The Sewing Circles of Herat

by Christina Lamb

  ‘The Americans have failed, they have not caught bin Laden or Mullah Omar or any senior Taliban or al Qaeda. All they have done is oust our government. We never did anything to them. Mullah Omar is still in Afghanistan and will stay there making contact with those commanders unhappy with the new government. You British of all people know how unwise it is for outsiders to meddle in Afghanistan. You will see Islam will win out and we will break the Americans into pieces as we did with the Russians and bring back the name of the Taliban.’

  I left feeling uneasy, thinking of the words of Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, ‘we have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another’. Sahadi seemed such a young simple man, a father of four small children in a land where far too many children had lost their fathers, and on the few occasions he had looked straight at me I thought I could detect some doubt in his eyes, as though something had gone wrong that he could not explain. It was the same look that I had seen in the silent red-haired son of Abdullah whose watchful eyes sought reassurance everywhere yet trusted nobody.

  General Hamid Gul and I had a history, and it was with some trepidation that I rang the doorbell of his house in Rawalpindi. Once, twelve years earlier, while I was living in Pakistan, I had received another mysterious phone-call. ‘The Chief would like to meet you’, said a purring almost feminine voice. I was told to be waiting at eight and on the stroke of the hour, two men in grey shalwar kamiz, silk cravats and dark glasses who could only have been intelligence agents knocked on the door of my apartment in Islamabad. In a dark saloon car with tinted windows I was driven to an unmarked building on the wide Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy just near Zero Point. Behind the high walls and barbed wire stood the headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence, or the ISI as it was known, an organisation that struck fear into the hearts of most of its countrymen.

  I was shown into a long room with a conference table, a large military map of Afghanistan dotted with coloured pins covering most of one wall. From a corner of the room emerged a short man in grey shalwar kamiz with a long black waistcoat and a moustache that looked as though it were pasted down from nose to lip. His eyes smouldered blackly, his complexion like that of a bruised plum, and he had a commanding presence that I would later come to think of as malevolent. I had learnt by then to resist the urge to put out my hand as it is not the custom in Islamic countries to shake hands with women, and he came towards me with a curt nod of welcome. This was General Hamid Gul, Director General of the ISI.

  If any one individual could be said to be the true architect of the jihad it was General Gul. Backed by the financial and logistical support of the CIA, he headed the agency at the peak of its power in the crucial years from 1987–1989 when victory against the Soviet Union was sealed and the fight spread to become a pan-Islamic rather than just an Afghan cause.

  Even before Afghanistan, the ISI had been widely regarded by its countrymen as a sinister force. Conceived in the 1950s by General Ayub Khan as a means of keeping watch on politicians, its power grew after he took over the country in 1958, effectively becoming the army’s political wing. In the 1970s, the Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, expanded it to spy on Baluch nationalists in the insurgency in Baluchistan, and began using the agency to damage his political enemies. It ran smear campaigns against politicians, prominent figures and journalists and became known as a ‘dirty tricks’ brigade.

  However, it was after General Zia ul-Haq seized power from Bhutto in 1977 that the agency really spread its tentacles, supporting and arming various extremist and radical sectarian groups within Pakistan in a kind of divide and rule strategy and training militants to fight in Kashmir, another cause close to its heart. It was the Afghan war that enabled it to complete the transformation into a ‘state within a state’. When the Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul at Christmas 1979, Zia was quick to spot the opportunity. Relations between Pakistan and America had been at an all-time low and aid was suspended following the hanging of Bhutto and the burning down of the US Embassy in Islamabad that November. With the Cold War in full swing, Washington was anxious to check Soviet expansionism, and the fall of the Shah of Iran left Pakistan as its only ally in the region. General Fazle Haq, then Governor of Frontier province and one of Zia’s key advisors, wasted no time making contact with the Carter administration. ‘I told Zbigniew Brezinski [Carter’s National Security Advisor] you screwed up in Vietnam and Korea, you better get it right this time,’ he later said.

