The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  The two leaders instructed their defense secretaries to meet to discuss recent border clashes on the inhospitable twenty-thousand-foot-high Siachen Glacier, measuring one thousand square miles, in a region of Kashmir where the frontier had not been clearly defined. The glacier had been captured by the Indians in April 1984. In addition, they announced, the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan would meet in the third week of January 1986 to reopen talks on Delhi’s proposal for a peace and friendship treaty and Islamabad’s offer of a no-war pact.

  Zia ul Haq said the Indian premier had repeated his accusation that his county was sheltering, training, and arming Sikh terrorists from Indian Punjab. “Pakistan is totally against all kinds of terrorism,” he declared. In turn he referred to his complaint of cross-border subversion by India. “We have agreed that we will look into this problem in a more detailed manner,” he said, without elaborating.40

  Once the emergency was lifted in Punjab and state elections held in September 1985, the exclusively Sikh Akali Dal party emerged victorious. A modicum of normalcy returned to Punjab. But the Rajiv Gandhi government’s failure to fulfill its promise to transfer Chandigarh—the joint capital of Punjab and Haryana—to Punjab by the end of January 1986 led to the revival of Sikh extremism.

  India’s Operation Brasstacks

  On January 26, 1986, the militant Sikhs who had gathered in the Golden Temple backed the resolution proposed by the leaders of the All India Sikh Students Federation and the late Bhindranwale’s Damdami Taksal, a fundamentalist sect within Sikhism, favoring the establishment of Khalistan. But it was only three months later that the troops of the border security force and the “Black Cat” commandos of the National Security Guards41 were sent into the Golden Temple by the Akali Dal chief minister Surjit Singh Barnala to flush out the armed militants. Their Operation Black Thunder I resulted in the capture of three hundred armed militants and caches of firearms originating in Pakistan’s tribal belt, where the production of small arms flourished.

  While publicly complaining about Pakistan’s role in igniting Sikh irredentism, Rajiv Gandhi instructed RAW to take countermeasures. RAW set up its Counter Intelligence Team-X and Counter Intelligence Team-J to target Pakistan and the Khalistani groups respectively. These clandestine units of RAW used cross-border traffickers to ship weapons and cash across the long, porous Indo-Pakistan frontier, just as the ISI had been doing in the opposite direction.

  In Afghanistan, the CIA shipped 150 shoulder-held, US-made Stinger surface-to-air (SAM) missiles to the ISI for the Afghan mujahedin in the spring of 1996, followed by three hundred British-made Blowpipe missiles in the summer. The mujahedin started firing them extensively in the autumn, downing sixty Soviet helicopter gunships by year-end, thus finding them more effective than the Soviet-designed SAM-7s, clandestinely procured from Egypt and China by the CIA, which they had used before.42 The blunting of the most effective tool in Moscow’s armory to decimate the insurgents turned the war in favor of the mujahedin.

  In January 1987 the Moscow-backed Afghan government declared a unilateral cease-fire for six months, which was to be followed by a unilateral withdrawal of six thousand Soviet troops in August.

  Among other things, this further raised the spirits of Zia ul Haq, who was savoring good tidings from Washington. Disregarding the solid evidence that US intelligence services had provided President Reagan about the 1984 explosion of a Pakistani-produced nuclear bomb, he issued a certification of “no atom bomb made by Pakistan” in October 1986 to clear the way for generous economic and military aid. His decision put Rajiv Gandhi in a spin.

  The next month Gandhi gave the go-ahead to his assertive chief of army staff (COAS) Lieutenant General Krishnaswamy Sundararajan, often called Sundarji (in command February 1985–May 1988), to stage the war game code-named Brasstacks he had conceived in July. It was designed to test the scholar-soldier’s innovative concept of combining mechanization, mobility, and air support, using computers for operating tanks and running command centers, as well as electronic warfare equipment that had been installed in the past few years. Along with the chief of naval staff, Radhakrishna Hariram Tahiliani, he had submitted a draft of the nuclear weapons doctrine to the defense minister in 1985.

