Pakistan: War and Ideology

If India builds the [atomic] bomb, we [Pakistan] will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own. We have no other choice.

—Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan1

What is a Constitution? It is a booklet with twelve or ten pages. I can tear them away and say that tomorrow we shall live under a different system. Today, the people will followwherever I lead. All the politicians, including the once mighty Mr. Bhutto will follow me with tails wagging.

—Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, President of Pakistan2

The Pakistan Army’s biggest folly has been that under Zia (ul-Haq), it started outsourcing its basic job—soldiering—to these freelance militants. By blurring the line between a professional soldier—who, at least in theory, is always required to obey his officer, who in turn is governed by a set of laws—and a mujahid, who can pick and choose his cause and his commander depending on his mood, the Pakistan Army has caused immense confusion it its own ranks.

—Mohammad Hanif, Pakistani journalist3

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him.

—Brig. S. K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War4

In the years between its creation and the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Pakistan followed through on the logic of Iqbal, Jinnah, and the two-nation theory. The world has seen the result—a violent, schizophrenic nation at war with its neighbors and with itself. Above all, a nation which has followed its religion into one disaster after another, while remaining unable to step back or examine itself critically to realize what is happening.

Flaws in the two-nation theory were apparent from the very beginning. After the partition of India, fully a third of the Raj’s Muslim population remained in the territory that had been set aside for Hindus rather than move to the new Muslim nation of Pakistan.5 In East Pakistan (later to become the nation of Bangladesh), a large Hindu population remained behind. These facts ran counter to the two-nation theory, which claimed that Muslims and Hindus were incapable of forming a single nation together. At the very moment of Pakistan’s creation, the theory behind its existence was challenged by reality.

The theory was promoted by Jinnah as a way for India to ensure peace. Far from doing so, the partition which created Pakistan led almost immediately to warfare. The first flash point for conflict was the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir.

PAKISTAN AND KASHMIR—THE FIRST CONFLICT

A major complicating factor behind the partition of India was that a large part of the subcontinent had never been ruled directly from Britain. There were over 500 princely states (as they were called) which were governed directly by a local ruler in the name of the British crown. The various rulers of these states were given the option of aligning with India or Pakistan

Jammu and Kashmir was a princely state with a majority Muslim population and sizable numbers of Hindus and Sikhs. But it was governed by a Hindu maharajah who alone had the choice of which country to align with. Both India and Pakistan were interested in the territory. Since India does not accept the two-nation theory, it encourages Hindu and Muslim populations to live together peacefully within its border. But Pakistan insists that any region with a majority of Muslims must belong to them.

In October of 1947, Pakistan crossed over from politics to warfare:
[Elements of the Pakistani Army] invoked jihad to mobilize tribesmen from the [North-West] frontier and send them to raid and seize Kashmir; the government in turn called on religious scholars to issue supportive fatwas or religious decrees.6

Facing an invasion from Pakistan by guerilla fighters, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir turned to the Indian Army for help. On October 26, he signed an Instrument of Accession granting sovereignty of his state to India.7

During the conflict over Kashmir, Pakistan established what would become a foreign policy pattern: using non-state actors as proxies to stir up trouble. The Times of London reported in 1948:

That Pakistan is unofficially involved in aiding the [Kashmiri] raiders is certain. Your correspondent has first hand evidence that arms, ammunition and supplies are being made available to the Azad Kashmiri forces. A few Pakistani officers are also helping to direct the operations.8

The irregular warfare characteristic of this first Kashmir conflict was not successful in giving Pakistan control of the territory, but it did keep India from asserting its authority. The ceasefire line of 1948 (later to become the Line of Control) divided the princely state into Pakistani and Indian sectors. The war also signaled Pakistan’s willingness to go to war over Muslim-majority territories—a defining quality of its foreign policy ever since.

A MILITARY FOUNDATION

A quick glance at the history of Pakistan will show a cycle of military coups and dictatorships followed by periods of civilian governance. This cycle goes back to the foundations of the country. In the early years, the Pakistani Army was still very British in its ethos and training. It was the only truly national institution with any prestige or credibility. Consequently, the Army quickly established itself as the guardian of the nation. Since then they have often stepped in when civilian leadership appeared to flag and destabilize the country.

