Narco-Insecurity, Inc. The Convergence of the Narcotics Underworld and Extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Its Global Proliferation Chapter two

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By David R. Winston

Chapter Two

The Puppet Masters and the Trafficking Pipeline


The USSR’s economic decline in the late 1980s coupled with the growing Soviet-American rapprochement fostered significant pressure in the country to end its engagement in Afghanistan.

This brought about a gradual withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan over several months, completing on February 15, 1989.
Unfortunately, this did not lead to an end of conflict.

The PDPA government, now led by Mohammad Najibullah, was not willing to cede control to the mujahidin. While they withdrew combat troops, the Soviets still supplied much needed supplies and funds to the struggling government.

The mujahidin were also too divided to take advantage of the military weaknesses of the Najibullah regime.

163 A few weeks after the Soviets completed their withdrawal, the mujahidin commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom the West had supported via Pakistan, tricked a Tajik faction of the mujahidin into alliance negotiations, only to then torture and slaughter the entire delegation.

164 Within a few months of the Soviet defeat, the mujahidin had devolved into embattled warlords fighting over territory armed with Western-provided weaponry.

165 Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson worked to keep the aid flowing, despite the clear signs that the mujahidin were not the ‘freedom fighters’ he believed them to be. Wilson had taken on the plight of the mujahidin as a career-defining project; he was a major factor in the CIA’s initial decision to provide covert funding.

Two years after the Soviets withdrew their troops, Wilson was still pulling for more aid, and as a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, he was in a position to greatly influence that allocation.

He got Congress to give $250 million in arms and aid to the mujahidin, and with Saudi Arabia promising to match it for a total of $500 million, it was supposed to be enough to give the mujahidin the upper hand to finally take out the Najibullah government.

The plan failed, with the mujahidin again devolving into factionalism and infighting.166 This did not deter Wilson and his supporters, however.

167 As Wilson continued to push for more funding, members of Congress heard increasing reports of the criminality and brutality of the mujahidin.

Reports came in that they hijacked aid trucks, burned down a women’s health clinic, and murdered countless civilians in their attempt to ‘liberate’ cities.

168 John Murtha, chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, was alarmed at reports that the mujahidin were trafficking drugs.

169 As a result of these increasing concerns, the US Senate Intelligence Committee rejected requests for continued funding of covert operations in Afghanistan on September 30, 1991.

This was until Wilson caught wind of it.
After a rousing speech to the House Intelligence Committee, he got them to approve an additional $200 million, as well as a supply of arms acquired during the Gulf War.

170 Even Murtha voted in favour of the bill, placing his allegiance to Wilson over his concerns about the drug trafficking.

171 The 1992 aid packages of the US and Saudi Arabia enabled the mujahidin to at last conquer Kabul in April. Celebrations by the West were premature, and as quickly as the mujahidin came together to take Kabul, they unravelled again, creating further schisms in the mujahidin.

172 Initially, the mujahidin attempted to form an Islamic government with all factions represented.

Mujahidin commander Ahmad Dostam Massoud became Defence Minister and Afghan National Liberation Front founder Sibghatullah Mojaddedi became the President, with the intention of rotating positions

162 Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001), 69. 163 Ibid., 70. 164 George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 543. 165 Ibid., 1224. 166 Ibid., 1227. 167 Ibid., 1228. 168 Ibid., 1229-1230. 169 Ibid., 1238. 170 Jon E. Lewis, The Mammoth Book of Covert Ops:
True Stories of Covert Military Operations, from the Bay of Pigs to the Death of Osama Bin Laden (London, UK: Robinson, 2014), 301-303. 171 Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, 1238. 172 Lewis, The Mammoth Book of Covert Ops, 304. 36 between all mujahidin factions.

173 This plan was supported by every faction except Hezb-i-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hezb-i-Islami began their onslaught on Kabul the very hour that Mojaddedi took office.