  Operation Brasstacks involved mobilizing nearly three-quarters of the Indian army in Rajasthan bordering Sindh, where irredentist Sindhi nationalism was gaining momentum, and putting them on high alert. It was the largest war game ever seen on the subcontinent, involving 1,300 tanks, 1,000-plus armored vehicles, and 400,000 troops barely thirty miles from the Pakistani frontier. It was the model for a full-scale invasion and revived the long-held fear of Pakistani leaders of their country being annihilated by India.

  The mobilization of the Indian military, involving nine army divisions and five independent armored brigades, in western Rajasthan gave “the assembled forces the capability to launch a piercing strike into Pakistan to cut off northern Pakistan from the southern part,” according to Abdul Sattar, then Pakistan’s foreign secretary. “Contrary to an existing understanding, the Indian army chief did not inform his Pakistani counterpart of the location, schedule and scale of the exercise. . . . Three wars, chronic tensions rooted in unresolved disputes, inadequate or unreliable intelligence, and deep-rooted mutual suspicions fuelled worst-case assumptions.”43

  As Pakistan’s COAS, General Zia ul Haq extended his army’s winter exercises in Punjab and then in December mobilized the Fifth Corps in Karachi as well as the Southern Air Command while deploying mechanized divisions and artillery along the Indian border. The Indians perceived his moves north of the Sutlej River and west of the Ravi River in Sialkot district as part of a pincer to squeeze Indian Punjab, where the Sikh insurgency had revived.

  The crisis deepened in January 1987, with Delhi calling Pakistan’s moves “provocative.” In return Islamabad pointed its finger at the massive Indian military buildup in Rajasthan, not far from its frontier. The mood at the annual Army Day Parade in Delhi on January 15 was bullish. The tension between the two neighbors became explosive three days later. That night Pakistani foreign minister Zain Noorani conveyed President Zia ul Haq’s personal message to the Indian ambassador, S. K. Singh: in the event of a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by India, Pakistan was “capable of inflicting unacceptable damage on it.”44 This, however, did not dissuade Sunderarajan from ordering the airlifting of troops into Indian Punjab.

  In Islamabad top Pakistani officials met in an emergency session on January 20. The next day Prime Minister Junejo telephoned Rajiv Gandhi and proposed defusing the crisis. After consulting the four other members of the Cabinet Committee on Security, Gandhi agreed. As a result, the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan met in Delhi on January 31. They signed an agreement on February 4 to deactivate forward air bases and then withdraw ground troops from frontline positions in stages.

  Zia ul Haq’s High-Wire Act

  That there was a menace lurking behind Zia ul Haq’s claim—“capable of inflicting unacceptable damage” on India—would become clear some weeks later. Known to only a select few, Zia ul Haq was engaged in a high-wire act. His overarching aim was to dissuade the Indians from starting a conventional war with a nuclear-armed Pakistan without providing evidence that contradicted President Reagan’s assertion that Islamabad was not pursuing a nuclear weapons agenda.

  At his behest, Qadeer Khan gave an interview to Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar on January 28, 1987, in Islamabad. “We have it [an atom bomb,] and we have enriched uranium,” he said. “Weaponized the thing. Put it all together.” Nayar said, “If you have tested, it would be a tremendous warning for India.” Qadeer Khan stared at the interviewer coldly. “Mr Nayar, if you drive us to the wall, we will use the bomb,” Qadeer Khan said. “You did it to us in East Bengal. We won’t waste time with conventional weapons. We will come straight out with it.”45

  Nayar sent his scoop to the London-bas
ed weekly newspaper Observer, whose editor, Donald Trelford, withheld publication for four weeks while he tried to get the story authenticated by different sources. During the hiatus, the content of the interview leaked.

  To lower tensions, Rajiv Gandhi hit on the idea of using the upcoming cricket test match between India and Pakistan in the Reliance World Cup Cricket tournament in Rajasthan’s capital of Jaipur. He invited Zia ul Haq to witness the second day’s play in the five-day match on February 22, 1987, as part of the “Cricket for Peace” diplomacy. Cricket is extremely popular in India and Pakistan, with test matches attracting up to three hundred million television viewers. On such occasions, streets and bazaars in both countries are deserted as most people sit glued to their TVs—or their radios before the arrival of television. Predictably, the Pakistani leader accepted Gandhi’s invitation.

