The Longest August (35 page)

This caused consternation in PPP circles. It led to vote rigging, carried out by the all-powerful district commissioners in rural areas, to an undetermined extent. The electoral officials declared the PPP had won 155 of 200 seats—76 percent of the total, up from 58 percent in the previous general election in 1970—with the PNA getting only 36. Bhutto's opponents cried foul. Massive protest demonstrations led by the Islamic parties within the PNA followed. Bhutto responded with martial law and gunfire by army troops.

When these methods proved ineffective, he made concessions to the religious camp. He announced that Islamic Sharia law would be enforced within six months. He banned alcohol and gambling and closed night clubs. He declared Friday, the holy day in Islam, as the weekly off-day instead of the traditional Sunday.

Bhutto's compromises failed to satisfy the opposition. That provided General Muhammad Zia ul Haq with a rationale to stage his Operation Fair Play at four
am
on July 5, 1977. He overthrew the civilian government and imposed martial law. He placed Bhutto under house arrest in the hill station of Murree. Zia's operation code-name implied that he wanted to disengage the hostile camps and conduct a fresh election, but that never happened.

In Delhi, on the other hand, Gandhi, assured of the electoral success of her Congress Party by the Intelligence Bureau (IB), ordered a general election in January 1977. The IB proved disastrously wrong. The Janata Alliance, a coalition of the main opposition parties, trounced the Congress Alliance, led by Gandhi, by 345 to 189 seats. Morarji Desai, a former conservative Congress leader, became the prime minister. A long-time adversary of Gandhi, he attempted to move as far away from his predecessor's foreign policy as he could. To balance Gandhi's strong pro-Soviet tilt, he tried to improve ties with China, with his foreign minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visiting Beijing in February 1979. Desai went on to formalize the decade-long covert cooperation between RAW and Israel's Mossad. At the same time he reiterated India's peaceful intentions toward Pakistan.

Zia ul Haq reneged on his promise to hold a National Assembly election because the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief told him that based on the information collected by his agents, the PPP would win a free and fair contest. Ironically, it was on the recommendation of General Ghulam Jilani Khan, the ISI head, that Bhutto had promoted Lieutenant General Zia ul Haq to chief of army staff in March 1976 above the heads of four more senior generals. Also, given Zia ul Haq's well-known piousness and lack of interest in politics, Bhutto had concluded that he could count on the unfailing loyalty of a general whose religiosity would add a pro-Islamic hue to his political persona.

When General Ayub Khan had seized power in 1958, the standing of politicians had collapsed, and the once-powerful Muslim League had splintered into squabbling factions. By contrast Zia ul Haq had overthrown Bhutto, who for all his faults had mesmerized a very substantial part of the public and whose PPP, built from scratch, had acquired fairly deep roots in society. He therefore faced a daunting challenge: to dispel the Bhutto magic and smash the PPP.

12: Islamist Zia ul Haq,
Builder of the A-Bomb

As personalities, Muhammad Zia ul Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto stood poles apart. Zia ul Haq came from a modest home in the East Punjab city of Jalandhar, his very religious father, Muhammad Akbar Ali, being a junior clerk in the British Indian Army in Delhi. Born in 1924, he graduated from the city's prestigious St. Stephen's College
1
and then joined a cavalry regiment of the army. In 1947 he opted for the Pakistani military. He rose through the ranks but did not cease to be reverential to those who were socially superior to him. He remained strictly religious. “Drinking, gambling, dancing and music were the way the officers spent their free time,” he recollected. “I said prayers, instead. Initially, I was treated with some amusement—sometimes with contempt—but my seniors and my peers decided to leave me alone after some time.”
2
As a colonel in 1962, he underwent two years' training at the US Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Here too he stayed away from drinking and dancing. During the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War he was a tank commander. And as Brigadier Zia ul Haq, he trained soldiers in Jordan from 1967 to 1970. He was promoted to major general in 1973 and put in charge of the First Armored Division in Multan.

Two years later he rose to lieutenant general and took command of the Second Strike Corps, also based in Multan. He invited Premier Bhutto to his base and asked him to hit a target. The egotistical Bhutto scored with the first shot, much to his surprise and satisfaction. Turning on his obsequiousness to the fullest, Zia ul Haq exuded his loyalty to Bhutto, who noticed how meticulous the general was in offering his daily Islamic prayers.

Now, in July 1977, having toppled his benefactor and assumed supreme power as the chief martial law administrator, Zia ul Haq called himself “a soldier of Allah.” He projected himself as a moderator, promising a free and fair election in ninety days, with both the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) contesting. He released Bhutto on July 28.

