Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  REAGAN AND THE AMERICAN CONNECTION

  The pro-Soviet coup in Kabul forced Carter to change his view of Pakistan. The country that he had literally flown over in 1978 was now critical to stopping the Soviets. To Carter, shaken by the fall of the Shah of Iran and by the Marxist coup in Kabul, it looked as if Southwest Asia were crumbling into enemy hands. In July 1979, Carter ordered the CIA to provide modest assistance to the rebellion against the communist government in Kabul, six months before the Soviet invasion. The aid was low level, involving mostly propaganda support and very modest amounts of money but no weapons.29

  The Soviet invasion cemented the change in Washington, and it would lead to a renewal of America’s cold war love affair with the Pakistani army and Inter-Services Intelligence. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, traveled to Pakistan after the invasion and offered more assistance for the mujahedin and for Pakistan. When Brzezinski offered $400 million in aid over two years, Zia turned down the offer as “peanuts,” a gratuitous insult to Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia. But Zia allowed the bilateral relationship between the ISI and the Saudis’ General Intelligence Directorate to become a trilateral CIA-ISI-GID relationship in which Washington and Riyadh provided matching grants of money and purchased arms and Islamabad handled distribution and training. On January 10, 1980, just fourteen days after the Soviets invaded Kabul, the first CIA-provided arms for the mujahedin arrived in Pakistan via the ISI.30

  The size of the covert program grew steadily. By 1984 the CIA was providing $250 million dollars annually;31 at its peak, in 1987 and 1988, the amount reached at least $400 million.32 Since the program was largely concerned with fundraising and arms procurement, it had very little staff: no more than a hundred people were involved in the Afghan effort, slightly less than half of them at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the others in Islamabad.33 Given the enormous consequences of the operation, which helped precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war, it has to be judged one of the most cost-effective federal government programs in history.

  One of the most colorful figures in modern American history was associated with the program. Congressman Charlie Wilson, a Democrat from Texas, was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the war effort, the Afghans, and especially Zia. He sat on the key House committees that funded covert operations, and he literally gave the CIA more money than it asked for. He also pushed to get the mujahedin the Stinger, an advanced surface-to-air missile system. Charlie Wilson made close to three dozen trips to the region, stopping in Cairo, Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Islamabad each time to get backing from all of America’s key allies. Usually accompanied by a beautiful woman, Charlie flattered the allies, and they flattered him. Zia and Akhtar made him a secret field marshal in the Pakistani army, and Wilson cried when Zia died in August 1988, telling Akhtar’s successor, Hamid Gul, that “I have lost my father on this day.”34 Charlie had even planned to get married in Pakistan at one point, and he persuaded Zia to hold an elaborate ceremony in the Khyber Pass with lancers and cavalry. Guests would come from around the world, even from Israel. But the wedding never took place.35

  Wilson was really a secondary figure in the war, despite the prominence that the movie Charlie Wilson’s War gave him later. It was Reagan and his spy chief Bill Casey who did the real heavy lifting. Right after they came into office, they offered Zia a new deal, worth $3.5 billion over five years, that included sophisticated F-16 jet fighters to protect Pakistani air space from Russia and India. This time Zia took the offer.

  Casey was President Ronald Reagan’s hand-picked director of central intelligence (DCI), and he had the president’s ear more than any other man in Washington. He had managed Reagan’s election victory in 1980 and shared his tough anticommunist views. Reagan made the unprecedented move of making Casey a full member of his cabinet; no DCI before or since has had that status. During World War II, Casey had been involved in supporting underground resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe as a member of the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. He was a genuine expert in the art of covert warfare. As director, he supervised America’s clandestine war to wear down the Soviet Union and bleed it to death. Afghanistan was at the center of that battle. It was the CIA’s war, and the CIA ran policy toward Pakistan (and indirectly India) as a consequence.

