Magnificent Delusions (38 page)

“Pakistan is in the advanced stage of a nuclear weapons program,” Shultz's briefing paper highlighted. The United States had tried to block Pakistan's nuclear program by building a new security relationship, including a significant aid package, hoping this would reduce
the “underlying incentive for acquisition of nuclear weapons.” But Pakistan's nuclear program was motivated in large part by fear of India, and the United States was unwilling to provide a security guarantee against India.

Shultz told Reagan that there was “overwhelming evidence that Zia has been breaking his assurances to us. We are absolutely confident that our intelligence is genuine and accurate.” He also shared the intelligence community's belief that, if forced to choose between US aid and a nuclear weapons capability, Zia would opt for the latter. “Zia could well believe that we will never pose that choice for him,” Shultz observed.
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When they met on December 7, 1982, Reagan mentioned the nuclear question to Zia but did not give it a higher priority than Pakistan's role as a frontline state in confronting the Soviet Union. After meeting Zia, Reagan wrote in his diary for that Tuesday: “The weather turned out fine for the official greeting ceremony for Pres. Zia of Pakistan. We got along fine. He's a good man (cavalry). Gave me his word they were not building an atomic or nuclear bomb. He's dedicated to helping the Afghans & stopping the Soviets.”
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P
AKISTAN'S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS
were already an issue in relations with the United States when Zia toppled Bhutto in July 1977. The deal to buy no A-7 fighter bombers was its first casualty. After the Ford administration allowed cash sales of US weapons, the Pakistanis scrambled to get funding from the Saudis for the A-7s. But within a few months of coming to office—and at the height of anti-Bhutto protests—the Carter administration suspended the deal. The decision was linked to Pakistan's contract for the purchase of a nuclear reprocessing plant from France.
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Carter was also uncomfortable with Zia's status as a military ruler. To establish a firm grip on power, Zia had introduced public lashings, calling them an Islamic practice. Dissident journalists were among those lashed in public stadiums, and the lashings were shown on television. As Bhutto's trial dragged on, Zia arrested thousands of
his supporters in order to prevent a backlash to the former prime minister's eventual execution. Carter, with his concern for human rights, could not ignore Zia's conduct at home. When he visited India in January 1978 he refused to add even a stopover in Pakistan.

Just two days before Zia's coup Arthur Hummel had presented his credentials as the new US ambassador to Pakistan. Hummel was a career diplomat who knew Chinese, having been born to missionary parents in China. His posting in Pakistan was probably linked to the country's role in the evolving US-Chinese entente. He had served as ambassador to Burma, but this was hardly enough to prepare him for the issues he faced in Pakistan. After four years in Islamabad Hummel then served as ambassador in Beijing.

Hummel's arrival in Pakistan had coincided with Bhutto's removal from power and Zia's military takeover. For Pakistani conspiracy theorists, the new ambassador was the hatchet man sent to enforce Washington's writ on an out-of-control ally. But the Carter administration had set a different mission for Hummel: he was to ensure that Pakistan did not go forward with obtaining the nuclear reprocessing plant. The French had informed the Americans that if they backed out of the deal, Pakistan would simply go ahead with building a plant on its own, or Pakistan could also look for some other collaborator. So Hummel spent the entire first year as ambassador building ties with Zia and his close advisers.

Almost nine months later he told the secretary of state about his efforts to dissuade Pakistan from pursuing nuclear weapons. “We are not simply trying to make nuclear weapons production more difficult for Pakistan,” he wrote. “We are attempting to deny them the option.” He said he wanted to forestall the Zia regime from announcing that it would “go it alone” because that would tie everyone's hands. Hummel also wanted to avoid “promising, even implicitly, more than we know we can deliver” and did not want assistance and aid to be treated as more valuable bargaining chips than they really were.
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It was a tall order, but Hummel felt he had an obligation to give it a try.

Hummel soon found out that getting a public commitment from Pakistan that it would abandon nuclear ambitions was not easy. Pak
istan's establishment had embraced the belief that nuclear weapons were “the only guarantee of Pakistan's national survival in the face of both an inveterately hostile India that cannot be deterred conventionally and unreliable external allies that fail to deliver in extremis.”
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Any public avowal by a Pakistani administration that it would forego the nuclear option would invite charges that it was selling out national interest.

Agha Shahi, the new foreign minister, explained the situation to Hummel, stating, “No government of Pakistan could give even private assurance not to engage in reprocessing and still survive in face of public opinion.”
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Bhutto had claimed that the CIA destabilized his government for trying to secure Pakistan's nuclear future. Thus, giving up reprocessing so soon after the coup would paint the new government as an American lackey. Shahi characterized American requests for private assurance as “impinging on the sovereignty of Pakistan.”

While Zia and his officials avoided making commitments on the subject, they engaged with Hummel in a manner that raised his hopes. Because of this, he advised Washington to keep the discussion of the nuclear question quiet. But Zia broke the silence himself. In an interview he told a Saudi newspaper that no Muslim country had nuclear arms. “If Pakistan possesses such a weapon it would reinforce the power of the Muslim world,” Zia was quoted as saying.

