by Ali, Tariq
Whatever the truth, Zahoor Elahi became an instant martyr. The anniversary of his death is marked in Gujrat each year with great pomp and ceremony by his family (usually government ministers), and streets have been named after him. After his death, his oldest son, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, inherited the mantle and became a crucial power broker in General Zia’s khaki Muslim League. Total power, however, continued to elude the Zahoor Elahi clan. The Sharif family had the Muslim League contract, but the Chaudhrys maintained family tradition by masking their resentment. They waited patiently. Their chance would come a decade later when another general, Pervez Musharraf, seized power.
But the Chaudhrys, along with the Sharifs, prospered well enough during the Zia years. So did the Pakistan army, to which the war in Afghanistan had given an enormous boost. It was a frontline ally of the United States against the godless Communists. And Zia and his generals knew only too well that without the financial and military support of the United States and also of China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Egypt, it would not have been so easy to win. The ISI and CIA watched and applauded as Russian technicians and their families were killed, disemboweled, and their heads displayed on posts. This was sweet revenge for Vietnam. Meanwhile Prince Turki bin Faisal, the Saudi chieftain promoting the war, dispatched Sheikh Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan to further advance the struggle by demonstrating to the Believers that the Saudis were behind them and not to worry too much about America. The story has been well documented, but what is not stressed often enough is how this war wrecked the northwestern regions of Pakistan. The consequences are still sharply felt.
The crude but effective ISI manuals used to fight Moscow are once again proving helpful, this time to the forces fighting the United States in Afghanistan today. One of the anti-Soviet commanders, Abdul Haq, told admiring Western journalists that the mujahideen did not actually target civilians, “but if I hit them, I don’t care. . . . If my family lived near the Soviet embassy, I would hit it. I wouldn’t care about them. If I am prepared to die, my son has to die for it, and my wife has to die for it.” These “qualities” were then praised in the Western media as exhibitions of an indomitable warrior race. Robert Fisk, who reported on the conflict for the London Times, has written of the strict instructions to refer to the mujahideen as “freedom fighters,” regardless of any of their activities.
Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf of the ISI, who was centrally involved in training the mujahideen and selecting Pakistani commandos to cross the border and fight alongside them, defended these tactics in 2003:
Next was sabotage and assassination from within . . . this included placing a bomb under the dining-room table of Kabul University in late 1983. The explosion, in the middle of the meal, killed nine Soviets, including a woman Professor. Educational institutions were considered fair game as the staff were all communists indoctrinating their students with Marxist dogma . . . this was corrupting the youth, turning them away from Islam.*
The same tactics and the same justifications, directed now against the United States and NATO, are said to represent the “sickness” of Islam and are traced back directly to the Koran or other Islamic teachings. In which case, one might ask, how is it that jihadi manuals circulating in the refugee camps and among the mujahideen were produced at the University of Nebraska–Omaha?
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since as the Afghan school-system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist creed.†
Meanwhile changes were taking place in the Soviet Union. With the elevation of Mikhail Gorbachev to general secretary of the politburo in March 1985, it soon became obvious that the Soviet Union would accept defeat in Afghanistan and withdraw its troops. I had a surprising personal experience in this regard. At a UN-sponsored conference in Tashkent that spring, I was astonished when, after my speech, which was extremely critical of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and its aftermath, the younger members of the Soviet delegation, led by Yevgeni Primakov (subsequently head of the KGB and briefly prime minister under Yeltsin), came up and hugged me, saying they agreed with me and so did their new general secretary. When I reported this to various Pakistani friends, they became despondent. Some refused to believe this was possible. Today, many of them are equally committed to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and plead with the West to send more troops.*
The Soviet Union had accepted defeat and decided on a unilateral withdrawal from Afghanistan. Nonetheless, General Gromov wanted some guarantees for their Afghan supporters who were being left behind. The United States—its mission successful—was prepared to play ball. General Zia, however, was not. The Afghan war had gone to his head (as it had to that of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues), and he wanted his own people in power there. Zia dreamed of hoisting the crescent and star in Central Asian capitals. As the Soviet withdrawal got closer, Zia and the ISI made plans for the postwar settlement. During his rule Pakistan had built a nuclear bomb, and this, coupled with the Soviet defeat, had given Zia and the generals closest to him a new confidence and the feeling that they were invulnerable.