174 Within two months, Mojadeddi handed over the presidency to Jamiat-i Islami leader Burhanuddin Rabbani.

175 Other factions soon engaged in their own brawls, such as between the Shia Hizb-i Wahdat and Saudi-backed Ittihad-i Islami. Several ministers refused to hand over their posts at the agreed rotation schedule, including President Rabbani, and factions receded to their respective ethnic groups vying for the upper hand.

176 During this era of authority constantly changing hands, the only consistent power was opium. Poppy harvesting saw a massive increase in the 1990s, jumping by 38% from 1993 to 1994 alone.

From 1992 to 1995, Afghanistan’s opium business rivalled Burma’s as the largest in the world, producing 2,200-2,400 metric tons a year.

177 After the Soviets left Afghanistan, many refugees in neighbouring states returned. Poppy farming was an easy way for refugees to make a sustainable living quickly, since the former mujahidin needed to rely more heavily on narcotics smuggling after international aid dried up.

178 Opium revenue was of vital importance to every faction to fund their militia and build up local infrastructure to sustain their control. When warlord Mullah Nasim Akhunzada became the ruler of the Helmand Valley, he built on its foundation of opium cultivation and taxed the profits to pay for the weapons needed to fight Hekmatyar’s forces.

He also used the revenue to build schools and roads in the dilapidated valley to win local support. In 1990, the US paid Akhunzada financial compensation of around $2 million in aid on the condition he stop poppy cultivation, to which he agreed.

179 However, this moratorium was short-lived, as regional control continued to rapidly shift hands.

Enter the Taliban

By 1995, the Afghan capital was razed to the ground, with 40% of all housing destroyed, and countless monuments demolished. After the dust settled, the faction that rose to the top with the backing of the ISI was the Taliban.

180 The Taliban, named for its members being former students of Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, rose to prominence in October 1994. Many were Afghan refugees who had been living in FATA and included many former mujahidin members.

Led by mostly unknown religious scholars, they offered disheartened Afghans a group to unite behind to end the infighting.
They gained popularity in the southwest, and soon grew their support in central and eastern Afghanistan.

They were able to end warlord and drug lord power struggles by paying them to leave or surrender control. By the end of 1995, they controlled half the country and were aiming to take over Kabul.

Hekmaytar grew concerned when he saw his usual ally, Pakistan, begin to back the Taliban. To ward off the Taliban takeover, Hekmaytar joined in an alliance with Rabbani, but it was too late.

181 Hekmatyar’s forces were handily defeated by the Taliban and he fled to Iran, where he lived in exile until 2002.

Most of Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami defected from their group and joined the ranks of the Taliban, which had a similar goal of establishing an Islamic state.182 The Taliban took Kabul in September 1996.

183 173 David B. Edwards, Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002). 174 Edward A. Gargan, “Rebels’ Leader Arrives in Kabul and Forms an Islamic Republic,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Apr. 29, 1992. 175 Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, 73. 176 Edwards, Before Taliban.

177 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven and London, UK: Yale University Press, 2001), 119. 178 Martin Booth, Opium—A History (London, UK: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013), 310. 179 James T. Bradford, Poppies, Politics and Power – Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 209. 180 Lewis, The Mammoth Book of Covert Ops, 304. 181 Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, 77-78. 182 Mujib Mashal, “Hekmatyar’s Never-Ending Afghan War: How One Former Anti-Soviet Ally of the US, Who Refused to Meet Reagan, Continues His War Three Decades Later,” Al Jazeera, Jan. 28, 2012.

183 Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, 77-78. 37 The Taliban’s policies on opium production shifted as quickly as Kabul’s leadership had. When the Taliban captured Kandahar in 1994, they made a public announcement that they would ban all drug production and distribution.

This ban did not last very long, as they realised the extent to which the farmers in Kandahar relied on it for survival.

Holding a tenuous control over the public, the Taliban feared backlash if they held to the poppy ban. Head of the Taliban’s anti-drug control force Abdul Rashid explained, “We let people cultivate poppies because farmers get good prices.

