World History: Pakistan 1977-1996

  1. Pakistan (Land of the Pure)
  1. Pakistan is roughly twice the size of California. Its population of 193 million (2013) is divided into several ethnic groups the largest of which are the Punjabi people who make up 45% of the total. The Pashtun and Sindhi percentages account for 15% each.
  2. Most of the population doesnot have access to cleanwater. Much of the country is desert. Forested areas are steadily shrinking. As forests vanish desertification intensifies. Pollution of all types continues to foul the environment. (CIA Factbook)
  3. As many as 3 million Afghan refugees have fled to Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban has seized tribal regions near the Afghan border. One million Pakistanis are internally displaced people (IDPs).
  4. India and Pakistan have fought three wars (1947/1965/1971)over the disputed territory of Kashmir. One million people died in the 1947 war which birthed both nations and involved the mass migration of 12-14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.
  5. The 1971 war split Pakistan. East Pakistan declared itself independent and was re-christened Bangladesh. There is no accurate count of the war’s dead. Estimates range from hundreds of thousands to 3 million.
  6. The India –Pakistan border stretches almost 2,000 miles. It is fenced, floodlit and heavily militarized.
  1. Zia-ul-Haq and the Islamization of Pakistan (1977-1988)
  1. Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, died in 1948 at age 82. His successor was assassinated. Several leaders followed between 1951 and 1973 when Zulfikar al Bhutto was named Prime Minister.
  2. Bhutto lasted 4 years. He was deposed in a coup d’etat in 1977 and jailed. The coup leader, General Zia led a campaign to introduce Islamic Law and create an Islamic system. Bhutto was hanged in 1979.
  3. Zia was a fervent Muslim. He believed Pakistanis should embrace political Islam as an organizing principle. “We were created on the basis of Islam” he said. He compared his country to Israel, “where its religion and its ideology are the main sources of its strength.”
  4. Pakistan is 97% Muslim (Struggle for the Soul of Pakistan, NGM, September, 2007) “Without Islam,” he believed, “Pakistan would fail” (Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, pg 61).
  5. In December, 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Pakistan’s neighbor, Afghanistan. Millions of Afghan refugees fled to Pakistan. The Soviets planned, financed and participated in terror strikes in Pakistan.
  6. General Zia feared Pakistan would be sandwiched between a communist Afghanistan and a Hindu India.
  7. Zia strongly encouraged “the financing and construction of hundreds of madrassas or religious schools to educate young men in Islam’s precepts and to prepare some for anti-communist jihad”. (Coll, pg 61).
  8. The Pakistani army adopted the motto of “Jihad In the Service Of Allah”. A full 25% of the Pakistani budget was devoted to military spending. Less than 3% was spent on education, health care and the public welfare. (Struggle for the Soul of Pakistan, National Geographic Magazine, Sept, 2007)
  9. Zia embraced jihad as a strategy. He saw the legions of Islamic fighters gathering on the Afghan frontier in the early 1980s as a secret tactical weapon. They accepted martyrdom’s glories. He assured U.S President Reagan, “Afghan youth will fight the Soviet invasion with bare hands, if necessary” (Coll, pg 62).
  1. American Aid and the Afghan Jihad
  1. U.S President Reagan wanted to make the Soviets pay a heavy price for their aggression. The key was winning the cooperation of General Zia. The U.S approved 3.2 billion in aid to Pakistan.
  2. Zia took the money, but insisted Pakistan would decide how it was spent and what Afghans received aid. U.S personnel were not allowed to cross the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan. The Pakistanis trained the Afghans; they distributed the weapons as well.
  3. Saudi Arabia and China also provided weapons, ammunition and money. A CIA officer said, “Can it possibly be any better than buying bullets from the Chinese to use to shoot Russians?”(Coll, pg 66).
  4. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who had ordered the invasion of Afghanistan, died in 1982. He was followed by two men in ill-health who both died shortly after taking power.
  5. The U.S.S.R’s last leader, Gorbachev, tried to save the Soviet Union by reforming his vast empire and withdrawing its military forces from Eastern Europe while ending the war in Afghanistan in 1989.
  6. Almost 30,000 Soviet soldiers lost their lives. Many tens of thousands more were wounded. American Stinger anti-aircraft missiles led to heavy losses of planes and helicopters. Heroin use among Soviet soldiers climbed and the war weakened the troubled Soviet economy.
  7. In 1988, General Zia, Pakistan’s top spy, the American ambassador and several Pakistani generals boarded a plane for Islamabad. Shortly after take-off the plane crashed, everyone aboard was killed. The Afghan jihad had lost its founding father.
  8. But Zia had “left an expansive legacy. In 1971 there had been only 900 madrassas in all of Pakistan. By the summer of 1988 there were about 8,000 official religious schools and an estimated 25,000 unregistered ones, many clustered along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier and funded by wealthy patrons from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. (Coll, pg 180).
  9. The Pakistani ISI was “the most powerful institution in Pakistan” by 1989 (Coll, pg 180). This service had welcomed thousands of volunteers who wished to wage jihad in Afghanistan. These fighters were now being funneled into Kashmir to continue jihad against India.
  10. 1989 was a tumultuous year. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union abandoned Eastern Europe. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria and Romania emerged from behind the Iron Curtain and became free, democratic countries. China’s communist government slaughtered demonstrating students in Tiananmen Square and the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. The Islamists had won.
  1. Ensuring Islamic Control of Afghanistan
  1. As the Soviets withdrew, Islamist mujahedin with the support of Pakistan’s ISI murdered mujahedin royalists, intellectuals, rival commanders – anyone who threatened strong alternative leadership (Coll, pg 180). The Soviet exit did not end the fighting. Afghanistan was divided into warlord regions.
  2. The Afghans endured anarchy, deep poverty, constant violence and crime. People were desperate for a strong hand to restore stability and end the anarchy. The Taliban emerged to under the direction of Mullah Omar.
  3. Omar, a former mujahideen commander, gathered an army of religious zealots, the Taliban, and launched a new jihad “to cleanse Afghanistan of lawlessness and corruption. Backed by Pakistan they captured the Afghan capital, Kabul, in April of 1996 and imposed their own extreme vision of Islamic law.
  4. Osama bin Laden “felt at home” in Afghanistan. He hailed terrorist bombings against American targets in Saudi Arabia. He boasted, “having borne arms against the Russians for 10 years, we think our battle with the Americans will be easy by comparison, and we are now more determined to carry on until we see the face of God.” (Coll, pg 340).