  The hawkish Brezinski was quick to take the bait, but it was under the Reagan administration that the mujaheddin cause was really embraced. In the autumn of 1981 a six-year package of $3.2billion in economic and military aid to Pakistan was agreed. As it was a covert war against the Soviet Union, the massive CIA weapons pipeline that was put in place to arm the mujaheddin was completely managed and supervised on the ground by the ISI, giving the agency enormous power. The weapons came from China, Israel, Poland and factories set up to copy Soviet arms to disguise their provenance. From the moment they arrived in Karachi they were under ISI control to transport, distribute – or sometimes siphon off 1 – as agents saw fit. ‘Pakistan insisted they decided who get weapons and we agreed to it,’ said Chuck Cogan, CIA Director for the Near East from 1980–3. According to one estimate, the ISI was involved in transferring 65,000 tonnes of light weapons to the mujaheddin, mostly handed out through the seven Peshawar-based parties.

  The distribution was a lucrative business. The ISI charged $20 per kilogram to move supplies in to Afghanistan, using the long running smuggling networks of the Tribal Areas. The empty trucks returned filled with drugs. The CIA also deposited money into special accounts in Pakistan, shipped sophisticated intelligence gathering equipment to the ISI and gave the agency a free hand in training. General Gul claimed that by 1989 more than 80,000 mujaheddin had passed through ISI training camps. The CIA even agreed to keep its agents out of Afghanistan, a decision it was to bitterly regret later. ‘The Americans weren’t even allowed in tribal areas’, General Gul told me, ‘they could not talk to any of the Afghan leaders without my men being present’.

  Although weekly meetings were held with representatives of the three main agencies involved – CIA, the Saudi Al-Istakhabara-al-Ama headed by Prince Turki bin Abdul, and Chinese intelligence, ISI was selective in what it passed on. ‘My father and ISI always made sure the Americans had no direct contact with the mujaheddin,’ General Zia’s son Ijaz-ul Haq told me, ‘that’s why now they don’t know anything about Afghanistan.’

  Hamid Gul at his home in Rawalpindi in 2001.

  Among the things not mentioned was the fact that ISI agents were increasingly planning and directing operations inside Afghanistan and arms were frequently given as a reward for carrying them out.2 The agency did not like independent commanders, particularly those like Abdul Haq with civilian support inside Afghanistan because that might make them reluctant to carry out ISI plans that often involved blowing up bridges or dams. The ISI so poisoned Haq’s name that CIA agents referred to him as ‘Hollywood Haq’. The feeling was mutual. ‘Intelligence communities have their own agendas,’ Abdul Haq told me bitterly, ‘it’s better to rely on arms captured from inside.’ With such a deliberately divisive system it is hardly surprising that no unified Afghan national organisation or leadership emerged to establish a government in Kabul when the Russians left.

  American aid for the Afghan rebels rose from $30m a year in 1980 to $600m by 1986, an amount said to be matched dollar for dollar by the Saudis, and Afghanistan became the world’s fifth largest arms importer. All this money enabled the ISI to build up a vast network of between 25,000 and 100,000 freelance agents, from doormen and taxi-drivers in hotels, to journalists on all the country’s leading newspapers; to arm and train militants to fight in Kashmir; and to become increasingly influential in domestic politics.

  By the time General Gul took the helm in 1987, the agency was already out of control. When the sudden death of President Zia in a mysterio
us air crash in 1988 left it orphaned and opened the way to restoring democracy, Gul did everything in his power to try to prevent Benazir Bhutto from winning the subsequent elections. Not only did he force the other political parties to cobble together an alliance against her but also his agents organised smear campaigns, airdropping leaflets showing a photograph of her mother Nusrat when she was Pakistan’s First Lady, dancing bare-armed with president Gerald Ford in the White House. The caption warned that the country was about to be taken over by ‘gangsters in bangles’.

  To Gul’s chagrin, his campaign was unsuccessful; the combination of international pressure and massive popular support for Bhutto ensured that she became the country’s first female Prime Minister. But in the negotiations that went on between the military, the Americans, and Bhutto before she was allowed to take power, he made sure that the ISI would retain control of Afghan policy.