The only unifying ideology behind Pakistan, however, was the Islamic religion. Thus, the Army has always been involved in the promotion of Islam within the country and in the struggle against any forces which were perceived as undermining Islam. In the earliest years, Pakistan consisted of a disparate mishmash of tribes and ethnicities, languages and customs. But any demands made on behalf of ethnic groups were treated as threats to national stability.9

Initially, some in the Army tried to limit the influence of Islam, but there was a limit to what even military commanders could accomplish. In 1958, the Army’s commander- in-chief Ayub Khan seized control of the government. Khan was interested in pursuing moderate and relatively secular political policies. Accordingly, he tried to ban Jamaar-i- Islami (the nation’s militant Islamic party) and even removed the word “Islamic” from Pakistan’s official title. But popular and institutional momentum ran against such changes. Khan was soon forced to reverse course.10

THE IMPORTANCE OF VIOLENCE

A conceptual barrier prevents most western observers from getting a handle on Pakistan. Imagine a modern Western politician expressing support for the idea that Protestants should kill Catholics or encouraging a jihad on behalf of the Pope. Such a person would be on the lunatic fringe—or thrown in jail. In Pakistan, it is politically correct to decry the infidel or praise the way of jihad. Any public figure who wants to be taken seriously must say such things, and to some extent believe them.

This is why, when Ayub Khan started planning a new war with India over Kashmir, he knew such an act would meet with tremendous popular approval. Khan’s foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, blustered publicly that Pakistan would embark on a “thousand year war” with India, if necessary.11 Such war-mongering would get a politician fired in the West; in Pakistan, it is the political equivalent of shaking hands and kissing babies.

The two-nation theory dictates that Kashmir must be part of Pakistan because its population is majority Muslim. Bhutto showed how well he had absorbed that logic in his insistence that “Kashmir must be liberated if Pakistan is to have its full meaning.”12 In 1965, Khan and Bhutto brought their plan to fruition and engaged in the old trick of sending in armed guerillas to stir up trouble in Kashmir.13

But the two-nation theory again produced faulty thinking. Khan believed that “Hindu resolve” would soon crack after a few hard blows.14 He and Bhutto both believed the Kashmiris would welcome the chance to embark on an armed uprising to “liberate” themselves from the Hindus. Instead, Pakistani guerillas found that the Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs of Kashmir had achieved a fair degree of peaceful coexistence. They weren’t interested in an uprising. The subsequent invasion of Kashmir by Pakistani regular forces had very little success. Instead of cracking under hard blows, the Indian Army launched a successful counterattack deep into Pakistan’s southern heartland, effectively ending the conflict.15

Tellingly, this spectacular failure did not produce self-reflection in the Pakistani government. Bhutto doubled down on his strategy, saying Pakistan should have continued the war and criticizing Ayub Khan for signing the Tashkent treaty which ended hostilities.16 Since the Pakistani people had been force-fed propaganda detailing the “great success” of the war, they were shocked and outraged when Khan ended the war without success.17

In 1969, a discredited Ayub Khan handed power over to the Army’s commander- in-chief, Yahya Khan. During Yahya’s brief tenure, he reaffirmed Pakistan’s commitment to militant Islamic ideology.18 The same ideology which had foundered on the rocks of Kashmir simply brought forward a new champion.

THE BANGLADESHI GENOCIDE

The Muslim Bengalis of East Pakistan were at the forefront of the problems facing Yahya Khan’s new regime. The Muslim Punjabis of West Pakistan looked down upon them with undisguised racism and contempt. They wanted to forge a homogenous Islamic nation, and the Islamic practices of the East Bengalis—as well as their friendly relations with Hindu Bengalis—were highly suspect. For their part, Bengali Muslims had little intention of conforming to Muslim Punjabi preferences.19

Here again the two-nation theory was pointing Pakistan toward disaster. According to the theory, Bengali Muslims should have more in common with Muslim Punjabis living over a thousand miles away than with the Bengali Hindus who had been their neighbors for centuries. Since Bengali Muslims didn’t see things that way, they were un-Islamic to the elites of West Pakistan. Therefore, they had to be purified.

