In the months before 9/11, Pakistan’s economic decline was unmistakable. There was a tangible fear that the country was drifting towards chaos. There was a picture of decay—of overcrowded cities and crumbling buildings, dusty roads, bands of children with dirty faces and outstretched hands, the breakdown of law and order as dark-haired, dark-eyed men moved through the villages with AK-47s. Men with full-length beard have become a common sight, and there are far more turbans of militant Islamic green.
Madrasahs or Islamic religious schools were everywhere, estimated at 40,000 dotting the country in various shapes and forms, some with vast acreage or dormitories, others tiny makeshift rooms in mosques in poor neighborhoods. What was striking to a traveler was the presence in every city and town of monuments to Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. In Quetta, Peshawar, Karachi and Lahore towering replicas rise from central square of the Chagai Hills, the site in the desert of Balochistan where Pakistan’s scientists and its generals tested their bomb in 1998 two weeks after India exploded its own.
It all began when the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was carved out of British India to provide a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims. The idea of a Muslim homeland has remained murky through the years. No leader since independence has been able to bind the people together in the name of Islam, because of their diversity. There are 7 major Sunni Muslim sects, as well as Shiites, Ahmadis, Sufis, Ismaelis, and many subsects. This is exacerbated by a de facto system of caste. It’s as caste-conscious as India, but more subtle, e.g., education and wealth. The Army is second only to the Brahmans.
Personalities have always loomed higher than institutions; except for the 550,000-man Army whose leaders are the arbiter of power for the past 55 years. At the time of the death of General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in August 1988, the Army had ruled Pakistan for 24 of the 41 independent years. There had only been 3 general elections in 4 decades. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was elected in December 1970, was the only popularly elected leader ever to govern the country. Pakistanis had thus turned to violent agitation as a means of political change, e.g., General Mohammed Ayub Khan in 1969, General Yahya Khan in 1971, and Bhutto in 1977.
Islamabad, the capital, is an artificial city carved out of the Margala Hills in the 1960s by a Greek architect at the behest of another military ruler, General Ayub Khan. It is a city in constant contrast to the rest of the country, and seems somehow detached from it. As one American ambassador described it, “Islamabad is like a New York cemetery: half the size, but twice as dead.” It has a population of 800,000 spread over 351 square miles. Its sister city, Rawalpindi, the seat of military power, has a population of 1.4 million in a 55 square miles area.
To the west and southwest of Islamabad lie Afghanistan and Iran. To the east, India, and the Arabian Sea to its south. The country’s illiteracy rate of 54% is among the highest in Asia. Its annual population growth of 2.4% is among the highest in the world. Pakistan is a brooding, changeless place, seemingly caught between the 19th and 21st centuries. It has a fierce appetite for change.
General Zia was born in 1924 into the family of a civil servant who was a devout religious man (maulvi) in Jullundun, now part of Indian Pubjab when India was still ruled by the British Raj. Its violent partition in 1947, which created Pakistan, was an event that affected his thinking for the rest of his life.
He rose from obscurity in the Army in 1976 when Bhutto promoted him over 10 generals to become Chief of the Army Staff. Bhutto considered him a pliant, unimaginative choice, but sixteen months later Zia overthrew him. From the time he seized power, he began catering to the country’s four strongest groups: the Army, the Muslim clergy, the financial and industrial barons, and the feudal landlords. He embarked on a sweeping Islamization program to make Pakistani laws conform with the teachings of the Koran. But it was in the books only, and no one, e.g., thieves, adulterers, etc. was punished for breaking them. He gave priority to Pakistan’s program to develop a nuclear weapon.
Because of the country’s strategic importance, the Carter and Reagan administrations looked the other way when it came to Pakistan’s programs. They were even silent regarding its human rights record. In 1979 some Pakistanis predicted Zia’s fall because of rising prices, an idle economy, and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But when Soviet troops crossed over Afghanistan, the US bestowed a new legitimacy on his regime. By 1980, he was no longer a pariah in the west. From a “simple soldier,” he was now rubbing elbows with presidents and kings.
Although he was first a military man, he retained a common touch that was bred of a middle-class background in British India. He would sometimes escort visitors to their cars, waited in the hot weather to wave them off. He was a master manipulator of power, yet he could be disarmingly candid at times. He never moved into the presidential residence in Islamabad but continued to live in the Army House, the official residence of the Chief of Army Staff.
Zia had two passions—Islam and Afghanistan. He divided his country by the imposition of the harsher aspects of Islamic law and by his agreement to provide the Aghan Mujahideen with ever increasing shipment of arms supplied by the CIA. From 1981 until his death in 1988, Washington committed more than $7 billion in military and economic aid to Pakistan and at least $2 billion in covert assistance to the Afghan Mujahideen, channeled through Pakistan's powerful ISI. From the day of the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan dominated his domestic and foreign policies.
