Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World. Christina Lamb
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force, one of Pakistan’s main weapons being the militants it trained to infiltrate Kashmir, and he often differentiated between terrorism and jihad.
Other senior generals went much further. When Zia became army chief in 1977 he had introduced a programme of Islamisation. I interviewed him in 1988, just a few weeks before the mysterious plane crash in which he was killed, and asked him why it had been necessary to try to ‘Islamise’ a country where the overwhelming majority of the population were Muslim. ‘It’s what the people want,’ he said. ‘Education, agriculture, industrialisation – there are 101 important issues, but the fundamental issue is that this country must have the spirit of Islam.’7
Nowhere had he ensured this more than in the army. From the beginning, Pakistan’s military leaders had seen themselves as defenders of their religion and had used Islam as a rallying cry. During the 1971 civil war which culminated in the loss of Bangladesh, Pakistan’s then ruler General Yahya Khan motivated his soldiers by declaring the Mukti Bahini (the Bengali guerrillas) to be a kafir army against which the Pakistani army was waging a legitimate jihad. His army chief, General A.A.K. ‘Tiger’ Niazi, told reporters in Dhaka, ‘Remember, every Muslim soldier is worth ten Hindus.’ Ten days later the General was forced to surrender on Dhaka racecourse in front of crowds shouting anti-Pakistan slogans. The humiliating defeat had a major impact on Pakistan’s soldiers, many of whom felt that they had lost because they were not good Muslims, and Islam began to play a greater part in military training. Musharraf, who was a commando at the time, though not involved, said he ‘literally wept’.8
Under Zia, for the first time piety became a part of an officer’s evaluation. The role of the army became not just to protect the country’s geographical borders, but also its ideology as the first nation created in the name of Islam, and a particular kind of Islam. Zia changed the battle cry of the Pakistan army commandos from the Shia ‘Nara e Haidry – Ya Ali’ to the Sunni ‘Allah Hoo Allah Hoo!’ and built mosques in each garrison, appointing imams for every regiment. These were generally from the ultra-conservative Deobandi group Tableeghi Jamaat (TJ), and he encouraged soldiers and officers to spend their leave participating in its preaching missions. He was the first chief of staff to attend the huge annual gathering of TJ at Raiwind, near Lahore.
From the start Zia cultivated a close relationship with Pakistan’s largest religious party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which had considerable street power. He met the JI chief for ninety minutes the night before the hanging of Bhutto, and JI members took to the streets to celebrate Bhutto’s death.
During Zia’s tenure as army chief, the writings of JI’s founder Maulana Maudoodi, including his book Jihad in Islam, started to circulate in army-run educational institutions. Many officers began to openly express their support for JI’s ideology. In the mosques it was as if jihad became the sixth pillar of Islam, along with the belief in one god; the namaz or prayers five times a day; giving alms or zakat; roza, fasting from dawn till sunset during the month of Ramadan; and haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca which every able-bodied Muslim was supposed to do once in their lifetime. This was encouraged by the CIA as a recruiting tool for defeating the communists in Afghanistan. Ziauddin Yousafzai, whose daughter Malala would later be shot by the Taliban, was growing up in a poor, remote village in Swat in the 1980s, during Zia’s rule. He said talk of jihad was so glorified that many of his friends went across the border to fight, and he almost went too.
There were other influences at work. Several army officers posted to the Arab states around the Persian Gulf in the 1970s and 1980s came back heavily influenced by an orthodox interpretation of Islam. Zia promoted those who thought like him, and they invariably rose to occupy prominent positions in the military hierarchy. Many more officers came under religious influence as they worked directly with the Afghan mujaheddin, seeing their defeat of the Russians as a victory of Islam against an infidel superpower. It was not just a policy, but a cause they believed in.
This was reinforced when relations were cut off in 1990 and Pakistani officers had no more access to US military academies.
By 2001 those who had come through Zia’s indoctrination were in senior positions. Some of the key generals who had brought Musharraf to power while his plane was circling the skies above Karachi were committed Islamists. One to whom Musharraf was particularly beholden was General Mahmood, who had been his front-line commander in the Kargil raid. At the time of the coup Mahmood was commanding 10th Corps, the key unit stationed in Rawalpindi which moved into Islamabad to detain Nawaz Sharif and secure government buildings.
The most important people for Musharraf to win over were the nine army corps commanders, the real power in the land, each controlling as many as 60,000 men. He summoned them from all over the country for a long and heated meeting in the operations room of the Pakistani Joint Chiefs of Staff. Like General Mahmood, whom he had appointed ISI chief, some were very close to the Islamic militants they had nurtured for years, and could not believe that Musharraf would ally with the unreliable US against them. As Bob Woodward wrote in Bush at War: ‘In so many words, Powell and Armitage [were] asking Pakistan to help destroy what its intelligence service had helped create and maintain: The Taliban.’
The army which used to send many of its officers to train in the US had become virulently anti-American, furious at how Washington had cut off support once the Russians had been ousted from Afghanistan. Many of them believed the US was behind the mysterious plane crash that killed Zia in 1988 along with many senior officers.
Musharraf told his generals that Pakistan had no choice but to cooperate with the US or be declared a terrorist state, and thus also attacked. He argued that if he refused to cooperate, then the great enemy India would step in and offer its bases to the US, and Pakistan’s very existence could be threatened. The US would destroy Pakistan’s military forces and take the opportunity to destroy its nuclear weapons. The Taliban were ‘not worth committing suicide over’, he said. He cited the example of them blowing up the Buddhas to point out that ‘After they came to power we lost much of the leverage we had over them.’
As always in Pakistan, even the Buddha story had two versions. According to Mullah Zaeef, the Taliban Ambassador who accompanied the Pakistan delegation, General Haider warned Mullah Omar about the risks of continuing to shelter bin Laden. ‘I am up to 80 per cent certain that the Americans will attack you,’ he said. As Haider talked, Zaeef said, ‘Mahmood leaned towards me and whispered, “What is this silly donkey talking about?”’9
Three days after 9/11, Musharraf telephoned Colin Powell, agreeing to accept his list of seven demands. These included allowing overflights, cutting all arms and fuel shipments to the Taliban and al Qaeda, and publicly condemning the terrorist acts. Less publicly, he allowed American forces to use four airbases in Baluchistan and Sindh, supposedly just for logistics. It later emerged from US Central Command that over 50,000 combat missions were flown out of these.
However, Musharraf made it clear that he had agreed to the US demands against public sentiment, and would need to show Pakistan was getting some benefit in return. For a start, he wanted the removal of all the sanctions imposed because of the country’s nuclear programme and the coup. He also wanted the cancellation of its $3 billion debt to the US, and some F16s for his generals.
Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin went in to see him again on 15 September to seal the details. ‘Everything he promised that day he did deliver,’ she said. ‘He didn’t get everything he wanted, but nor did we. He wanted us to support their position on Kashmir – I said no. He wanted to make sure the Indian air force didn’t overfly Pakistan, which we agreed, and absolutely no US combat troops in Pakistan. He did agree the use of airbases as well as over-flight rights. He also said, “We will help take down al Qaeda and the Taliban, but if there are any Pakistani citizens involved, you can’t arrest them, we’ll do that.” It was one of the red lines.’
Within ten days of Musharraf’s agreement, and just twelve days after 9/11, Bush had waived all sanctions against Pakistan and asked Congress to reschedule old loans and agree fresh loans of more than $600 million. Japan and the EU followed suit. Over