Magnificent Delusions (42 page)

As an elder statesman who had also advised Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, Clifford was much admired in India. In Delhi he offered India cutting-edge military equipment to offset the impact of US supplies to Pakistan. But the wisdom of this attempt to win over both Pakistan and India with inducements comprising military
hardware was questionable. All it did was reinforce Pakistan's belief that it could militarily beat India with the right weapons as it also offered India some equipment to match the weapons provided to Pakistan.

“It is hard to watch Zbigniew Brzezinski and Clark Clifford tracking over South Asia,” observed the
Washington Post
, “the one sewing up the details of a substantial military and economic package to Pakistan, the other offering a new arms package including sophisticated guidance systems and smart bombs to India—without feeling a little warning buzz of unease.”
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This article thus voiced fears that the United States would be repeating the mistake of military supplies policy that led to both Pakistan and India using American weapons in their earlier wars.

The problem for the United States was that it wanted to get involved in Afghanistan, but there was no way of bypassing Pakistan to do so. In a brief for members of Congress, the Congressional Research Service summarized the American dilemma. “U.S. options for influencing events in Afghanistan,” it said, “are limited to providing direct or indirect assistance to the Afghan guerrilla forces and refugees and to support the regime of President Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan.” In both cases the options required working through the Pakistani government “since that country is the only haven of the Afghan insurgents to which U.S. has access.”
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The Carter administration also tried hard to balance concerns over nonproliferation with the opening for calibrated confrontation that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan presented. “The administration plans to seek urgent congressional approval for a substantial amount of economic and security assistance to Pakistan over the next 18 months,” the State Department informed American embassies in several European capitals. But it emphasized that US global nonproliferation policy remained unchanged.

The Symington and Glenn Amendments would remain in place, and the United States would “continue to press the Pakistanis” on the issue of nuclear proliferation. But instead of coercive measures, the United States would focus on persuasion. The United States thought that it was “in Pakistan's own best interest to abandon its
nuclear enrichment and processing programs and other sensitive nuclear activities.”
⁷⁴
If someone in the US government had a blueprint of how they would convince Pakistanis to give up on what they considered their national interest, they did not put it in writing.

Brzezinski led an American team to Pakistan to persuade Zia that he should accept the US offer, which could increase once Carter had won reelection in November 1980. The
New York Times
quipped that Brzezinski told Zia that “$400 million in aid was hardly ‘peanuts'—and that a certain Georgia farmer would always know how to raise more.”

However, the White House had not yet considered where China came in and had ignored the possibility of a fourth war between India and Pakistan. With or without a Soviet involvement, would Americans have to defend Pakistan? “What if Pakistani bungling and Soviet meddling stir rebellion in Baluchistan, near the Persian Gulf?” the
New York Times
queried. “Can Gen Zia hold the loyalty of his peoples? Could Americans help him? Should they?” Pronouncements about arming Afghan insurgents and building Pakistan's military reflected a mood, the
Times
editorial declared, but until these questions were answered, it was not yet a policy.
⁷⁵

Zia announced at a press conference that the US offer of aid was inadequate and Pakistan would not be able to accept it unless its quantum was increased significantly. In separate editorials the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
both suggested that Pakistan's refusal of the American offer of aid might have been a good thing. The
Post
argued that Pakistan was not the place where the United States should “draw a line” against further Soviet adventures. In its view the “Zia regime would have taken fresh American arms and used them first against the very non-Punjabi minorities that it needs to conciliate in order to strengthen and legitimize its rule.” The paper hoped that Zia's rejection of the quantum of aid would prevent “unwise and irreversible policy choices” being made.
⁷⁶

The
Times
pointed out that $400 million could not be described as “peanuts.” Pakistan, it said, was using the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to advance “more grandiose ambitions.” The country was “seeking instant, massive and unconditional military help on a scale
that would have served no American interest.” In the paper's opinion, “no amount of American military assistance (remember Iran) could really have secured the Zia regime from the internal insurgencies of disaffected ethnic minorities.”
⁷⁷

The Carter administration and the US media were both unaware that Zia had turned down the aid package based on a careful forecast of the American election's outcome. Carter was facing a primary challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy, the US economy was torpid, and the hostage crisis in Iran was dragging on, with no end in sight—Carter would probably not win reelection. Zia's friends in Saudi Arabia as well as in the United States advised him that the likely Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, would be more likely to support Pakistan's plans in Afghanistan than would the embattled Carter administration.

Historically, Pakistan had never turned down American aid, even when it was meager compared with the country's request. The Pakistani pattern had been to accept what was offered while continuing to ask for more. Zia was now treading new ground. In the hope of a better deal down the line, Pakistani officials told reporters that they were waiting to find out what Saudi Arabia would offer them before accepting the US offer. The Pakistanis had in mind a military and economic package from Washington of $2 billion annually over a five-year period—a total amount of $ 10 billion.
⁷⁸

Amidst the haggling over the size of an aid package for Pakistan, the CIA director received warning that the Pakistanis were interpreting US willingness to resume aid as acceptance of their nuclear program. The CIA's Nuclear Proliferation Intelligence section observed that the “Pakistani resolve to move ahead with its nuclear program” had been reinforced.
⁷⁹

By the time the US presidential primaries concluded, Zia had made up his mind: he would wait until after the US elections before concluding an aid deal with the United States. The likelihood of Ronald Reagan becoming president appeared much greater, so instead of negotiating with a lame-duck administration, Zia would spend the rest of the year approaching conservative anticommunists in the United States.

