Rawalpindi, June 2009
I was depressed by my war. Everything I covered in Afghanistan and Pakistan seemed to be going in the wrong direction. Wars were supposed to have definitive ends and have identifiable enemies, like the twentieth-century wars I’d grown up hearing about. Instead we now seemed to be locked in some kind of forever war. And it was becoming harder to report them. Places I had travelled to freely in both countries had become no-go areas. Afghanistan was more violent; Pakistan more anti-Western. Peshawar, which had been such a friendly place to live in my early twenties, had grown so hostile I felt as if I was the only Westerner there. Women I’d written about were being killed. Hotels I’d stayed at were being bombed. Friends had been taken hostage. Late-night discussions with fellow journalists had become macabre – instead of the old gossip of who was sleeping with whom, we talked about whether we’d prefer to be killed by suicide bomb or a knife at our throats. I started actually reading the fire instructions in hotel rooms and checking out the exits everywhere I went. An old Taliban contact on the Quetta shura offered me an interview and I had to decline because we couldn’t find a way to meet safely. It was becoming impossible to do the job in the way I always had. My heart sank when I had to give a ‘proof of life’ question and answer to my newsdesk before I went on assignment. Even the sunlight in Kabul seemed brittle.
Then one day an email pinged into my inbox informing me that our Washington correspondent was coming back to London. Would I be interested in the job? I was about to press the delete button. My whole career had been covering developing countries. I couldn’t imagine not regularly jumping on planes to Afghanistan or Pakistan. Then my finger hovered. America had just elected Barack Obama, its first black President. Like so many people I had been fascinated by the campaign which propelled the little-known Senator from Illinois to the most powerful office on earth, and would never forget the excitement of election night, which I had spent with friends at a party in London organised by the Black Caucus of MPs. Obama had promised to change America’s relationship with the world, to end the wars and close Guantánamo. People were talking of his as a transformational presidency. Most of the decisions that affected the places I covered were made in Washington, and much of the time I found them baffling. If I lived there and covered American politics, maybe, just maybe, I would understand.
I asked for advice from my friend James, who as spokesman for NATO had to defend its Afghan policy, which meant we often ended up on panels together taking opposite positions then agreeing in the pub afterwards. ‘Do it!’ he said. ‘How long will you be there? Three, four years? Take my word for it, Afghanistan and Pakistan will still be a train wreck when you come back.’
Before I moved, there was one person I wanted to see.
‘Look for the man who looks like a Taliban,’ he had said on the phone. I sat in the coffee shop sipping a cappuccino and toying nervously with a slice of chocolate cake that had looked better in the display cabinet, and surveyed the room.
There were plenty of men with beards, but none who quite looked Taliban. A Muzak version of the theme from Love Story was being piped over the sound system. The Front Page Café in the Pearl Continental Hotel, Rawalpindi, was an odd choice of venue. I guessed he’d chosen it because of the name or the location, just down the road from the headquarters of Pakistan’s army, which had ruled the country for more than half its existence. At the entrance a towering Pathan in scarlet uniform with golden epaulettes slid my bag through an x-ray machine to check for weapons, and as I walked through the lobby several heads popped up over newspapers as if jerked to attention by some invisible puppet-master. I knew that if I came back four hours later they would still be reading the same papers – Pakistan’s hotels were filled with these men in grey shalwar kamiz who spied for one or more of the country’s intelligence services.
Five minutes turned to half an hour, one coffee became two, and fear turned to disappointment as I tried not to keep looking at my watch. I’d been trying to meet this man for twenty years. Now he had finally agreed, it seemed he was not going to turn up.
The man I was waiting for was Colonel Imam – at least, that was his nom de guerre. His real name was Amir Sultan Tarar, and his real rank Brigadier General, and he was a legendary figure among Afghans, revered by some, hated by others.
When I lived in Peshawar in the 1980s he had run the ISI training programme for the Afghan resistance fighting the Soviet Union which had invaded their country. Ninety-five thousand Afghans had been through his camps, including warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, and Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and he called them all ‘my boys’. In those days we called them ‘freedom fighters’. When Osama bin Laden arrived in Peshawar in 1984 and began funding a wave of Arabs to join the fight, Colonel Imam welcomed them even though many were renegades in their own countries.
In those days my Afghan friends spoke of Colonel Imam in hushed tones. The CIA support to the Afghan mujaheddin was the biggest covert programme in history, yet also the one over which the Agency had least control, as all distribution of arms and funds went through ISI. Colonel Imam literally determined the fate of Afghan commanders by deciding who got what. After the Russians were driven out the Americans had given him five gallantry awards. The White House presented him with a piece of the Berlin Wall with a bronze plaque inscribed ‘To the one who dealt the first blow’ like the one General Gul had received.