As some Muslim leaders in West Pakistan developed these arguments, the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan understandably viewed them as a threat. In addition to having a lot more Hindus living among them after the partition, East Bengali Muslim politicians inclined toward pragmatism and secularism, preferring to emphasize the ties that bound them to their Hindu cousins (culture and language) rather than their religious differences.20 This was anathema to West Pakistanis, and within a few years of Yahya Khan assuming power he and the other self-appointed guardians of Pakistan and its Islamic ideology moved against it.

The flash point came in long-promised elections held in December of 1970. Taking a page from Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s playbook, the Awami League in East Pakistan managed to unify the Bengali Muslim electorate behind a platform for increased East Pakistan autonomy. Their electoral success was so sweeping that they gained a majority in Pakistan’s national legislature. Yahya Khan and Zulfiqar Bhutto (whose own Pakistani People’s Party—the PPP—had come in second) immediately saw this as political disaster. Khan was determined that the elected legislature would never meet. After breaking off talks with East Pakistani representatives, he sent the Pakistani Army on a stunning campaign of violence and murder among the civilian population of East Pakistan in 1971.

What followed was genocide. The West Pakistani military, in concert with irregular militias composed of militant jihadists, embarked on a campaign of systematic murder and rape designed to crush Bangladeshi calls for self-determination and eradicate the Bengali Hindu population. As many as three million people were killed. Somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali Hindu and Muslim women were raped by the West Pakistanis.21

The campaign stretched over nine months, but within days those close to the events could see that a Bangladeshi genocide was taking place:

There is no reason now to refrain from declaring, on evidence which is brave and strong, that the Government and the Army of Pakistan, which is to say the establishment of West Pakistan, is and has been for some weeks engaged upon the most extensive and barbarous exercise of genocide that the world has known about since the end of the second world war.22

A U.S. consul in East Pakistan wrote back to the State Department, describing the killing that was taking place. Since the U.S. supplied Pakistan with much of its weaponry and ammunition, Washington had some pull with Yahya Khan and his government. But the Nixon administration was using Khan “as a secret communications channel to Mao Zedong’s China” and wanted nothing to interfere with their broader Cold War interests.23

President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were actually annoyed at diplomatic efforts to inform them about the genocide. When U.S. Ambassador to India Kenneth Keating publicly decried the genocide and excoriated the U.S. policy of ignoring it he was isolated and even scorned privately as a traitor. The U.S. consul in Dhaka who had informed Washington of the cruelty Pakistan was inflicting on the Bengalis, Archer Blood, was removed from his post. Kissinger went so far as to “sneer at people who ‘bleed’ for ‘the dying Bengalis’.”24 It was a true low point in American foreign policy.

Between eight and ten million East Bengalis became refugees as they fled from the violence to India, most of them Hindus. Within East Pakistan, about 30 million were internally displaced. Shocked by Pakistan’s reckless mass murder and pressured by an infuriated country, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi organized a military intervention. Once the Indian Army was involved, after a patient build-up, Pakistani forces were overwhelmed and soon surrendered in December, 1971. In the aftermath East Pakistan split off completely, forming the new nation of Bangladesh. Bangladesh later conferred its highest state honor on Indira Gandhi for her critical role in its attainment of independence.

ZULFIQAR ALI BHUTTO’S ISLAMIC SOCIALISM

After a second humiliating defeat in under a decade, the military government of Pakistan finally yielded to a civilian government. As the leader of the largest remaining political party (the PPP) in the wake of East Pakistan’s bloody departure, Zulfiqar Bhutto found his road to the presidency clear. One might think that, as an avowed socialist, Bhutto’s time in government would be marked by shaking off Pakistan’s dangerous commitment to violent Islamist ideology. It was not so.