Zia's plan was to portray the Afghan Mujahideen as a primitive, tribal David challenging the Soviet Goliath in a remote part of Central Asia. By the time the new American president was in office, he reasoned, there would be sufficient momentum for the idea of supporting a Holy War in Afghanistan. In addition to inviting almost every American and British journalist known for his anticommunist credentials, Zia also reached out to retired military officers, businessmen, and socialites with political connections.

Among the people Zia invited to visit Pakistan and meet the Mujahideen was Texas socialite Joanne Herring, whose second husband, Robert Herring, was chairman of the Houston Natural Gas (HNG) Company. HNG, which later emerged as Enron, had business interests in the greater Middle East, and Robert was offered the position of Pakistan's honorary consul in Houston. He, in turn, proposed that Joanne simultaneously hold the title of honorary consul for Morocco and Pakistan.

The Herrings were politically well connected, though Joanne was known more for glamour than for political wisdom. In her memoir, written years later, she spoke of Pakistan as an Arab nation, demonstrating that she knew little about the country she represented as honorary consul. But she was devoutly anticommunist and knew many influential people who shared her beliefs. Zia knew that, and so he showered her with hospitality in order to use her connections.

Zia wanted the Afghan Mujahideen to become heroes to American anticommunists. On his suggestion, Joanne brought along her photographer son, Robin King, and adventurer and moviemaker Charles Fawcett to Pakistan. Their joint effort, facilitated by Pakistan's information ministry and army public relations, resulted in a documentary film about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the brave men resisting it.
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Herring showed the film
Courage Is Our Weapon
at parties and in salons upon her return to the United States. Those who viewed it included donors to conservative causes, Republican public officials, and several individuals who could be expected to hold senior appointed positions in a Republican administration.

By the time of the US presidential election in November 1980, Zia had succeeded in creating the image of the Mujahideen as simple, honorable peasant soldiers resisting communist occupation of their homeland. The obscurantism of Afghan resistance leaders remained well hidden, as did the regional political motives of their Pakistani sponsors. For example, long before the Soviet invasion Mujahideen leader Gulbeddin Hekmatyar was known in Kabul for throwing acid on women who did not cover their faces. Now Americans such as Herring viewed him with the romance that Western leftists once felt for Ho Chi Minh or Che Guevara.

W
ITH RONALD REAGAN'S
inauguration as the fortieth president of the United States, Zia came close to fulfilling his desire to secure Pakistan's interests in Afghanistan with American help. The new administration was eager to implement Brzezinski's advice that the United States would have to take several actions to convert Afghanistan into a quagmire for the Soviets similar to the one the Americans were sucked into in Vietnam.

“From the outset,” explained Robert Gates, who was then the CIA's deputy director, “the Reagan administration targeted covert action, foreign assistance, diplomacy and even direct military intervention on Third World battlegrounds in opposition to the Soviets, Cubans, Libyans—and anyone else perceived to be a surrogate of the Soviet Union.”
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Afghanistan was a particularly attractive battleground because the Soviets—and not their surrogates—were directly in the battlefield.

Understanding the US objective, Zia realized his position of strength in bargaining with the Americans. Some US assistance was already trickling in for the Mujahideen, but Zia said that Pakistan was “not ready to serve as a conduit for the supply of arms to the Afghan freedom fighters.”
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In doing so he wanted to make sure that the terms of engagement as well as full operational control of the Jihad stayed in Pakistan's hands.

Some Americans outside the administration could see what he was doing. Zia, said a
Washington Post
editorial, was “plainly ready to trade on the country's strategic utility” for the United States so as “to acquire the aid and arms necessary to protect his country and to keep himself in power.” It advised caution “in broadening American commitment to a regime that is at once uncertain and necessarily fixed on its own agenda.”
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But the new US secretary of state, Alexander Haig, dismissed these concerns. He underscored the Reagan administration's “determination to stop Soviet expansionism” and told a Pakistani delegation of the administration's commitment “to being supportive of Pakistan.”
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In Haig the Pakistanis had found their new Dulles. In a message to all US embassies titled “U.S. Policy towards Pakistan,” Haig declared that “Pakistan's security is inextricably linked to our own security and to that of industrialized democracies, primarily because of Western and Japanese dependence on Persian Gulf oil.” The United States, he said, had “concluded that a stronger, more self-confident Pakistan” was “essential for the enhanced deterrence to Soviet expansionism which we seek.”
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Like Dulles, Haig also expressed admiration for Pakistan's “large well-trained armed forces and its good Islamic credentials.”
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He also reasoned subsequently that Pakistan's sense of insecurity motivated its quest for nuclear weapons. If the United States helped Pakistan feel secure, there would be no reason for Pakistan to continue seeking a nuclear deterrent, he argued.