The Duel (32 page)

“When I reported the military request, the ministers were initially very excited and many of them were prepared to go along with it. When the meeting began, I was alone. When it ended, I had a unanimous vote for an immediate cease-fire. I tell you this to show you that in India too generals can be very irrational. In Pakistan they run the country.”

I repeated what I had said earlier, and discussion on this subject ended. She then told me that the Israelis had offered to carry out a lightning strike against Pakistan’s nuclear reactor provided they could use an Indian air force base. “I turned down this offer. I told them we can do it ourselves if we wanted.”

Our conversation concluded with her talking about Bhutto and his visit to Simla to sign the peace treaty after the war in Bangladesh and how nervous he had been. She asked after his children and asked me to convey her warm regards to Benazir.

“You know, I was in prison myself when they hanged Bhutto. It upset me a great deal. Had I been prime minister, I would not have let it happen.” Mrs. Gandhi seemed very sure on this front.

The next day I was invited to an “off-the-record” discussion at the India International Centre, where I was staying with twenty or so people, mainly civil servants, intelligence officials, journalists representing the Soviet and American lobbies, etc. “We hear you had a very interesting discussion with our prime minister yesterday,” said the chair. “That’s what we want to discuss.” For two hours they tried to convince me that I was wrong and that Pakistan was preparing a strike in Kashmir. I remained patient, explaining at great length why this was impossible given the Afghan involvement and given that General Zia was extremely unpopular in the Sind, Baluchistan, parts of the Frontier, and sections of the Punjab. Zia could not afford any crazy war that he would lose. That is why he was desperate at the moment for some form of rapprochement and kept turning up in India uninvited on the pretext of watching cricket matches. Most of the spooks present were not convinced, and finally I told them that if India wanted a preemptive strike against Pakistan, I couldn’t stop them, but they should think up a better excuse since nobody in the world would believe India had been attacked first.

This story has an amusing footnote. Back in London several months later, I described this conversation to Benazir Bhutto. She listened carefully, then asked, “But why did you tell them that our generals weren’t preparing an attack?” At that moment she reminded me most of her father. She too thought the best way to break the military’s grip on politics was by helping them to be defeated in a war.

I recalled my Delhi conversations most vividly when I heard that Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards in October 1984. It later emerged that one of them had visited Sikh training camps in Pakistan. For though no frontal assault was being prepared, the desire for revenge among sections of the military never evaporated. Mrs. Gandhi’s internal problems with the Sikh community were of her own making, and Pakistan took advantage of Sikh discontent by training Sikh terrorists. Could it be that the CIA and the DIA had obtained information from their agents inside the Indian establishment suggesting that the Indians were seriously considering a “preemptive strike” against Pakistan? This would certainly have destabilized the entire Afghan operation, not to mention the military dictatorship in Pakistan.
A high-powered secret decision might have made Washington get rid of the Indian prime minister using Sikh hitmen trained in Pakistan. That certainly was the view of senior civil servants in New Delhi, who told me that the internal report submitted to the new prime minister linked Pakistan to the assassins and had not been made public for fear of creating a new war fever.

Further evidence in this vein was offered to me on a trip to Pakistan in 2006. On the flight back to London I encountered an old acquaintance. I had first spotted him in the departure lounge at the airport, surrounded by uniformed policemen as I waited to board the PIA flight. He took a seat not far from me in the business class, which was virtually empty. I was buried in a novel when he came and stood near my seat. We exchanged salaams.

“Recognize me?” he asked.

“Forgive me,” I replied, “I . . .”

“I never forgave you when you were young. Why should I now? Look at me closely and try again.”

I did as he asked. Slowly a picture formed of a pimply teenager who many decades ago used to hang out with my gang of friends during the delightful summer months we spent in the Himalayan foothills in Nathiagali. I remembered his mother first as cooking the best semolina
halwa
in the country, and that helped recall his name. He roared with delight.

“What do you do these days?” I asked him.

“You’re going to kill me.”

“Try me.”

“I was a senior security officer for Bhutto and later Zia.”

“You served both.”

“It was my job.”

I sighed in despair. “And after that?”

He was now an even more senior intelligence officer, on his way to a European conference to discuss better ways of combatting terrorism.

“Is OBL still alive?”

He didn’t reply.

“When you don’t reply, I’ll assume the answer is yes.”

I asked the question again. He didn’t reply.

“Do you know where he is?”

He burst out laughing. “I don’t, and even if I did, do you think I’d tell you?”

“No, but I thought I’d ask anyway. Does anyone know where he is?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

I insisted, “Nothing in our wonderful country is ever a secret. Someone must know.”

“Three people know. Possibly four. You can guess who they are.”

I could. “And Washington?”

“They don’t want him alive?”

“And your boys can’t kill him.”

“Listen, friend, why should we kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?”

As long as Osama was alive, the official seemed to be saying, the flow of dollars would never stop. It sounded credible, but was it true? I shifted the conversation to another subject. Why had General Zia’s assassination never been properly investigated? He shrugged his shoulders, saying Washington wasn’t keen to dig any deeper. His own view was that the Russians were responsible. This is not an uncommon view among sections of Pakistani intelligence. For most of them the explanation is linked to Afghanistan: it was revenge by Moscow. I think this is pure fantasy. What my informant suggested was more original and contained a sting in the tail. According to him, the Russians owed the Indians a favor (he didn’t explain why), and Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (Indira’s son) had asked for Zia’s head.

“Why?” I inquired in as innocent a tone as I could muster.

“In return for his mother’s death.”

This was the only semiofficial confirmation I ever received from the Pakistani side regarding Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination.