Despite Bhutto’s fashionable socialism, common among leaders of the Islamic world in the 1970s, his authority came from his membership in the landowning class. As John Schmidt explains, “The mainstream political parties in Pakistan can best be viewed as patronage networks.”25 Bhutto is best thought of as a kind of feudal leader, sitting at the top of a large network of reciprocal expectations and obligations. He was also steeped in the idea that Islamic ideology was essential to the unity and the survival of Pakistan.

Bhutto’s main political strategy, as historian Zahid Hussain argues, was to unite Pakistan under the banner of Islamic nationalism. He seems to have used religion to provide the cohesion and stability needed to enact the socialist economic reforms he championed. Under Bhutto, the government increased Islamic teaching in schools and even went so far as to declare the Ahmadi Islamic sect officially non-Muslim by constitutional amendment.26 This was devastating for the millions of Ahmadis, who had developed their brand of Islam in the Pakistani heartland of the Punjab; by amendment, they were made infidels in their own land. Bhutto was desperate to appeal to religious purists throughout his time as Prime Minister. In his last days in power he banned alcohol sales and gambling and closed down nightclubs in an attempt to win more popular support.27

Two of Bhutto’s contributions as Prime Minister would come to have global impact. The first of these was his empowerment of Pakistan’s intelligence services. It was under Bhutto that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) first rose to national prominence. Under his successor, ISI would become one of the premiere trainers of jihadists in the world—a position it has never truly relinquished.28

Bhutto’s second contribution was Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Within weeks of attaining power, Bhutto held a clandestine meeting with 70 scientists in which he asked them to develop nuclear weapons. As Bhutto crudely put it after a nuclear bomb test by India in 1974, “there’s a Hindu bomb, a Jewish bomb, and a Christian bomb; there must be an Islamic bomb.”29 In this statement we see again the Pakistani mode of assessing world affairs through a narrow sectarian paradigm. Fortunately for Bhutto, a Pakistani named Abdul Kadeer Khan was working in the Netherlands as a scientist. He stole critical information on a uranium enrichment process developed by his employer and brought it back to Pakistan.30

To the end, Bhutto’s hand was often forced by concerns about Pakistan’s religious authorities. When he appointed General Zia ul-Haq (his eventual successor) as Army Chief-of-Staff, a crucial element in the decision was the general’s reputation for Islamic piety.31 But Bhutto was ultimately unable to govern the Islamic forces he hoped to co-opt. In 1977, General Zia replaced him in a coup engineered by Pakistani Islamists.32 Two years later, Bhutto was hanged for allegedly conspiring to murder a rival politician.

GENERAL ZIA’S AGGRESSIVE ISLAMIZATION

General Zia’s authority rested upon his military competence and his unquestioned commitment to Islam. Almost immediately after the coup which brought him to power he asserted, “Pakistan, which was created in the name of Islam, will continue to survive only if it sticks to Islam.”33 His policies showed this commitment lay deeper than mere words.

Under the general, Pakistan became even more aggressively Islamized than before. He cut back on public education spending and instead encouraged Islamic groups to establish madrasas for the education of the young. By the end of his rule in 1988, the number of madrasas in Pakistan had grown from a mere 900 to over 8,000 (with another 25,000 unofficial Islamic schools).34 Madrasas, as we will see later, would prove essential in educating a whole generation of young men into the world of jihad.

Zia also recreated the Pakistani Army as an institution for disseminating Islamic ideology. Religious commitment became essential for promotion through the ranks. All officers were required to read The Quranic Concept of War, a book which came with a foreword and personal endorsement from Zia himself. This book is a tour de force of jihadist sentiment. In the words of its author:

Death in this world is inevitable; life in the Hereafter is certain; and the reward of those who fight for the cause of Allah is safe, splendid and sure … Those who die fighting for the cause of Allah never actually die.35

The key to victory, the book argues, is terror: “Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end itself.”36 These sentiments are familiar to anyone in the West who has been exposed to the realities of Islamic terrorism.