After 9/11, however, he was on the other side. Or the West was on the other side, depending on which way you looked at it. Although by 1990 the Americans had cut off all their funding to the Afghans, Imam continued working with his boys even as they started fighting against each other.
It is not entirely true to say I had never met him. He had been involved in the planning for the battle for Jalalabad in 1989, the disastrous attempt by the mujaheddin to capture a city from the communist government after the departure of the Russians. Trapped between the rockets of the mujaheddin coming into the city and the bombs of the Afghan air force on the roads around, some 10,000 civilians were killed in the single worst week of the entire war. ISI had closed the border, and I was one of the only reporters to get to the front line to see what was happening. With bodies dropping all around us, one of the Afghan fighters I was with had suddenly stiffened and pointed out Colonel Imam directing operations. The group’s commander, Rahim Wardak, had confronted him angrily, demanding, ‘How dare you who have never won a war give orders to us who have never lost one?’
When the Taliban emerged as a new force in southern Afghanistan promising to restore law and order and curb the warlords who were making life a misery for millions of Afghans, Colonel Imam quickly spotted their potential and helped organise them. After they had launched their first offensive at Spin Boldak in April 1994, a cable from the US Embassy in Islamabad to Washington reported that the attack ‘was preceded by artillery shelling of the base from Pakistan Frontier Corps positions’ inside Pakistan. It also noted: ‘coordination was provided by Pakistani officers on the scene’.1
They travelled in gleaming new Toyota pick-ups purchased by the Saudis and shipped to Karachi then fitted with machine guns, rocket launchers and anti-aircraft guns. The mobility these provided would be critical to Taliban success.
Imam and another ISI major had been on board a thirty-truck convoy with military escort sent by Pakistan from Quetta in November 1994, ostensibly to deliver foreign aid to Herat. Its real objective, however, was to capture Kandahar and install Mullah Omar in power. Not far across the border their way was blocked by a mujaheddin commander, Mansour Achakzai, and his militia, who were notorious for raping and abducting people. Achakzai pulled at Imam’s beard and demanded, ‘Why have you come to our country without our permission?’ Then he impounded the convoy.
Taking on ISI was an unwise move. When they heard what had happened the Taliban mobilised fighters, helped by Pakistani commandos in plain clothes, and began battling for the city. The then Governor, Gul Agha, who had often dealt with Imam during the jihad, left for Pakistan. The local military commander Mullah Naqib also chose not to resist. Achakzai was captured and his body dangled from the gun of a tank in front of Kandahar airport as a warning. After capturing Kandahar, the Taliban swept north. An intercepted cable from Imam boasted, ‘My boys and I are riding into Mazar-i-Sharif.’
Yet to the outside world Pakistan insisted it was not involved. On a visit to Washington in February 1996, Foreign Minister Assef Ali met the Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and ‘categorically denied’ that Pakistan was giving assistance to the Taliban. ISI Director General Nasim Rana insisted ‘not one bullet’ had been provided to them.
Just over six months later, in September 1996, with Kabul under siege from the Taliban, ISI launched a major offensive into Afghanistan. An armoured column headed up the Grand Trunk Road from Peshawar, captured Jalalabad and closed in on Kabul. ‘The two-week massive well-coordinated armor, air and infantry attack across the Durand Line could not have been planned and executed by Taliban’s barefoot mullahs,’ said Peter Tomsen, the American diplomat who was Ambassador to the Afghan resistance from 1989 to 1992.
The mujaheddin government crumbled under the attack. On 26 September Ahmat Shah Massoud, who was its Defence Minister, issued orders to evacuate to Panjshir. Before leaving he went to the French Embassy, which adjoins the UN compound where Mohammad Najibullah had been living since being deposed as President. The two old enemies met at a door at the end of the Embassy garden, and Massoud offered to fly his former nemesis to safety. Najibullah refused, and so sealed his fate.
In 1997 Pakistan became one of only three countries to recognise the Taliban, followed by Saudi Arabia and UAE. According to Tomsen: ‘ISI officers were stationed in every ministry. In the provinces ISI established about eight bases manned by active-duty and retired ISI colonels and brigadiers.’ Major militant groups linked to ISI – Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin – all ran training camps inside Afghanistan.
At the time of 9/11 Imam was officially Pakistan’s consul-general in Herat. He told me he was outraged when he heard that President Musharraf, faced with the threat of US retribution, had agreed to switch sides. He refused orders to leave Afghanistan and come home. Finally Musharraf sent him a message demanding, ‘What are you doing?’ I arrived in Herat just after the Taliban fell in November 2001, and was told he had driven out with them.
