The Longest August (36 page)

As a consequence, the social, cultural, and ideological distance between rapidly Islamizing Pakistani and secular Indian societies grew wider than before.

Zia's Cat-and-Mouse Game on Nuclear Weapons

By late 1978, the Carter administration had solid evidence of Pakistan's uranium enrichment program at the ERL in Kahuta. It broached the subject with Islamabad. Dissatisfied with the response he received, Carter cut off economic and military assistance, except food aid, to Pakistan in April 1979 under the Symington Amendment. He reiterated that the aid would be resumed only if he certified that Pakistan would not develop or acquire nuclear arms or assist other nations to do so.
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Relations between Islamabad and Washington remained stalemated when Indira Gandhi was returned to power on January 14, 1980—within a few weeks of Soviet troops arriving in Afghanistan. She was keen to dissuade Zia ul Haq from approaching the Carter administration to restore military and economic aid to his country because of the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. In April she dispatched Swaran Singh, former foreign minister, as her special envoy to Islamabad to reassure Zia ul Haq that her government would not take advantage if he decided to move his troops away from the Indian border to the Afghan frontier. But by the time the back channel contacts between the two leaders built up to schedule a visit to Islamabad by the Indian foreign minister Pamulapartu Venkata Narasimha Rao in March 1981, the political scene in Washington had altered—to the detriment of Gandhi.

Republican Ronald Reagan (in office 1981–1989) moved into the White House in January 1981. His description of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” would become his signature. It was with this reprehensible regime that the Gandhi government had signed a major agreement to boost India's energy sector and to double bilateral trade between 1981 and 1986 during the December 1980 visit of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to Delhi.

While Reagan lacked Carter's intelligence, he was a superb communicator, having spent many years as a tall, robustly built actor in Hollywood.
His persuasive manner helped him to overcome congressional resistance to his policies. Alexander Haig, his secretary of state from January 1981 to July 1982, described Pakistan's nuclear program as “a private matter.” All he wanted was that it should not detonate an atom bomb, thus emulating the example of Israel, which had refrained from testing its nuclear weapons first acquired in 1966.

The Reagan administration worked with Congress to give Pakistan a five-year waiver of the Symington Amendment because of its role in funneling US aid to the mujahedin in Afghanistan. In May 1981, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reversed its previous stance and sanctioned $3.2 billion aid to Islamabad over the next six years, divided equally between civilian and military assistance. The White House argued that supplying Pakistan with modern US weaponry would reduce the chance of its pursuing the nuclear option. In reality, nothing of the sort happened. Islamabad forged ahead on both armament fronts, conventional and unconventional. The Senate adopted its committee's bill in December 1981.
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Reagan appointed William Casey as CIA director. A bald, corpulent man with a rubbery face and oversize spectacles, he had started his working life with the CIA's predecessor, Office of Strategic Surveys, and established himself as an unconventional operator, callous and combative in equal measure. Now, personal rapport quickly developed between him, ISI director Lieutenant General Abdur Rahman Khan, and Prince Turki bin Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence. The Afghan insurgency picked up.

Since the United States did not want to create a paper trail of money transactions, which would give Moscow evidence of its involvement in Afghan affairs (thus raising the specter of a regional conflict with international potential), all money dealings were in cash. This gave ample opportunities to the ISI to siphon off foreign funds and funnel them into the nuclear program.

As 1982 unrolled, Pakistan received from China the complete design of a twenty-five-kiloton nuclear bomb and sufficient weapons-grade uranium for two bombs. Beijing went on to provide Islamabad with the design of one of its warheads.
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Little wonder that Islamabad-Moscow relations turned bitter. In his speech at the banquet in honor of the visiting Indira Gandhi on September 20, 1982, Brezhnev publicly advised India against accepting Zia ul Haq's offer of a no-war pact. Behind closed doors, he explained to Gandhi that after inking a no-war pact with India, the Pakistani leader would shift the bulk of his troops from the Indian border to the one with Afghanistan and threaten the Kremlin-backed
regime in Kabul. Gandhi took his advice. She made a counterproposal for a peace and friendship treaty, which failed to interest Zia ul Haq.

