Some may quickly dismiss these claims as a fatuous attempt to deflect long-standing American, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and Afghan criticisms of Pakistan for providing sanctuary to the Taliban, among other militants active in Afghanistan, but analysts do so at their own peril. The scenario Raja describes is plausible given Afghanistan’s past history with Pakistan. Furthermore, it has been my experience that many Pakistanis in uniform share his belief. The fact that the United States has made no genuine inquiry into these issues has prevented it from refuting these serious—if spurious—allegations. Equally important, the belief that India and Afghanistan are both meddling in Pakistani affairs is widely held outside the military as well. Pakistan’s media commentators devote significant air time and column inches to the purported mushrooming Indian consulates in Afghanistan, Indian support of militants operating throughout Pakistan, and accounts of anti-Pakistan militants safely ensconced in Afghan sanctuaries (see, e.g., Ahsan 2006; Daily Times 2012b; Pakistan Express Tribune 2012; Zahra-Malik 2011). M. Maqbool Khan Wazir (2011), writing in the official publication of IPRI, a government-sponsored think tank, boldly claims:
The role of foreign players in the ongoing insurgency in FATA, KP and Balochistan would be hard to dismiss given its persistence in the face of the military operation. The investigations made by Pakistani [intelligence] agencies have found evidences [sic] of foreign involvement in creating anarchy in Pakistan. These investigations indicate that the Pakistani law enforcing agencies found highly credible evidence proving that the Indians were not only giving comprehensive financial support to terrorists in Pakistan but were also providing them with arms, equipment and technical support. During operation Rah-e-Nijat huge quantity of Indian arms and ammunition, literature, medical equipment and medicines was recovered from Sherawangi area, near Kaniguram in South Waziristan Agency. Rehman Malik, interior minister, has provided evidence to the US of Indian assistance to the militants who are targeting NATO forces and Pakistani troops simultaneously (71).
It would behoove international actors to focus intelligence and other assets on these allegations, if for no other reason than to credibly engage the nature of the claims and their degree of legitimacy. However, given that Pakistanis accept these propositions as statements of fact, I am skeptical that any amount of counter-vailing evidence can mitigate Pakistani fears and the precarious behaviors they encourage.
The Army Manages the Afghan Threat
In its efforts to contend with the direct and indirect threats flowing from Afghanistan, the Pakistan Army has long used one of its few abundant resources: Islamists. While the major ulema parties did not at first welcome the Partition of South Asia into India and Pakistan (they believed that nationalism was antithetical to the supranational identity politics of Islamism and thought that Partition would weaken the umma, the international Islamic nation, in South Asia), they eventually reconciled themselves to, and even championed, the notion of Pakistan. Key among these parties were the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) and the Jamiat-ulema-Islami (JUI). They remain so to date. Over time, JI and JUI became the Pakistan Army’s partners in developing, promoting, and policing the ideology of Pakistan, first at home and then abroad. By 1960, Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, acting under the auspices of the army, encouraged Pakistan’s Islamist parties to “pursue a forward policy of seeking ideological allies in Afghanistan” (Haqqani 2005, 167), and the Pakistani Islamist parties became the principal foes of the Afghan communists (Rubin 2002). During this period, Pakistan was under Ayub’s supposedly secular rule, underscoring the fact that even ostensibly secular generals were willing to instrumentalize Islam for domestic and foreign purposes. Some 40 years later, Musharraf, also a professedly secular leader, would do the same. This has been the bedrock of the army’s policy to manage Afghanistan.
The principal political party in Afghanistan was the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which was founded in 1965. In 1967, the PDPA split into two factions: Khalq (masses) and Parcham (flag). Khalq, under the leadership of Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, recruited heavily among Pakhtuns and had a strong base in the Soviet-trained military. Parcham, under the leadership of Babrak Karmal, tended to draw from the bureaucracy and educational establishments. While both were Marxist and pro-Soviet, Khalq preferred more rapid and radical socialist transformation, while Parcham was more gradualist and willing to cooperate with other political organizations (Barfield 2010). Both PDPA factions were small—perhaps in the thousands—and had their base in Kabul’s urban population. In fact, the PDPA factions did not have a monopoly even on Marxism in Kabul, much less the rest of Afghanistan. The party appealed to Afghanistan’s Pakhtuns because it fervently supported the notion of Pakhtunistan, to Pakistan’s unending chagrin. But some non-Pakhtuns, less than pleased by this position, formed their own Marxist groups, which favored autonomy for non-Pakhtuns (Rubin 2002).