We cannot push the people to grow wheat as there would be an uprising against the Taliban if we forced them to stop poppy cultivation. So we grow opium and get our wheat from Pakistan.”

184 They also saw the crop as an opportunity to raise revenue. They began taxing farmers in the form of zakat, charitable alms under Islamic law. These donations were in the form of a 20% opium tax on farmers which would go directly to the Taliban.

On top of that, many local commanders and provincial governors imposed an additional tax to build their enterprise, turning themselves into drug lords.

The Taliban brought in at least $20 million USD in zakat alone excluding additional taxes.185 The Taliban continued to dominate the opium market through the mid-nineties. By 1996, Kandahar alone produced 120 metric tons of opium from 3,160 hectares (7,800 acres) of poppy fields, dwarfing their previous year’s haul of 79 metric tons from 2,460 hectares (6,080 acres).

The next year, after seeing a massive influx of Pashtun refugees return from Pakistan as the Taliban expanded their territory north of Kabul, opium production levels increased by 25% to 2,800 metric tons.186 In 1997, an estimated 96% of all Afghan heroin came from the Taliban.

187 The Taliban’s expansion efforts led to a growth of the drug pipeline that had been established by the mujahidin 15 years earlier. Couriers moved the opium from Helmand out to Pakistan, in Baluchistan or the Makran coast; to Iran, in the west or Tehran; to eastern Turkey; and over to Central Asia through Turkmenistan.

Their operations became so advanced that they were able to start flying opium over to the Gulf in cargo planes in 1997.
188 This widespread expansion was made possible by the machinations of the ISI who turned its covert operations outward at the end of the Soviet-Afghan War.

The ISI seized the opportunity of the crumbling Soviet Union to create its own sphere of influence.

With a robust arms pipeline in place and a slew of loyal jihadists, the ISI launched numerous covert operations through the former Soviet republics. Pakistan had acquired an arsenal from years of skimming off of the mujahidin arms pipeline.

189 The ISI spawned three arms pipelines: one through India; one through the Balkans; and one through Central Asia – all supplying weapons for jihadist groups.

As they had done before, the ISI created a symbiotic pipeline that used the same smugglers and pathways to transit weapons and the narcotics to pay for those weapons.

190 The Central Asian pipeline supplied the fledgling jihadist groups that were the ideological offspring of the mujahidin.

When the former Soviet republics were granted their independence, they couldn’t prevent getting dragged down with the fallen empire.

The panicked Russian Federation cancelled all loans to its former satellites and severely underpaid for imports.

Lacking the infrastructure to operate independently and without any trade relations outside the Soviet sphere, Central Asian states fell into economic catastrophe.

As inflation rose and supplies dwindled, the public began to protest. Echoing the repressive tactics of their Soviet predecessors, the Central Asian governments vio184 Rashid, Taliban, 118. 185 Ibid., 118-119. 186 Ibid., 119. 187 Ibid., 119-120. 188 Ibid., 120. 189 Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks (New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 89. 190 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 90. 38 lently cracked down on protesters.

This rapidly escalating situation gave rise to multiple extremist militant movements.

The ISI was eager to help them further their cause by setting up their arms/ drugs pipeline.

191 This was made even easier by the numerous existing connections between Central Asians already living in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Soviet conquest of Central Asia led hundreds of thousands of Central Asians from various ethnic groups and tribes to seek refuge in Afghanistan since the 1920s.

192 This created communal links to Central Asia that would enable opium traffickers to form what became known as the northern route, where opium cultivated in Afghanistan travels through Central Asia to Russia or Turkey and then the global market.

193 The narcotics trade was extremely prosperous for traffickers in Central Asia. In 2000, a kilo of raw opium worth $50 USD in Afghanistan would be worth $10,000 USD in Russia, and they were the perfect waypoint between the two.

The geographic nature and political landscape of the region provided numerous opportunities for smuggling.

