Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  But then, in 1988, Zia and other senior army men died in a still-mysterious air crash. Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the man Zia had hanged, became prime minister of Pakistan and got rid of Gul at the first available opportunity in 1989. Gul turned into an intriguer; he led the frustrated power-hungry officers of the ISI in a successful conspiracy to bring down Bhutto in 1990.

  Retirement from the army diminished Gul. He attempted to reinvent himself as a full-time jihadi, writing columns in the Urdu papers and sending long faxes, as an exasperated editor told me, to the offices of the English-language press, usually denouncing the new military government for surrendering before India and America.

  Gul’s awareness of his lost authority seemed present in his swift response on the telephone when I told him that the men shadowing me might stop me from traveling to his home in the Chaklala air base near Rawalpindi. “I’ll see,” he said, in a controlled voice, “who dares stops you from visiting my home.”

  Palladian columns—the mansions of military officers in Pakistan are always grand—guarded the front of Gul’s house, which was otherwise remarkably un-Roman. On the walls of the living room, framed photos of the Kaaba seemed to look away from the suffocating excess in the middle: the huge crystal decorations on the center table, the shiny life-size brass deer, the satin green upholstery, the animal skin rugs, and the glittering trophies.

  Beardless, and sporting a trimmed mustache, a Western-style tweed jacket, and vigorously polished brown moccasins, Gul seemed closer to his background as a cavalry officer than to the austere world of jihad. His English was mostly Urdu-accented and only occasionally, when he ceased his loud declamations, lapsed into the Sandhurst inflections and phrases of an older generation of army men. He dealt awkwardly with my more personal questions, revealing only, with obvious irritation, that his family was originally from the hilly district of Swat and that he had gone to a village school before attending a government college in Lahore.

  These were humble origins when compared to the “brown sahabs” Gul was known for attacking at every available opportunity, the men Anglicized and groomed to assume power at influential establishments like Aitchison College, Lahore, and St. Patrick’s College, Karachi. They partly accounted for Gul’s immodest ambitions and claims. In February 1989, when the Soviet Army withdrew from Afghanistan, he was, as director general of the ISI, leading the jihad. As he described it, his role in the jihad had begun even while he was a lowly brigadier. Three weeks after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, he wrote and circulated a policy paper in which he advocated Pakistani support for a low-intensity guerrilla war against the Soviet Union and its Afghan allies, gradually extending it right into the Muslim-majority Central Asian provinces of the Soviet Union.

  The paper reached Zia, who was impressed by Gul’s energy and ambition. A meeting with the general followed. “I told General Zia,” Gul said, “that if we defeated the Russians, and I was very optimistic that we would, then there was no reason that the borders of our great Islamic world should stop at the Amu Darya” (Amu is the Oxus River, which formed the boundary between Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union).

  The paper, Gul claimed, was read carefully by high-placed officials of the CIA and formed the basis of later incursions into what William Casey, the director of the CIA under Ronald Reagan, described as the “soft underbelly of the Soviet Union.”

  Much of this seemed like boasting, however. The cold warriors of the Carter administration had long been waiting for the Soviets to slip up in Afghanistan. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, who wanted to “sow shit in the Soviet backyard,” had arranged for clandestine aid to the radical Islamists in Pakistan a few months before Soviet troops arrived in Afghanistan. The Soviet intervention gave them the pretext they needed to raise the ante. In the letter Brzezinski wrote to Carter on the day the Soviet Army entered Afghanistan, he was exultant: “Now, we can give the Soviet Union its Vietnam War.” It was this trap for the Soviets that the CIA, under Casey, deepened through the early and mid-1980s by providing billions of dollars’ worth of arms and aid.

  In fact, Casey, a veteran of the OSS, and a fanatical cold warrior, wanted the ISI to involve the Muslims of the Soviet Union in the jihad, and he wasn’t satisfied with the ISI-arranged smuggling of thousands of Korans into what is now Uzbekistan and Tajikistan or with the distribution of heroin among Soviet troops. One officer of the ISI, and a critic of Gul, told me that the ISI received plenty of unofficial encouragement from Casey himself to attempt operations more damaging to the Soviet Union, but nothing that could be traced back to the CIA or the government of the United States. The senior officers of the ISI, flush with unaudited funds, were running their own little battles by the mid-1980s, and one of them arranged for the mining and bombing of military installations a few kilometers deep inside Soviet territory. The Soviet ambassador in Islamabad immediately left some ominous messages at the Pakistan Foreign Office, and Gul, confronted with the possibility of a Third World War, had to hastily withdraw the saboteurs from Soviet territory.