During her talks at the Kremlin, Gandhi privately advised a pullout of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. But her counsel was spurned.
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By then India's defense industry was tied so closely to its Soviet counterpart that she lacked any cards to play in her dealings with the Kremlin.

As a result of India's continued cordial relations with the Marxist regime, links between RAW and the Afghan intelligence agency, KHAD, run by the Ministry of State Security, became tighter. Both worked closely with the KGB, the Soviet Union's main security and intelligence agency. Among other things, the KGB and KHAD supplied vital information to RAW on the activities of Sikh separatists in Pakistan's tribal region.

In the state of Punjab, formed in 1966, Sikhs were 60 percent of its fifteen million inhabitants, the rest being almost wholly Hindu. Militants in the Sikh community had resorted to violence from October 1981 in their demand for Khalistan—the homeland for Sikhs—sandwiched between Pakistan and India. Sikh separatists argued that their community was the victim of discrimination by Hindus. However, the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak (1469–1539), was born a Hindu, and his faith emerged out of his attempt to reform Hinduism by getting rid of its caste system. Since the inception of Sikhism, relations between Hindus and Sikhs had been cordial, with Sikhs celebrating such Hindu festivals as Divali (Hindi: festival of light). Interfaith marriages were tolerated by both communities. Now, by resorting to attacking Hindus in Punjab, the advocates of Khalistan created tension between Sikhs and Hindus. Crucially, their demand for a homeland on the basis of religion, the seed that had flowered into Pakistan, struck at the very foundation of India's secular constitution. It was ruled out of hand by the authorities in Delhi.

This subject was therefore off the agenda during the hour-long meeting Gandhi had with Zia ul Haq on November 1, 1982, when he stopped in New Delhi on his way to Malaysia. They decided to authorize their foreign ministers to proceed with talks leading to the establishment of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).
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Five Players in South Asia's Nuclear Game

Behind the scenes, Gandhi fretted about Zia ul Haq's clandestine drive to build an atom bomb by using weapons-grade uranium, and she considered
ways of terminating his scheme. She knew that Israeli warplanes had destroyed the French-equipped Osirak nuclear reactor under construction eighteen miles south of Baghdad on June 7, 1981. The daring, surprising raid by Israel inspired her to initiate a project in the autumn code-named Osirak Contingency under Air Marshall Dilbagh Singh, chief of air staff.

The Indian Air Force's planes practiced low-level flying runs with two-thousand-pound bombs. But neutralizing the strong air defenses of the Kahuta facility, including surface-to-air missiles, proved too great a challenge for India's military. But because of the links between RAW and Mossad, it did not take long for Israel to offer its expertise in jamming advanced communications systems at Kahuta. Its move was in line with its policy of blocking any Muslim nation from possessing nuclear weapons.

Thus in 1982 Israel became the fifth player in South Asia's nuclear game—after India, Pakistan, China, and America. Their alignments were full of contradictions. India forged a daring plan against Pakistan with Israel, a country with which it lacked full diplomatic links. Though committed by law to the doctrine of nonproliferation of nuclear arms, the Reagan White House chose to turn a blind eye to the ongoing assistance that Beijing, a nonsignatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was giving to Islamabad in its nuclear weapons program. Israel, the long-established staunch ally of the United States in the Cold War, now arrayed itself against Pakistan at a time when that country had become the key element in Washington's campaign to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

In marked contrast, China remained singularly consistent in its strategy to offset India's hegemony in South Asia by aiding Pakistan to overcome its inherent weakness compared to its mighty neighbor in conventional weapons and armed personnel. By eagerly assisting Pakistan to construct a nuclear weapon, Beijing aimed to raise it to parity with India in defense matters, thus frustrating India's ambition to become a hegemonic power in South Asia.

Delhi accepted the assistance of Israel's hawkish defense minister, Ariel Sharon. By the end of 1982, a joint Indo-Israeli plan was hatched to raid Pakistan's Kahuta nuclear facility. Indian military officers traveled to Tel Aviv clandestinely in February 1983 to purchase electronic equipment to jam Kahuta's air defenses. Tellingly, on February 23, 1983, Gandhi accused Pakistan of “covertly attempting to make nuclear weapons,” and three days later Raja Ramanna, head of the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, revealed that India too was developing a uranium-enriching facility.
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Bizarrely, this was the backdrop to the cordial meeting between Gandhi and Zia ul Haq on the sidelines of the Seventh Nonaligned Movement from March 7 to 12, 1983, in Delhi. They signed an agreement on normalizing relations by setting up the Joint Indo-Pakistan Commission, with subcommissions for trade, economics, information, and travel.

