Ghost Wars (11 page)

Hart concluded within months of his arrival that the war should be expanded. In the fall of 1981 he attended a regional conference of CIA station chiefs in Bangkok. On a piece of paper in his back pocket he had hand-scrawled a new list of weapons that would make the mujahedin more effective. The questions debated at Bangkok included “What would the Pakistanis tolerate? What will the Soviets tolerate before they start striking at Pakistan?” Officers from Langley worried that they might go too far, too fast.

Back in Islamabad, Hart sat in his house at night and drafted long cables to Langley on yellow legal pads, describing a Soviet convoy of tanks destroyed here, a helicopter shot down there. With CIA help the mujahedin were crippling heavily equipped Soviet detachments, Hart wrote, while using dated weaponry and loose guerrilla tactics. In January 1982, Hart cabled headquarters to ask again for more and better weapons.
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Hart and other case officers involved sometimes reflected that it might have been a relatively uncomplicated war, if only the CIA had been able to run it on its own. But the United States did not own a subcontinental empire, as the British had a century before. If the CIA wanted to pump more and better weapons into Afghanistan, it had to negotiate access to the Afghan frontier through the sovereign nation of Pakistan. When the jihad began to gather strength by 1982, Hart found himself increasingly forced to reckon with Pakistan’s own agenda in the war. This meant reckoning with the personal goals of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq. It also meant accommodating Zia’s primary secret service, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

After Vietnam and the stinging Washington scandals of the 1970s, many case officers feared local political entanglements, especially in violent covert operations. Many of them had vowed after Vietnam that there would be no more CIA-led quixotic quests for Third World hearts and minds. In Afghanistan, they said, the CIA would stick to its legal authority:mules, money, and mortars.
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For many in the CIA the Afghan jihad was about killing Soviets, first and last. Hart even suggested that the Pakistanis put a bounty out on Soviet soldiers: ten thousand rupees for a special forces soldier, five thousand for a conscript, and double in either case if the prisoners were brought in alive.
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This was payback for Soviet aid to the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, and for many CIA officers who had served in that war, it was personal. Guns for everyone! was Howard Hart’s preference. Langley’s D.O. leaders did not want to organize exiled Afghan political parties on Pakistani soil. They did not want to build a provisional anticommunist Afghan government. They did not even like to help choose winners and losers among the jihad’s guerrilla leaders. Let the Pakistanis fuss over Afghan politics to the extent that it was necessary at all.

This indirect approach was beginning to work, Hart believed. Yet as the mujahedin resistance grew and stiffened, the agency’s passivity about who led the Afghan rebels—who got the most guns, the most money, the most power—helped ensure that Zia-ul-Haq’s political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA’s own.

MOHAMMED ZIA-UL-HAQ was a young captain in a Punjabi unit of Britain’s colonial army when London’s exhausted government finally quit India in 1947. He had been born and raised on the Indian side of the new border with Pakistan, a line soon drawn in the blood of Hindu-Muslim religious riots. His father had been an Anglophilic civil servant but also a pious lay Islamic teacher. His family spoke in British accents and bandied slang as if in a Wiltshire country house.

As with millions of Punjabi Muslims, the religious violence at Pakistan’s birth seared Zia’s memory. While escorting a train of refugees on a weeklong journey from northern India to Pakistan in 1947, he witnessed a nightmarish landscape of mutilated corpses. “We were under constant fire. The country was burning until we reached Lahore. Life had become so cheap between Hindu and Muslim.” Once in Pakistan, he said later, he “realized that we were bathed in blood, but at last we were free citizens.”
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British-trained Punjabi Muslim army officers such as Zia became one of the new nation’s most powerful ruling groups. Three wars with India anointed them as Pakistan’s supreme guardians. Battlefield experience coalesced them into a disciplined brotherhood. Failed civilian governments and a series of army-led coups d’état conditioned rising young generals to see themselves as politicians.

The nation had been created in Islam’s name, yet it lacked confidence about its identity. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, belonged to a movement of secular, urban Muslim intellectuals. They saw Islam as a source of culture but not as a proselytizing faith or a basis of political order. Jinnah attempted to construct for Pakistan a secular democratic constitution tinted with Islamic values. But he died while the nation was young, and his successors failed to overcome Pakistan’s obstacles: divided territory, a weak middle class, plural ethnic traditions, an unruly western border facing Afghanistan, a hostile India, and vast wealth gaps.