He did not trust politicians, but in February 1985 he allowed restricted, non-party elections for Parliament. He appointed Mohammed Khan Junejo, a wealthy landlord from the province of Sindh to serve as prime minister. But when Junejo started to act as though he really was head of the government, Zia dismissed him. Hey disagreed strongly on two issues—the role of the Army, which was Zia’s primary constituency, and Afghanistan.
Zia crafted his Afghan strategy on a line drawn upon the map of 1893 by an exhausted British Raj. After its expansion into northwest India, Britain attempted to push further on. Twice it invaded the Kingdom of Afghanistan in 1839 and 1878. Both incursions ended in disastrous defeats. Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary in the colonial government of India, met with the Amir of Afghanistan in Kabul, and demarcated (known as the “Durand Line”) one of the wildest and least governable terrains on earth. The British thus gained a buffer between the Raj and the Russian Empire. Given their history of isolation and their culture of insurrection, the better part of reason was to subsidize the tribal chiefs rather than to attempt to battle them. In the process it split in half the land known as Pashtunistan.
The Pashtuns, whose total number is at least 20 million, are known as Pathans, a garbled Hindustani rendering of their native tongues: Pakhtan for those who live in or north of Peshawar; Pashtu for the tribes across Afghanistan or scattered in the south. Whatever their dialect, they bonded as one and they despised the artificial lines that swept across the map, continuing to come and go as they always had, between what became Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier and Balochistan, and their larger homeland of Afghanistan.
Peshawar is a rugged and lawless place driven by religious fervor and violence, and rich in political intrigue. It is the capital of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. It retains the feel of a sprawling town of pastel-colored villas and Afghan refugee camps; military training centers and madrasahs, and religious schools where jihad is more often preached. There is a booming black market economy as well as abundance of drugs and easy availability of guns. It is the key staging area for jihad in Afghanistan.
Zia lived in dread of the resurrection of the call for a united Pashtunistan. When the Pashtun leader Sardar Mohammed Daoud took over the government in Kabul and called on the Pashtuns of Pakistan to secede and join their brothers under the Afghan flag, Bhutto struck back. He invited Afghan Pastuns to Pakistan, and some 5,000 came. They were students and mullahs, warlords and tribal chiefs. The majority were anti-secular champions of a fundamentalist state in Afghanistan. None embraced Pashtunistan. Bhutto organized them into a guerrilla force to harass Daoud’s regime. Six years before the Soviets invaded Aghanistan, the Mujahideen had been born. Zia had overthrown Bhutto, but he accelerated Bhutto’s policies in Afganistan. Pakistan needed a client state there to protect itself against Pashtunistan.
Though Zia was a religious Muslim, he was neither fanatical nor fundamentalistic but was committed to Islamic Pakistan. He was proud of the fact that besides Israel, Pakistan was the only other state created on religious grounds, e.g., created on the basis of Islam. Pointing to Israel’s religion and ideology as the main sources of its strength, he decried Pakistan’s failure to see the importance of these things. As he put it, “without them, you’re like a straw being thrown into the ocean. You’re a Sindh, a Baloch, a Punjabi, a Pathan. Pakistan’s binding force has always been Islam. Without it, Pakistan would fall.”
No man has dominated all aspects of Pakistan’s life as did Zia, who died in a mysterious, still unexplained airplane crash in 1988. When he seized control of the government in a military coup, he promised to restore democracy in 90 days. He never did. He consolidated his power by deft maneuvering , and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he embarked on policies that made Pakistan the hub of American policy in South Asia for the next decade.
A few weeks after his death, the investigation was proving more difficult than had originally been expected. Five “working theories” on the cause of the crash were looked into. One of them, a missile attack, was easily discounted. There had been no midair explosion. The four other theories were: mechanical failure, pilot error, sabotage, and instantaneous crew incapacitation (presumably from poisonous gas). Among the dead with Zia were the American ambassador (Arnold Raphael), the American military attache’ (Brig. Gen. Gen. Herbert Wascom), and ten Pakistani generals.
Zia’s vision of Islam was often confusing, as were his Islamic laws. When he died, nobody really knew where he stood. He was preparing for general elections he did not believe in and that many people doubted he would hold. He was also pushing his army and the Afghan resistance into a more aggressive role, hoping to secure a military victory as the Soviets began withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was increasingly emerging that the Pakistani armed forces, the United State, and the fundamentalist wing of the Afghan resistance were unhappy with that role.
Rawlein G. Soberano, Ph.D.
President
Asian American Business Roundtable
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