Among those who accepted his word at face value was India's Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). “He [General Zia] has categorically stated on several occasions that takeover was necessary to prevent civil war, his prime objective being to supervise political solution,” said Foreign Secretary J. S. Mehta, the highest bureaucrat in the ministry, in his cable to all of India's foreign missions, according to declassified documents. “His 90-day plan makes it incumbent on him to arrange polls in October. All public indications so far suggest that he means what he says.”
3

This was not to be. Bhutto's rallies proved hugely popular, and he capped his domestic activities with a tour of friendly Arab countries. Knowing Bhutto's record of punishing his enemies, Zia ul Haq calculated that after his expected electoral victory, Bhutto would wreak vengeance. Therefore he rearrested him on September 3 because of his alleged involvement in the murder of Muhammad Khan Kasuri, a Punjabi politician who, because of his differences with Bhutto, had quit the PPP in 1974. Bhutto would be found guilty and hanged in April 1979.

Zia's Artful Deception

India's ambassador in Islamabad,
4
however, continued to present Zia ul Haq in a favorable light. “Gen Zia ul Haq is said to be devout but not a fanatic and is professional in outlook,” wrote Mehta, the former foreign secretary of the MEA in Delhi. The Pakistan-Afghanistan division of the MEA agreed. “The concessions to Islamic Sharia Law and
Nizam-i-Mustafa
[Urdu: Rule of Prophet Muhammad] are doubtless meant to neutralize any serious opposition to the unconstitutional takeover of government by the armed forces, but not necessarily an indication of ambition to continue in power. It also incidentally gains for the regime the support of orthodox political elements.”
5

In reality, Zia ul Haq started monopolizing power once the Supreme Court had invoked the “doctrine of necessity” in October to legitimize the coup. It also allowed him to suspend the 1973 constitution. As the chief
martial law administrator, he presented a provisional constitution that authorized him to amend the 1973 document at will. But he pursued Bhutto's project of building an atom bomb with much greater vigor while keeping Project 706 under wraps, with the innocuous sounding Engineering Research Laboratory (ERL) stealthily enriching uranium.

To get an inkling of what transpired inside the ERL, India's Research and Analysis (RAW) agents collected discarded hair from nearby barber shops and sent them to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, for analysis. It found traces of uranium in the hair, indicating uranium enriching activity at the ERL.
6

A past master in speaking with a forked tongue, Zia ul Haq responded warmly to friendly overtures by Indian premier Moraji Desai. They maintained direct contact through periodic telephone conversations until mid-1979, when, following a split in the ruling Janata Alliance, Desai had to step down. In early 1978, according to Bahukutumbi Raman, former head of RAW's Counter-Terrorism Division, in an unguarded moment Desai told Zia ul Haq that he was well aware of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
7
Predictably, Zia ul Haq denied any contraband activity. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) went into overdrive to winkle out all foreign spies and their agents from the ERL area.

Zia ul Haq was well aware of Washington's policy of discouraging nonnuclear states to acquire nuclear arms. In 1976, US senator Stuart Symington's Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 specified ending aid to any country that imported uranium enrichment technology. The following year Senator John Glenn's Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act stipulated the termination of aid to any country that imported reprocessing technology, which is used to recover fissionable plutonium from irradiated nuclear fuel for nuclear weapons.
8
The US Congress passed the Nonproliferation Act in March 1978. It barred any country from receiving American assistance if it tested a nuclear weapon, and imposed sanctions against a state that attempted to acquire unauthorized nuclear technology.

While acknowledging the construction of a uranium enriching facility, Zia ul Haq said that it would be used solely for generating electricity and declared that no Pakistani government could compromise on the nuclear issue under American pressure. In his meeting with Cyrus Vance, US secretary of state, in October 1978, Pakistan's foreign minister Agha Shahi said, “You don't have to be a nuclear weapons expert to understand the strategic importance of having one. The value lies in its possession, and not in its use.”
9

In geopolitical terms, however, what caused a major shift in Indo-Pakistan relations was the coup by Marxist military officers against Afghan president Muhammad Daoud Khan on April 27, 1978. Daoud Khan was killed in the fighting at the presidential palace, and his official positions of president and prime minister went to Nur Muhammad Taraki. The military leaders renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The coup turned Afghanistan into a frontline state in the Cold War between the White House and the Kremlin.

This was a second seismic change in five years in Afghanistan. In July 1973 Prime Minister General Daoud Khan had overthrown his cousin King Muhammad Zahir Shah and declared Afghanistan a republic. To consolidate his power he revived the issue of Pashtunistan, an independent state to be carved out of parts of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA). His officers started training twelve thousand irredentist Pashtun and Baluch volunteers to harass Pakistan's army. In return, Bhutto sponsored an anti-Daoud Khan coup, fronted by the Afghan Islamist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in July 1975. It failed. But Bhutto allowed Peshawar, the capital of NWFP, to become a base of Afghan Islamist groups. Mediation by the shah of Iran eased Islamabad-Kabul tensions by 1977. But normalization of relations between the two neighbors was disrupted by the subsequent Marxist military officers' coup.

Ripples of the Marxist Coup in Kabul

The Marxist takeover in Kabul alarmed the administration of US president Jimmy Carter (in office 1977–1981). It hastened to resume development aid to Islamabad that it had stopped earlier. Washington's ban on the sale of US weapons and parts to Pakistan after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War remained in place until 1975, when it was lifted by President Gerald Ford.