  Casey traveled repeatedly to Islamabad. On his first visit, Zia ul-Haq had showed him a map of Afghanistan with a red triangle superimposed on it, pointing in the direction of the Indian Ocean, just three hundred miles from the Afghan-Pakistani border. Zia showed the map to many subsequent visitors. Pakistan was the real battlefield, he argued, and Moscow’s real objective was access to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Zia was determined to keep Moscow from getting a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean, but he also knew that he needed to be careful not to provoke the Russians too much, too soon. As Casey’s deputy for operations in Afghanistan would later recount, “Zia was a believer. Without Zia, there would have been no Afghan war, and no Afghan victory.”36

  Zia himself traveled to Washington in December 1982, where, on Pearl Harbor Day, he and Reagan met in the Oval Office. Reagan promised American support against the Soviets. When he raised the issue of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Zia assured him that it was only for peaceful purposes and that Pakistan would not “embarrass” America with its nuclear ambitions. “No embarrassment” would become Zia’s mantra on the nuclear front, by which he meant that Pakistan would build a bomb but not test it or otherwise be too public about the country’s plans for it. Reagan almost certainly left Zia confident that his priority was Afghanistan and that his administration was comfortable with “no embarrassments” on secondary issues. In May 1984, Vice President George Bush went to Islamabad to see the war up front. He too raised the nuclear issue, and he got the same answer. The CIA was asked to brief the Pakistanis on several occasions on what it knew about Pakistan’s program, the hope being that the briefings would persuade the Pakistanis to slow down for fear that their program would be discovered and cause “embarrassment.” Instead, the briefings simply exposed American methods of collecting intelligence to the Pakistanis. One Pakistani official characterized the briefings as “show and tell” and told his American counterpart that they only encouraged Pakistan to try harder to hide the program.37

  To satisfy congressional critics of Pakistan’s nuclear program, the Reagan administration agreed to abide by a bill requiring annual certification from the president that Pakistan did not have a nuclear bomb. The so-called Pressler amendment, named after Larry Pressler, the Republican senator who sponsored it, was intended to provide a way to keep providing lavish aid to Pakistan, not to prevent it. As long as Casey was DCI, the certifications were certain to be affirmative. In 1986 Casey told the new outgoing chief for Pakistan that the goal was no longer just to bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan, it was to “win the war.” A new $4 billion aid package for Pakistan followed.38 The CIA also began providing Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the ISI for the mujahedin, which challenged the Russian control of the air and provided the Afghans with a critical military advantage.

  The nuclear issue refused to stay dormant. In 1984 Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, A. Q. Khan, who had stolen the plans for the critical centrifuge from the Netherlands, was quoted in an Indian newspaper as saying that the promise that Pakistan’s program was only for peaceful purposes was “humbug.” The Pakistanis claimed that he was misquoted. The Reagan team escaped embarrassment, but they certainly knew the truth. On a later occasion, Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci asked Zia directly how he would continue to have the ISI provide arms to the rebels once the Soviets had withdrawn their troops (though not their aid). Moscow had demanded that the CIA and ISI stop providing arms as a precondition to withdrawal, but Washington refused and Islamabad maintained the fiction that it did not supply arms to the mujahedin. Zia replied, “I’ll lie to them like I have been lying to them for the past ten
years.” Carlucci added, “Just like he has been lying to us about the nuclear business.”39

  On August 17, 1988, Zia and Akhtar, who had by then been promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several other senior Pakistani generals as well as the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, were killed when their C-130 aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff. Raphel’s widow was told by American investigators that it was 90 percent certain that the crash was due to a mechanical failure, not sabotage, but immediately suspicions of foul play surfaced.40 No one ever claimed responsibility, but there are dozens of conspiracy theories about what happened and why.