  Iftikhar Gilani, who was Law Minister at that time and one of Bhutto’s closest advisors, told me, ‘From 1988 onwards no civilian government controlled Afghan policy. We didn’t even have any say on it. I complained to Benazir that it was embarrassing and that we should be able to formulate policy and she said, ‘‘why do you have to argue?” I replied, “either we’re a government and we control things or we’re not.’’ She said, ‘‘don’t touch this subject, these are prohibited areas.’’ We were the cabinet of an elected government, and yet the military, or the ISI, was running our most important foreign policy and we weren’t even given real briefs of what they were doing. If I were her I would not have accepted government on that condition.’ Bhutto herself admitted to me, ‘It’s partially true that the ISI and the army had control of Afghan policy but at least when I was Prime Minister there was a check. It was after my overthrow that they invited Osama bin Laden and turned it into a surrogate state.’3

  So that evening I first met Hamid Gul in early 1989, he was Afghan supremo. Finally to meet this shadowy figure that I had never even seen a photograph of yet had heard so much about was an un-nerving experience. After initial awkwardness, for the next two hours we discussed the situation in Afghanistan. He gave the most eloquent exposition of the war that I had ever heard and I could understand how the general had brought tears to the eyes of politicians when he made a presentation to parliament urging them not to accept the Geneva Accords allowing the Soviet troops to withdraw safely. It was the first time that I realised that supporting the mujaheddin was not just a policy for the ISI, it had become their whole raison d’être.

  Partly it was the desire to run someone else’s foreign policy after so many years as a satellite of the United States, and partly its own extreme insecurity, hemmed in by the Indian giant and losing more than half its population in the war that resulted in the formation of Bangladesh. Founded as a religious state, Pakistan’s leaders had yet to come to agreement on how the country should be run and had failed to develop a modern economy, relying instead on foreign aid and exporting people and living off their remittances.

  A friendly government in Kabul would enable Pakistan to secure its north and western borders and put to rest the Pashtunistan issue. Many Afghans felt strongly that the Pashtun areas in Pakistan should be incorporated back into their territory and Afghanistan had been the only country which voted against Pakistan’s admission to the United Nations.

  But it was also ideological. One of Zia’s Islamic generals, Gul was a committed member of the Muslim Brotherhood, determined to see a fundamentalist government in Kabul and then Pakistan. To him the man to do that was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and he was blatantly using American money and arms to support those leaders that were most anti-west, spuriously arguing that they were the best fighters.

  General Gul played a critical role in developing the Afghan jihad as an Islamic cause, meeting with the mullahs and maulanas and encouraging them to whip up passions in the madrassas. It was Gul who had first brought in the Arabs to join the fight, instructing Pakistan embassies overseas to issue visas and free plane tickets even if they were wanted men in their own countries. More than 50,000 young Muslims from 38 different countries from Algeria to Sudan flew in. ‘It sort of became a fashion among Arab families for one son to get training in Afghanistan,’ he explained.

  ‘The West thinks they can use the fundamentalists as cannon fodder – they were all right to win the war but not to run the future Afghanistan,’ he added. ‘Well we will not allow that.’

  Then in March 1989, Jalalabad happened. I knew the battle was his plan. He had told me it was time for the mujaheddin to take cities and he had boasted they could take Jalalabad ‘within three days’. When it all started to go terribly wrong, with more civilians killed than in any other week of the war and the mujaheddin’s inability to use conventional warfare exposed, he briefed a New York Times journalist that it was Benazir Bhutto who had ordered the attack.

  She was desperate to get him out and later that year finally obtained the green light from Washington where the Bush administration was starting to see him as a liability. He was shifted to Corps Commander Multan but he carried on controlling Afghan policy until 1992, and remained influential afterwards, going to Sudan to meet with bin Laden while his faithful lieutenants in the ISI continued his work.

