by Ali, Tariq
The discussion continues with Kissinger stressing his concern that once a nuclear reprocessing plant was built it could easily develop in another direction, and Bhutto pleading disingenuously that in such a case the West could easily bring pressure to bear that could stop that. Kissinger remains unconvinced. When Bhutto explains that Pakistan had pledged never to misuse the reprocessing facilities, his interlocutor points out that he is not interested in “words, but concerned with realities.” The country with the facilities could easily abrogate a binational agreement whenever it wished.
Earlier Bhutto had been informed that the United States was quite happy to provide Iran with nuclear reprocessing plants that could be used by Pakistan and other states in the region. This brilliant idea had matured in the heads of two senior officials in the Ford administration who would resurface in a later Republican administration: Dick Cheney, then chief of staff at the White House, and Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. Cheney is a keen advocate today of bombing Iran’s nuclear energy stations, an idea that has, till now, been vetoed by the Pentagon. That Cheney and Rumsfeld’s plan might not have been entirely determined by U.S. strategic needs is mentioned in a recent study, whose authors point out that “the first proposed US nuclear deal with Iran would have been extremely lucrative for US corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric, which stood to earn $6.4 billion from the project.”* Cheney and Rumsfeld were never great believers in self-renunciation. Strategic and business interests could never be separate for them.
Bhutto was not interested in playing second fiddle to Iran and rejected the idea, but he was also not seriously interested in a reprocessing plant. All he wanted was the bomb. That was the instruction he had given to Pakistani scientists. Clearly, between the two meetings with Kissinger the latter was informed by U.S. intelligence of what was really going on. Kissinger’s realization that he was being lied to so blatantly prompted him to start playing the godfather. His rage was not just imperial, but also personal. From 1973 onward Kissinger had spear-headed a campaign to lift the U.S. arms embargo on Pakistan and had dispatched Henry Byroade as U.S. ambassador to accelerate the process and control the nuclear ambitions. Byroade later confirmed this in an interview with historian Niel M. Johnson:
JOHNSON: . . . So you left there in ’73 and went to Pakistan.
BYROADE: That’s right. I planned to retire, and Henry Kissinger talked me into going to Pakistan. I went there for one specific purpose, and I planned to stay about eighteen months. We’d had an arms embargo on Pakistan for about ten years, growing out of the India-Pakistan war. This had worked out in the long term to be, I thought, very unfair to Pakistan, because India turned to the Soviet Union for their armament needs, primarily, but also to a lot of other countries.... Kissinger said, “This is unfair, and we’ve got to lift that embargo, but it’s not easy with the India lobby and all of that.” So he said, “You go out there and stay long enough to be credible and come back and talk to people on the Hill about it, and see if we can lift that thing.”
. . . You know, it’s very easy to impose these things; India and Pakistan get into a war, our weapons are involved, so “bingo, embargo!” It was very proper, but when it came around to lifting it, it’s something else. But we did during Bhutto’s visit, and we did get a little flak from the Hill but not very much. So we lifted that and were able for the first time to start replenishing some of their equipment. I was then ready to come home, but Pakistan got involved in the nuclear business, which upset me no end. I stayed and struggled, trying to keep that from being a problem between us for two more years. I was there about four years.
JOHNSON: Four years, and Bhutto was still in power?
BYROADE: Bhutto was in trouble, deep trouble when I left, but he was still in power.
JOHNSON: General Zia, was he the one that was...
BYROADE: When I left, he was chief of staff, with, I think, no idea of taking over at that point.*
In 1976, Zia had been made chief of staff by Bhutto. It is possible, but unlikely, that Byroade, whose links with the U.S. military stretched back to the Second World War, had no idea of DIA/Pentagon contacts with Zia, which went back to his time in Fort Leavenworth and had been renewed in Jordan in 1970. Military coups in Pakistan are rarely, if ever, organized without the tacit or explicit approval of the U.S. embassy. Bhutto’s “treachery” on the nuclear issue was the principal reason why the United States gave the green light for his removal.