While Communist parties competed for power and influence, Islamists were also responding to the spread of leftist ideology. By the mid-1950s, Islamic politics had become firmly entrenched in Kabul, with Islamists gathering at the sharia faculty at Kabul University to debate campus Marxists. These Islamists became Pakistan’s early allies, a partnership mediated by Pakistan’s own Islamist parties. In 1973, the Islamists formed a leadership shura (council), which held its first meeting in the home of Barhanuddin Rabbani, a junior member of the sharia faculty. Rabbani was subsequently elected leader of the shura, with Ghulam Rasul Sayyaf, one of his colleagues at Kabul University, as deputy leader. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a student in the engineering school, was put in charge of political activities, even though at the time of the meeting he was in jail for murdering a Marxist student. The council, which later became known as the Jamiat-i-Islami (Islamic Society) (Rubin 2002), formed the nucleus of the various mujahideen groups that Pakistan began to instrumentalize in its efforts to manipulate Afghanistan’s internal affairs.
As Afghanistan’s domestic politics continued to churn, with the pro-Pakhtunistan Daoud ousting King Zahir Shah, the insurgency in Balochistan reached a crisis point. Afghanistan’s leadership opposed Pakistan’s use of force in Balochistan and continued to prosecute its demand for Pakhtunistan. In 1973, the authoritarian civilian leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, unable to resolve his disagreements with Daoud, ordered the ISI to lead covert actions in Afghanistan. According to Gen. Khalid Mahmud Arif (1995), who served as Zia’s vice chief of Army Staff:
An Afghan cell had been created in the Foreign Office in July/August 1973. It met regularly for the next three years, under the chairmanship of either Prime Minister Bhutto or Mr. Aziz Ahmad [the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs under Bhutto], and gave out policy guidelines. The Inspector General Frontier Constabulary and the DGISI [director general Inter-Services Intelligence directorate] worked in concert to conduct intelligence missions inside Afghanistan. The Afghan leaders, Gulbadin [sic] Hikmatyar [sic] and Rabbani, came into contact with the Pakistani authorities during the period. The Pakistani intelligence agencies also kept communication channels open with the deposed king, Zahir Shah, who was living in exile in Italy. Gradually, the cell became dormant during the final stages of the Bhutto administration. On 2 May 1978, the Afghan Cell was reactivated in the Foreign Office (306–307).
Bhutto’s forward policy relied on Islamist elements in Afghanistan who were opposed both to Daoud’s liberalizing regime and his efforts to expel them. Rizwan Hussain (2005) emphasizes that Pakistan’s decision to aid the Afghan Islamists was driven by strategic considerations rather than sympathy with their ideology: the Afghan Islamists did not support Kabul’s territorial claims on Pakistani lands, and they were opposed to friendly relations with India. “Because of this, they made ideal proxies for Pakistan to destabilise Afghanistan. By [supporting them], Islamabad wanted to send a message to Daud [sic] that if he persisted in aiding ‘secessionists’ in Pakistan then he could expect Pakistan to reply in the same vein” (79).
By 1973, several
Islamist leaders had fled to Pakistan to escape Daoud. Pakistan established training camps for them in North and South Waziristan agencies (laying the foundation for a larger effort in the 1980s with American, Saudi, and other funders). Not only were these Pakhtun-dominated agencies a virtual black hole in which the press could not operate, they were also conveniently located, bordering Afghanistan’s eastern provinces of Paktia, Logar and Paktika. There was already a large Pakistani military garrison at Razmak (in the northern part of South Waziristan, near the southern boundary with North Waziristan), and troops were also stationed in Mohmand Agency, abutting the northeastern, Pakhtun-dominated Afghan provinces of Nangarhar and Kunar. The North-West Frontier Province units of the Frontier Corps (a paramilitary organization whose recruits come from FATA but whose officers are seconded from the Pakistan Army), was ordered to organize and train the Afghans, and the unit’s inspector general, Brig. (later Maj. Gen.) Naseerullah Khan Babar, was placed in charge of the overall operation.18 Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud (who would later become an enemy of Pakistan and a target of the Pakistan-backed Taliban in the mid-1990s) were among the first to receive training.
