The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Zia ul Haq was well aware of Washington’s policy of discouraging nonnuclear states to acquire nuclear arms. In 1976, US senator Stuart Symington’s Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 specified ending aid to any country that imported uranium enrichment technology. The following year Senator John Glenn’s Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act stipulated the termination of aid to any country that imported reprocessing technology, which is used to recover fissionable plutonium from irradiated nuclear fuel for nuclear weapons.8 The US Congress passed the Nonproliferation Act in March 1978. It barred any country from receiving American assistance if it tested a nuclear weapon, and imposed sanctions against a state that attempted to acquire unauthorized nuclear technology.

  While acknowledging the construction of a uranium enriching facility, Zia ul Haq said that it would be used solely for generating electricity and declared that no Pakistani government could compromise on the nuclear issue under American pressure. In his meeting with Cyrus Vance, US secretary of state, in October 1978, Pakistan’s foreign minister Agha Shahi said, “You don’t have to be a nuclear weapons expert to understand the strategic importance of having one. The value lies in its possession, and not in its use.”9

  In geopolitical terms, however, what caused a major shift in Indo-Pakistan relations was the coup by Marxist military officers against Afghan president Muhammad Daoud Khan on April 27, 1978. Daoud Khan was killed in the fighting at the presidential palace, and his official positions of president and prime minister went to Nur Muhammad Taraki. The military leaders renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The coup turned Afghanistan into a frontline state in the Cold War between the White House and the Kremlin.

  This was a second seismic change in five years in Afghanistan. In July 1973 Prime Minister General Daoud Khan had overthrown his cousin King Muhammad Zahir Shah and declared Afghanistan a republic. To consolidate his power he revived the issue of Pashtunistan, an independent state to be carved out of parts of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA). His officers started training twelve thousand irredentist Pashtun and Baluch volunteers to harass Pakistan’s army. In return, Bhutto sponsored an anti-Daoud Khan coup, fronted by the Afghan Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in July 1975. It failed. But Bhutto allowed Peshawar, the capital of NWFP, to become a base of Afghan Islamist groups. Mediation by the shah of Iran eased Islamabad-Kabul tensions by 1977. But normalization of relations between the two neighbors was disrupted by the subsequent Marxist military officers’ coup.

  Ripples of the Marxist Coup in Kabul

  The Marxist takeover in Kabul alarmed the administration of US president Jimmy Carter (in office 1977–1981). It hastened to resume development aid to Islamabad that it had stopped earlier. Washington’s ban on the sale of US weapons and parts to Pakistan after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War remained in place until 1975, when it was lifted by President Gerald Ford.

  On the other side, the Kremlin dispatched its military advisers to Kabul. At the same time Alexander Puzanov, the Soviet ambassador in Kabul, advised President Taraki in June to initiate dialogue with his Pakistani counterpart to resolve their mutual differences.10

  Taraki invited Zia ul Haq to Kabul. Instead, they met in Paghman, sixteen miles from the capital, on September 9.11 Their starkly opposing ideologies came into sharp focus. Taraki proudly informed his interlocutor that his regime had given land to eleven million Afghans. Zia ul Haq remarked that all property belonged to Allah and human beings were no more than His custodians. “All land belongs to the tiller,” retorted Taraki.12

  Desai and other Indian politicians would have agreed with Taraki’s statement. They had carried out land reform in India, albeit in fits and starts. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Delhi’s historically close ties with Kabul were unaffected by the political upheavals. The Taraki regime’s signing of a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Moscow in December 1978 followed India’s example in August 1973.

  By then the government of President Zia ul Haq had provided Afghanistan’s Islamist insurgents, called mujahedin (Arabic: those who wage jihad), with covert training bases—an enterprise in which the CIA participated actively under its Operation Cyclone.

