Zia’s longevity as a ruler was made possible by the unstinting support he received from President Ronald Reagan and the U.S. administration after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Zia offered the ISI to act as a conduit for the arms and funds the CIA wanted to supply to the Afghan Mujahedin. In the next few years the Americans built up the ISI into a formidable intelligence agency that managed to run the Afghan war and the political process inside Pakistan. Widespread corruption within the ISI through its involvement in the Afghan heroin trade and the CIA arms pipeline enriched many ISI generals and also provided covert funds for Pakistan’s nuclear program and the promotion of new ISI-BACKED Islamic insurgencies in Kashmir and Central Asia. Musharraf was to have the same strategy after 9/11, using U.S. funds provided for combating al Qaeda to strengthen the army against India, modernize the ISI, and undermine his political opponents.
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Zia bargained hard for maximum U.S. support. In January 1980 he dismissed President Jimmy Carter’s offer of a $400 million aid package as “peanuts.” A year later, he accepted an alliance with Reagan, agreeing to a five-year (1981-1986) military and economic aid package worth $3.2 billion, which included the sale of forty F-16 fighter aircraft to Pakistan. This was followed by a six-year (1987-1993) $4.02 billion aid package that was never completed. Between 1982 and 1990 the CIA, working with the ISI and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, funded the training, arrival, and arming of some thirty-five thousand Islamic militants from forty-three Muslim countries in Pakistani madrassas to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. This global jihad launched by Zia and Reagan was to sow the seeds of al Qaeda and turn Pakistan into the world center of jihadism for the next two decades.
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Zia’s quid pro quo with the Americans was that they were not to question his domestic politics or his grip on power—exactly what Musharraf negotiated with Washington after 9/11. As long as Zia backed the Afghan Mujahedin, Reagan turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s lack of democracy, the floggings and torture, the drug trafficking by the army, and even the country’s clandestine nuclear weapons program. Similarly, two decades later, as long as Musharraf pursued al Qaeda, President George W. Bush declined to question his domestic policies or insist upon democracy.
Reagan was to severely compromise the U.S. stance on nuclear proliferation by declining to question Islamabad’s development of nuclear weapons—as long as Zia did not embarrass Washington by testing them.
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It is widely believed that with the help of China, Pakistan developed a nuclear weapon by the late 1980s. The U.S. Congress did monitor Zia’s nuclear program and imposed the Pressler Amendment, in which the U.S. president had to verify every year that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device. The inability of President George H. W. Bush to make such a verification in 1990 led to U.S. sanctions on Islamabad. Pakistani generals became bitter, accusing the Americans of a grand betrayal, as the sanctions came just a few months after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when Pakistan was of far less value to the Americans.
The aims of Pakistan and the United States in relation to Afghanistan now diverged considerably. Zia wanted to secure a pro-Pakistan fundamentalist government in Kabul, led by Gulbuddin Hikmetyar, whom the ISI favored.
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Washington wanted a more moderate Mujahedin government, but at the same time was rapidly losing interest in the region. Neither aim was to be met as Afghanistan slipped into a brutal civil war.
When Zia was killed in a plane crash in 1988, public anger against the army forced the new army chief, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, to hold elections. Benazir Bhutto, the daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, had returned to Pakistan from exile in 1986 to a rapturous reception by the public but had been sidelined by Zia. Now under the watchful eye of a nervous military, Bhutto mobilized public support for a PPP victory at the polls. To prevent a PPP landslide, the ISI cobbled together a right-wing alliance of nine Islamic parties and the Muslim League, called the Islamic Democratic Alliance (IDA).
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No party secured a clear majority in the election, although the PPP won the largest number of seats in the National Assembly.
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The army refused to let Bhutto govern as prime minister until Washington brokered a deal in which she had to agree to allow the army to run foreign policy and the nuclear program, and not to reduce the military’s budget. General Beg was to encroach even more upon Bhutto’s decision-making prerogatives. Bhutto was not allowed to ask about the military’s budget for the nuclear program, backing the Kashmir insurgency, or the Afghan Mujahedin. She was further hobbled in the provinces as her main political rival and the army’s protégé, Nawaz Sharif, became chief minister of Punjab, which led to a state of open confrontation between the two leaders. Sharif, a businessman from Lahore whose family had prospered enormously under the Zia regime, was a dour, unintelligent politician who had been promoted and patronized by the military.