As Zia rose to his generalship, he embraced personal religious faith to a greater degree than many of his comrades in arms. He also believed that Pakistanis should embrace political Islam as an organizing principle. “We were
created
on the basis of Islam,” Zia said. He compared his country to Israel, where “its religion and its ideology are the main sources of its strength.” Without Islam, he believed, “Pakistan would fail.”
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After 1977 he reigned as a dictator and ceded few political privileges to others. But he did not decorate himself in ornate trappings of power. He was a courteous man in private, patient with his handicapped child, and attentive to visitors and guests. He wore his hair slicked down with grease, neatly parted in the style of film actors of a bygone era, and his mustache was trimmed and waxed. His deferential manner was easily underestimated. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had promoted him to army chief of staff apparently in the belief that Zia would be compliant. Zia not only overthrew Bhutto but hanged him.

In the context of 1979’s upheavals Zia was not a radical. He declared Pakistan an Islamic state but did not move as forcefully as Khomeini did in Iran. He created no Pakistani religious police fashioned on the Saudi Arabian model. He did not bring Pakistan’s Islamic clergy to power. Zia believed deeply in the colonial-era army’s values, traditions, and geopolitical mission—a thoroughly British orientation. “Devout Muslim, yes, but too much a politician to have the fundamentalist’s fervor,” as an ISI brigadier put it. “Without Zia there could have been no successful jihad, but behind all the public image there was always the calculating politician who put his own position foremost.” He also sought to safeguard Pakistan, and at times he showed himself willing to compromise with the Soviets over Afghanistan, through negotiations.
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Yet Zia strongly encouraged personal religious piety within the Pakistan army’s officer corps, a major change from the past. He encouraged the financing and construction of hundreds of
madrassas,
or religious schools, along the Afghan frontier to educate young Afghans—as well as Pakistanis—in Islam’s precepts and to prepare some of them for anticommunist jihad. The border
madrassas
formed a kind of Islamic ideological picket fence between communist Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gradually Zia embraced jihad as a strategy. He saw the legions of Islamic fighters gathering on the Afghan frontier in the early 1980s as a secret tactical weapon. They accepted martyrdom’s glories. Their faith could trump the superior firepower of the godless Soviet occupiers. “Afghan youth will fight the Soviet invasion with bare hands, if necessary,” he assured President Reagan in private.
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He feared that Kabul’s communists would stir up Pashtun independence activists along the disputed Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pashtuns comprised Afghanistan’s dominant ethnic group, but there were more Pashtuns living inside Pakistan than inside Afghanistan. A successful independence campaign might well shatter Pakistan once and for all. Within a year of the Soviet invasion, about one million Afghan refugees had poured into Pakistan, threatening social unrest. Soviet and Afghan secret services had begun to run terrorist operations on Pakistani soil, as far inland as Sind province. A stronghold of the Bhutto family, Sind was a hotbed of opposition to Zia. The KGB’s Afghan agents set up shop in Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar, and Quetta. They linked up with one of the hanged Bhutto’s sons, Murtaza, and helped him carry out hijackings of Pakistani airliners.
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Zia suspected that India’s intelligence service was involved as well. If Soviet-backed communists took full control in Afghanistan, Pakistan would be sandwiched between two hostile regimes—the Soviet empire to the west and north, and India to the east. To avoid this, Zia felt he needed to carry the Afghan jihad well across the Khyber Pass, to keep the Soviets back on their heels. A war fought on Islamic principles could also help Zia shore up a political base at home and deflect appeals to Pashtun nationalism.