All this is in the past. The current obsession is with the nuclear status of both countries, which could, it is feared, lead to a wipeout of large parts of the subcontinent. The assessment of a “jihadi threat” to Pakistan’s nuclear facilities is particularly virulent and not simply on the blogosphere. Otherwise intelligent people are making regular statements that border on hysteria. The following three samples are representative of this overreaction, and numerous others are even less
restrained. Matthew Bunn of the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard has said:

If you can have over forty heavily armed terrorists show up in the middle of Moscow and seize a theatre. How many might show up at some remote Pakistani nuclear weapon storage facility? This is a country that has you know substantial armed remnants of Al Qaeda still operating in the country, that are able to hold off big chunks of the Pakistani regular army and the frontier provinces for weeks at a time. If a huge Al Qaeda force arrives at one of these nuclear weapon storage facilities, what do the guards do? Do they fight, do they help? This strikes me as a very open question.

Art Brown, former CIA operations director, Asia, regards Musharraf as a vital asset without whom there might be serious trouble:

I think that if Musharraf is removed from office, particularly if he is assassinated and there is a power grab, I think the control over the Pakistani nuclear program would obviously be a concern. We would be concerned over any government that had that kind of a program and lost its leader in a bloody coup. The laboratories themselves are probably less of a concern just because it would take longer to do something with those materials in the laboratories, take them out and sell them. We might be able to intercept that at some point, but the ready-made nuclear weapons that are sitting there in the Pakistani arsenal, those indeed could go out somebody’s door and appear in our opponents’ box overnight.

Robert Joseph, from the Arms Control section of the U.S. State Department, is equally worried:

What concerns me the most is that a terrorist has to be successful only one time in terms of acquiring the material and acquiring the nuclear device and detonating that device on an American city or a city anywhere in the world. So what we need to do is have a comprehensive approach for dealing with that threat. We are emphasizing
two key elements. One of course is prevention. So that we deny the terrorist access to fissile material or other weapons of mass destruction of related materials. We also need to put in place, and we are working hard, the protection capabilities, the ability to detect the transfer of this type of material for example. As well as to interdict this material.

Add to this the views of the nuclear historian Scott Sagan in his book and a new dimension emerges:

Pakistan is clearly the most serious concern in the short run. Pakistani weapons lack the advanced Permissive Actions Link (PALS) locks that make it difficult for a terrorist or other unauthorized individual to use a stolen nuclear weapon. In June 2001, Pakistani officials also acknowledged that there were no specialized Pakistani teams trained on how to seize or dismantle a nuclear weapon if one was stolen. No dedicated personnel reliability program (PRP) was in place to ensure the psychological stability and reliability of the officers and guards of Pakistan’s nuclear forces. Instead, Pakistani soldiers and scientists with nuclear responsibilities were reviewed and approved for duty if they were not suspected of being Indian agents by the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

This is what partially explains U.S. support for Pakistan’s military leadership at the expense of democracy and democratic institutions. If we take each argument in turn, what is being said is either risible or applies to Israel and India as well. What if forty heavily armed ultra-right Jewish settlers tried to seize Israeli weapons of mass destruction? Or a small group of hard-core Hindu fundamentalists attempted the same in India? As in Pakistan, they would be apprehended and dealt with. None of these countries has a security force known for its softness to dissidents of any variety. As for “substantial armed remnants” of Al Qaeda, cited by Matthew Bunn, most intelligence reports put their number at well below five hundred. The Pakistan army is currently half a million strong.

And if Musharraf resigns or is removed from the presidency, the
military high command would not be affected in the slightest. They would continue to control the security of the nuclear facilities. As for the acquisition of nuclear weapons by “a terrorist,” this was much more likely in Russia under Yeltsin than in Pakistan today. After all, much of the fissile material obtained by Pakistan came from Western Europe. Sagan’s points are far more relevant, but since he wrote his book in 2003, all the measures whose absence he noted, according to Pakistan’s military security experts, are now in place, and the United States is aware of this. The loopholes that existed in terms of selling nuclear technology to friendly states have long since been sealed.

As I have suggested elsewhere in this book, the only way any jihadi groups could penetrate the nuclear facilities would be if the army wanted them to. This is virtually excluded as long as the military does not split, though the possibility of a rupture in the armed forces would be real if the United States insisted on expanding the Afghan war by occupying parts of Pakistan or systematically bombing Pashtun villages suspected of harboring “terrorists.” Continuous U.S. pressure on Pakistan’s stance toward Israel is also linked to the country’s nuclear status. Pakistani officials are told that were they to recognize Israel, some of the pressure on the nuclear issue would dissipate.

Early in March 2008, Shireen Mazari, director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies, revealed that Washington had sent Pakistan a list of eleven demands. These included providing U.S. military and auxiliary staff the right to enter and leave the country without visa restrictions, to carry arms and wear uniforms throughout Pakistan; only U.S. jurisdiction would apply to U.S. nationals, as in Japan. They would also be free to import and export anything, as they currently can in Iraq. In addition to this they wanted free movement of all vehicles and aircraft and total immunity from all claims for damage of property or personnel. The demands were rejected. Mazari concluded her report with the following advice:

So, for those who feel there is bonhomie and complete understanding between the Pakistan military and the US military, and the trouble only exists at the political level, it is time to do a serious rethink. The first step in dealing rationally with our indigenous terrorist
problem holistically and credibly is to create space between ourselves and the US. As the US adage goes: “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
*

Two months later, Dr. Mazari was unceremoniously sacked from her job by the Foreign Office and given fifteen minutes to vacate her office. She was even more angered by a call from Husain Haqqani, ambassador designate to Washington, who arrived with a bouquet of flowers to bid her farewell and apologize for the manner of her dismissal. Mazari was blunt in her response. “I know my independent views have upset the U.S. lobby in Pakistan which dominates the PPP. That’s why I have been sacked.”