During 1983, China helped Pakistan with triggering devices for an atom bomb. These were either conventional charges or electronic trigging circuits. The Pakistani experts, led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, started conducting cold tests in a tunnel in the Chagai Hills of northwest Baluchistan to perfect a triggering device. Success came only at the end of more than twenty trials. That was the final step to assembling an atom bomb. They did so by the end of the year. At that point the Engineering Research Laboratory was officially renamed the Kahuta Research Laboratory.

In Washington a (later) declassified US government assessment in 1983 concluded that “there is unambiguous evidence that Pakistan is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons development program. . . . We believe the ultimate application of the enriched uranium produced at Kahuta is clearly nuclear weapons.”
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Yet no action was taken against Pakistan. The Reagan White House had equated hurting Pakistan by imposing sanctions on it with aiding the Kremlin. So when faced with the choice of expelling the Soviets from Afghanistan by all possible means or stopping Islamabad from building an atom bomb, it opted for hemorrhaging the “evil empire.” It was so unwaveringly committed to this policy that it deployed underhand tactics to squash the irrefutable evidence that State Department officials would periodically furnish to show Islamabad inexorably racing to produce a nuclear weapon.

The Indo-Israeli plan to raid the Kahuta facility did not remain secret for long from the ISI. In the autumn of 1983 its chief Lieutenant General, Rahman Khan, sent a message to his counterpart in RAW, Nowsher F. Suntook. This led to a meeting between Munir Ahmad Khan, head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC), and Ramanna in a Vienna hotel. Ahmad Khan warned Ramanna that if India alone, or in collusion with Israel, attacked Kahuta, Pakistan would hit India's nuclear facility in Trombay on the outskirts of Mumbai, with horrific consequences for millions of that mega-city's residents.
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Faced with such a scenario, Gandhi hesitated.

Meanwhile, the links between RAW and Mossad had grown so tight that Mossad equipped RAW's two Boeing 707s belonging to its Aviation
Research Center with specialist equipment to gather signals intelligence.
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It was against this background that in late 1983 Sharon offered to carry out the raid from Jamnagar in Gujarat by entering Pakistan beneath the radar and following the mountains in Kashmir to reach Kahuta. It was then that, with the connivance of the Reagan White House, the CIA station chief in Islamabad reportedly tipped off Zia ul Haq about Sharon's proposal to Gandhi, hoping to de-escalate the dangerous tit-for-tat between India and Pakistan.
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Zia ul Haq acted. At his behest, Qadeer Khan gave long interviews to two leading local newspapers in January and February 1984. His core message was that “Pakistan could build the bomb if it needed to. And if Kahuta is destroyed, more than one such plant can be rebuilt.” To leave nothing to chance, Pakistan's ambassador in Delhi told India's External Affairs Ministry that his country would rain fire in retaliation for an attack on Kahuta.
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Zia ul Haq's aim was twofold: to show that Pakistan's nuclear program was unstoppable in order to gain international acceptance, and to warn Gandhi that Pakistan was ready to strike back if she decided to raid Kahuta. He succeeded. In March Gandhi revoked her earlier go-ahead to Sharon.

The year 1984 was the pivotal one for Pakistan's nuclear program. After receiving an atom bomb assembled in Kahuta in January, the Chinese detonated it successfully at their test site at Lop Nor in Xinjiang province in March.
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This led to discreet jubilation among top officials in Islamabad and Kahuta. Having thus acquired parity with India in defense, Pakistani leaders were now equipped to challenge India's claim to regional hegemony. This super-secret event at Lop Nor, however, would reach the CIA and RAW two years later, and others much later. Meanwhile, Zia ul Haq, a master in dissimulation, would only admit that his country had acquired a very modest uranium enrichment capability for peaceful purposes.