Hummel had been convinced that Zia wanted good relations with the United States and was willing to settle disagreements outside of the public view. As such, he conveyed to the State Department that he saw Zia's interview as a “gaffe” and requested that the US government not “publicize Zia's gaffe at this point. To do so could measurably complicate Zia's already difficult domestic position.”
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Contrary to the ambassador's assertion, however, Zia's statement was not a gaffe. Soon Zia made a similar statement in an interview with Bernard Nossiter of the
Washington Post
. “The West has got it,” Zia said about nuclear technology. “In the East, Russians have got it. The Chinese have got it. The Indians have got it. The Jews have got it. Then, why should Pakistan, which is considered part of the
Muslim world, be deprived of this technology particularly when we are a developing country and are very short of energy resources.”
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Although he avoided using the term “weapons,” it was clear what he meant.

Hummel also bought into Zia's version of events when media reports suggested that Pakistan was supporting opposition groups from Afghanistan. After the BBC reported that an eight-party joint front had been created in Pakistan's northwest city of Peshawar in order to oppose the leftist government that had taken power in Afghanistan, Hummel told Washington that he did not see the Pakistan government's hand in “sponsoring such a group at this time or even permitting it to operate on Pakistan soil.”
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The US ambassador saw Pakistan's policy toward the Afghan regime as similar to America's—“one of watchful waiting.” In his view “Pakistan would have nothing to gain from such a provocation.” But later events would prove that the BBC report was accurate. Pakistan had indeed been supporting the Afghan opposition, in effect provoking the Soviet Union. Once the Soviets got directly involved, the United States would have no choice but to synchronize Afghan policy with Pakistan. By buying into Zia's story, Hummel and his team failed to anticipate the emerging sequence of events in Afghanistan.

By the end of August 1978 US pressure had resulted in France halting the Pakistani reprocessing plant project. Once Zia announced that France had backed out of the agreement, the United States announced that it would resume aid. The administration had already asked Congress to approve $69 million in development aid to Pakistan for the 1979 fiscal year in addition to $53.4 million in food aid.
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Around this same time Zia accelerated Pakistan's role in Afghanistan. The Afghan president, Mohammad Daoud, had been an ardent supporter of the demand for Pashtunistan. Although India publicly did not support the Afghan claim, Pakistan had always voiced fear of an Afghan-Indian “pincer movement” intended to undo Pakistan.
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Pashtun nationalist leaders were periodically cast as traitors, most recently after Bhutto dismissed the elected government of Balochistan.
Daoud's overthrow of the king had come within months of Bhutto's action to consolidate central Pakistani rule over the “Pashtunistan” territories.

Although Daoud was a member of the erstwhile royal family and had conservative instincts, he had ended up in alliance with the relatively small Afghan communist party, the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Pakistan's alliance with the United States had resulted in only limited American aid making its way to Afghanistan. As prime minister under the king from 1953 to 1964, Daoud had sought more resources to modernize Afghanistan and develop its infrastructure. When the United States held back, he turned to the Soviet Union. By the time Daoud seized complete power, Soviet aid amounted to more than three times that of the United States. By 1978 several thousand Soviet engineers, machinery operators, and other technical specialists worked at different levels in Afghanistan, along with some military advisers.
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But the search for economic benefits was only one factor in Daoud's foreign policy. He also hoped to become actively engaged on behalf of Pakistan's Baloch and Pashtun in an effort to force Pakistan's hand in reopening discussion about the Durand Line, the British-drawn border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Bhutto had wanted to settle the matter. Talks were initiated with Daoud through the Shah of Iran, but Bhutto's removal from power brought that process to an end.

Pakistan's concerns about India had always overshadowed its worries over Afghanistan. But ensuring loyalty of its Baloch and Pashtun citizens and fending off any questions about the Durand Line had also been important. After discovering arms in the Iraqi embassy, Bhutto had started a small war in Balochistan that lasted four years and was aimed at rooting out Baloch secessionism. That counterinsurgency operation along the Afghan border had resulted in the death of thirty-three hundred Pakistan soldiers and fifty-three hundred Baloch.
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After taking power Zia expanded the insurgency Pakistan had prepared against Afghanistan during Bhutto's rule. The Soviets also started preparations for the power struggle that many expected would follow the elderly Daoud's death.
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Pakistan's allies or instruments of influence in this game of intrigue were Afghan Islamists. Religious sentiment had always been strong in Afghanistan. Once Afghanistan introduced an elected Parliament in the 1960s, small Islamist factions emerged, seeking the creation of an Islamic state based on Sharia law. These factions coalesced into Jamiat-e-Islami Afghanistan (Islamic Society of Afghanistan) by 1972, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, a professor of theology at Kabul University. Pakistan gave refuge to Rabbani the next year.

Soon after Rabbani's arrival in Peshawar in 1973, the ISI provided him support. Some of his associates, such as Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and Ahmed Shah Massoud, were given military training. Pakistan was already running a low-level insurgency to expand its influence in Afghanistan when, on April 28, 1978, the PDPA's military cadres killed Daoud and, in a military coup, took power. Pakistan recognized the new regime and maintained diplomatic relations as it also accelerated the Islamist insurgency and started seeking US support for its Afghan project.

In Zia's calculation it was only a matter of time before Pakistan's Islamist protégés became more than a mere nuisance in Afghanistan. As the PDPA regime implemented radical social and economic policies, resentment against the new order in Kabul spread through the Afghan countryside. When land reform limited land holding to five acres, a large number of Afghan landowners became enemies of the regime. The PDPA also tried to change by decree conservative social norms, such as those relating to the treatment of women. It was also less respectful toward clerics and traditional tribal leaders.