  A thorough and credible investigation has never been conducted. Akhtar’s ISI biographer, Yousaf, concluded that “the KGB or KHAD (its Afghan counterpart) had been involved” but that the Americans were eager to see Zia killed now that the jihad was almost over.41 John Gunther Dean, then the U.S. ambassador to India, accused the Israeli secret service, Mossad, of killing Zia, possibly to stop the Pakistani bomb program.42 In the most recent study, based on interviews with many of the Pakistani air force officers who investigated the crash, Shuja Nawaz concludes that “many questions still remain” about why the plane crashed and why the investigation of the crash was so incomplete.43 Like much else in Pakistan’s history, this incident remains a mystery. One thing is certain: America does not kill its ambassadors or its allies’ leaders.

  Casey had died a year before, in May 1987, of a brain tumor at the age of eighty-seven, so the main authors of the war all died before victory was achieved. By then, he and his boss, President Reagan, were engulfed in the Iran-Contra scandal, the secret deal with Iran to trade arms for hostages in Lebanon. In Afghanistan, Casey had presided over the largest CIA covert action program in the agency’s history; by the time of his death, its budget had grown from less than $20 million to $400 million.

  INDIA AND THE REAGAN YEARS

  The Reagan-Casey team focused on the cold war exclusively. Pakistan was an essential ally against Russia; India was at best an afterthought, if not a Soviet ally. Casey, who ran the war in Afghanistan, was uninterested in India. Reagan’s primary wish was to avoid Indian interference in Pakistan. So it was a bit of a pleasant surprise that Reagan and Indira Gandhi initially got along together quite well. They met first at a summit of industrialized and developing states in Cancun, Mexico, in October 1981. Their personal chemistry was good, although the two had dramatically different policy views. In July 1982 Indira came to Washington, her first visit since the dark days of 1971. Again the dynamic between the two leaders was positive, but the good vibrations masked very serious differences, especially over Pakistan as Zia stepped up interference in Kashmir and Punjab.

  In April 1984 Indian forces took control of most of the Siachen Glacier in northern Kashmir. (Siachen translates as “place of roses,” but it is in fact a frozen river of ice at the top of the world.) Operation Cloud Messenger was intended to preempt a Pakistani effort to seize the glacier, but it also sent a signal to Zia that Indira was not to be trifled with. Pakistan responded by trying to seize back the wasteland, and a bloody war for control of the glacier began that lasts to this day. More soldiers die from exposure to the harsh elements there than from combat; in April 2012, 135 Pakistani soldiers and civilians died in one avalanche alone. For two poor countries, it is a monumental waste of resources.

  On October 31, 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her bodyguards, Sikhs who were angered by her bloody military operation in Amritsar (Operation Blue Star). Her son, Rajiv, became prime minister. Her daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, was with Indira in her last moments and accompanied her body to the hospital. The investigation of the assassination did not find evidence of Pakistani involvement, but many in South Asia assume that the assassins had connections to the ISI and/or the CIA. A prominent Pakistani author, Tariq Ali, has written a clever screen play suggesting such a conspiracy.44

  Rajiv had planned to be an airline pilot and met his Italian wife while studying in the United Kingdom. On the death of his brother Sanjay, he was propelled into politics, despite the fact that he was reluctant to take up a political career and Sonia was very much against it. He would prove to be a shadow of his mother as prime minister, lacking her sharp, decisive edge, but he probably also had less of her animosity toward the United States. The two leaders, Reagan and Rajiv, would separately call for a world without nuclear weapons during their political careers, but they did not make that goal part of the bilateral relationship. Reagan invited Rajiv to the White House in June 1985. The personal relationship between Reagan and Rajiv, like that between Reagan and Indira Gandhi, was positive, but little of substance followed, aside from a visit to India by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in October 1986. Shortly after his visit, the first of an American secretary of defense to India, a major crisis erupted between India and Pakistan.