When Imam got back to Pakistan he warned Musharraf he was making a mistake siding with the Americans: ‘I told him I spent eighteen years with these people, and they cannot be defeated.’ He also went to see Mullah Zaeef, the Taliban Ambassador in Islamabad. Tears ran down Imam’s face as he told Zaeef, ‘Almighty Allah might have decided what is to take place in Afghanistan but Pakistan is to blame. How much cruelty it has done to its neighbour! And how much more will come.’2
Whether officially or otherwise, Imam became part of a double game that Pakistan was playing with the West. According to UN reports, Colonel Imam and other ISI colleagues had been spotted directing operations inside the southern Afghan provinces of Uruzgan and Helmand. ‘Rogue elements’ was how Musharraf shrugged them off when confronted by evidence. Others said they were not rogue at all but working for S Sector of ISI, whose main aim was to drive the Americans out of Afghanistan. Later Richard Armitage, the former US Assistant Secretary of State, would tell me Imam had even been in Marja, a small town in Helmand, in 2010, just before Western forces launched a massive operation to capture it from the Taliban. ‘He warned me we’d fail,’ he said.
It seemed to me that if anyone knew what role Pakistan was really playing, it was Imam. Ever since he’d left Herat I had been trying to meet him. I had gone to apartments where curtains jerked closed as I rang the bell, dialled endless mobile numbers only for male voices at the other end to claim not to know him, and sent messages through intermediaries.
Finally, after a series of phone conversations, he had suddenly agreed to meet. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was nervous. ISI regularly ‘disappeared’ people. Pakistan had become one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist. I couldn’t help fearing it was a set-up. The fact that the meeting was in a public place was no reassurance: when ISI picked me up in Quetta it was from my room in a four-star hotel packed with the world’s media. Frightening as war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan could be, in my mind Pakistan was worse, as you didn’t know who was the enemy – it might be the state itself.
I had just decided he wasn’t coming when a shadow loomed over my table. ‘Lamb to the slaughter,’ boomed a voice. Two men stood there, one of whom did indeed look like a Taliban. Dressed in a white shalwar kamiz, Colonel Imam was tall and lanky, with a long white beard and deep-set brown eyes, and clacking a string of wooden worry beads. I knew he was sixty-five, but he looked younger. I had always thought he was a Pathan, and he looked like one, but on the phone he had told me he came from central Punjab. He introduced his friend as Brigadier Pervez, which may or may not have been his name, and told me they both worked on Afghanistan.
They sat down and ordered black tea and cold water. ‘Good enough,’ said Colonel Imam, an expression which was to punctuate the next couple of hours of conversation. Whenever he wanted to express exasperation he said ‘My foot,’ part of a quaint old-fashioned English that seemed to belong on the pages of Kipling but still appeared in some Pakistani newspapers, where buses ‘turned turtle’, ‘miscreants escaped under cover of darkness’ and journalists referred to themselves as ‘this scribe’.
‘What I am about to tell you has not come in any newspaper or book,’ he began. ‘This great tragedy all goes back more than thirty years.’
Imam told me that as a boy growing up he had dreamed of going to America, and was overjoyed when as a young army major in 1974 he had been selected to go for officer training to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where the US trains its special forces. ‘One of our instructors explained this course is to teach people to topple down a legal government,’ he said. ‘I got very interested and attained the leading position.’
Back in Pakistan he was posted to Peshawar as commandant of the parachute school, which at that time was the country’s only special forces operation. ‘When I got there I picked up some gossip in the teashops that the Russians were coming into Afghanistan with lots of money and supporting the two communist parties, Khalq [the masses] and Parcham [banner]. Sardar Daud, one of the leading politicians, had recently toppled his brother-in-law, King Zahir Shah, and the Russians saw an opportunity. Naturally people were very perturbed in Peshawar. We also heard there was some agitation among the students in Kabul, and that when it became violent Daud came with an iron hand and started arresting university students and professors. They arrested Professor Abdul Rasul Sayyaf from the Islamic law faculty, and another professor, Burhanuddin Rabbani, went underground with a large number of students and began creeping towards Pakistan. This was very scary, as the government of Pakistan and the government of Afghanistan have not enjoyed good relations since our creation in 1947 – Afghanistan was the first government in the entire world not to recognise Pakistan, and we knew they had designs on our territory. But when those Afghans came to Peshawar, as Pashtuns are very good at extending hospitality, they were accommodated.’
Pakistan’s Prime Minister at that time was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the country’s first democratically elected leader. His relations with the US were strained because of his open determination to build the first Islamic bomb. ‘We will eat grass to have the atom bomb,’ he had pledged after India carried out nuclear tests in 1974. His words prompted a warning from US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who visited Islamabad in 1976 with the message ‘We will make a horrible example of you.’
Just like the British long before, Bhutto worried about Russian expansionism creeping south. So he asked Brigadier Nasirullah Babar, who was in Peshawar heading the paramilitary forces, to get hold of the Afghan rebels and organise them.
