Magnificent Delusions (44 page)

This intelligence resulted in the two visits to Pakistan from US Presidential Envoy Vernon Walters, during which Zia assured him of being “honorable” and promising not to build a nuclear weapon. George Shultz, who had replaced Haig as secretary of state, pressed Reagan to raise the matter with Zia during his state visit in December 1982. But the US president was still content to accept Zia's word of honor and continued to maintain close relations with him because of Pakistan's centrality to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The nuclear program was not Pakistan's only clandestine activity to which the United States chose to turn a blind eye. Washington also ignored Indian accusations about Pakistan's role in fomenting rebellion among Sikhs in India's Punjab state. Soon after the beginning of America's augmented assistance program to Pakistan, a group of religious Sikhs started demanding a separate homeland, to be called Khalistan. Graffiti appeared in Delhi with the message, “The Sikhs Are a Nation.” India asserted that Pakistan's ISI was funding the Khalistan campaign.

US media reports cited Sikh separatists speaking of establishing close ties with the Jamaat-e-Islami, a Pakistani fundamentalist organization active in supporting the Afghan Mujahideen. A branch of the Jamaat was also active in Kashmir. “One day the people of Kashmir will turn to Pakistan and we will benefit,” Sikh activist Gajendra Singh was quoted as saying. “One thing is certain: the next war with Pakistan will result in a Pakistani Kashmir and a sovereign Khalistan.”
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The Sikh insurgents resorted to terrorist tactics, resulting in harsh measures from the Indian government. An official Indian report spoke of “the encouragement, connivance and assistance of certain foreign powers” in the plans to create an independent Sikh state. “In time the militant movement would have developed into a full-scale insurgency which would have crippled the armed forces in any future confrontation across the borders,” the report said. The border referred to was obviously Pakistan, the only country that shares the Punjab border with India.
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India asserted that the Sikh militants were well trained and well disciplined militarily. Their training was allegedly carried out in what were ostensibly religious camps in the Pakistani-controlled portion of Kashmir, in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and in Sikh temples across India. The report quoted a number of Sikh exiles as having said that Pakistan was a natural ally and that it had promised aid. But Pakistan denied involvement although Zia said that gun-runners could have smuggled arms into Punjab without the government's knowledge.
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The United States decided to ignore allegations of Pakistani involvement in the Sikh uprising. When Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi was killed in October 1984 by an enraged Sikh bodyguard, Washington tried to calm the ensuing India-Pakistan tensions without publicly acknowledging Pakistan's ties to Sikh militants. The Khalistan militancy would end years later, only after India initiated retaliatory terrorist strikes in Pakistani Punjab. By then twenty thousand people had been killed in India along with dozens in Pakistan. The collateral damage of the war to bleed the Soviets had spread out of Afghanistan. A Pakistan-backed insurgency in Kashmir was soon to follow.

Another casualty of the focus on Afghanistan was the human rights situation inside Pakistan. Thousands of political prisoners languished in jail, and after anti-Zia demonstrations in Sindh in 1983, more than one hundred people were sentenced to flogging in a single application of “Islamic law.” Dozens of demonstrators were killed.
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US Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger arrived in Pakistan amidst the riots, describing them an “internal problem they seem to be dealing with.” Weinberger said Pakistan occupied a “critical strategic position” against the Soviet Union. “They have a strong military,” he declared, “and we are trying to strengthen it all the more.”
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Zia had modeled the now-expanded ISI on the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi, which tried to control their citizens as part of their effort to maintain national security. The ISI had become the arbiter of Pakistani patriotism. The intelligence apparatus spied widely on Pakistani citizens, imprisoning those who disagreed with the government's policies. The media was fully controlled and was often used to build a specific national narrative. Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of the elected prime minister Zia had toppled and executed, became an internationally celebrated political prisoner before being forced into exile in London in January 1984.

In 1985 the United States completed its disbursement of the $3.2 billion aid package for Pakistan. At this point Pakistan and the administration were forced to address Congress's nuclear proliferation concerns before approving additional aid. Pakistani diplomats as well as officials in the Reagan White House supported an amendment to the Foreign Aid Bill that would help get around the restrictions of
the Symington and Glenn Amendments that forbade aid to countries with unsafeguarded nuclear programs.

Named after Senator Larry Pressler, a Republican from South Dakota, the Pressler Amendment allowed aid to flow to Pakistan as long as the US president certified on an annual basis that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device. In a letter to Zia that praised his contribution to the war against the Soviets, Reagan warned of “serious consequences” if Pakistan enriched uranium beyond 5 percent.
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The hopes expressed by Haig that US-provided advanced conventional weapons would keep Pakistan from continuing with a nuclear program had, by now, proved futile.

Within months of the Pressler Amendment's adoption the US Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Pakistan had produced an atomic weapon in October 1985 “with on sight technical assistance” from China. The US intelligence community believed that Pakistan was producing enough highly enriched uranium for at least one atomic weapon.
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But still the administration committed itself to providing $4.02 billion in aid to Pakistan over the next six years, including additional F-16 aircraft.

The White House presumed that Pakistan would hold uranium enrichment levels below 5 percent to continue qualifying for US assistance. This gave Pakistan the capability for going nuclear later but enabled the US president to certify that Pakistan did not, as of yet, possess nuclear weapons. Each year, from 1986 to 1988, Reagan signed the certificate required under the Pressler Amendment to keep the aid flowing. His successor, George H. W. Bush, did the same in 1989.