AND THEN ZIA went up in smoke. On August 17, 1988, he took five generals to the trial of a new U.S. Abrams M1/A1 tank at a military test range near Bahawalpur. Also present were a U.S. general and the U.S. ambassador, Arnold Raphael. The demonstration did not go well and everybody was grumpy. Zia offered the Americans a lift in his specially built C-130 aircraft, which had a sealed cabin to protect him from assassins. A few minutes after the plane took off, the pilots lost control and it crashed into the desert. All the passengers were killed. All that was left of Zia was his jawbone, which was duly buried in Islamabad (the nearby roundabout became known to cabbies as Jawbone Chowk). The cause of the crash remains a mystery. The U.S. National Archives contain 250 pages of documents relating to the incident, but they are still classified. Pakistani intelligence experts have informally told me that it was the Russians taking their revenge for Afghanistan or, in another variant, acting on behalf of Indian leader Rajiv Gandhi, whose mother, Indira, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, who had apparently visited the Sikh training camps in Pakistan. A remarkable version was supplied by John Gunther Dean, a senior diplomat serving as U.S. ambassador to India. According to Barbara Crossette, the New York Times South Asia bureau chief at the time:
In New Delhi in August 1988, a lot of history came together in Dean’s mind. He had an immediate suspicion about who killed Zia, but his putative perpetrator was not on the list of possible conspirators then in circulation. Dean thought the plot to rid the world of General Zia bore the hallmarks of Israel, or specifically the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.
Dean believed in “dissent through channels,” not leaks. And, knowing what a controversy such a public accusation would unleash, and the effect it would have not only in the United States and South Asia but also in the wider Islamic world, he decided to go back to Washington to explain his theory in person to his superiors at the State Department. That act cost him his diplomatic career.*
Was Dean hinting that Mossad had blown up Zia to punish him for getting a bomb? Dean never spoke again so we don’t know, but it seems unlikely. The Israelis had appreciated Zia’s role in defeating the Palestinians in Jordan. Zia had allowed a Mossad presence in Peshawar during the Afghan war. Furthermore, he often thought of Pakistan as a Muslim equivalent of Israel:
Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state. Take out Judaism from Israel and it will collapse like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state: it would collapse. For the past four years we have been trying to bring Islamic values to the country.*
Most Pakistanis, as is their wont, blamed the CIA. Zia’s son was convinced it was Murtaza Bhutto’s group, “al-Zulfiqar.” Zia’s widow would whisper it was “our own people,” meaning the army. Be
nazir Bhutto described it as “an act of God.” The only fact they could all agree on was that he was dead. The mystery remains unsolved to this day. When foreign leaders were pleading with him to spare Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s life, Zia had replied that nobody was indispensable, and “I am of the opinion that the higher you go, the harder you fall.” The “soldier of Islam” had left behind his own epitaph.
6
THE WASHINGTON QUARTET
The General as Chief Executive
WITH ZIA’S ASSASSINATION, THE SECOND PERIOD OF MILITARY rule in Pakistan came to an end. What followed was a longish civilian prologue to Musharraf’s reign, unprecedented in the country’s short history. For ten years members of two political dynasties—the Bhutto and Sharif families—ran the country in turn. This ten-year spell was an important phase in Pakistan’s history. Tragically, neither Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, nor Zia’s protégé, Nawaz Sharif, showed any ability to govern the country in interests other than their own. Clientilism, patronage, and corruption on a gigantic scale were the hallmarks of their weak regimes.