‘At that time there were just thirty or thirty-five students, but they were very brilliant and bright,’ said Imam. ‘They told Babar, we need training to face the communist forces in Kabul – what they needed was guerrilla warfare. The army special forces said there is a major in Peshawar who recently trained in America and he could do the job. That’s how I got sucked in. It’s very difficult to organise Afghans – something like counting frogs in a muddy pond’, he huffed. ‘It took months but finally we made a political party, Jamaat-e-Islami [Islamic Society], with Professor Rabbani as head and Yunus Khalis, another Islamic scholar, as deputy. That was the first foundation of an anti-Russia movement.’
At this point Brigadier Pervez stepped in. ‘You have read in your British history how the Russians were always creeping towards the south and east towards your Indian empire, and only British influence in Afghanistan stopped them, and the line of your Mr Durand. We knew their real plan was to push through Baluchistan towards the Arabian Sea; their target was the Persian Gulf oil. Afghanistan itself doesn’t have any economic attraction, it’s only a foothold.’ He almost spat the last words. ‘So anyone running Pakistan, whether Bhutto or an Islamist, would have done the same, just like you British had in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t about Islam, it was about stopping Russians, and we didn’t get any help. Americans and Europeans had written off Afghanistan – to them Pakistan was the buffer between the free world and the communist world.’
Imam picked up the narrative. ‘From 1975 to 1977 it was silent training. It was very difficult – maybe thirteen or fifteen men would come from Afghanistan for a month or two and we’d run a camp then they would go back. Then they would train others. They were very smart. The naughtiest student was Hekmatyar. As far as fighting [Ahmat Shah] Massoud was the best but he could not organise, he failed in politics. Another good fighter was Khalis. Although he had a small party his people were very dedicated, totally born to taking out Russians. We used to give them old World War II rifles, .303 single-barrel guns. Then they would go to the tribal areas and buy more. Whatever we had in our old arsenals we gave them and they made improvised Molotov cocktails to hit Russian tanks.’
The programme came to a halt in July 1977 when General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in a coup, imprisoning Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The following year there were also dramatic changes across the border. Afghan President Daud was killed in spring 1978 along with many of his family, and replaced by the more hardline communist government of Nur Mohammad Taraki, who began rounding up and killing thousands of intellectuals and Islamists. Hundreds of thousands more Afghans fled into Pakistan, many of whom wanted to fight the communists. ‘General Zia decided they were fellow brother Muslims and we should support them,’ said Imam. ‘He heard there had been some training, so he gathered all of us and said, OK, you start up again.’
There seemed little hope of outside support. As leader of a nation traumatised by Vietnam and Watergate, US President Jimmy Carter had launched a purge of the CIA aimed at ending dirty tricks and secret wars and had cut off all economic and military aid to Pakistan in response to the coup. ‘The Americans were cautioning us not to interfere,’ said Brigadier Pervez. ‘The Carter administration took it for granted that Afghanistan was gone.’
In December 1979 everything changed when the Russians sent their army into Afghanistan, turning the country into a Cold War battleground. The US began secretly sending weapons to the mujaheddin. Imam and his team really got going when a year later Ronald Reagan was elected and millions became billions. ‘When Reagan came things really changed,’ said Imam. ‘Although he was a film star he had a very good idea. William Casey, the CIA chief, came and said, “We’ll give you anything you want, we want the Russians to be defeated.”’ Zia saw his chance. ‘Our President made one condition,’ said Imam. ‘He said, “OK, but you Americans won’t interfere in any of our conduct, our operations, our training.” Everything was to go through us in ISI. The CIA agreed, they were very happy. They were just monitoring on the basis of the information we gave them. It was marvellous conduct and in ten years the Soviet Union was defeated and then ceased to exist. Total cost to the Americans – $5 billion and no American lives. Now the Americans have been bogged down in Afghanistan eight years, lost more than a thousand lives, and what is the expenditure? $100 billion per year! My foot!’
Initially, Washington’s objective in arming the Afghan rebels was to mire the Soviets in the Afghan bog. Some, like Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw it more personally, as a chance to kill Russians as payback for their support to the Viet Cong, who had killed 58,000 Americans. It was only later that they became convinced that this motley group of Afghans could actually defeat the Red Army.
One of the most passionate about the cause was a colourful Texan Congressman with a penchant for beauty queens with names like Snowflake. Charlie Wilson was on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, and under his campaigning the US went from supplying Lee Enfield rifles to AK47s and surface-to-air missiles.
American financial assistance rocketed from tens of millions of dollars to hundreds of millions, all of which was matched by the Saudis. Arms were shipped to Karachi or flown to Rawalpindi, then placed under ISI control. The CIA bought ISI a fleet of trucks which I used to see plying up and down the Grand Trunk Road with khaki tarpaulins over their tops to hide the weapons. CIA headquarters back in leafy Langley even sent in Tennessee mules for the Afghans to transport the weapons over the mountains. Wilson was a frequent visitor to the Pearl Continental in Peshawar. By the time Milt Bearden arrived in Islamabad as CIA station chief in 1986 his instructions from his boss William Casey were unambiguous. ‘We’re in it to win,’ he was told.