The critical moment for Zia’s regime came in 1979, when Soviet tanks rumbled into Afghanistan, its western neighbor. Pakistan’s response was lying ready-made in the ideology and experience it had built up over the years. Here was Zia’s very own jihad. When the United States determined upon a course of financial (and later military) support for Afghanistan’s resistance to Soviet occupation, it was Pakistan that directed the funds, the fighters, and the weapons. Zia ensured that American money would serve his and Pakistan’s political and strategic interests.37

The Soviet invasion was both a threat and an opportunity, as far as Pakistan was concerned. On the one hand, since atheistic communism was the enemy, it was clear that religious fervor should be the true source of successful resistance to that enemy. On the other, it would be to Pakistan’s benefit if the communist threat could be replaced by a regime with strategic and ideological goals identical to Pakistan’s. There were also ethnic motivations, as Pashtuns straddled the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. All these factors ensured, as Steve Coll reports, “that ISI’s Muslim Brotherhood-inspired clients … won the greatest share of support.”38

As we now know quite well, the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan involved much more than just funding and providing support for native Afghan fighters. A large part of the effort managed and directed by Pakistan was involved in enticing and training new recruits for the struggle. The madrasas Zia’s regime was already promoting proved critical in this. They began to proliferate in the areas near the porous border between the two countries. Students from Karachi would later be the first to establish a jihadist organization in Pakistan committed to fighting the jihad in Afghanistan.39 The whole Afghanistan- Pakistan border region became a province of interlocking networks made up of ISI officers, Arab volunteers, and radical Islamist madrasas.40

Using American and Saudi money, the ISI trained guerillas soldiers for the fight in Afghanistan. Radical Islamic ideology was an indispensable element of this training. Previously tranquil and remote areas beyond the reach of the Pakistani government became awash in militant religious ideas and high-powered weaponry. As the American military would later discover, this situation would prove disastrous.41

The Americans were thinking only of defeating the Soviets, but the Pakistanis were already planning for what happened after the Soviets left. When the Soviets began their withdrawal in 1988, Pakistan lost little time in diverting its well-prepared jihadists for another insurgency in Kashmir.42 This effort was no more successful than the previous ones, but it was also no less bloody and devastating. The same year, General Zia’s tenure came to an end with his mysterious death in a plane crash (in which Arnold Raphel, the American ambassador to Pakistan, was also killed). He left behind a country primed for jihad, radically Islamized, and awash in cheap weaponry.

AFTER THE SOVIET INVASION—THE RISE OF THE TALIBAN

Although the Pakistani government returned to civilian control after General Zia’s death, its policies remained largely the same. Whether the Prime Minister was Benazir Bhutto (daughter of Zulfiqar) or Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan continued its effort to gain control in Afghanistan. The chief agents for this takeover were eventually the Pashtun students trained at Pakistan’s jihadist madrasas along the Afghan border.

However, when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the main opponents to the left-wing government in Afghanistan was the Tajik war hero Ahmed Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar had been ISIS’s chief Pashtun mujahideen proxy, and Pakistan saw Massoud’s growing authority as a threat to their own influence. The Pakistanis hated Massoud, whom they saw as a secular-minded Tajik who would not be under their thumb. When Massoud finally removed the left-wing government from power in 1992 and Hekmatyar’s power began to fade, Pakistan turned to a different group of Pashtun fanatics to carry on the jihad. These emerging young jihadists, who had taken to calling themselves Taliban (the Pashtun word for “students”) because of their origins in the Pakistan-sponsored madrasas on the border, began seizing territory in the south. Infused with puritanical Islamic militancy and feelings of ethnic superiority, the Taliban was eager to take on Massoud’s Tajiks. With full support from Pakistan’s ISI they engaged in a low- level civil war, culminating in the Taliban’s 1996 capture of Kabul.43 Two days before the 9/11 attacks Massoud was assassinated, at the behest of Osama bin Laden, by Tunisians posing as a news crew.