On the night of July 4–5, 1977, to preempt an agreement between Bhutto and the opposition parties that would have entailed new general elections, General Zia struck. Having reached an agreement with the United States that Bhutto’s rule was intolerable, Zia was not prepared to tolerate a rapprochement between the two rival political groups. He proclaimed martial law, declared himself chief martial law administrator, promised new elections within ninety days, and placed Bhutto “under protective custody.” Bhutto was stunned. In January 1977 I had visited Pakistan and on my return written a series of three short articles for the Guardian predicting a military takeover. This was considered fantastical and the articles were not published. I had repeated the argument to Benazir Bhutto in Oxford, to which she had replied that her father might well be assassinated, but that there could never be a coup “since Zia was in our pocket.” I told her to let her father know that in Pakistan no general was ever in the pocket of a civilian politician.
The army had assumed there would be large public protests and had been prepared to crush them, but was encouraged by the muted response. As a result, Bhutto was released on July 28, 1977. He immediately embarked on a political tour of the country and was greeted by large crowds. In Lahore, half a million people came out to receive him, thus destroying the military’s illusions that he was a discredited and spent force. “Two men, one coffin” is what Zia’s colleagues now told him. Zia realized that Bhutto would win any election that was not heavily rigged. Were this to happen, Zia’s own future would be truncated. This time he made sure that Bhutto would never be free again.
On September 3, 1977, Bhutto was arrested in Lahore and charged with “conspiracy to murder Ahmed Raza Kasuri,” a former PPP member who had joined the opposition. In November 1974, a group of gunmen had opened fire on a car carrying Kasuri and his father. The latter died. Kasuri had accused Bhutto of being responsible, but a special inquiry tribunal had looked into the allegations and rejected them. Kasuri then rejoined the Peoples Party and remained a member from April 1976 to April 1977, but was refused a party nomination to contest the ill-fated March 1977 general elections. This rejection went deep. After Zia’s coup, Kasuri embarked on a private prosecution of Bhutto, and this was now used by the military as a motive in a case of alleged murder. On September 13, 1977, Bhutto was released on bail by two senior High Court judges—K. Samdani and Mazharul Huq. Four days later he was rearrested in Karachi by commandos under martial law regulations.
The trial for murder began in September 1977 before the Lahore High Court. The two judges who had granted bail were excluded from the bench. The acting chief justice, Maulvi Mushtaq, was a close personal friend of Zia’s and his conduct at the trial was a travesty. Even journalists who disliked Bhutto were shocked by Mushtaq’s vindictiveness. He had been ordered to insult and humiliate Bhutto, and he did so throughout the trial, which lasted till March 1978. Only hearsay evidence implicated Bhutto. One of the state witnesses was Masood Mahmood, a former boss of the Federal Security Force. He had been promised immunity, but ended up with a new identity, a great deal of money, and a luxury apartment in California, where he died in the late nineties. Foreign observers attending the trial included John Mathew, QC, and Ramsey Clark, former attorney general of the United States. Both agreed that in Britain and the United States such a case would never have come to trial since it was based on the uncorroborated evidence of pardoned accomplices.* Bhutto and four others were sentenced to death on March 18, 1978. An appeal against the judgment was heard in the Supreme Court on
May 20, 1978, and continued for several months. Bhutto’s appearance before the court shocked observers. He had lost a great deal of weight and looked haggard. His speech lasted three hours. He defended his political honor, refused to take the charge of murder seriously, and pointed the finger at Zia and his generals, who had decided to do away with him. He concluded by looking at the judges with contempt and saying, “Now you can hang me.” The Supreme Court rejected the appeal by a 4–3 vote. One judge who was considered unreliable by the military was retired during the trial; a second was denied sick leave and a delay in the trial. He had to withdraw from the bench. Chief Justice Anwarul Haq was in communication with the military dictator every single day. A detailed two-hundred-page dissenting opinion by Justice Safdar Shah provided a devastating rebuttal of the case brought forward by the state. Shah, with whom I spent many hours in London, revealed that he had been threatened before and during the case and told that his relations in the army would suffer unless he behaved himself. He told me, “I was ashamed to belong to a Supreme Court which did the bidding of the military.”