It was the proxy war to end all proxy wars – paying one nation to train another to fight – and was to become the largest covert operation in CIA history. As Imam explained, the entire enterprise was outsourced to Pakistan. ISI maintained control over the Afghans through the divide-and-rule method of their old British masters, by creating seven parties. The leaders’ influence depended on their having weapons and largesse to distribute, and for this they were dependent on ISI. No American official was allowed to meet commanders or mujaheddin leaders without ISI being present. Even General Zia never got to meet one alone.
In Imam’s role as chief instructor, he trained more than 95,000 fighters between 1979 and 1989. ‘I had a team of two hundred officers, and we had twelve teams working day and night. About two hundred mujaheddin would come for a ten-to-fifteen-day course on a weapon system then go back.’ Charlie Wilson and then Deputy CIA Director Robert Gates were regular visitors to these camps. ‘When Charlie Wilson used to see Afghans training he would dance with happiness,’ said Imam.
He found his students to be fast learners. ‘The Afghan is a very cunning soldier. He picks up very quickly. As unit commander I’d be training recruits for six months and get 70 per cent success; in Afghanistan teenagers would come for a few days and the result would be 100 per cent. Once I only had three days to train a group of teenagers on an RD7 anti-tank rocket launcher, which is a very difficult weapon, before Charlie Wilson came to visit, and I was worried they wouldn’t give a good show, but they were so good that Charlie was dancing.’
As I had seen for myself at the battle of Jalalabad, ISI had done more than train. ‘I used to be on the ground all the time,’ said Imam. ‘My officers were with them, without that they would not have been successful. Afghans do not know strategy, just fighting. All the hard work was done by the Pakistan army.’
By the mid-1980s weapons were coming from all over the world, everywhere from France to China, and Imam’s team carried out trials to decide which were most suitable. The British were reluctant to provide weapons, though they were funding the resistance. ‘They didn’t want their weapon systems being used as they didn’t want Russians to know they were involved, but the Americans wanted them to be so they sent Blowpipes.’
Imam didn’t think much of the Blowpipe, a portable surface-to-air missile which had been used in the Falklands War then withdrawn because it had proved so hard to aim. One British officer compared using it to ‘trying to shoot pheasants with a drainpipe’, and the official report on the war said it had managed only two hits. It was some of these mothballed units that were sent to the mujaheddin. ‘It was a useless weapon I rejected,’ said Imam. ‘The missile came and it wasn’t hitting. We were firing this way and it was going that way. But my Director General said no, you take it, we took it just as a sign to show to Kabul that the Britishers were also involved.’
All of this training and distribution of weapons made ISI the real puppet-master of the war. It had been a small, neglected part of the armed forces until the war in Afghanistan, when the American and Saudi support turned it into the most powerful organisation in Pakistan, with 10,000 officers and many more informants. American diplomats regularly told me that they considered ISI to be the most effective intelligence agency in the Third World.
‘We gave them everything,’ said one. In the process they turned ISI into a monster that would soon not be satisfied with running the Afghan war but would train militants for its own proxy war in Kashmir, interfere in Pakistan’s politics, stoking sectarian violence, even creating a political party, and determine election results.
I sat there listening to Imam’s account in horror. In the background coffee cups were clinking and the Muzak had switched up-tempo to Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.
‘Can I have permission to light up a cigarette?’ he asked.
‘By all means,’ I replied. I felt like one myself.
Of course, living in Peshawar in the late 1980s, I had known what was going on. But we were all so busy reporting the war on the ground day to day that I had not appreciated the scale, nor how cynically the Pakistanis had misled the Americans. My Afghan friends were always complaining about ISI depriving them of weapons if they didn’t do its bidding, and giving all the weapons to the fundamentalists. Of the seven mujaheddin leaders Imam and his ISI colleagues played off against each other their clear favourite was Hekmatyar. At one point he was receiving 90 per cent of the arms.
Meanwhile Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir, who was regarded by many of us reporters as the most effective and impressive commander, received only a tiny fraction of the American largesse. ISI regarded Tajiks as sissies, joking, ‘When a Pashtun wants to make love to a woman his first choice is a Tajik man.’ Massoud had to develop his own sources in Iran and France. After the war, when the CIA tried to buy back the Stinger surface-to-air missiles they had provided, they sent their agent Gary Schroen to Massoud. Schroen told him the US had supplied 2,000 Stingers to ISI for the resistance. ‘Do you know how many I received?’ asked Massoud. ‘Eight.’