The civil war in Tajikistan in the 1990s created vulnerabilities in its border with Afghanistan that terrorist groups took advantage of. Even when some routes were cut off, they were easily circumvented and new routes were created.

When Kyrgyzstan cut off a major smuggling route in 1999 that spanned from Khoroq, on the Tajikistan border of Afghanistan, to Osh, Kyrgyzstan, the smuggling output actually increased, indicating smugglers found easy alternatives.

194 The ISI sought to further its influence in Central Asia by radicalising and providing training for new recruits to the extremist groups.

In a press conference on July 11, 2002, Kazakhstan’s deputy head of the Almaty Department of the National Security Committee spoke about how a fundamentalist Pakistani religious organisation, Tablighi Jamaat, enticed young men in Kazakhstan to go to Pakistan for a four-month course learning “pure Islam.”

195 While there, multiple extremist group recruiters, including from Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda, attempted to radicalise the Kazakhs and offer them military training.

196 Many of them brought that training back to their home to join local extremist groups or form their own.

Tablighi Jamaat has long had strong ties to the Pakistani ISI, including Lieutenant-General Javed Nasir, who served as the Director-General of the ISI from 1992-1993.

He considered himself someone “who symbolizes Tablighi Jamaat’s most prominent member with international fame and reputation of the most scrupulously honest individual.”

197 The Central Asia Dynamic
Beyond the help of the ISI, militant groups in Central Asia received financial support from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and several Gulf states. They all hoped to replace the vacuum in power left by the Soviet Union.

198 The vast support of extremist groups in Central Asia led to the rise of the most extreme of them, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in 1998, which started with the goal to overthrow the secular government of Uzbekistan but evolved into a terror group with global aspirations.

The IMU were backed by the Taliban early on, with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar 191 Ibid. 192 Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, 44. 193 UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), “Afghan Opiate Trafficking Along the Northern Route,” Vienna, Austria: UNODC, June 2018. 194 Glen E. Curtis, “Involvement of Russian Organized Crime Syndicates, Criminal Elements in the Russian Military, and Regional Terrorist Groups in Narcotics Trafficking in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Chechnya,” Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, October 2002, 9-10. 195 “Pakistani Islamists Active in Kazakhstan?,”

Jul. 12, 2002, discussed on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline, https://www.rferl. org/a/1142714.html. 196 Fred Burton and Scott Stewart, “Tablighi Jamaat: An Indirect Line to Terrorism,” Stratfor Worldview, Jan. 23, 2008, https://worldview. stratfor.com/article/tablighi-jamaat-indirect-line-terrorism. 197 Ardeshir Cowasjee, “Three Stars,” Dawn, Jan. 12, 2003, Three stars.

198 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 90. 39 giving them $50,000 USD in 1999.

199 They soon won the backing of Al-Qaeda, receiving $35 million USD from 2000 to 2001, including $20 million USD directly from Osama bin Laden.

200 The rest of their funds came from narcotics trafficking. Central Asian countries produced licit opium for the Soviet Union for decades, but trade was contained within the USSR.

Soviet authorities would regulate poppy field production fiercely between 1986 and 1991, executing several eradication efforts and arresting anyone who tried to engage in a black market.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, poppy farmers took advantage of the chaos by engaging in the illicit market of Afghanistan through the Russian Federation.

201 The IMU turned this smuggling effort into a trafficking empire. The founder of the IMU, Juma Namangani, engaged in opium trafficking as a member of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan during the Tajik civil war before forming the IMU.

He used his connections with militants in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to grow his business, eventually controlling 70% of the opium trade routed through Kyrgyzstan.

202 At this point, a majority of the opium cultivated was smuggled through Central Asia.

203 It also became the main region for smuggling in chemical precursors used for heroin refining in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

204 As its empire grew, the IMU eventually opened its own heroin refineries in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

205 Smugglers in Central Asia sent their products out to Turkish and Iranian dealers who then sent it out to the world.

206 By 1999, Kyrgyzstan’s narcotics exports had even surpassed those of Burma, one of the leading producers in the world.