  But, sitting next to his host, Gandhi, at the cricket ground, Zia ul Haq reportedly said, “If your forces cross our border by an inch, we are going to annihilate your cities,” indicating that if necessary, his military would not hesitate to use atom bombs first to defend Pakistan.46 In a pro forma statement, Pakistan denied the statement attributed to its president.

  After a long wait, on March 1, 1987, the Observer splashed the story: “Pakistan Has the A-Bomb.” It quoted Khan: “What the CIA has been saying about the atom bomb is correct. They told us Pakistan could never produce the bomb and they doubted my capabilities, but they now know we have it.”47

  The story, published around the globe, embarrassed Zia ul Haq. He launched a vigorous damage limitation effort. Qadeer Khan claimed he had been tricked by Nayar, who had quoted him out of context. In the Pakistani media, Nayar was pilloried as “a scummy RAW agent.” Zia ul Haq asserted that “Pakistan has neither the desire, nor the intention, nor the capacity to develop a nuclear weapon.”48 Following the Observer revelation, the Indian government stated that the disclosure was “forcing us to review our option.” It was a meaningless statement, as India had been manufacturing atom bombs since 1980.

  Despite the controversy and the news headlines, the public diplomacy of mending fences by the protagonists remained on track. On March 2 the two foreign secretaries, meeting in Islamabad, agreed to a phased troop withdrawal to peacetime positions. Two days later the Indian defense ministry arranged a guided tour of the front line in Rajasthan for local and foreign journalists as well as military attachés, including the one from Pakistan. “This is not a third-world army,” a Western diplomat told the New York Times correspondent Steven R. Weisman. “This is a modern army, fully competent for any mission, easily as good as the Chinese, the Koreans or the French.” India’s superiority in conventional warfare “might be motivating Pakistan to turn to nuclear weapons as a deterrent,” according to some analysts.49 This was an understatement.

  In reality, a bomb built by Pakistanis had been tested in China in early 1984, and three years later Pakistan was all geared up to assemble one at home. From March 1988 it became commonplace in the Indian media to say that the Pakistanis were “within a turn of a screwdriver” of assembling an atom bomb.

  Proxy Wars on Track

  While the overtly conducted war games and diplomacy ended satisfactorily, the proxy war by India and Pakistan through RAW and the ISI intensified in 1987. In Afghanistan KHAD and the KGB increased their training and arming of the Baluchi nationalists for subversive activities in Baluchistan. The separatists’ aim of establishing an independent Baluchistan would have meant reducing Pakistan by a hefty 43 percent and was therefore resisted bitterly by the government in Islamabad. As part of the KHAD-RAW-KGB triad, RAW’s Counter Intelligence Team-X became an active participant in stoking subversion in Pakistan. It coordinated its activities with KHAD. The result was a low-level but steady campaign of bombings in Karachi, Lahore, and Multan. According to the US State Department, more than half of the 835 terrorist incidents worldwide in 1987 were in Pakistan.50

  Indian Punjab remained on the boil. In Amritsar, militants had started creeping into the Golden Temple from the summer of 1986. Their takeover was complete in June 1987, when Darshan Singh Ragi, the Sikhs’ supreme leader opposed to violence, was forced to flee the shrine because of serious threats to his life. This was a signal for the Delhi government to impose central rule in Punjab. (It would continue until February 1992.)

  To ensure that the proxy war did not escalate to the extent that it made hot war inevitable, Zia ul Haq conceived the idea of a clandestine meeting between the heads of the ISI and RAW. But he needed an obliging but influential intermediary with extraordinary finesse to achieve this aim. During his military assignment in Jordan, he had cultivated a friendship with Crown Prince Hassan bin Talal, whose Cambridge-educated, Pakistani wife, Sarvath Ikramullah, was born in Kolkata and was a niece of Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, the former Pakistani premier. Hassan bin Talal agreed to act as go-between. He succeeded in contacting Rajiv Gandhi’s office.

  With the authorization of their respective leaders, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, director general of the ISI (in office March 1987–October 1989), and RAW chief A. K. Verma met in Amman to discuss their mutual problems. In exchange for the phased handing over of the nearly three thousand militant Sikhs who had crossed into Pakistan, Verma promised to de-escalate the bombing campaign in Pakistani cities in stages.51 They met again in the Swiss town of Interlaken, this time focusing on the India-occupied Siachen Glacier in Kashmir, but made no progress.