Yet Hekmatyar was vehemently anti-Western. At his press conferences I was amazed by the anti-American slogans – didn’t he know where his money was coming from? He also despised women. Even though I covered myself from head to foot, I was once bundled out of an interview with him because one of his aides told me, ‘Engineer Hekmatyar can see your ankles.’ In the vast Shamshatoo refugee camp, where Hekmatyar held sway, women teachers had acid thrown in their faces. His men were also behind a campaign of assassinations of Afghan intellectuals.
One of the most popular stops for us journalists in Peshawar was the office of Professor Sayyid Bahauddin Majrooh, a floppy-haired poet who ran the Afghan Information Centre, the only independent Afghan source of news. In 1987 his organisation carried out a survey among Afghan refugees which revealed that 70 per cent of them wanted King Zahir Shah as their future ruler rather than any of the seven mujaheddin leaders, particularly Hekmatyar. Many of us reported it. A few months later, in February 1988, Professor Majrooh’s doorbell rang just as dusk was falling. He opened the door and was gunned down by Kalashnikov fire.
I remember realising for the first time what ISI was really up to. At that time I had an American boyfriend who was also a journalist, Mark Fineman from the Los Angeles Times, and he was over from Delhi where he was based, and staying in the Holiday Inn. I burst into his room one evening and laid out the whole thing. We sat up till the early hours piecing it together.
ISI was not just distributing arms, but directing operations and providing the Americans with intelligence to serve its own interests. ISI’s Director, General Hamid Gul, and the leader of its Afghan cell, Brigadier Afzal Janjua, were committed Islamists, members of the Muslim Brotherhood, as were the second-tier officers on the ground like Colonel Imam. Their aim was to install a client fundamentalist regime in Kabul that would recognise the Durand Line as the border and serve as a bulwark against Pakistan’s real enemy, India.
The Americans had little independent information, and ISI officers used codes when they talked to each other on the phone and swept their offices for bugs. So successful was ISI in fooling its backers that Milt Bearden, the CIA station chief, openly professed his admiration for Hamid Gul, presenting him with an American cavalry sword and helping him find an American university for his son. He recalls telling the US Ambassador Arne Raphael, ‘Why do I look at Hamid Gul and see a plucky little general who might one day take over the country?’ From then on they both referred to Gul affectionately as ‘PLG’.
The Americans all seemed to accept ISI’s argument that the radical jihadists like Hekmatyar and Sayyaf were the best fighters, and therefore deserved more arms. ‘That’s what we used to tell them,’ said Imam with a thin smile. In 1985 President Reagan even invited the muhajeddin leaders to the White House. In a bizarre photo-call he sat surrounded by these bearded men on sofas and declared to the press, ‘These gentlemen are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.’
By 1986 the CIA was spending 70 per cent of its entire operations budget funding a Muslim jihad to kill Russians. The whole campaign was managed by a bunch of Islamists who were giving the lion’s share of the US money and weapons to people who wanted to kill Americans.
The US was happy to use Islam as a rallying cry. The CIA funded the printing of Korans to be distributed throughout the region, and the University of Nebraska produced primary-school textbooks, known as ‘the ABC of Jihad’, which taught children the alphabet and to count with Kalashnikovs and swords instead of apples and oranges, and were filled with images of Islamic warriors.
Alphabet song
A is for Allah. Allah is One.
B is for Father [bab]. Father goes to the mosque.
D is for religion [din]. Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the enemies of Islam.
J is for jihad. Jihad is an obligation.
Far from being disturbed by these developments, the Americans were delighted to see the Afghan jihad become a cause across the Middle East. By the mid-1980s the Afghan fighters in Peshawar were joined by Arabs, coming in such numbers that special reception committees were set up at Pakistan’s airports. One of them was Osama bin Laden. ‘The Americans used to be very happy about this,’ said Imam. ‘I’m witness. When bin Laden came they were very happy. This rich man using his own money to dig tunnels.’
The first American official to openly question what was going on was a slightly-built, bespectacled fellow called Ed McWilliams who arrived at the Embassy in Islamabad in spring 1988 to be US Special Envoy to the Afghans. A hardline Cold Warrior who had started his career in Vietnam interrogating Viet Cong prisoners, he seemed an unlikely maverick. However, he had lived in Moscow, where he had got used to operating under the radar screen, away from the eyes of the KGB, and he spoke fluent Dari. He managed to visit Peshawar and Quetta without escorts, and was shocked at what he heard. All the Afghans he met told him the same story – Hekmatyar and ISI, backed by Pakistan’s biggest religious party Jamaat-e-Islami, were trying to wipe out their rivals.