Zia knew he would need American help, and he milked Washington for all he could. He turned down Carter’s initial offer of $400 million in aid, dismissing it as “peanuts,” and was rewarded with a $3.2 billion proposal from the Reagan administration plus permission to buy F-16 fighter jets, previously available only to NATO allies and Japan.
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Yet as he loaded up his shopping cart, Zia kept his cool and his distance. In private meetings with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Secretary of State Shultz, and others, Zia lied brazenly about Pakistan’s secret efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Reagan had come into office criticizing Carter for alienating American allies by harping on human rights. The new president assured Zia that Washington would now be a more faithful friend. “Given the uncertainty and sensitivity surrounding certain areas of our relationship,” Shultz wrote in a classified memo as the Pakistani general prepared to visit Washington late in 1982, President Reagan should “endeavor to convince Zia of his personal interest in these concerns and his sensitivity to Zia’s views.” Shultz added, “We must remember that without Zia’s support, the Afghan resistance, key to making the Soviets pay a heavy price for their Afghan adventure, is effectively dead.”
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Zia sought and obtained political control over the CIA’s weapons and money. He insisted that every gun and dollar allocated for the mujahedin pass through Pakistani hands. He would decide which Afghan guerrillas benefited. He did not want Langley setting up its own Afghan kingmaking operation on Pakistani soil. Zia wanted to run his own hearts-and-minds operation inside Afghanistan. As it happened, this suited the Vietnam-scarred officers at Langley just fine.
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For the first four years of its Afghan jihad, the CIA kept its solo operations and contacts with Afghans to a minimum. That was why Hart had sneaked into Peshawar for his initial contact with Abdul Haq. Such direct encounters between CIA officers and Afghan rebels were officially forbidden by Zia’s intelligence service. The CIA held the meetings anyway but limited their extent. The agency’s main unilateral operations early in the war were aimed at stealing advanced Soviet weaponry off the Afghan battlefield and shipping it back to the United States for examination.

To make his complex liaison with the CIA work, Zia relied on his chief spy and most trusted lieutenant, a gray-eyed and patrician general, Akhtar Abdur Rahman, director-general of ISI. Zia told Akhtar that it was his job to draw the CIA in and hold them at bay. Among other things, Zia felt he needed time. He did not want to take big risks on the Afghan battlefield—risks that might increase Soviet-backed terrorism in Pakistan or prompt a direct military attack. Again and again Zia told Akhtar: “The water in Afghanistan must boil at the right temperature.” Zia did not want the Afghan pot to boil over.
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ABOUT EVERY OTHER MONTH Howard Hart drove the dozen miles from Islamabad to Rawalpindi to have a meal with General Akhtar at ISI headquarters and catch up on the Afghan jihad. They would talk in Akhtar’s office or in a small dining room, attended by servants in starched uniforms. Outside, gardeners trimmed shrubbery or washed sidewalks. Pakistan’s army bases were the cleanest and most freshly painted places in the country, conspicuous sanctuaries of green lawns and whitewashed walls.

ISI and the CIA had collaborated secretly for decades, yet mutual suspicion reigned. Akhtar laid down rules to ensure that ISI would retain control over contacts with Afghan rebels. No American—CIA or otherwise—would be permitted to cross the border into Afghanistan. Movements of weapons within Pakistan and distributions to Afghan commanders would be handled strictly by ISI officers. All training of mujahedin would be carried out solely by ISI in camps along the Afghan frontiers. No CIA officers would train Afghans directly, although when new and complex weapons systems were introduced, ISI would permit the CIA to teach its own Pakistani instructors.

Akhtar banned social contact between ISI officers and their CIA counterparts. His men weren’t allowed to attend diplomatic functions. ISI officers routinely swept their homes and offices for bugs and talked in crude codes on the telephone. Howard Hart was “H2.” Certain weapons in transit might be “apples” or “oranges.” The CIA was no more trusting. When Akhtar and his aides visited CIA training facilities in the United States, they were forced to wear blindfolds on the internal flight to the base.
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Akhtar himself kept a very low profile. He rarely surfaced on the Islamabad social circuit. He met Hart almost exclusively on ISI’s grounds.

He was the son of a Pathan medical doctor from Peshawar, on the Afghan frontier. (
Pathan
is the term used by Pakistanis to refer to members of the Afghan Pashtun tribes that straddle the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.) He had joined the British colonial army in Punjab just before independence, as Zia had done. They had risen through the ranks together, and Zia trusted him. As a young artillery officer Akhtar had been a champion boxer and wrestler. He had grown over the years into a vain, difficult, self-absorbed general who operated within the Pakistani army as Zia’s most loyal cohort. “If Zia said, ‘It is going to rain frogs tonight,’ Akhtar would go out with his frog net,” Hart recalled. Zia had appointed him to run ISI in June 1979; Akhtar would hold the position for eight influential years.