  Rajiv authorized a large military exercise along the Pakistan border in the fall of 1986, code-named Operation Brass Tacks. He may have intended it to discourage further Pakistani activity in Punjab among the Sikhs, but he may not have fully understood the likely impact of the exercise in Pakistan. His army commander, General Krishnaswamy Sundarji, may have had more ambitious motives, perhaps hoping that the exercise would provoke a response that would allow India to destroy Pakistan’s nascent nuclear program as Israel had destroyed Iraq’s program in 1981. Sundarji would later write a novel making the case that Indian decisionmaking on nuclear issues was muddled and ill informed and that the army should be given a greater voice in strategic planning.45 Whatever India’s motives—and they were clearly muddled—the deployment in January 1987 of two armored divisions, one mechanized division, and six infantry divisions along the border with lots of supporting air power prompted a major Pakistani response.

  Both sides’ militaries were deployed in dangerous postures. In Washington, the CIA was warning that war was possible. Reagan and Casey feared that an Indo-Pakistani war would only play into the hands of the Soviets and undermine the Afghan war. Washington urged restraint on both sides. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and Zia and Rajiv backed away from conflict. Zia accepted an invitation to attend a cricket match in Jaipur, India, in February, and the meeting in the stands between Zia and Rajiv lowered tensions considerably. Not for the last time, cricket diplomacy offered a way to avoid potential disaster in the subcontinent.46

  Rajiv made a second visit to Washington in the fall of 1987, but once again the visit was more show than substance. He lost his bid for reelection in December 1989. By then Reagan had left the Oval Office and Vice President George Bush was elected president in his place. Reagan had decisively tilted the United States toward Zia and Pakistan during his tenure; together the two had won the war in Afghanistan and set the stage for the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the end of the cold war. Yet Reagan ignored the Kashmir issue entirely. The American-Pakistani alliance had been built on sand, with a time bomb, Pakistan’s nuclear program, ticking beneath the surface. It exploded on Bush’s watch.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FROM CRISIS TO CRISIS: BUSH AND CLINTON

  THE OFFICE OF the deputy national security adviser to the president of the United States is tiny. In many American homes, the walk-in closets are larger. But in the White House, proximity is power, and the deputy sits near his boss, the national security adviser to the president, who has a much more spacious, lavish office in the corner of the West Wing directly across from the Oval Office. In the fall of 1991, the deputy national security adviser was Robert Gates, a career CIA officer who had been chosen by Brent Scowcroft to be his deputy in 1989. Gates was meeting with General Sunith Francis Rodrigues, chief of army staff of the Indian army. I was the note taker for the meeting. General Rodrigues—an Indian soldier of Portuguese descent who was a graduate of the Royal College of Defence Studies in London (formerly the Imperial War College)—had been decorated for his service in the 1971 war with Pakistan and had become command
er of the Indian army in June 1990. He was visiting Washington to improve military-to-military relations between India and the United States.

  After welcoming Rodrigues, Gates began to urge that India sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and keep its nuclear program strictly peaceful. Rodrigues interrupted Gates almost immediately, leaning toward him across his desk in the cramped office and asking, “Why are you reading me these talking points? This is the only message we ever hear from Americans,” he said. “You speak about the importance of the NPT and want us to give up the nuclear option. America is the only country ever to use the bomb on an enemy, and you have built thousands of them. Yet you tell us not to do what you have done! And you turn a blind eye to Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons and its refusal to sign the NPT! And you give Pakistan the combat aircraft, F-16s, to deliver its nuclear attack on our cities!”

  In essence, Rodrigues’s argument was about the fairness of the post–World War II world order. The five victors in the war are all nuclear weapons states, with their rights to the bomb institutionalized in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) and in their permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Other states, like India, were expected to accept second-tier status and to forgo nuclear weapons. India, which did not exist as a state in 1945, when the United Nations was created and the modern order established, found that policy to be both hypocritical and unfair. As the world’s largest democracy, it feels that it has a right to be on the Security Council; in fact, many Indians argue that they have more right to a seat than their former colonial masters, Britain and France. The general was simply more passionate in his denunciation of the new world order than the mostly soft-spoken Indian diplomats.