In summer 1975, Pakistan backed a series of Islamist insurrections in Afghanistan, including one led by Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. While Daoud easily crushed these uprisings, he used them as an excuse to arrest even mainstream Islamists, prompting even more Islamists to flee to Pakistan (Barfield 2012). To ensure that its Afghan project remained covert, Pakistan actually enlisted Afghan Islamists into the Frontier Corps while the ISI and the army’s elite Special Services Group trained them. Analysts believe that between 1973 and 1977, Pakistan’s armed forces trained some 5,000 militants to fight the Daoud regime (Hussain 2005). But despite their similar goals, the Afghan militants remained divided by ethnicity (Pakhtun vs. non-Pakhtun). Dari speakers (e.g., non-Pakhtuns) tended to support Rabbani, while Pakhtuns tended to support Hekmatyar.
In keeping with Pakistan’s past use of nonstate actors (e.g., in the 1947 and 1965 wars), knowledge of the Afghan effort was confined to a small number of persons within Pakistan’s military and bureaucratic establishments: Gen. Babur claimed that only Prime Minister Bhutto, Army Chief Tikka Khan, and Minister of State for Defence and Foreign Affairs Aziz Ahmad knew of Pakistan’s activities. During their time in Pakistan, Afghan Islamists were able to forge even deeper links with Pakistan’s Islamists, in particular members of the JI and the JUI. Both of these parties were closely tied to the military and received funding from Saudi Arabia, among other Arab donors. Hekmatyar would go on to form Hizb-e-Islami-Afghanistan, which had ideological ties to JI leadership in Pakistan (Haqqani 2005; Hussain 2005; Rubin 2002).
Pakistan undertook these initiatives well before the Soviets crossed the Amu Darya and long before the United States became involved. In other words, the basic lineaments of Pakistan’s Afghanistan policies were formed long before the Christmas 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. However, they developed further after the invasion in coordination with the United States and Saudi Arabia and in consideration of Pakistan’s own enduring interests. A perusal of these historical facts undermines Pakistan’s often-touted narrative that it was “used” by the United States and deployed to service principally American Cold War objectives.
At the same time that he was initiating covert actions in Afghanistan, Bhutto was also requesting additional assistance from the United States. But US–Pakistan relations had cooled after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war and the ambivalent American response to the secession of Bangladesh, and the United States was not persuaded by Bhutto’s arguments for greater military support. In preparation for Bhutto’s 1973 visit to Washington, the US Department of State produced talking points cautioning that the United States saw “the resolution of Pakistan’s security problems primarily in political/psychological and economic terms and only secondarily in military terms” (Haqqani 2005, 104). In short, at this juncture, the United States was not persuaded that it should provide military support to Pakistan when the solutions to its security problems were not primarily military in nature.
Positive regional political developments temporarily halted Pakistan’s first experiments with training Afghan militants. Although the Soviet Union had signed a Friendship Treaty with India even as India was preparing to intervene in East Pakistan, the USSR, which was well-disposed toward Bhutto’s leftist politics, also sought to improve its ties with Pakistan. As a part of that effort, Kabul softened its support for the Pakhtunistan agenda. At the same time, Afghanistan was experiencing better relations with Iran, which, like Pakistan, was a CENTO treaty partner. Tehran urged Kabul to reach some accommodation with Pakistan, sweetening the pot with $700 million for development projects. China, another important Pakistani ally, offered Daoud a $55 million loan in the hopes of driving a wedge between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. A third push came from the United States in the form of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who, during a 1974 visit to Kabul, urged Daoud to reach some accord with Pakistan. These efforts bore fruit in 1976, when Bhutto visited Kabul. He and Daoud discussed an array of issues, and even though the two countries did not come to an agreement on the Durand Line, this thaw in relations prompted Pakistan to stop its assistance to the Afghan Islamists in early 1977 (Hussain 2005).