  At home, on December 2, 1978, the Islamabad government announced that the Islamic law concerning theft (cutting off of hands), drinking (seventy-four lashes), and adultery (death by stoning) would be enforced from the birthday of Prophet Muhammad the following year. Pakistan’s lurch toward Islamization went unremarked by the Carter White House. Finding itself deprived of its strategic alliance with Iran after the overthrow of its staunch ally Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah by the rabidly anti-American Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in February 1979, the United States tightened its links with Zia ul Haq’s military regime.

  It decided to upgrade its backing for the Afghan mujahedin by authorizing the CIA to start supplying them with weapons. Initially the CIA armed them with Soviet-made arms partly from its own stores built up during the previous regional conflicts and partly by procuring them from Egypt, a one-time ally of Moscow. This enabled the mujahedin to claim that they had secured these firearms by attacking the armories of the government.

  In Kabul the Marxist regime split into two factions, leading to the killing of Taraki and the rise of Hafizullah Amin as president in September 1979. He in turn was toppled by Babrak Karmal in December. Karmal invited Soviet troops to help him stabilize the political situation. They arrived on Christmas Day. Overnight this transformed Zia ul Haq from a despicable dictator to an unblemished ally in the US-led global campaign against Soviet communism.

  Delhi and Islamabad reacted differently to the events in Afghanistan. Indian diplomats recommended negotiations between the contending Afghan parties. In stark contrast, Zia ul Haq presented Moscow’s move as “a push towards the warm waters of the Arabian Sea,” implying that Pakistan would be the next target of the Soviet Union’s aggressive expansion. Carter readily accepted his interpretation.

  The Cold War between the White House and the Kremlin intensified. But the Carter administration realized that killing Soviet troops in Afghanistan with CIA-supplied arms would be very provocative and raise the prospect of direct Moscow-Washington confrontation. Therefore it decided to work through a proxy—Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate—to be able to exercise “plausible deniability.” Out of this emerged the Washington-Islamabad-Riyadh alliance, whereby the United States, the overall coordinator, became the sole supplier of weapons, bought with American and Saudi cash, to be channeled exclusively through Pakistan. In this scheme, the ISI acquired a pivotal role.

  It then operated from a drab, unmarked red-brick building behind high stone walls on Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy in Islamabad. About one hundred military officers maintained an internal and external intelligence network of thousands of agents and freelance spies. Like the rest of the military, ISI officers and agents underwent religious education, as mandated by Zia ul Haq. Equally compulsory became the offering of prayer by soldiers led by officers.

  With the new, ambitious assignment in Afghanistan and a vastly increased budget, the ISI would expand its staff and agents, engaging Pakistanis fluent in Persian and Pushtu as well as thousands of Afghans with promises of money and domicile for their families in Pakistan. That would push the total number of ISI employees, full- and part-time, to almost one hundred thousand by early 1988.13 Zia mandated that the ISI collect foreign and domestic intelligence; coordinate intelligence functions of the three military services; conduct surveillance over foreigners, the media, politically active Pakistanis, diplomats of other countries based in Pakistan, and Pakistani diplomats serving abroad; intercept and monitor communications; and conduct covert offensive operations.

  While relations between Islamabad and Moscow turned frosty, the Delhi-Moscow embrace became warmer. In May 1980, Indian officials signed contracts for the purchase of MIG-25 airc
raft, attack boats, and advanced T-72 tanks, to be produced later in India.

  In June 1980 Zia ul Haq set up Sharia courts at the high court level in the provinces and the appellate Sharia bench at the Supreme Court level. They were authorized to decide whether a particular law was Islamic or not.14 These official measures were buttressed by the promotion of Islam through mosques and the media. A review of all textbooks was undertaken and the ones regarded as un-Islamic were removed.

  As a consequence, the social, cultural, and ideological distance between rapidly Islamizing Pakistani and secular Indian societies grew wider than before.