207 The opium trade in Central Asia vastly expanded the Afghan drug pipeline, enabling much further reach to Russia and Europe.

This was facilitated by their connections with Chechen guerrilla fighters, who were also heavily involved in narcotics trafficking. Much like in the early days of Central Asian militancy, the Chechens were significantly enabled by the ISI.

In 1996, a conference was held in Mogadishu, Somalia to discuss the new frontiers for jihadist struggle: Chechnya and Kashmir.

The conference was attended by the ISI, along with Iranian intelligence, Al-Qaeda, and multiple representatives of extremist groups who all had an interest in expanding the jihadist movement.
One of the more infamous of the attendees was Osama bin Laden, eager to be part of the next jihadist struggle.

The ISI pledged to provide arms and ammunition for the fighters they were planning on sending to the new battlefields that they had helped create.

A major roadblock to Pakistani hegemony in Asia was the Northern Alliance.

Backed by Russia, the Northern Alliance consisted of a group of warlords united in their opposition to Taliban control of Afghanistan.

One of the warlords who received significant support from the Russians, Ahmed Shah Massoud, controlled a region bordering Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, limiting Pakistan’s access to those countries.

The ISI reasoned that if it was able to distract Russia with a conflict elsewhere, that could drain its resources to weaken its support for Massoud and enable the Taliban to get the upper hand, granting Pakistan access to all borders of Afghanistan.

The ISI saw the conflict in Chechnya as the perfect distraction for Russia.

208 The ISI began its covert operation by grooming Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev in 1994.

The Pakistani organisation trained and indoctrinated him and his troops at Amir Muawia camp in 199 Ibid., 91. 200 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 11. 201 Booth, Opium—A History, 317. 202 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 13-14. 203 Ibid.,” 9. 204 Aparajita Biswas, “Small Arms and Drug Trafficking in the Indian Ocean Region” (working paper, Centre for African Studies, University of Mumbai, Mumbai), 22. 205 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 9. 206 Biswas, “Small Arms and Drug Trafficking,” 22. 207 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 9. 208 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 94. 40 Khost province, Afghanistan.

This was one of the camps set up by the ISI to train the mujahidin in the 1980s and was infamously run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

It arranged for the Chechen group to then transit to Pakistan for further training. In addition to training Chechens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the ISI sent mujahidin veterans to Chechnya.

One of those trainers was Khattab, who was part of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle and involved in his funding network. This is likely what led to bin Laden providing $25 mil. USD to the group.

209 In addition to funding from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the Chechens funded their operations through arms and narcotics trafficking.

210 Chechen traffickers took advantage of the instability many Caucus countries were undergoing, like Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, through starting a massive narcotics and arms trafficking operation.

Georgia, in particular, provided access to Turkey and from there the West, leading Chechen militants to establish a large presence there, growing to a billion-dollar industry by 2002.

This Georgian safety hub for jihadists became strategically important to Pakistan and the Taliban, who hid operatives in the Chechen enclave of the Pankisi Gorge.

According to Russian officials, one of those given refuge for a time was Osama bin Laden.

211 As the ISI had planned, the escalating conflict between Russia and the Chechen militants reduced Russian support for the Northern Alliance, and allowed the Taliban to contain the force.

212 The narcotics pipeline further expanded to include the Balkans, which already had existing vulnerabilities to the illicit market.

In the former Yugoslavia, poppies were a government regulated crop, and therefore there were plenty of opium farmers who would risk trading in the illicit market for a huge payout.

The same was true of North Macedonia, which had licit opium production from the 1920s to the 1930s.

213 There was a huge potential market in this region for smugglers to take advantage of.

The success of the Chechen insurgent movement created a ripple effect through the Balkans, giving rise to insurgent groups in Albania and Kosovo.