In November 1988, a thirty-five-year-old Benazir Bhutto had, much to the annoyance of the army, won the elections held a short time after Zia’s demise. Despite strong Islamist opposition, she became the country’s only woman prime minister. This had been the first real opportunity people had to show their anger at her father’s execution. Her program pledged a few reforms to help the poor, but was far removed from the world of “food, clothes, and shelter for all.” Her options were severely limited. Her enemies were embedded in the state apparatuses and she was politically weak. When I met her a few months after her triumph, she was refreshingly honest: “I can’t do anything. The army on one side and the president [Ghulam Ishaq Khan, a former bureaucrat who had supported Zia against Bhutto] on the other.” It was undoubtedly a difficult situation. My advice was to go on television and tell the people, explaining why she was virtually powerless. It was the only way to educate citizens. My other suggestion was to implement certain reforms that did not require billions. She should, at the least, attempt to set up girls’ schools all over the country and repeal the disgraceful Hudood Ordinances, pushed through by Zia, that treated women as second-class citizens and equated rape with adultery. She nodded approvingly, but nothing was done. As prime minister, Benazir could not even avenge herself on Zia’s ghost, let alone introduce a single legislative measure that mattered. The system Zia had put in place was never challenged. Most of her party hierarchy were so happy to be back in power that all they could think about was themselves. After an inconclusive twenty months in office, President Ishaq, using the enormous powers vested in him via Zia’s Eighth Amendment to the 1973 constitution, dismissed Benazir’s government in August 1990, accusing her of tolerating corruption and failing to control ethnic violence in her home province of Sind. There was little public response. In the elections that followed, Nawaz Sharif won a majority and became the new prime minister. He too fell out with the president and was dismissed from office in 1993. A former World Bank employee, Moin Qureshi, was appointed caretaker prime minister pending new elections in October 1993, which returned Benazir to power.
Meanwhile the crisis in Afghanistan continued even after the unilateral Soviet withdrawal in February 1989. The two countries had become intertwined. A leading member of the Soviet politburo, Yevgeni Primakov, had proposed a deal to stabilize Afghanistan whereby Moscow would gradually take the old Afghan leaders and cadres out of the country, leaving an intact structure for the government that followed. Pakistan rejected this sensible offer. Its foreign minister, Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, an old friend of Washington, wanted no compromise. Nor did his masters. The scent of blood was in their nostrils, and so the mujahideen factions were told to continue the war. A demoralized and defeated pro-Soviet Afghan army disintegrated rapidly, and most of the Afghan leadership ultimately fled abroad. The prime minister, Mohammad Najibullah, took refuge in the UN office. Large parts of Kabul were destroyed, after which the mujahideen groups, much to the dismay of their foreign friends, began to fight each other. Political disputes were settled with artillery. Different combinations of president and ministers were not able to restore order. There was no effective central government. Gunmen became “tax collectors” and trade came to a virtual standstill. The poppy alone remained sacrosanct.
During Benazir Bhutto’s second term in office (1993–96) her minister of the interior, General Naseerullah Babar, together with the ISI, devised a plan to set up the Taliban as a politico-military force that could take over Afghanistan, a move only halfheartedly approved by the U.S. embassy. The truth was, once the Soviet Union had withdrawn its troops, Washington had lost interest in the country.