By the end of Reagan's term the CIA had spent $2 billion in aiding Afghan resistance fighters through Pakistan's ISI. The Saudis had officially matched the amount and had also provided additional support of an undisclosed amount. As the idea of an Islamic Holy War became popular, volunteers from several Arab and Muslim countries flocked to Pakistan to fight alongside the Afghans. These warriors, most of whom constituted Al-Qaeda and its associated terrorist groups after the collapse of the Soviet Union, brought in extra funding from private Saudi contributors. At one point some estimated
that these private donations to the Afghan Jihad contributed $25 million per month.
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The United States had succeeded in bleeding the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The United States had hoped to roll back what had been expanding Soviet influence in the third world, and so Afghanistan, for the United States, was just the larger of a series of covert wars—the others being fought in Nicaragua, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Angola—that were meant to punish the Soviet Union and inflict a heavy cost in men, money, and prestige. The CIA estimated that Soviet costs between 1981 and 1986 in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua amounted to about $13 billion.
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Soviet casualties in Afghanistan included 13,310 dead and 35,478 wounded.
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By contrast, the United States lost no soldiers in its proxy engagements. By 1987–1988 the Americans had achieved their objective in Afghanistan. The Soviets, now led by the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, were willing to negotiate a way out of their Afghan quagmire. But Pakistan's more expansive plans for permanent influence in Afghanistan and for extended Jihad to Kashmir were still incomplete. Under US direction Zia agreed to indirect talks in Geneva with the Soviet-installed Afghan government. But he dragged the talks so as to strengthen the hands of Mujahideen groups he wanted to see in control of Kabul later.

Zia had organized controlled parliamentary elections in 1985 and appointed a civilian prime minister whom he expected to be weak and compliant. The new prime minister, Muhammad Khan Junejo, was a conservative provincial politician who slowly extended press freedom and demanded the removal of martial law. Although Zia kept Junejo from being briefed about Afghanistan for almost a year, the prime minister insisted on reexamining Zia's assumptions about the Afghan war.
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Like many Pakistani civilians, Junejo recognized that the country could not afford the burden of three million permanent Afghan refugees; the presence of a large number of trained militants on its soil undermined the writ of the Pakistani state. Further, arms intended for the Mujahideen had seeped into Pakistani cities and towns, producing a culture of violence. Drug trafficking had exponentially
increased, as areas bordering Afghanistan were allowed to descend into lawlessness. From Junejo's perspective, Pakistan needed an international agreement leading to a Soviet withdrawal and the repatriation of Afghan refugees and militants.

Junejo also allowed Benazir Bhutto to return from exile to a rapturous welcome from millions of supporters. During her exile she had made a favorable impression on Western journalists, diplomats, and some US congressmen. Although she was careful not to criticize the United States upon her return to Pakistan, Bhutto joined Junejo in questioning the wisdom of Pakistan's Afghan policy.

Despite Zia's reservations and the ISI's objections, in April 1988 Pakistan and Afghanistan's communist government signed an agreement, with the United States and the Soviet Union as guarantors. The Geneva Accord set a timetable for the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan between May 15, 1988 and February 15, 1989. The Americans cheered what was clearly a Soviet defeat, but for Pakistan, war was far from over.

The Pakistanis had given more than two-thirds of the resources the CIA provided to Islamist groups.
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As the Soviets began to withdraw, the ISI worked in tandem with these groups to exert control over Afghanistan. “We have earned the right to have [in Kabul] a power which is very friendly toward us,” Zia told American scholar Selig Harrison. “We have taken risks as a frontline state and we will not permit a return to the prewar situation, marked by a large Indian and Soviet influence and Afghan claims on our own territory”
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Zia predicted that “The new power will be really Islamic, a part of the Islamic renaissance which, you will see, will someday extend itself to the Soviet Muslims.” But he did not live to lead Pakistan as it attempted to realize this dream. On August 17, 1988, he was killed in a mysterious plane crash along with General Rahman; the US ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel; and the chief of the US military mission to Pakistan, Brigadier General Herbert Wassom. Several other Pakistan army generals and officers were also killed.

Conspiracy theorists, later joined by one of Zia's daughters, accused the United States of eliminating Zia to preempt the Islamic renaissance he had spoken about. Once again the United States had
supported a Pakistani military dictator by providing several billion dollars in economic aid and upgrading Pakistan's military hardware. American leaders had chosen to trust Zia's word against hard intelligence about Pakistan's nuclear program. However, not only had the United States failed to influence Pakistani policies, even the followers of the dictator it supported were not willing to see America positively. Pakistan's state ideology and its perceived national interest were simply not congruent with those of the United States.

But not all American officials had been blind to the divergence in US and Pakistani interests, especially toward the end of the anticommunist Jihad in Afghanistan. After traveling through Afghanistan and Pakistan, Edmund McWilliams, a Foreign Service officer, had alerted the US government of the rising peril, noting that “Gulbeddin Hekmatyar—backed by officers in ISI's Afghan bureau, operatives from the Muslim brotherhood's Jamaat e Islami, officers from Saudi intelligence, and Arab volunteers from a dozen countries—was moving systematically to wipe out his rivals in Afghanistan” ahead of the Soviet withdrawal.
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Like Archer Blood, whose telegram documenting Pakistan army atrocities in Bangladesh had no effect on Nixon, McWilliams was ignored. The Reagan administration wanted to celebrate its triumph against the Soviets, not worry about what Pakistan might do next. McWilliams was sent back to Washington a few months later, as Afghanistan descended into civil war soon after the Soviet withdrawal.

US assistance to Pakistan was suspended in 1990 after George H.W. Bush failed to certify, as required by the Pressler Amendment, that Pakistan did not possess nuclear weapons. The collapse of the Soviet Union by 1991 significantly decreased US interest in both Afghanistan and Pakistan until the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. Ironically, the origins of those terrorist attacks could be traced to the radical Islamist groups that had been raised and trained in Pakistan with covert US funds.