After widespread corruption allegations against Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, became known, President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, backed by the army, dismissed Bhutto’s government on August 6, 1990, and ordered general elections. They were to be won by Nawaz Sharif and the Pakistan Muslim League. For the next decade Pakistan was on a political and constitutional roller coaster. A ruling “troika” emerged, consisting of the president, the army chief, and the prime minister. The state of tension and jockeying for power among the three never allowed an elected government to consolidate itself. The army played divide-and-rule among the political parties, stunting their development as genuine vehicles for democracy. Both Bhutto and Sharif were twice elected prime minister and both formed governments, only to be twice dismissed by the president at the urging of the army.
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Although the president had the legal power to dismiss the government, it was the constant undermining of the democratic process by the army and the ISI that failed to allow democracy to take root. No elected government ever completed its tenure, and the public was never given the opportunity to dismiss a government through the ballot box.
Sharif and Bhutto carried on a bitter personal vendetta against each other that stymied issue-related politics and the opportunity to carry out desperately needed economic reforms. The army and the Islamic fundamentalist parties fueled this rivalry and continued to undermine elected governments even as they dominated foreign policy. The uprising in Kashmir against Indian rule through the 1990s allowed the military to sponsor new Islamic militant groups, which in turn trained thousands of Pakistani fighters for both Kashmir and Afghanistan. Pakistan’s foreign policy became associated with jihad against India and support to the Taliban. Relations with the United States deteriorated further, and in 1993 President Clinton placed Pakistan on a watch list of state sponsors of terrorism because of the ISI’s open involvement in training Kashmiri insurgents. The army was forced to remove the ISI chief and relocate its training camps to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Nawaz Sharif was elected for a second time in February 1997, after general elections that saw the lowest voter turnout in Pakistan’s history— only 32 percent of voters took part—a clear indication of public frustration at the stagnant political process.
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India and Pakistan became locked in a new rivalry in the spring of 1998, after India carried out nuclear tests. Pakistan responded by testing five nuclear devices on May 27, 1998. However, the government failed to prepare for global sanctions imposed on both countries. Pakistan went bust as its economy and exchange rate went into freefall. Although Pakistan had become a nuclear power, it had neither a stable economy nor a political system to match such responsibilities.
Sharif tried to improve relations with India but was undermined by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, whom he had recently appointed as the new army chief. In the spring of 1999, Musharraf and a handful of generals secretly deployed troops into Indian Kashmir to occupy mountaintops in the Kargil sector. It was the first time since 1971 that Pakistani troops had violated the sanctity of the Line of Control, or LOC, dividing the two Kashmirs between India and Pakistan.
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Meeting no Indian forces, the Pakistanis advanced until they looked down on a major road to the important town of Leh. The Indians were taken by surprise as the Pakistanis started shelling the road and the town of Kargil. On May 22, Indian forces began to move dozens of heavy guns to Kargil to shell the mountaintops. A conventional but localized war ensued, although there were serious fears that it could escalate into a conventional or even a nuclear conflict.
Musharraf had calculated that India would never escalate the conflict for fear it could lead to an unsheathing of nuclear weapons. He expected the United States to step in and mediate a cease-fire, after which Pakistan could demand talks on Kashmir. The Pakistanis believed that their nuclear capability would deter any Indian escalation of the conflict. The world was stunned at Musharraf ’s audacious threat of using nuclear weapons as a form of blackmail to settle an international dispute. Moreover, Pakistan was creating a deliberate air of unpredictability about when and how it would use such weapons. Pakistani officials told journalists they had indirectly conveyed to New Delhi that if Indian armored columns were to cross the international border and penetrate deep into Pakistani territory, the army was ready to use battlefield nuclear weapons against them—inside Pakistani territory and despite the possibility of massive Pakistani civilian casualties.