  Zia’s Cat-and-Mouse Game on Nuclear Weapons

  By late 1978, the Carter administration had solid evidence of Pakistan’s uranium enrichment program at the ERL in Kahuta. It broached the subject with Islamabad. Dissatisfied with the response he received, Carter cut off economic and military assistance, except food aid, to Pakistan in April 1979 under the Symington Amendment. He reiterated that the aid would be resumed only if he certified that Pakistan would not develop or acquire nuclear arms or assist other nations to do so.15

  Relations between Islamabad and Washington remained stalemated when Indira Gandhi was returned to power on January 14, 1980—within a few weeks of Soviet troops arriving in Afghanistan. She was keen to dissuade Zia ul Haq from approaching the Carter administration to restore military and economic aid to his country because of the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. In April she dispatched Swaran Singh, former foreign minister, as her special envoy to Islamabad to reassure Zia ul Haq that her government would not take advantage if he decided to move his troops away from the Indian border to the Afghan frontier. But by the time the back channel contacts between the two leaders built up to schedule a visit to Islamabad by the Indian foreign minister Pamulapartu Venkata Narasimha Rao in March 1981, the political scene in Washington had altered—to the detriment of Gandhi.

  Republican Ronald Reagan (in office 1981–1989) moved into the White House in January 1981. His description of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” would become his signature. It was with this reprehensible regime that the Gandhi government had signed a major agreement to boost India’s energy sector and to double bilateral trade between 1981 and 1986 during the December 1980 visit of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to Delhi.

  While Reagan lacked Carter’s intelligence, he was a superb communicator, having spent many years as a tall, robustly built actor in Hollywood. His persuasive manner helped him to overcome congressional resistance to his policies. Alexander Haig, his secretary of state from January 1981 to July 1982, described Pakistan’s nuclear program as “a private matter.” All he wanted was that it should not detonate an atom bomb, thus emulating the example of Israel, which had refrained from testing its nuclear weapons first acquired in 1966.

  The Reagan administration worked with Congress to give Pakistan a five-year waiver of the Symington Amendment because of its role in funneling US aid to the mujahedin in Afghanistan. In May 1981, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reversed its previous stance and sanctioned $3.2 billion aid to Islamabad over the next six years, divided equally between civilian and military assistance. The White House argued that supplying Pakistan with modern US weaponry would reduce the chance of its pursuing the nuclear option. In reality, nothing of the sort happened. Islamabad forged ahead on both armament fronts, conventional and unconventional. The Senate adopted its committee’s bill in December 1981.16

  Reagan appointed William Casey as CIA director. A bald, corpulent man with a rubbery face and oversize spectacles, he had started his working life with the CIA’s predecessor, Office of Strategic Surveys, and established himself as an unconventional operator, callous and combative in equal measure. Now, personal rapport quickly developed between him, ISI director Lieutenant General Abdur Rahman Khan, and Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence. The Afghan insurgency picked up.

  Since the United States did not want to create a paper trail of money transactions, which would give Moscow evidence of its involvement in Afghan affairs (thus raising the specter of a regional conflict with international potential), all money dealings were in cash. This gave ample opportunities to the ISI to siphon off foreign funds and funnel them into the nuclear program.

  As 1982 unrolled, Pakistan received from China the complete design of a twenty-five-kiloton nuclear bomb and sufficient weapons-grade uranium for two bombs. Beijing went on to provide Islamabad with the design of one of its warheads.17 Little wonder that Islamabad-Moscow relations turned bitter. In his speech at the banquet in honor of the visiting Indira Gandhi on September 20, 1982, Brezhnev publicly advised India against accepting Zia ul Haq’s offer of a no-war pact. Behind closed doors, he explained to Gandhi that after inking a no-war pact with India, the Pakistani leader would shift the bulk of his troops from the Indian border to the one with Afghanistan and threaten the Kremlin-backed regime in Kabul. Gandhi took his advice. She made a counterproposal for a peace and friendship treaty, which failed to interest Zia ul Haq.

  During her talks at the Kremlin, Gandhi privately advised a pullout of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. But her counsel was spurned.18 By then India’s defense industry was tied so closely to its Soviet counterpart that she lacked any cards to play in her dealings with the Kremlin.