  When I met him, Gul had nothing but abuse for his former bankrollers in the CIA: “A self-serving people. All they wanted was to turn Afghanistan into a Vietnam for the Soviet Union; they used us for this purpose, and then they lost interest after the Soviets withdrew.”

  This was a commonplace sentiment in Pakistan. You heard it from liberal journalists, who had from the very beginning highlighted the folly and risk of fighting other people’s wars; you heard it from the jihadis, hoping to fight for another day. American involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan had become the story of the cynical arrogance of cold warriors like Brzezinski and Casey.

  The jihad that Gul imagined himself to be leading turned out to be under neither his nor the ISI’s control. Many different realpolitik interests had brought it to Pakistan and would, in time, take it away. The Americans wanted to rouse the Muslims of the world against the Soviet Union; the Saudi royal family, which matched the American assistance dollar to dollar, wanted its own version of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism, to triumph over the then-resurgent Shiism of Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. For these larger battles, Pakistan was merely a base, where CIA operatives could, for a while at least, mingle happily with such rich Arab jihadis as Osama bin Laden.

  After the Soviet withdrawal was agreed to in Geneva in 1987, the American interest in both the jihad and Afghanistan dwindled. The CIA promptly scaled back and soon ended its aid to Pakistan and the mujahideen.

  Left pretty much to their own devices, the ISI and Gul began to flounder. In 1988 came the still-mysterious fire in Ojhri, halfway between Islamabad and Rawalpindi, in which the ten thousand tons of arms and ammunition supplied by the CIA to the ISI for the Afghan mujahideen exploded in a spectacularly violent fireworks visible in a twelve-mile radius that many people took to be the beginning of a war between India and Pakistan; the rain of rockets and missiles lasted a whole day, killing a hundred people and injuring thousands of others.

  Then, in 1989, Gul abandoned the usual mode of guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan and conceived and supervised what turned out to be a disastrous frontal assault by the mujahideen. on the Communist-held city of Jalalabad in Afghanistan. Four months later the mujahideen had lost three thousand men and were further away than ever from taking Jalalabad. The Afghan Communist government in Kabul lasted another three years, during which the mujahideen turned to declaring jihad against each other.

  The divisions among the seven mujahideen parties recognized by the ISI had been deepening since 1979, caused less by ethnic and linguistic differences than by the inequitable way in which the ISI parceled out the largess from America and Saudi Arabia. The ISI under Gul was most generous to a particularly brutal mujahideen leader called Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose aggressive Islamism remained apart from the production and smuggling of heroin that created his wealth and power. The ISI expected Hekmatyar to install a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul after the fall of the
Communists. But Hekmatyar turned out to be unacceptable to most other mujahideen leaders, especially those who had fought the Soviets without much American or Pakistani assistance.

  When the Tajik mujahideen. commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, finally drove out the Communist government of Kabul in 1992, a full-scale civil war broke out in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, backed by the ISI, rocket-bombed Kabul for months. More people died in the city during the fighting in the early 1990s than during the decade-long jihad against the Russians. International powers stepped in once again to bankroll various factions: The Saudis supported the Sunni fundamentalists, Iran backed the Shiva Hazaras, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan had their own favorites among the Tajik and Uzbek mujahideen, and the ISI hadn’t lost faith in Hekmatyar when in 1994 the student militia of the Taliban suddenly emerged out of nowhere and conquered most of Afghanistan.

  Gul, still trying to prop up Hekmatyar, initially denounced the Taliban as CIA agents. These actions were more than personal or professional misjudgments and failures; they undermined whole societies. Reckless but high-placed adventurers like Gul, pursuing absurd fantasies of a pan-Islamic empire, had taken a largely poor and illiterate country to the edge.

