Kashmir on February 10, 1964, he joined the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s. Kashmiri trained in the ISI border camps in North Waziristan; according to some accounts, he received training with the elite Special Services Group of the Pakistani army. He was involved in several years of combat, in which he lost an eye and a finger. After the defeat of the Soviets, Kashmiri turned his attention to his homeland, where, with ISI assistance, he formed a militant group known as the 313 Brigade, a unit that made itself famous by harassing and attacking the Indian army. In 1991, he was captured and spent two years in an Indian prison before escaping.

  In 1994, Kashmiri took the war into India proper. A team of his men kidnapped several Western tourists and held them for ransom in a safe house near New Delhi, demanding the release of a senior Kashmiri militant, Maulana Masood Azhar, who had been arrested in Kashmir early in the year. The Indian army tracked down the band and raided the house, but Kashmiri escaped. His campaigns in Kashmir made him a hero in the ISI. In 2000, he brought the severed head of an Indian soldier to ISI headquarters in Islamabad. On several occasions, both General Pervez Musharraf, the dictator of Pakistan at the time, and Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed, then head of the ISI, personally thanked him for his accomplishments in the jihad.15

  The growing tension in Kashmir exacerbated Indo-Pakistani tensions. By August 1989 India was reinforcing its already large troop presence in the province to suppress the unrest, using a very heavy hand. Indian troops engaged in massive and sustained human rights violations against the Kashmiri people, and hundreds died in extra-legal killings; even more disappeared with no explanation. The brutal Indian response just encouraged more violence and desperation. New Delhi accused Islamabad of helping the insurgents. In December 1989, Pakistan responded with a massive military exercise, deploying 200,000 ground troops and virtually the entire Pakistani air force in a display of its might and determination.16

  The rhetoric heated up on both sides. On March 13, 1990, Benazir Bhutto said that Pakistan would fight for a “thousand years” to free Kashmir, and the two countries seemed to be heading toward war. To calm the waters, President Bush dispatched deputy national security adviser Robert Gates and Richard Haass, the senior director for Near East and South Asia affairs on the National Security Council, to the region; however, even before their trip in May, tensions began to abate. At no point did either India or Pakistan actually put their nuclear weapons on alert or start the nuclear countdown, so the crisis never got to the boiling point. But it was sufficiently alarming that Bush felt that he had to send Gates. It would be not be the first or the last time that the two countries seemed to be heading toward war because of Pakistan-based terrorism.17

  After the crisis faded, the army and Pakistan’s president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, moved to oust Benazir Bhutto from office, alleging corruption. New elections were held, and the ISI worked actively to help elect Nawaz Sharif, the Zia protégé whom Bhutto had defeated earlier. According to Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s future ambassador to the United States, Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief, ran the anti-Bhutto campaign for the army. The campaign included allegations that Bhutto had “strong Zionist links” and was too pro-American.18 Bhutto’s suspicions of what the ISI and the army would do to her proved later to be all too accurate.

  Before Sharif took office, the bottom fell out of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. The spring 1990 crisis and the Gates-Haass trip to the region had contributed to the growing sense in Washington that Pakistan had the bomb; after all, why was Bush worried about a possible nuclear exchange in South Asia if Pakistan did not have the capability? In October 1990, President Bush reported to Congress that he could not certify that Pakistan was abiding by U.S. legislative requirements not to cross the nuclear threshold—saying, in effect, that Pakistan had the bomb. Under the Pressler amendment, all U.S. foreign assistance to Pakistan had to be halted immediately. Even equipment paid for, like F-16 fighter jets, could not be delivered. Pakistanis argued that the United States just did not need their country any longer because the Soviets were in retreat. Many, if not most, felt then and now that the United States used the nuclear issue as a means to dispense with helping Pakistan; after all, they claimed (correctly), Washington had known of Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions under Zia but pretended that the country had not gone over the threshold. Others would say that the Afghan war had provided Zia with crucial cover in Washington to build the bomb without American sanctions. A. Q. Khan, for example, has said that he urged Zia to test a bomb in 1984 but that Zia told him to wait while the war continued. As Khan concluded, “had the Afghan war not taken place, we would not have been able to make the bomb as early as we did given the U.S. and European pressure on our program.”19

  Sharif, the new prime minister, thus found himself inheriting the two jihads but without the support of the United States that Zia and Benazir had enjoyed. Sharif was very dependent on the ISI and the army as well as the religious parties for his position. Some former ISI officers have even alleged that Sharif reached out to Osama bin Laden in early 1990 for assistance and secretly met with bin Laden in Saudi Arabia, where he had returned after the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan.20 However, those accusations have not been proven; they probably were part of a later smear campaign against Nawaz that occurred after the army broke with him in 1999. Sharif’s new ISI commander was Lieutenant General Javid Nasir, a self-proclaimed Islamist who was very eager to prosecute the wars east and west.

  The Afghan war came to a climax in April 1992, when a key Uzbek commander in the communist army, Abdul Rashid Dostum, brok
e ranks and defected with his supporters to the mujahedin. The communist government collapsed quickly from within, and Kabul finally fell to the mujahedin. After twelve years it appeared that Zia’s jihad had triumphed, but it was an empty triumph. The mujahedin fell to fighting among themselves, and the brutal and bloody civil war that followed continues until today. Pakistan found itself backing its major clients in the mujahedin, especially Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s primarily Pashtun group, against the other mujahedin factions, especially that led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Tajik, and Dostum’s Uzbek faction. The civil war was incredibly complex, with players often switching sides, and much violence was directed against civilians. Afghanistan was descending into anarchy, hardly the vision of a Pakistani ally that could provide strategic depth for Islamabad against India. And by now, the Kashmir war was a stalemate. India had a half-million men in the province, and while violence levels had peaked, they remained high.

  Pakistani politics then turned to another of the mysteries in the nation’s history. The chief of army staff, General Asif Nawaz, suddenly died on January 8, 1993. His wife suggested that he had been poisoned and that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may have been part of the conspiracy to kill him. Asif Nawaz had taken command determined to get the army out of politics. In his first order of the day, he said that it was time for the army to return to the business of being a professional military and to allow the democratic process to work, and he tried to persuade Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto to reconcile for the good of the nation.21 Asif also was concerned by the deteriorating security situation in the country’s only port, Karachi, where sectarian violence was getting out of control, and he was increasingly said to be concerned that the prime minister was not up to the job. His mysterious death has never been fully explained, but it would usher in yet another change at the top.22 Nawaz Sharif was removed by the president for corruption, just as Benazir had been, and for failure to investigate Asif’s mysterious death adequately, and new elections were held in 1993.