With ISI in “command and control of military operations,” the Taliban slowly took control of Afghanistan in the mid-90s.44 They had a steady supply of new fighters coming from ISI-controlled madrasas, making their war machine almost unstoppable. At this time, Benazir Bhutto and her administration publicly denied any connection with their Taliban protégés.45

After the Taliban captured Kabul and de facto governance of Afghanistan, Pakistan was one of only three nations (Saudi Arabia and the UAE being the other two) to recognize them as the legitimate government. Having finally put its proxies in charge of the country, Pakistan sought to protect the new regime:

Pakistani ISI officers were stationed in every [Afghan] ministry in the provinces, the ISI established about eight bases manned by active duty and retired ISI colonels and brigadiers.46

One of Pakistan’s bases for training jihadists was a large facility in Khost, Afghanistan, close to the Pakistan border. In 1997, an old Arab mujahideen financier came looking for a training camp to use for his own jihadist organization. The organization, of course, was al-Qaeda, and the man was Osama bin Laden. It was this camp that America struck with cruise missiles in 1998 after al-Qaeda’s African embassy bombings. Unfortunately, by that time bin Laden and his acolytes had already departed.

THE KARGIL WAR—NUCLEAR BRINKSMANSHIP

In 1999, Pakistan brought the Indian subcontinent to the brink of nuclear war over Kashmir. After successfully testing six nuclear weapons in 1998, it sent the Pakistani Army over the Line of Control into the Kargil district of Kashmir. Again there was public deception, as Pakistan argued that it was independent Kashmiri insurgents who started the conflict, while documents later revealed that Pakistani irregular forces were definitely involved.

Army Chief-of-Staff Pervez Musharraf calculated that nuclear weapons gave his country room to seize the initiative. The thinking was that India would be cautious in its response for fear of a nuclear exchange. Pakistani officials deliberately cultivated an air of unpredictability over how and when it would use its new nuclear arsenal. An indirect threat was conveyed to India that Pakistan was willing to use tactical nuclear weapons against Indian forces inside Pakistan if they happened to invade.47

General Musharraf launched the Kargil attack on his own initiative, without the knowledge of Prime Minister Sharif. The general seems to have believed that once Pakistan had acquired territory in Kashmir, international moderation would focus on avoiding nuclear conflict. This would work to Pakistan’s favor, allowing them to hold onto any territory gained.48 Instead, there was only two months of fighting that left 527 Indians and as many as 4,000 Pakistanis dead. The incident might have broken out into nuclear war, but Bill Clinton intervened with Sharif and insisted that he withdraw Pakistani troops from Kargil. Eventually, Sharif and Clinton released a joint statement agreeing to respect the Line of Control and pick up bilateral talks. Pakistan ended up with no new territory.

The Kargil War demonstrates how much Pakistan’s strategic thinking is shaped by its experience with proxy wars and terror-inducing jihadist aggression. General Musharraf’s assumptions were not only incorrect, they were incredibly dangerous, with implications far beyond Kashmir or even just Pakistan and India if a nuclear exchange had occurred. Over 3,000 people were killed or injured over a fruitless military adventure. In a final irony, when Prime Minister Sharif attempted to fire Musharraf after the Kargil failure he was deposed and eventually replaced by General Musharraf himself.

THE PATH TO 9/11

After deadly bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1988 and a bold attack on the USS Cole in 2000, the United States began to step up its efforts to get hold of Osama bin Laden. The Americans used UN sanctions and political pressure in an attempt to get the Taliban to hand him over. Yet even as Pakistan pretended to help out, behind the scenes they had no intention of abandoning their Taliban allies. As Musharraf’s principal staff officer made clear at the time:

We are trying to stop the U.S. from undermining the Taliban regime. They cannot do it without Pakistan’s help, because they have no assets there, but we will not allow it to happen.49

In the months before the 9/11 attacks, the Russians and French were sharing intelligence with the UN that showed about 30 ISI trucks a day moving into Afghanistan to supply the Taliban in direct contravention of UN sanctions.

When the 9/11 attacks took place, the leader of al-Qaeda was being sheltered by a regime created and nurtured by Pakistan. Despite intense international pressure on the Taliban to give up bin Laden, it could depend on Pakistan’s sponsorship and support. Even after 9/11, as the next chapter will show, very little really changed in this relationship.