  Gul himself had done well out of it all. There was the Palladian-fronted house in Rawalpindi; there were a farmhouse and, rumors said, more properties elsewhere; there was the lucrative transport business that apparently his daughter ran in Islamabad.

  And there were new jihads and jihadis to root for. “These Americans now accuse Osama bin Laden of terrorism. Once upon a time they used to call upon him in Peshawar and ask him to recruit more Arabs for the jihad,” said Gul, anxious, like all jihadis I was to meet in Pakistan, to claim a special intimacy with bin Laden. “I met him in Sudan in 1993. Such a wise and intelligent man. So much spirituality on his face. But this is the effect of jihad. It is a very noble state to be in. That’s why I look so young, although I am sixty-four years old. Jihad keeps me young, gives me a great purpose in life.”

  Gul’s enemies in Pakistan—and there were many—scoffed at his Islamic fervor; it was, for them, another kind of opportunism, a trivate pipeline to power and to at least some of the money flowing in from rich Muslin countries for organizations devoted to Islamic causes. And listening to them, you could easily begin to think of jihad as another racket in a poor, backward country. Certainly, renewed faith, alone doesn’t account for the many sectarian groups that have spring up over previous years, whose exploits—shoot-outs, bomb explosions, arson—dominate the national news.

  Many sects and ideologies of the Islamic world have traveled to Pakistan. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt influenced the leaders of the Jaamat-i-Islami, the biggest of the religious parties, several of whom had studied at Cairo; the Saudis arrived late, but their open-fisted generosity has ensured a speedy embrace of Wahhabism among the poorer menbers of the clergy. A wall of Sunni madrassas partly funded with Saudi money lies alongside the borders Pakistan and Afghanistan share with the Shia-majority Iran.

  Among these imported Islamic schools, the Deobandis are the most powerful and closest to the Wahhabis. The name comes from the original madrassa set up in 1866 in a small town near Delhi called Deoband. The madrassa was part of the insular Muslim response to British rule in the nineteenth century, the work of men who felt that Western-style education of the kind proposed by the British, and embraced by the Hindus, would fracture the Muslim community, men who were convinced that a training in the fundamentals of the Koran and the Sharia would shield Indian Muslims from the corruptions of the modern world.

  A couple of years ago I read an American academic’s book about Deoband; then one hot summer day, while I was on my way to the hill station of Mussoorie I saw a sign for the town itself alongside the rutted road. The madrassa building, a wide, low quadrangle supervised by minarets, seemed shrunken in the vast dusty land. I wasn’t welcome inside; the thin timid-looking young men in skullcaps didn’t want to talk to me; wouldn’t even let me in. I later discovered that Muslims had recently been massacred in a town not far from the madrassa.

  The image of Deoband after that was of the fearful Muslims marooned among the Hindus of the Indo-Gangetic plain. In Pakistan, however, this image dissolved fast. The large courtyard of the Binori Town madrassa in Karachi, one of the largest and oldest of Deobandi institutions in Pakistan, has marble floors. Students from Africa, Central Asia, the Philippines, and Malaysia swarmed confidently through the large complex, its several hostels, kitchens, although in the classrooms a Koran-oriented syllabus first created in India in the nineteenth century was still being used. The notice board displayed beautifully typed appeals for volunteers in various jihads in Kashmir, Chechnya, the Philippines, and Afghanistan. The Taliban seemed a big draw, and quite appropriately; most of the Taliban’s leadership as well as many of the foot soldiers of the Taliban have emerged from the Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan and southern Afghanistan.

  It was Jamal who said, “You must go to the Deobandi madrassas. That’s where a lot of the Taliban were trained, and a lot of Pakistani young men there also go to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban. You’ll find lots of fanatics there.”