  As a result of India’s continued cordial relations with the Marxist regime, links between RAW and the Afghan intelligence agency, KHAD, run by the Ministry of State Security, became tighter. Both worked closely with the KGB, the Soviet Union’s main security and intelligence agency. Among other things, the KGB and KHAD supplied vital information to RAW on the activities of Sikh separatists in Pakistan’s tribal region.

  In the state of Punjab, formed in 1966, Sikhs were 60 percent of its fifteen million inhabitants, the rest being almost wholly Hindu. Militants in the Sikh community had resorted to violence from October 1981 in their demand for Khalistan—the homeland for Sikhs—sandwiched between Pakistan and India. Sikh separatists argued that their community was the victim of discrimination by Hindus. However, the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak (1469–1539), was born a Hindu, and his faith emerged out of his attempt to reform Hinduism by getting rid of its caste system. Since the inception of Sikhism, relations between Hindus and Sikhs had been cordial, with Sikhs celebrating such Hindu festivals as Divali (Hindi: festival of light). Interfaith marriages were tolerated by both communities. Now, by resorting to attacking Hindus in Punjab, the advocates of Khalistan created tension between Sikhs and Hindus. Crucially, their demand for a homeland on the basis of religion, the seed that had flowered into Pakistan, struck at the very foundation of India’s secular constitution. It was ruled out of hand by the authorities in Delhi.

  This subject was therefore off the agenda during the hour-long meeting Gandhi had with Zia ul Haq on November 1, 1982, when he stopped in New Delhi on his way to Malaysia. They decided to authorize their foreign ministers to proceed with talks leading to the establishment of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).19

  Five Players in South Asia’s Nuclear Game

  Behind the scenes, Gandhi fretted about Zia ul Haq’s clandestine drive to build an atom bomb by using weapons-grade uranium, and she considered ways of terminating his scheme. She knew that Israeli warplanes had destroyed the French-equipped Osirak nuclear reactor under construction eighteen miles south of Baghdad on June 7, 1981. The daring, surprising raid by Israel inspired her to initiate a project in the autumn code-named Osirak Contingency under Air Marshall Dilbagh Singh, chief of air staff.

  The Indian Air Force’s planes practiced low-level flying runs with two-thousand-pound bombs. But neutralizing the strong air defenses of the Kahuta facility, including surface-to-air missiles, proved too great a challenge for India’s military. But because of the links between RAW and Mossad, it did not take long for Israel to offer its expertise in jamming advanced communications systems at Kahuta. Its
move was in line with its policy of blocking any Muslim nation from possessing nuclear weapons.

  Thus in 1982 Israel became the fifth player in South Asia’s nuclear game—after India, Pakistan, China, and America. Their alignments were full of contradictions. India forged a daring plan against Pakistan with Israel, a country with which it lacked full diplomatic links. Though committed by law to the doctrine of nonproliferation of nuclear arms, the Reagan White House chose to turn a blind eye to the ongoing assistance that Beijing, a nonsignatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was giving to Islamabad in its nuclear weapons program. Israel, the long-established staunch ally of the United States in the Cold War, now arrayed itself against Pakistan at a time when that country had become the key element in Washington’s campaign to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

  In marked contrast, China remained singularly consistent in its strategy to offset India’s hegemony in South Asia by aiding Pakistan to overcome its inherent weakness compared to its mighty neighbor in conventional weapons and armed personnel. By eagerly assisting Pakistan to construct a nuclear weapon, Beijing aimed to raise it to parity with India in defense matters, thus frustrating India’s ambition to become a hegemonic power in South Asia.

  Delhi accepted the assistance of Israel’s hawkish defense minister, Ariel Sharon. By the end of 1982, a joint Indo-Israeli plan was hatched to raid Pakistan’s Kahuta nuclear facility. Indian military officers traveled to Tel Aviv clandestinely in February 1983 to purchase electronic equipment to jam Kahuta’s air defenses. Tellingly, on February 23, 1983, Gandhi accused Pakistan of “covertly attempting to make nuclear weapons,” and three days later Raja Ramanna, head of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, revealed that India too was developing a uranium-enriching facility.20