In July 1977, Gen. Zia ul Haq deposed Bhutto and seized power in Operation Fairplay. Daoud, continuing his efforts to reduce tensions with Pakistan, refrained from commenting on what he called an “internal affair,” and in return Zia made a number of conciliatory approaches to Kabul, including releasing many of the Pakhtun and Baloch nationalists imprisoned under Bhutto (Arif 1995). Daoud also continued to distance his regime from Moscow. But fast-moving events in Afghanistan soon eviscerated the progress Daoud and Zia made. While Daoud may have espoused some of the PDPA’s goals, the party was not happy with his gradualist approach to reform and modernization. Equally problematic for the PDPA, and Moscow, Daoud was essentially a nationalist who wanted to gain greater independence from the Soviets in domestic and foreign affairs (Magnus and Naby 2002; Maley 2002). In April 1978 the PDPA seized power in a coup, in the course of which Daoud was killed. The coup was dubbed the Saur Revolution in reference to the Afghan month in which it took place (Hussain 2005; Maley 2002). Many Pakistani defense analysts remain convinced that the Saur Revolution was backed by the Soviets even though the historical record is less clear on this issue (see, e.g., Chishti 1990).19
Within days of the coup, Nur Mohammad Taraki (who led the Khalq faction of the PDPA) was named the president and prime minister, and his rival, Babrak Karmal (who led the Parcham faction), became the deputy prime minister. But the inclusion of both Parcham and Khalq leaders in the new government did not end the hostility between the two factions. Taraki exiled Karmal and other Parcham leaders by sending them to diplomatic postings abroad, and he purged those who remained in the country. His government rapidly imposed socialism on Afghanistan, using extremely brutal methods (including mass executions), which created a strong backlash at nearly every level of society.20
Zia and Taraki had a dismal relationship from their very first meeting, which took place in Kabul. When Zia talked about Islam, Taraki took numerous opportunities to mock his professed piety. (For details of their meeting, see Arif 1995, 308). Zia, for his part, believed that the Soviets had instigated the Afghan coup and that the removal of Daoud spelled the end of Afghan–Pakistani cooperation (Hussain 2005; Magnus and Naby 2002; Maley 2002). With no rapprochement possible, Zia focused aggressively on domestic Islamization and on his attempts to undermine many of Bhutto’s more leftist policies (e.g., the nationalization of private assets).
In an assessment that clearly reflects the influence of British strategic thought, Zia concluded that the Saur revolution meant that Afghanistan could no longer act as a buffer between the Soviet Union and the rest of the subcontinent, and his military government consequently feared further Soviet moves toward Pakistan. To prevent this, Lt. General Faiz
Ali Chishti—an important member of Zia’s inner military circle—advocated a forward policy that would counter Soviet influence by “installing a ‘favourable government in Kabul, using friendly Pakhtun tribes’ as ‘defence of Pakistan lay in the defence of Afghanistan’ ” (Hussain 2005, 97). In May 1978, Pakistan—at the urging of allies such as Iran, the United States, and Saudi Arabia—recognized the newly designated Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, Zia also reactivated the secret Afghan cell that Bhutto had created in 1973 (Haqqani 2005; Hussain 2005).
Throughout summer 1979, the PDPA’s policies continued to push Islamists into Pakistan, adding to those who had fled during Daoud’s tenure. Zia, taking advantage of the preparatory work done by Bhutto, organized the various Afghan groups into a viable political and military force under his control. The relationship between Zia and the Afghan Islamists was symbiotic: he was able to grant them some degree of international legitimacy, and they bolstered his Islamizing activities within Pakistan. The army recruited numerous Islamist parties, such as the JI and JUI, to strengthen the legitimacy of military rule and also to help organize the Afghan resistance. JI forged particularly tight relations with the two factions of Hizb-i-Islami (Hussain 2005; Rubin 2002).
The Soviet Union observed the increasingly intense violence in Afghanistan with growing alarm. In September 1979, Hafizullah Amin, fearing that Taraki was conspiring with Moscow to have him removed, killed Taraki and appointed himself prime minister. While Taraki had enjoyed the relative confidence of Moscow, under Amin, relations between Moscow and Kabul worsened because he used terror to consolidate his rule. Fearing that it would lose Afghanistan altogether, the Soviet Union invaded on Christmas Day 1979. Soon thereafter, the Soviets killed Amin and installed Babrak Karmal as president (Barfield 2010; Bradsher 1985; Hussain 2005; Magnus and Naby 2002; Maley 2002). The Soviet “intervention provoked a deep sense of alarm in Pakistan. Suddenly the buffer disappeared and the Soviet superpower advanced to Pakistan’s borders” (Sattar 2007, 155).
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