October 1999 was a decisive date for Pakistan. The army seized power, ousting the elected prime minister Nawaz Sharif and abruptly changing the balance of political forces. For the first time militant Islamic groups with close ties to Afghanistan-based Osama Bin Laden acquired a veto over Pakistani foreign and defence policy. The new regime in Islamabad put forward a moderate, pro-American front man, General Pervez Musharraf. But from the start he was beholden to a clique of hard-line nationalist generals who have been building, for more than a decade, a close network of militant Islamic groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan to lead efforts to destabilise India.
The real power in Islamabad is General Muhammad Aziz, who played a key role in the 1999 coup as deputy army chief of staff under Musharraf, and has now been promoted to corps commander in Lahore. Musharraf is an Urdu-speaking refugee from India with no indigenous base in Pakistan. General Aziz speaks Punjabi, the language of Pakistan's dominant Punjab province, and is a leader of the Sudhan clan, a tight brotherhood of 75,000, with a strong martial and religious tradition, in command of the Poonch district of the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir.
Aziz, with his roots in Kashmir and a long record of military service there, masterminded the invasion of the Kargil area on the Indian side of the Kashmir cease-fire line early in 1999 (1). During and after the Afghan war, he directed Pakistani intelligence activities in Afghanistan, setting up the training camps for two key groups in the network of militant Islamic organisations spanning the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The most important was Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is primarily Pakistani in membership but has a substantial component of Afghans, who are, in effect, part of the Taliban secret police, helping to crush opponents of the TaIiban. Another was Harekat-ul-Ansar, the group responsible for the hijacking of an Indian airliner in January 2000. The United States designated the Harekat a terrorist organisation in 1997 and attacked its Afghan camps as part of the US 1998 cruise missile assault against Bin Laden's infrastructure in reprisal for attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The origins of the hard line now dominant in Pakistan's armed forces date back to the Bangladesh freedom movement and India's military support for its secession in 1971. Pakistan's humiliating defeat then was a turning point in the history of its army. A new generation of officers has since grown up nursing a bitter determination to get even with India. This has coincided with the transition from a Sandhurst-educated generation of cosmopolitan, elitist officers epitomised by the late president Ayub Khan (1958-71), to a new generation of more insular officers with rural and middle class roots. Many of this new generation have been receptive to the religious appeals made by Islamic groups, which suddenly expanded with the official encouragement of the Zia ul Haq regime (1977-88) during the Afghan war.
Zia deliberately created a powerful group of like-minded officers, centred in the intelligence agencies, driven by an ideology that mixed anti-Indian nationalism with messianic Islam. In a conversation with Zia on 29 June 1988, six weeks before his death, he told me that his goal was a strategic realignment in South Asia. Pakistan needed a satellite state in Kabul, he said, so that its western front would be secure and it could face India without worrying about the possibility of a pro-India Afghanistan. And Pakistan was destined to lead a pan-Islamic confederation.
"You Americans wanted us to be a front-line state," Zia said. "By helping you we have earned the right to have a regime to our liking in Afghanistan. We took risks as a front line state and we won't permit it to be like it was before - with Indian and Soviet influence and claims on our territory. It will be a real Islamic state, a real Islamic confederation, part of a pan-Islamic revival that will one day win over the Muslims in the Soviet Union. We won't have passports between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Who knows, perhaps Tajikistan and Uzbekistan may join, maybe some day even Iran and Turkey."
The current rise of militant Islam in South Asia is a legacy of the uncritical support given by the US during the Afghan war to Zia and his Interservices Intelligence Directorate (ISI). The Reagan administration had one myopic objective after the Russians blundered into Afghanistan: make it hot for them and tie them down there to relieve Soviet pressure elsewhere. The US made the historic mistake of letting Pakistan decide which groups in the Afghan resistance got the $3bn that the US and its friends poured in. Most of it went to militant Islamic groups that represented a minority of Afghans, but were favoured by the ISI.