Bhutto was hanged at 2 a.m. on April 4, 1979, in the district jail, Rawalpindi. The day before, he had been visited by his wife, Nusrat, and daughter, Benazir, for the last time. Both women had courageously been campaigning against the dictatorship and had been in and out of prison themselves. He told them how proud he was of his family. Neither woman was allowed to attend his funeral. Some years later the prison where Bhutto was hanged was demolished on Zia’s orders.
Zia had the support of the military high command (with only a single general against) and, of course, the United States.* The notion that Zia would have gone through with the hanging had it been opposed by Washington is risible. U.S. operatives in the region (including the “anthropologist” and Afghan expert Louis Dupree) had told a number of senior Pakistani officials that Bhutto was dispensable and would soon be out of the way.
The Pakistani leader’s judicial assassination transformed him into a martyr and ensured that his legacy would endure. Washington had assumed that with Bhutto out of the way the Pakistan army would abandon all notions of acquiring a nuclear identity. Here they miscalculated badly. In fact, Bhutto had retained political control of the nuclear facility, keeping the generals at a safe distance. One of Zia’s first instructions was to authorize a total military takeover of Kahuta. Since 1971, the military had become obsessed with revenge. In return for the loss of Bangladesh, they were now going to make a determined effort to destabilize and capture Kashmir, a long-disputed territory to which both India and Pakistan laid claim and which is discussed in a subsequent chapter. It was almost as if they believed their own propaganda according to which “Hindus and traitors” had been responsible for the Bengali defection. The trauma of military defeat had left a permanent scar on the psyche of many officers unaccustomed to thinking for themselves. A debilitated military apparatus was prepared to take risks to restore its pride.
Bhutto’s decision to respond to India’s nuclear test by securing a “Muslim bomb” strongly appealed to the army as well as those whose financial help would be essential. These included Mu’ammar alGadhafi, the eccentric and unpredictable leader of Libya, who would sometimes fly over from Tripoli unannounced, causing havoc for the chief of protocol in Islamabad, to have breakfast with his dear friend Bhutto and find out how work on the bomb was proceeding. Of all the Arab leaders, Gadhafi alone had genuinely intervened to save Bhutto’s life. Zia had promised him to commute the sentence, but later said he was overruled by his colleagues.
With Bhutto out of the way, the military could now control the entire nuclear process till success had been achieved. Whether they would have succeeded in hoodwinking Washington indefinitely—had not another major shift occurred in the region—remains an open question. But a geopolitical earthquake, the Soviet occupation of neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979, provided the cover for Pakistani scientists to mimic their Indian counterparts and split the atom. Zia himself was given a whitewash in the West. He was no longer a temporary necessity. From being viewed as a squalid and brutal military dictator, he was transformed into a necessary ally defending the frontiers of the free world against the godless Russians.
Religious affinity had done little to mitigate the hostility of Afghan leaders toward their neighbor to the east. The main reason was the Durand Line, a border imposed on the Afghans by the British Empire in 1893 to mark the frontier between British India and Afghanistan after the British had failed to subjugate the country. This arbitrary line through the mountains had purposefully divided the Pashtun population of the region. It was agreed at the time that, on the Hong Kong model, after a hundred years all of what became the North-West Frontier Province of British India would revert to Afghanistan. But no government in Kabul accepted the Durand Line any more than they accepted British, or, later, Pakistani, control over the territory.
