Be that as it may, these attacks remain for me the high point of my career with ISI. My bureau was the only military headquarters in over 40 years to have planned and coordinated military operations inside the communist superpower. The great majority were successful; they wounded the bear and they proved the effectiveness of well-led guerrilla attacks to be out of all proportion to their size. That the small-scale raids by such Commanders as Wali Beg could influence the councils in the Kremlin was of itself a singular reward.
The Bear Backs Off
“To those who flee comes neither power nor glory.”
IN late March, 1987, General Akhtar was promoted to four-star rank. This meant he had to relinquish his post as Director-General of the ISI and take up duties as Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. His promotion was not welcomed by the Parties, the Mujahideen, myself, or indeed by the General. For eight years General Akhtar had been the architect of the strategy for the Jehad. Under his overall direction the war had been brought to the point where ultimate military victory for the Mujahideen was in sight. It had been his recommendations to the President at the outset that had put Pakistan behind the guerrilla campaign. He had battled successfully on the political front to keep some semblance of unity among the Party Leaders, but only as a prerequisite {or an outright military victory. He well understood the Afghan psyche and the imperative need to achieve military objectives before introducing the distractions of political wrangling. The Mujahideen Leaders and Commanders could only cope with one at a time. No one perceived better than he the debilitating effect of the premature debut of political power grabbing on the Jehad.
During 1986 he had seen the Soviet resolve beginning to crumble. That was the year when President Gorbachev told the 27th Communist Party Conference that “counter-revolution and imperialism have transformed Afghanistan into a bleeding wound”. In May of that year, at the UN-sponsored Geneva peace talks, the Soviets had offered a four-year withdrawal timetable. In July they actually withdrew a token force of 6,000 men, which, significantly, included two MRRs and a tank regiment, as well as three, obviously superfluous, anti-aircraft artillery regiments. 1986 was also the year of the Stinger.
General Akhtar was going to a job that carried little authority or influence. From the most powerful position within the military in Pakistan, from a job that for all those long years had involved the struggle with the Soviet superpower on the battlefield, he was being ‘kicked upstairs’ to a sinecure. For two weeks Akhtar did not hand over his Afghan responsibilities to his successor, Major-General Hamid Gull There was talk of his retaining these duties in his new position. This is what he hoped for, as, for personal and professional reasons, he very much wanted to see the Jehad through to final victory. But it was not to be. President Zia did not relent, so, reluctantly, he handed over to Gull It was the first of a series of major setbacks to the war that occurred both before and after the Soviets’ withdrawal, and would eventually lead to the Mujahideen snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. General Akhtar was, I believe, the victim of American pressure. It was pressure that had been evident for years, but in April it finally coincided with our President’s wishes. Although the US Ambassador protested to him that General Akhtar should retain his Afghan obligations, he did not speak with conviction. The Americans had never been happy with Akhtar as head of ISI.
For a number of years the US had made no headway with General Akhtar over a number of issues. At the start of the war the objective had seemed clear cut—to drive the Soviets from Afghanistan and make them pay for the US humiliation in Vietnam. It was primarily a military matter, involving massive support for a guerrilla campaign. But, as the tide of battle began to turn slowly in the favour of the Mujahideen, as the Soviets began to show they were less than totally dedicated to remaining in Afghanistan, that in fact a military pull-out was possible, so the Americans began to look at an Afghanistan without the Red Army. What they saw alarmed them. They did not believe the Afghan communist regime would survive a Soviet withdrawal any more than the South Vietnamese had survived the US retreat from Vietnam. They saw an Islamic fundamentalist government in Kabul. They saw leaders like Khalis, Sayaf, Rabbani and particularly Hekmatyar, establishing an Iranian type of religious dictatorship, which would probably make Kabul as anti-American as Tehran. For this reason the US sought, with increasing vigour, to break the hegemony of the Leaders. They wanted to exploit the differences between the Parties and their Commanders. General Akhtar understood their aims and methods and opposed their every move.
The CIA had always argued that ISI should issue arms direct to Commanders, by-passing the Parties. This, they claimed, made sense militarily. The CIA would have dearly loved to decide who got the weapons and who did not. Although we explained that our method was based entirely on operational factors, they would not accept this and grew increasingly frustrated with ISI’s refusal to change the system. Had we distributed arms direct to Commanders it would have resulted in corruption, chaos and confusion inside Afghanistan. Interestingly, this is the situation today. In 1990 the Americans got their way. Weapons are now largely given to Commanders, with the ensuing infighting and lack of control. Commanders attacking Mujahideen convoys to steal arms they feel should have been given to them is now commonplace. This suits the US and the Soviets, who are equally fearful of a fundamentalist regime in Kabul aggravating their own problems within their adjoining Muslim republics.
General Akhtar was also strongly opposed to the Americans’ bright idea of bringing back the long-exiled Zahir Shah to head a government of reconciliation in Kabul. This was suggested in late 1986 and was just another ploy to cause more dissension between the moderates and fundamentalists. The latter regarded the former king as being, at best, a vacillating incompetent who had got through five prime ministers in ten years, or, at worst, an American puppet. Gailani, the Leader of a moderate Party, had at one time been an unofficial adviser to the King, so putting Zahir Shah forward was guaranteed to keep resentment and rivalries simmering.
Then there was the General’s resistance to the American and Pakistani foreign office demands that the Leaders call a Shoora (Council) to discuss arrangements for the future government of Afghanistan, on the basis of equal representation of each Party irrespective of its size. This would mean that some numerically large Parties, whose efforts and efficiency in the Jehad were poor, would have a greater say in politics and policy than some smaller ones who were more combat-orientated. Both General Akhtar and I were vocal against the injustice of this proposal. Similarly, we both opposed the formation of an interim government by the Parties until such time as the war had been decisively won, which to us meant when the Soviets had left Afghanistan and the Mujahideen had taken Kabul.
General Akhtar recognized that these US/Pakistani foreign office proposals were designed to increase the polarization between the Parties and to encourage dissension between Leaders and Commanders to the detriment of their efforts on the battlefield. He and I never wavered from our belief that the Mujahideen must secure a military victory before a political future for Afghanistan could be agreed. Once Commanders in the field became more interested in the politics in Peshawar than with fighting the war, they would soon, quite literally, abandon their operations to congregate in Pakistan. After all, why should they continue to prosecute the war with enthusiasm, at great personal risk, when potentially powerful political positions were up for grabs in Peshawar? Nobody was going to secure anything worthwhile unless they were there in person, to lobby and intrigue—as much a part of the Afghan character as fighting.