McWilliams was appalled that the CIA was collaborating with ISI in promoting an anti-American movement. When he tried to raise the issue at the Embassy, he found himself silenced. Finally, in desperation, in October 1988 he wrote a cable laying out his fears. Knowing it would not be cleared by the Ambassador, he sent it direct to the State Department, CIA headquarters and the National Security Council.
Shortly afterwards I spent an evening at his house in Islamabad along with Mark Fineman, ostensibly to watch Casablanca, one of my favourite movies. As Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman played out their tortured love affair in the background, Ed told us what he had done. We looked at him with astonished respect. While we had just endlessly talked about what ISI was doing, he had risked his career. The US Ambassador Robert Oakley was furious, and a whispering campaign would soon begin to besmirch Ed’s name. The only support he got was from some MI6 officers who were worried about the same issue. That was little help – their CIA counterparts drily pointed out that Britain had already lost at least two wars in Afghanistan.
No one wanted to know. This was a Good War, and it was not easy to report anything against the prevailing mood. When I reported some of the mujaheddin’s more barbaric behaviour I was denounced as a communist by a group of American journalists in Peshawar in a loud argument at Dean’s Hotel. When I questioned the battle for Jalalabad and ISI’s role, I was blackballed from the American Club, the only place for Westerners to hang out, eat burgers and drink alcohol. In the spring of 1989 Ed McWilliams was sent home. His replacement, Peter Tomsen, was more on-message, talking of how he was planning to ride on the back of a tank into free Kabul – though he too would leave as a critic of ISI. When I wrote about ISI smuggling arms, I was questioned, threatened and told that I should leave the country. When I didn’t, I was deported.
In the wake of 9/11 and what had happened subsequently in Afghanistan, all of this had taken on chilling significance.
Charlie Wilson never forgot his first visit to a Peshawar hospital, when he had asked a wounded Afghan how he could help, and the man had asked for something with which to shoot down Soviet helicopters. It was largely his lobbying that led to the mujaheddin being given the Stinger missiles in 1986 which really turned the war around. The Afghans loved the shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles in their long, black cylindrical tubes. They were light, easy to carry and very accurate, and meant that for the first time they had a weapon to counteract the Soviet advantage of air power. The arrival of the Stingers also made the role of the Americans public for the first time. On each weapon case was inscribed ‘General Dynamics’.
‘Stingers made a lot of difference in terminal stages, you could say it was the last straw which broke the camel’s back,’ said Imam. ‘The Russians lost a few hundred helicopters which was very decisive in their decision to withdraw.’
By April 1988 the Russians had signed the Geneva Accords to start pulling out troops. It was an astonishing defeat, which played a major part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘Afghanistan has been the graveyard of empires for centuries,’ said Imam. ‘History confirms they don’t like foreigners. It’s nothing to do with Islam, it’s the Afghan psyche, tribes like the Alizai and Noorzai are addicted to fighting – I used to love them. I tell you very frankly, until such time that you kill the last Alizai they will keep fighting. For the last three hundred years whoever came there, they were never subjugated. Even Alexander the Great, after defeating the Persian Empire, got stuck in Afghanistan within six weeks of entering. The same with Tamerlane, King of all Kings, he ended up having to pay passage tax to get out. And you British went three times, look what happened. But the Russians thought, we’re the biggest army in the world, we’re just across the border, we are a superpower. They thought the Americans are tied up with Iran because of their Embassy problem so they came here, wanting to get to the warm-water ports, and got stuck. We knew they wouldn’t succeed. Even so, we never thought they’d be exhausted in ten years. I was thinking it would take thirty years or so. It was a surprise for us, and the Afghans weren’t ready.’
Imam saw the Geneva Accords as the start of all the problems. ‘Till then we in Pakistan, the Afghan mujaheddin and America were aligned to defeat the Soviet Union, but we all had different motives. The Americans wanted to take revenge and break the Soviet Union. The Afghans wanted to get the Russians out and form their own Islamic government. Pakistan felt they are brother Muslims, we must help them. And secure our own border.’
On 15 February 1989 the last column of the Soviet 40th Army crossed the Friendship Bridge over the Oxus River, led by their commander General Boris Gromov, ending 3,331 days of senseless war. From the CIA station in Islamabad Milt Bearden sent a two-word cable to his headquarters in Langley. ‘WE WON’, it said, in giant letters made from Xs. That night, for the first time in three years, he turned the light off in his office before leaving. His office faced that of his Soviet counterpart, and he had liked them to think he was working all night to defeat them.
At CIA headquarters in Langley the new Director, William Webster, hosted a champagne celebration. The US Embassy in Islamabad also threw a party.
‘I wasn’t invited, but I wouldn’t have gone,’ said Colonel Imam. For Imam and his ISI colleagues there seemed little to celebrate. Najibullah was still President in Kabul, and relations between ISI and the Americans were rapidly turning sour. ‘After the Geneva Accords everything changed. Those CIA people who’d been working with us for ten years were excellent. They’d give us things without asking. If they knew I was going inside they would give me photographs, maps, gadgetry, communications gear, etc. After the Geneva Accords new people came who treated us as if we were the corrupt police of a Third World country.’