On the other side, the Kremlin dispatched its military advisers to Kabul. At the same time Alexander Puzanov, the Soviet ambassador in Kabul, advised President Taraki in June to initiate dialogue with his Pakistani counterpart to resolve their mutual differences.
10

Taraki invited Zia ul Haq to Kabul. Instead, they met in Paghman, sixteen miles from the capital, on September 9.
11
Their starkly opposing ideologies came into sharp focus. Taraki proudly informed his interlocutor
that his regime had given land to eleven million Afghans. Zia ul Haq remarked that all property belonged to Allah and human beings were no more than His custodians. “All land belongs to the tiller,” retorted Taraki.
12

Desai and other Indian politicians would have agreed with Taraki's statement. They had carried out land reform in India, albeit in fits and starts. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Delhi's historically close ties with Kabul were unaffected by the political upheavals. The Taraki regime's signing of a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Moscow in December 1978 followed India's example in August 1973.

By then the government of President Zia ul Haq had provided Afghanistan's Islamist insurgents, called mujahedin (Arabic: those who wage jihad), with covert training bases—an enterprise in which the CIA participated actively under its Operation Cyclone.

At home, on December 2, 1978, the Islamabad government announced that the Islamic law concerning theft (cutting off of hands), drinking (seventy-four lashes), and adultery (death by stoning) would be enforced from the birthday of Prophet Muhammad the following year. Pakistan's lurch toward Islamization went unremarked by the Carter White House. Finding itself deprived of its strategic alliance with Iran after the overthrow of its staunch ally Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah by the rabidly anti-American Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in February 1979, the United States tightened its links with Zia ul Haq's military regime.

It decided to upgrade its backing for the Afghan mujahedin by authorizing the CIA to start supplying them with weapons. Initially the CIA armed them with Soviet-made arms partly from its own stores built up during the previous regional conflicts and partly by procuring them from Egypt, a one-time ally of Moscow. This enabled the mujahedin to claim that they had secured these firearms by attacking the armories of the government.

In Kabul the Marxist regime split into two factions, leading to the killing of Taraki and the rise of Hafizullah Amin as president in September 1979. He in turn was toppled by Babrak Karmal in December. Karmal invited Soviet troops to help him stabilize the political situation. They arrived on Christmas Day. Overnight this transformed Zia ul Haq from a despicable dictator to an unblemished ally in the US-led global campaign against Soviet communism.

Delhi and Islamabad reacted differently to the events in Afghanistan. Indian diplomats recommended negotiations between the contending
Afghan parties. In stark contrast, Zia ul Haq presented Moscow's move as “a push towards the warm waters of the Arabian Sea,” implying that Pakistan would be the next target of the Soviet Union's aggressive expansion. Carter readily accepted his interpretation.

The Cold War between the White House and the Kremlin intensified. But the Carter administration realized that killing Soviet troops in Afghanistan with CIA-supplied arms would be very provocative and raise the prospect of direct Moscow-Washington confrontation. Therefore it decided to work through a proxy—Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate—to be able to exercise “plausible deniability.” Out of this emerged the Washington-Islamabad-Riyadh alliance, whereby the United States, the overall coordinator, became the sole supplier of weapons, bought with American and Saudi cash, to be channeled exclusively through Pakistan. In this scheme, the ISI acquired a pivotal role.

It then operated from a drab, unmarked red-brick building behind high stone walls on Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy in Islamabad. About one hundred military officers maintained an internal and external intelligence network of thousands of agents and freelance spies. Like the rest of the military, ISI officers and agents underwent religious education, as mandated by Zia ul Haq. Equally compulsory became the offering of prayer by soldiers led by officers.

With the new, ambitious assignment in Afghanistan and a vastly increased budget, the ISI would expand its staff and agents, engaging Pakistanis fluent in Persian and Pushtu as well as thousands of Afghans with promises of money and domicile for their families in Pakistan. That would push the total number of ISI employees, full- and part-time, to almost one hundred thousand by early 1988.
13
Zia mandated that the ISI collect foreign and domestic intelligence; coordinate intelligence functions of the three military services; conduct surveillance over foreigners, the media, politically active Pakistanis, diplomats of other countries based in Pakistan, and Pakistani diplomats serving abroad; intercept and monitor communications; and conduct covert offensive operations.

While relations between Islamabad and Moscow turned frosty, the Delhi-Moscow embrace became warmer. In May 1980, Indian officials signed contracts for the purchase of MIG-25 aircraft, attack boats, and advanced T-72 tanks, to be produced later in India.

In June 1980 Zia ul Haq set up Sharia courts at the high court level in the provinces and the appellate Sharia bench at the Supreme Court level. They were authorized to decide whether a particular law was Islamic or
not.
14
These official measures were buttressed by the promotion of Islam through mosques and the media. A review of all textbooks was undertaken and the ones regarded as un-Islamic were removed.