  In Indian Punjab, operating from the safety of the Golden Temple, the armed militants of the Bhindranwale Tiger Force and the Khalistan Commando Force of the Pakistan-based Paramjit Singh Panjwar52 would go out to murder prominent Punjabi politicians, police, and army officers, as well as suspected informers and innocent Hindus. Equally, the security forces carried out extrajudicial killings, attributing them to fake “encounters.” The photographs of these Sikh “martyrs” adorned the walls of many buildings in the Golden Temple complex.53

  Militant Sikhs operated in an environment in which Sikh and Hindu communities were alienated. With the terrorists increasingly carrying deadly AK-47 assault rifles, smuggled from Pakistan from May 1987 onward, armed policemen, lacking this weapon, found themselves at a crippling disadvantage. Since a section of Sikh police officers sympathized with the Khalistan cause, there were instances when underarmed Sikh policemen fled when encountering extremists. The morale of the law enforcement agencies plummeted.54

  Terrorism by Sikh militants intensified, claiming 173 victims, many of them Sikhs suspected as police informers, in January 1988, including 30 extremists. “Today, young Sikh militants with AK-47 assault rifles, shotguns and handguns of all kinds roam the [Golden Temple] complex at will, often carrying their weapons under blankets and robes,” reported Marc Kaufman of the Philadelphia Inquirer in February 1988. “Scores of militants—many of whom proudly say that large rewards have been offered for their capture—now live in small rooms that ring the Holy Pool, the most sacred area of the complex.”55

  In a nine-day operation in May 1988, code-named Black Thunder II, India’s security forces, commanded by Punjab’s director general of police, imposed a strict blockade of the Golden Temple complex and then moved in with blazing guns. In the resulting firefight forty-one militants were killed. Nearly two hundred Sikh extremists surrendered.

  The authorities claimed that interrogations of arrested militants revealed that many of them had been trained in camps inside Pakistan and that sophisticated firearms and ammunition had been smuggled across the Pakistani border. “Pakistan is perhaps the largest supporter of terrorism on the globe,” said Rajiv Gandhi at a press conference in New York after addressing the special UN session on disarmament on June 13, 1988. “We have given [the Pakistanis] a detailed list of training camps, of people who are carrying out the training, the type of training that has been carried out in the camps,” he added, demanding that Islamabad stop the aid. “We have given them maps of where the camps are lo
cated.”56

  As before, Zia ul Haq denied the charge and condemned terrorism. He was in an upbeat mood. Good tidings reached him from Afghanistan. Following the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s agreement with the UN special envoy in February 1988, the first phase of Soviet pullout from Afghanistan was completed in April. Also, his strategy of weakening Delhi’s grip over Kashmir in stages, conceived in early 1987 and conveyed to the leaders of the Jammu and Kashmir JeI, had gained traction. What had so far been viewed by India and Pakistan as a territorial dispute was now placed into a wider ideological context of Islamism by Zia ul Haq.

  Ironically, some months later, Zia ul Haq would become a victim of terrorism in Pakistan.

  A Crate of Exploding Mangoes

  On August 17, 1988, Pak-One, a C-130 Hercules turbo-prop transport plane, equipped with a sealed, air-conditioned capsule and carrying a four-man crew and twenty-seven passengers, crashed at 3:52 pm, eighteen miles from the Bahawalpur airport. Besides Zia ul Haq, the dead included Pakistan’s chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Abdur Rahman Khan; US ambassador Arnold Raphel, head of the US military aid mission to Pakistan; General Herbert M. Wassom; and a dozen other Pakistani generals. After lurching up and down in the sky, Pak-One plunged into the soil with such force that its propellers churned the ground for several feet. It then exploded, the crash igniting twenty thousand pounds of fuel, which burned for hours. The plane was on its return journey to Islamabad after top Pakistani and American officials had finished witnessing the performance of the newly supplied US M1 Abrams tank at the firing range of Tamewali, which was located several miles from the Bahawalpur airport.