Benazir Bhutto’s denials that her government was the main force supporting the Taliban were never convincing. In 1994, the last time I met her, she told me that all her government was doing was sending the Afghan refugees back to Afghanistan. What this gloss concealed was the heavy involvement of the ISI in the return journey. The Taliban (the word literally means “students”) were children of Afghan refugees and poor Pathan families “educated” in the madrassas in the 1980s. They provided the shock troops, but were led by a handful of experienced mujahideen including Mullah Omar. Without Pakistan’s support they could never have taken Kabul, although Mullah Omar, another fantasist, sometimes preferred to forget this reality, just as Sheikh Osama and Al Qaeda had convinced themselves that the defeat of the Russians was a jihadi victory, forgetting the key role of the infidels, without whose support the jihadis could never have won at all. Omar’s faction was dominant, but the ISI never completely lost control of the organization. Islamabad kept its cool even when Omar’s zealots asserted their independence by attacking the Pakistan embassy in Kabul in 1999 and, in the same year, his religious police interrupted a friendly soccer match between the two countries because the Pakistani players had arrived sporting long hair and shorts. Before a stunned crowd, the police caned the players, shaved their heads, and sent them back home. A return match in Islamabad was canceled.
General Hamid Gul, a staunchly pro-jihadi director general of the ISI during Benazir’s first term, whom she had unsuccessfully attempted to remove, paid her a warm tribute after her assassination in 2007:
It is not the jihadis who have killed her. She was rather protective of the jihadis in the past. Benazir was never soft on the Kashmir issue, let me tell you that. I served as the ISI director-general under her. The Taliban emerged during her second tenure in office and captured Kabul when she was still the prime minister. Her interior minister used to patronise them openly.*
Benazir Bhutto’s second government ran into serious trouble when her carefully handpicked president, Farooq Leghari, a loyal and staunch PPP stalwart, became discontented. It was an old problem: corruption in high places. Visiting Islamabad in early 1996, I found the surface calm deceptive. As I was lunching with my mother in her favorite Islamabad restaurant, a jovial, mustachioed figure came over to greet us from an adjacent table. His wife, Benazir, was abroad on a state visit. Senator Asif Zardari, state minister for investment, responsible for entertaining the children in her absence, had brought them out for a special treat. An exchange of pleasantries ensued. I asked how things were proceeding in the country. “Fine,” he replied with a charming grin. “All is well.” He should have known better.
Behind closed doors in Islamabad, a palace coup was in motion. Benazir Bhutto was about to be luxuriously betrayed. Leghari was preparing to dismiss her government after secret consultations with the army and opposition leaders. During dinner that same week, a senior civil servant, extremely fond of Benazir, was in despair. The president, he said, had sought to defuse the crisis by asking for a special meeting with the prime minister. Benazir, characteristically, turned up with her husband. This annoyed Leghari: one of the subjects he wanted to discuss with her was her husband’s legendary greed. Despite this, Leghari remained calm while attempting to convince the first couple that
not only their political enemies were demanding action. The scale of the corruption and the corresponding decay of the administration had become a national scandal. Leghari was under pressure from the army and others to move against the government. To resist them he needed her help. He pleaded with her to discipline Zardari and a number of other ministers who were out of control. Zardari, stubborn as always in defense of his material interests, taunted the president: nobody in Pakistan, he said, including Leghari, was entirely clean. The threat was obvious: you touch us and we’ll expose you.
Leghari felt the dignity of his office had been insulted. He went pale and began to tremble with anger. He suggested that the minister for investment leave the room. Benazir nodded and Zardari walked out. Leghari again entreated her to restrain her husband. She smiled and gave her president a lecture on loyalty and how much she valued it. The people who were complaining, she told him, were jealous of her husband’s business acumen. They were professional whingers, has-beens, rogues resentful at being passed over. She made no concessions. She was not convinced that the army was planning a coup.
It’s true that not every general is bursting to seize state power. General Asif Nawaz (chief of staff from 1991 to 1993) resisted the temptation despite advice to the contrary, and his sudden and unexpected death fueled the rumor mills in Islamabad. His widow and many others suspected murder.* His successor, General Wahid Kakar (1993–96) was to tell friends that the U.S. ambassador had made it clear that given the crisis, Washington would understand if firm action was taken. Kakar too remained outside politics, though the scale of corruption angered him, and on a famous occasion he is reported to have confronted Benazir Bhutto and complained about her husband’s greed.