He makes no secret of his anger. ‘For the Americans this was a huge success. Before the Russians came into Afghanistan it was a bipolar world. The Americans used to shit in their Embassy shelters because of the Soviet threat. These Afghans, by sacrificing 1.5 million people, finished off that threat, making it a unipolar world, and saved billions and billions off the US defence budget. It was a big prize for the Americans, scored by the Afghans. What did the Afghans get in return? Their whole country was destroyed. They had no infrastructure, no agriculture, no industry … At least the Americans should have helped them live like a decent animal. They could have spent $5 billion over five years. That was not done, they forgot Afghanistan – it was a great selfishness.’
I thought that perhaps the Americans had naïvely assumed the mujaheddin were on their way to victory. After all, in March 1988 the CIA had produced a National Intelligence Estimate predicting ‘the Najibullah regime will not long survive the completion of Soviet withdrawal even with continued Soviet assistance. The regime may fall before withdrawal is complete.’
But Richard Armitage laughed at the idea. ‘We thought within days of the Russians leaving they would fall in on each other. Everyone who went to Peshawar and beyond knew it. They hated each other, and their common enemy was gone. Did we envision full-scale civil war? Well, we figured warring tribes or groups.’
Imam and his colleagues at ISI could not believe what they were seeing. ‘This America had been happy to use Islam to make the mujaheddin fight, but did not want that these mujaheddin make their Islamic government, so they stopped their support and abandoned them. Net result: they started fighting each other.’
Many commanders became more focused on making money than on winning the war. In Kandahar, for example, Gul Agha Sherzai made a deal with the Governor, General Nur-al Haq Ulumi, who had been sent there after playing a critical role in defeating the mujaheddin at Jalalabad. Gul Agha’s men would stage fake attacks of rockets and light weapons near the airport to keep ISI happy, and Ulumi’s men would set oil drums on fire to make them look authentic. In return for keeping the peace Ulumi let Gul Agha sell ISI-provided American wheat inside Kandahar and pocket the profits. Gul Agha would then submit voucher requests to ISI for more money and ammunition to replace that used in airport ‘operations’.
When Charlie Wilson visited Pakistan after the Geneva Accords, Imam complained that the Americans were abandoning the Afghans.
‘What is the problem?’ asked Wilson.
‘They need financial support for rehabilitation,’ replied Imam.
‘Colonel Imam, dollars don’t grow on trees,’ was the Congressman’s response.
‘Do Afghan youth grow on trees?’ asked Imam. ‘One and a half million Afghans have died. What are you saying?’
Listening to Colonel Imam made me realise that men like him had been working towards an Islamist government in Afghanistan for thirty-five years – almost his whole professional life. And he was just one of many. It was clear that just as the fundamentalists had never gone away, neither had the infrastructure of ISI. Maybe its operatives were retired and off the books, maybe they were officially sanctioned, or maybe they were the beneficiaries of a large blind eye. Often they worked through fronts masquerading as welfare organisations.
An old friend of mine went to Azad Kashmir to be Chief Secretary, the most senior government official in the province. He told me that on his first day he was taken to lunch by the local ISI chief and told in no uncertain terms, ‘We run Kashmir.’
The scariest thing was that the views of Colonel Imam and his colleagues were no longer held only by a minority. Now when I visited Pakistan it seemed it was the moderate views that were in the minority. Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physics professor, showed me a photograph of his chemistry class standing on a balcony at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad in 1985, then one of the same department in 2008. The first picture showed girls in colourful clothes, some in jeans, some in shalwar kamiz, their heads uncovered. In the second all were in hijab, with only the eyes visible. ‘They look like clones,’ he said. ‘All of this goes back to General Zia and the way that the army went from defending our borders to transforming our society. What was once a kind of lunatic fringe is becoming the majority view.’
On the way to meet Colonel Imam, I had driven past the Red Mosque. Abdul Aziz, the preacher, had been freed on bail two months earlier, in April 2009. He was greeted by thousands of supporters who hoisted him on their shoulders chanting ‘Jihad, jihad!’ and carried him to the remains of the mosque. There in a fiery speech he vowed revenge. ‘The blood of those who were martyred here will usher in an Islamic revolution,’ he warned. Outside, rows of women in identical black burqas chanted support. The government had just signed a peace deal in Swat with the Taliban agreeing to bring in Islamic Sharia law, as well as similar deals in the tribal agencies of Bajaur and Mohmand. ‘Now Islam will not remain confined to Swat,’ thundered Abdul Aziz victoriously. ‘It will spread all over Pakistan then all over the world!’