The Duel (19 page)

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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I
N 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.

F
INALLY, AFTER TWO
unanimous politburo decisions against intervention, the Soviet Union changed its mind, saying that it had “new documentation.” This is still classified, but it would not be surprising in the least if the evidence consisted of forgeries suggesting that Amin (who was educated at Columbia University in the United States) was a CIA agent. Whatever it was, the politburo, with Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, voting against, now decided to send troops into Afghanistan. Its aim (not unlike that of the United States in 2001) was to get rid of a discredited regime and replace it with a marginally less repulsive one. The bear trap had worked. On Christmas Day in 1979, a hundred thousand Soviet troops crossed the Oxus and rumbled into Kabul. President Carter referred to the event as “the greatest threat to peace since World War Two” and warned the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, to “either withdraw or face serious consequences.”

Given that Afghanistan, thanks to the Russians, had now become fundamental to civilization, it was crucial for it to acquire a heroic political history. This required outside help on various levels. Knights in shining armor were dispatched to the region. Washington alerted researchers and advisers from different agencies and think tanks. The Rand Corporation reacted swiftly and decided that one of its more precocious staff members, a twenty-eight-year-old Japanese-American, should be parachuted into Pakistan on a rapid reconnaissance mission.

Francis Fukuyama spent ten days in the country from May 25 to June 5, 1980, as the guest of the director of military intelligence and was provided with access to generals and senior civil servants. Pakistan had earlier turned down a $400 million aid package offered by the
White House’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, on the grounds that “it was peanuts” and informed Washington that it was looking forward to subsidies that, at the least, were on a scale similar to what was being provided to Egypt and Turkey. Why should Pakistan accept anything less? It was now a frontline state, and in pleasant anticipation of what this new status entailed, a number of senior members of the elite had opened bank accounts in far-flung tax havens.

The military top brass confided their innermost fears to Fukuyama. The Soviet Union might cross the Durand Line and detach a salient of their North-West Frontier Province. A carefully orchestrated Indo-Soviet-Afghan pincer movement with the aim of further fragmenting Pakistan “along ethnic lines” was always a possibility. The guilty conscience on Baluchistan was beginning to affect the brass.

Fukuyama accepted much of what he was told, since it tied in neatly with U.S. interests. In any case, he knew that history is never written by any particular authors but often emerges from the periphery to surprise the center. The Vietnamese victory of 1975 still haunted U.S. policy makers. This new history being made in the awesome environment of the Hindu Kush just needed occasional help to proceed along similar lines. Muddling through was not an option. Fukuyama summed up the pros and cons of a tighter U.S.-Pakistan embrace. The advantages were obvious:

(1) denial of Pakistani territory to the Soviet Union.

(2) the possibility of aiding the Afghan rebels militarily so as to raise the cost of the intervention for the Soviets and divert their attention from the Persian Gulf.

(3) the use of Pakistani facilities in connection with the planned Rapid Deployment Force.

(4) the demonstration of American reliability, especially with respect to the People’s Republic of China.

The obvious drawbacks were not insurmountable: “(1) Adverse effects on U.S.-Indian relations; (2) a weakening of the credibility of the U.S. nonproliferation policy; (3) high economic costs and (4) commitment to a regime of questionable staying power.”

Shrewdly, Fukuyama noted that the Sino-Pakistani relationship offered a model equilibrium:

The Chinese have supported civilian and military regimes indifferently and have not attempted to influence Pakistan’s internal character. As a consequence, they have never been called to account for the failures of a particular regime.... Unless the United States can emulate this behavior in some fashion, the liabilities may well exceed the benefits.
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This advice was more or less accepted and reinforced by Brzezinski’s “realism.” General Zia-ul-Haq, the worst of Pakistan’s dictators, was about to be whitewashed and transformed into a plucky freedom fighter against the Evil Empire. The newspapers and television networks did their duty.

From 1980 to 1989, Afghanistan became the focal point of the Cold War. Millions crossed the Durand Line and settled in camps and cities in the NWFP, the largest influx—3.5 million refugees—a direct result of the Soviet occupation. The result was to be catastrophic for both countries. Nobody benefited from the Afghan war except for a tiny layer of heroin smugglers, civilian middlemen, the top brass of the Pakistan army, and politicians allied to all three. Weapons, heroin, drug dollars, NGOs assigned to “help” the refugees, and would-be jihadi warriors from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Algeria flooded the region. Pakistan’s largest city and port became the center of the heroin trade. The poppy was cultivated in the north, transformed into powder, and packaged to Karachi, from where it was smuggled out to Europe and America. The modern city and its elite were graphically depicted in Kamila Shamsie’s novel
Kartography.

All the main Western intelligence agencies (including the Israelis) were present in Peshawar, near the Afghan frontier. It began to resemble a gold-rush town. The region would never again be the same. For the first time in Pakistan’s history, the market and black-market rates
for the dollar were exactly the same. Weapons, including Stinger missiles, were sold to the mujahideen and illegal-arms dealers by Pakistani officers wanting to get rich quick. At a dinner in a London restaurant in 1986, Benazir Bhutto whispered in my ear that our generous host, a certain Sindhi gentleman, waxing eloquent on matters cultural, had a day job selling Stingers and Kalashnikovs. I asked him whether I could buy a missile and how much it would set me back. He was not in the least bit curious as to why I might need such a weapon.

“No problem at all,” he said with a smile. “Fly to Karachi. I’ll meet you at the airport. We’ll drive out of the city and you can try one. Then we’ll discuss a price.” Unlike me, he was quite serious.

The heroin trade funded Pakistan’s thriving black economy. General Fazle Haq, Zia’s governor in the Frontier Province, publicly declared his indifference, arguing that since the heroin went abroad, Pakistanis weren’t that bothered. The number of registered addicts in Pakistan grew from a few hundred in 1977 to over 2 million in 1987.
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The growth of gang warfare in Karachi is directly linked to its becoming a center of the heroin trade.

As for Pakistan and its people, they languished. Zia wanted a total break with the past and reached out for religion, usually the first resort of a scoundrel. On December 2, 1978, the “soldier of Islam,” as he often referred to himself, had denounced politicians “who did what they pleased in the name of Islam,” then proclaimed that he was preparing to enforce true Islamic laws in the country. He announced the creation of Sharia courts, whose powers were limited but which could nonetheless pronounce whether a law was “Islamic or un-Islamic.” Disputes between theologians began immediately, and a number of courts had to be rapidly reconstituted. Two months later Zia promulgated a number of new ordinances and presidential orders. According to these, all legal punishments related to alcohol consumption, adultery, theft, and burglary were to be replaced by the religious punishments prescribed by the Koran and early Islamic jurisprudence. Any Muslim caught drinking would be subjected to eighty lashes; an
unmarried couple caught fornicating would get one hundred lashes, but adultery involving married partners would lead to both being stoned to death; an offense against property would require amputation of the right hand from the wrist, and robbery would be punished by chopping off both hand and foot. These were Sunni prescriptions. The Shia theologians opposed amputating at the wrist, but were happy with removing all fingers and the thumb of the right hand. And as for the absurd demand so beloved of the Peoples Party, for food, clothes, and shelter, all this, according to General Zia, could not be provided by the state or private businesses, but only by God: “Any increase or decrease in your sustenance comes from Him. Trust in God and He will bestow upon you an abundance of good things in life.”