  I did want to find a few fanatics; I also wanted to travel to Afghanistan. On both fronts, however, my attempts were being thwarted. At the Taliban’s chaotic embassy in Islamabad, where gruffly inefficient former soldiers in black turbans ran or limped in and out of rooms furnished with peeling paint and dusty rugs, my visa application, deposited and redeposited several times, seemed as much of an illusion as the existence of an Afghan state or government. It wasn’t easy to find the jihadis. The names Jamal sold me—at quite a high rate; he said he hadn’t been paid his salary, he needed the money, and I didn’t argue—turned out to be those of men long retired and living now in isolation. All the leads offered to me by the other English-language journalists I knew came to nothing. A Pakistani acquaintance in London had warned me that this might happen, that the jihadis knew too well how the English-language press in Pakistan felt toward them and were suspicious of anyone carrying its references. I began hanging out at the offices of the Urdu publications, many of which were sympathetic to the jihadis, and it was at the office of a plump young editor in Islamabad, one of the professional cheerleaders of the jihad and another self proclaimed friend of Osama bin Laden, that I ran into Shafiq.

  Shafiq looked old, although he was only in his mid-forties. When the editor introduced him as a veteran of the jihad in Afghanistan, he raised the sleeves of his kurta and displayed a bullet wound in his left arm. He didn’t speak much; his Urdu was a low growl, the furtive tone, it turned out, of a fixer. His demands for money were more extravagant than Jamal’s and we were forced to meet early in the morning or late at night, the only time when my spies were off duty. It was difficult to arrange these meetings, for Shafiq’s mobile phone, he claimed, was tapped by the ISI. But he usually had the information I required.

  It took him some time to come up with someone to meet in Karachi; it wasn’t his “area,” he said. And then he said, with the glint in his eyes that always appeared in expectation of more money, that he had found someone special for me, an activist from the Sipah-e-Sahaba, one of the most dreaded anti-Shia groups in Pakistan, whose acronym SSP, featured often in the daily papers, usually regarding attacks on or by Shias. He would, Shafiq promised, using the English words, provide me with “good material.” All I had to do was shake off the spies and show up at the madrassa.

  One early morning, when the spies were still asleep, I took a flight from Peshawar to Karachi relieved to find no strange men in beaten-up cars awaiting me at the other end. Everywhere on the wide swift boulevard leading to the city center there were signs of Karachi’s financial eminence: the billboards, the glass-fronted boutiques, and the fancy patisseries. I had expected a meaner place, acting out its reputation as the setting for violent battles between militant groups of Muslim migrants from India and the police, and instead, with the spies gone, in this port city—i
ts warm, sea-scrubbed air and clear light and colonial buildings so much like Bombay, and so unlike the ingrown seediness of Peshawar or the diseased grandeur of Lahore and the wide suburban vacancies of Islamabad—suddenly I felt freer than I had ever before in Pakistan.

  I felt, I think, as a Pakistani visitor to the city might, and it was as a Pakistani journalist from London that I introduced myself to Rahmat. The deception was necessary, Shafiq had told me. The connection to India would throw Rahmat; he would not want to talk. In any case, it gave me a new assurance the evening I went to the Binori Town madrassa: in my shalwar kurta that I had bought earlier in the day, I could have been one of the hundreds of young men heading in and out of the evening namaz.

  Rahmat was waiting for me, as Shafiq had said he would be, at the small shop selling Afghan caps and Korans just inside the tall gateway to the madrassa. He was younger than I had expected, and the white, grimy kurta, the worn plastic slippers, and the dense beard that framed his face only highlighted his exceptional good looks, the wide, delicate cheekbones and shyly quizzical eyes.

  We sat and talked in one of the garishly lit shops and cafés that hemmed in the madrassa. Shafiq had exaggerated: Rahmat wasn’t a student but an odd-job man at the madrassa and he had never been a member of the Sipah-e-Sahaba. He wasn’t even sure whether the madrassa he had gone to near the city of Faisalabad was Deobandi; he only remembered that the teachers emphasized jihad as the primary duty of Muslims. As for the SSP, some members of the group had helped him and his family after his brother had been charged with murdering a Shia landlord.

  The murder had happened near Rahmat’s ancestral village in the Punjab, where his father had an auto repair shop. Rahmat had been languishing there after his stint at the madrassa along with his parents, four brothers, and two sisters, waiting for a job to come his way. Things hadn’t been bad in the 1980s, in the days of Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization, when you could still get a job after a madrassa education. But Rahmat had gone to the madrassa at the wrong time and had come out of it to join the hundreds of thousands of unemployable young men in Pakistan. Some of his friends had mustered enough money to travel to the Gulf, and he was hoping to follow them when one day his brother murdered the landlord.