  It was some months after the Jalalabad debacle but before his transfer that I got another phone-call to say the ‘chief’ would meet me and two men in the regulation grey shalwar kamiz turned up at my door. This time instead of going to ISI headquarters, the car carried on past Zero Point to Rawalpindi, the capital’s dusty and chaotic twin city where the military headquarters is based. Eventually we stopped at a house in the cantonment and I was taken into a room and told to sit down at a table where I presumed General Gul would join me. Instead, two unfamiliar men appeared with a thick manila file, which they placed on the table. ‘Why do you want to bring back the king?’ one of them asked.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I laughed.

  ‘Why are you working to bring back the king?’

  I realised I was being interrogated. I was accused of being part of a British-Soviet plot to bring back King Zahir Shah, who I knew from our conversations was one of Gul’s pet hates. It was ludicrous but there on the table was a bulging file of detailed reports on me and my movements with information which could only have come from some people I had considered among my closest friends. It was my first real experience of betrayal.

  I was kept all night in that room, being asked the same questions over and over again. Somehow the mere fact that I had been to Kandahar was seen as proof that I was working for the king. Eventually I was driven back to Islamabad with the warning ‘if you know what is good for you, you will leave the country’.

  I was determined not to be intimidated and even more so when I got home to find my flat had been ransacked and my telephone cut off. Two cars and a red motorcycle were stationed outside my house which was in a cul-de-sac near Jinnah market. I moved to stay with friends Oliver Wates, the Reuters correspondent and his wife Rosie, but it was becoming impossible to work. The Pakistani newspapers ran stories saying that I was working as a spy under headlines such as ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ and eventually the Interior Minister called a press conference to say my visa had been cancelled.

  Subsequently the government changed, Gul was prematurely retired, and I was allowed back to Pakistan. By that time Gul had moved out of the shadows and become an active spokesperson for the fundamentalists, or ‘fundos’ as they were known in Pakistan, and when the Taliban emerged, he was an ardent supporter, often spoken of as their ‘godfather’. Directors of the ISI had come and gone but it was Gul’s men still running the show on the ground and he had continued to exert enormous influence.

  With the Taliban collapsing, all his dreams for Afghanistan in tatters, it seemed the time had come. I obtained his private mobile number so that I wouldn’t have to go through a secretary which would give him a chance to change his mind and he chuckled when I said who I was, as if he had been waiting years
for my call. He invited me over the next morning.

  His house was in Chaklala, a walled estate of large white villas with neat green lawns for retired military in Rawalpindi. Annoyingly my driver could not find the place and we arrived half an hour late, immediately giving him the advantage that he would use of being able to cut the interview short. He welcomed me into a living room, which had a chunk of the Berlin Wall in pride of place on the table. He had always regarded himself as a key player in the fall of Communism.

  There were no pleasantries though there was an amused smile playing on his lips. My heart sank as he launched into a long tirade of how the Jews and the Indians were behind September 11th.

  ‘I had been expecting such an attack for a while,’ he said. ‘The Americans had been indulging in so many evils there had to be some kind of retribution. As a trained intelligence man and military professional who has been in this business for thirty-six years I have no doubt it was Sharon’s boys who did it. But the US is now using this opportunity of having world sympathy to go for strategic objectives and that means getting hold of the eastern flank of the Gulf to counter China and to get control of Pakistan’s nuclear facilities.’

  I asked him about his contacts with Osama bin Laden. ‘You know it was the CIA that first introduced me to bin Laden,’ he replied. ‘They were very fond of him – a man who’s a millionaire coming to fight in a dirty war with his bare hands. They told me with pride how he was digging tunnels – the very ones they are now blowing up. Before that, to me he was just one of thousands of foreigners who came to fight in Afghanistan. I first met him in Sudan in 1993 and he struck me as a very simple, sensitive man.

  ‘The Americans think they can use and discard people. They did the same with the ISI. After all we had done for them to defeat the Russians it was George Bush Senior who had me plucked out. He said “clip the wings of the ISI”, the same institution they want to share information with them now. That’s what they do, they build something up then when they feel it is becoming too independent they destroy it. He thought we had become ideologically motivated. But it had always been an ideological fight. It was only them that hadn’t understood that.’