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IN JULY 1977, when Zia seized power, 90 percent of men and 98 percent of women in neighboring Afghanistan were illiterate; 5 percent of landowners (most of whom were also tribal leaders) held 45 percent of the cultivable land, and the country had the lowest per capita income of any in Asia. A majority of the people in the countryside were desperately poor. Comparisons with other countries seem absurd when the classification that matters is between those who eat twice a day, those who eat once, and the hungry. In these conditions it is hardly surprising that fatalism and religion become deep-rooted. The tiny intellectual elite—monarchists, liberals, republicans, Communists—that dominated political life in Kabul were heavily dependent on local traders, businessmen, and tribal leaders. Money from the former helped to bribe the latter. The Afghan rulers had preserved their independence and held the British at bay. For most of the twentieth century geography had dictated neutrality in the Cold War. The rulers were friendly with Moscow and New Delhi. Some Pashtun Hindus had relocated in Kabul rather than flee to India during partition, and the Afghan rulers were much more tolerant in religious matters than their neighbors.
By a strange quirk of history, the same year that Zia seized power, the Parcham (Flag) Communists in Afghanistan, who had backed the 1973 military coup by Prince Daud after which a republic was proclaimed, withdrew their support from Daud and were reunited with other Communist groups to form the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Despite its title, the new party was neither popular nor democratic. Its most influential cadres were strategically concentrated in the army and air force.
The regimes in neighboring countries became involved in the brewing crisis that now threatened Daud. The Shah of Iran feared a Communist takeover and, acting as a conduit for Washington, recommended firm action—large-scale arrests, executions, torture—and put units from Savak, his tried-and-tested torture agency, at Daud’s disposal. The Shah tried to bribe Daud. If he recognized the Durand Line as a permanent frontier with Pakistan, Iran would give $3 billion to Afghanistan and ensure that Pakistan ceased all hostile actions in the tribal zones. Pakistani intelligence agencies had (even under Bhutto) been arming Afghan exiles while encouraging old-style tribal uprisings aimed at restoring the monarchy. Daud was tempted to accept the Shah’s offer, but the Communists in the armed forces, fearing Iranian repression as in Baluchistan, organized a preemptive strike and took power in April 1978. Washington was in a panic. This increased tenfold as it became clear that its long-standing ally, the overconfident Shah, was about to be toppled together with his throne.
General Zia’s dictatorship thus became the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the region, which is why Washington green-lighted Bhutto’s execution and turned a blind eye to the country’s nuclear program. The United States wanted a stable Pakistan, whatever the cost.
Zia understood his role well and instructed General Akhtar Abdul Rahman, his director general at the ISI, “The water in Afghanistan must be made to boil at the right temperature.” Rahman, an efficient, bigoted, and cold-blooded officer, set up the Afghan Bureau of the
ISI, which worked with U.S. intelligence agencies and was provided with unlimited supplies of funds and weaponry. Its aim was straightforward: to set a “bear trap,” in the words of the U.S. national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, via a simple strategy to destabilize the Afghan government, in the hope that its Soviet protectors would be drawn into the conflict.
Plans of this sort often go awry (as in Cuba over five decades), but they succeeded in Afghanistan, primarily because of the weaknesses of the Afghan Communists: they had come to power through a military coup that hadn’t involved any mobilization outside Kabul, yet they pretended this was a national revolution; their Stalinist political formation made them allergic to any form of accountability, and such ideas as drafting a charter of democratic rights or holding free elections to a constituent assembly never entered their heads. Ferocious factional struggles led, in September 1979, to a Mafia-style shoot-out at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, during which the prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, shot President Taraki dead. Amin claimed that 98 percent of the population supported his reforms but the 2 percent who opposed them had to be liquidated. The photographs of the victims were proudly published in the government press. Repression on this scale and of this variety had never before been experienced in the country. Mutinies in the army and uprisings in a number of towns resulted, and this time they had nothing to do with Washington or General Zia, but reflected genuine revulsion against the regime. Islamabad, of course, incited and armed the religious opposition. One of the ideological weapons used was a campaign against the PDPA’s decision to make literacy compulsory for all Afghan women. This was publicized as a ferocious assault on Islam and Afghan traditions.