Another CIA mistake was encouraging Islamic militants from all over the world to come to Afghanistan to join the jihad. Afghanistan became a base for Bin Laden and a wide variety of kindred groups during the late 1980s, while the war was still on; and the flow of jihadis from other parts of the Islamic world intensified after the Russians left. This was actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA. I often talked with American diplomats and CIA people involved and warned them that the US was creating a monster. They said that the more militant the jihadis were, the more fanatically they would fight against the Russians. Many of the former ISI generals, who are leading players in today's recycled military regime, became key actors in the military regime that took power in 1999.
The ISI channelled aid to Islamic militants even though they had much less indigenous strength than moderate Afghan elements based among the Pashtun tribes (2). Pakistan feared that, after the war, the Pashtun majority in Afghanistan might revive its claim to the Pashtun Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan, which was conquered by the British Raj and handed over to Pakistan when it was created in 1947.
The ISI objective was to find Afghan collaborators capable of establishing and sustaining a Pakistani-oriented client state after the war. At first the ISI picked Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the ultra radical Hezb-I-Islami, to be its man in Kabul after the Russians left. But Hekmatyar had little popular support and was dropped when the Taliban appeared.
The Taliban was an authentic Afghan response to the corruption of the resistance groups built by the ISI. The mullahs who created it had indigenous standing, unlike Hekmatyar. But the Taliban acquired military muscle and the money needed to operate only because it won Pakistani and Saudi support (3). The Taliban did not win its military victories with the help of students from madrasas. The ISI and the Pakistani armed forces provided weaponry, logistical help and manpower - not only Pakistani manpower but trained Afghan officers and soldiers from the former Communist army who are now on the ISI payroll.
The ISI used American money and weaponry to establish an entrenched power base within the Pakistani military and bureaucratic structure, and continued to exercise power during the civilian regimes of Benazir Bhutto (1993-96) and Nawaz Sharif (1997-99) who followed Zia, as well as during the current military regime. When Sharif launched an attempt at peace with India, culminating in the Lahore summit meeting with Prime Minister Atul Behari Vajpayee in February 1999, the ISI and its allies in the military high command led by General Aziz, then deputy army chief of staff, were outraged.
The Kargil offensive in May, a direct transgression of the Kashmir cease-fire line, was calculated to prevent peace. Sharif was not asked for his approval until it was too late to stop it. He eventually asserted himself by ordering a pullback from Kargil in August in spite of the protests of the army and the ISI, leading to a showdown with the forces and his ousting in the coup.
Although Musharraf has promised elections next year, his recent assumption of the presidency suggests that he is comfortable as a front man, and that military hard-liners, together with their militant Islamic allies, will remain the real powers in Pakistan.
American pressures for military and intelligence cooperation in pursuing Bin Laden and his followers have aggravated what were already serious internal stresses within the regime. If Musharraf goes too far in meeting US demands, he could well be unseated in a coup. But an equally plausible scenario is that he will extend just enough cooperation to maximise US concessions while avoiding a confrontation with the hard-liners by closing his eyes to continued covert ISI support of the Taliban [if of course they still exist]. Whatever happens, Islamabad is not likely to abandon its goal of a satellite state in Kabul that fulfils Zia's dream of a "strategic realignment".
* Member of the Century Foundation, Washington, and author, with Diego Cordovez, of Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, American Philological Association, 1995
(1) See Ignacio Ramonet, « The Pakistan threat », Le Monde diplomatique English edition, November 1999.
(2) Until the 19th century the Afghan state (founded in 1747 by Pashtun tribes led by Ahmad Shah Durrani) included the Pashtun areas of what is now north-west Pakistan. The British Raj then annexed Afghan territory between the Indus River and the Khyber Pass. Half of the Pashtuns were thus removed from the control of Kabul. Britain added insult to injury by instating, in 1893, the Durand line which guaranteed this conquest and then ceding the territory to Pakistan in 1947. By dividing the Pashtuns, the British created an explosive irredentism which has always haunted successive regimes in Kabul and which has done much to poison relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
(3) See Ahmed Rashid, "Taliban stir up regional instability", Le Monde diplomatique English edition, November 1999, and Gilles Dorronsoro, "Afghanistan all alone", Le Monde diplomatique English edition, June 2001.