Musharraf had been easily influenced by a few madcap generals and had not even informed his own high command or the navy and air force of his plan.
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The world swiftly turned against Pakistan, and President Clinton forced Sharif to carry out a humiliating climbdown during the Pakistani prime minister’s visit to Washington on July 4. Pakistan was forced to withdraw its forces and abandon Kargil after suffering some one thousand casualties. According to Bruce Riedel, then a senior director at the National Security Council, Clinton’s swift intervention was necessary because there was “disturbing evidence that the Pakistanis were preparing their nuclear arsenal for possible deployment.” Musharraf subsequently denied that Pakistan planned to use nuclear weapons.
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Pakistan lost on all counts. Rather than highlighting the Kashmir dispute, Musharraf’s adventurism had ensured that Kashmir was further eclipsed and that India would win the propaganda war. “Its folly [in the war in Kargil] lay in the fact that it committed Pakistan to a battle which it could not, under any circumstances, win. . . . Kargil has done more to obscure the Kashmir issue and damage the cause of the Kashmiri people than anything else in recent memory,” wrote Pakistani columnist Ayaz Amir.
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Kashmiri leaders felt humiliated and betrayed. Pakistan’s actions had undermined their own credibility. However, Musharraf refused to accept failure and promoted all the generals involved in the Kargil debacle.
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Nobody was held accountable. Musharraf claimed that a great victory would have been possible had Sharif not chickened out.
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Musharraf was now branded by friends and foes alike as a brash, adventurous hardliner mesmerized by the idea of military success against India yet unaware of strategy, diplomacy, or the economic chaos that even a minor war could bring upon Pakistan. The Clinton administration had no doubt that Musharraf was responsible for the incident. “Musharraf . . . bears . . . the lion’s share of the responsibility for Kargil,” said U.S. deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott.
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Islamabad was soon rocked by a blame game as Sharif pointed the finger at Musharraf, while Musharraf insisted that Sharif had been “on board” with all the key decisions regarding Kargil. The ISI began to mobilize the Islamic parties to hold rallies against Sharif.
At the end of September, Sharif sent his brother Shabaz Sharif and the ISI chief Lt.-Gen. Mohammed Ziauddin, a Sharif loyalist, to Washington, where they told U.S. officials that Musharraf was preparing a coup. The two promised to try to help capture bin Laden if the United States supported Nawaz Sharif, although the CIA knew that Ziauddin did not fully control the ISI.
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Nevertheless, on September 20, the State Department issued a terse statement warning the army not to carry out any unconstitutional act. Musharraf was furious and prepared to launch a countercoup if he was sacked by Sharif. The 111th Brigade of the Tenth Corps, based close to Islamabad—the traditional coup-making unit—was put on fifteen-minutes -readiness notice. Ultimately it was Sharif who moved first.
On the evening of October 12, 1999, while Musharraf was in the air returning from a trip to Sri Lanka, Sharif dismissed him and appointed Ziauddin as the new army chief. Musharraf’s plane, which was supposed to land in Karachi, was diverted to Nawabshah airport in Sindh province, where the police were waiting to arrest him. The army, however, moved swiftly to defend its chief and preserve its unity, taking control of the country and arresting Sharif, Ziauddin, and some two hundred politicians.
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Musharraf’s plane landed safely at Karachi, from where, in the early hours of the morning, he told the nation on television that Sharif had tried to divide the army.
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For a decade the army had taken a backseat in political affairs but had pulled the strings without taking responsibility for its actions. Now it was back in the driver’s seat. Some Pakistanis were happy to see the end of the Sharif government, which had become increasingly repressive, while others resigned themselves to another long period of military rule. In the West, the coup was viewed with enormous concern. An unstable, nuclear-equipped nation that only six months earlier had almost gone to war with India was now led by a general considered reckless and unpredictable. With the army in control, there was even less chance that Pakistan would go after Osama bin Laden or end its support to the Taliban regime.