The mujahidin movement snowballed, bringing fighters that had travelled to Chechnya to join the Balkan struggle, taking Chechen fighters along with them.

They brought their narcotics trafficking businesses with them, expanding the smuggling route to Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, Albania, and former Yugoslavia.

This formed a complex relationship of trading arms and narcotics between insurgent groups, Islamist groups, and organised crime syndicates.

A growing nexus started to form, with the Chechen insurgents working with the Albanian mafia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

The smuggling path created by these militants was soon to be known as the Balkan route, and became a major narcotics trafficking route.

The Balkan route expansion was a turning point in the funding of terrorist organisations.

As the jihadist empire expanded, they relied less on state sponsorship and international donations.

The KLA eventually became major narcotics money launderers, and the trafficking business became much more sophisticated.

214 The first domino in that terrible trajectory was the ISI’s covert actions in Chechnya, leading to a global trafficking route today that has little chance of subsiding.

The other jihadist campaign planned at the conference in Mogadishu was in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, where Pakistan had a long history of covert action.

In the lead up to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar, where it secretly installed 5,000 armed militants into the Kashmir Valley to incite a rebellion against Indian control.

This covert operation was the strategic precursor to the lSI’s modus operandi of arming and training insurgent movements in the 1980s.215 209 Ibid., 94-95. 210 Ibid., 95. 211 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 3-5. 212 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 96. 213 Booth, Opium—A History, 319. 214 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 96.

215 Navnita Chadha Behera, Demystifying Kashmir (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), 77. 41 As it had done with Russia, Pakistan sought to distract India with an internal conflict to gain the upper hand. The ISI believed if it brought the fight to India, then India would have less ability to attack Pakistan directly.
216 Pakistan also feared the potential for Kashmiris to win independence from India and seek to form their own state apart from Pakistan.

The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in particular advocated for independence and to join the divided parts of Kashmir, which would strip Pakistan of portions of Kashmir and the Northern Areas.

To ensure the secession movement occurred on its terms, Pakistan inserted itself into the rebellion’s operations.

Pakistan steered the rebellion through Operation Gibraltar, where it would distribute arms only to factions seeking Pakistani sovereignty of Jammu and Kashmir and sideline the independence factions.

217 It increased its control over the conflict in 1989 when the ISI funded the creation of Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), the militant arm of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami.

HM reportedly received more funds from the ISI than did any other organisation at the time.

218 Beyond funding HM, the ISI brought HM fighters to Pakistan to receive training in 1985.

219 The ISI augmented the rebellion in the early 1990s by sending in former mujahidin from Jalalabad, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.220 In addition to funds and troops, the ISI massively stepped up its arms smuggling pipeline to Jammu and Kashmir.

This is indicated by reports of progressive weapons confiscations from Indian border control. In 1987, before the extension of the arms pipeline, Indian border guards confiscated 125 guns.

In 1997, some years after the pipeline initiated, they hauled in almost 17,000 in just rifles.221 As in the other theatres of covert action, the ISI facilitated funding arms for militants through narcotics trafficking.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif admitted as much in 1994, recounting how Pakistan’s Chief of Staff for the Army, General Afzal Beg, and the Director General of the ISI asked him for permission to fund this covert operation through heroin trafficking.

222 Not only did the ISI use heroin proceeds abroad to fund its actions in Jammu and Kashmir, but it used the arms pipeline that had just expanded to the region to smuggle narcotics through India and surrounding states.

India had recently experienced a surge in heroin trafficking in the 1980s as a result of the Iran-Iraq War leading smugglers to seek alternative transit routes to Turkey.

This spawned a number of Indian narcotics syndicates to arise. This coupled with the robust transportation infrastructure in the country, vulnerable coastline and weak export regulations, created the prime conditions for a major expansion of the narcotics pipeline from Afghanistan.

223 As evidence of this, Indian border guards recovered 19,450 kg in narcotics from the Kashmir border from 1997 to 1998. Trafficking wasn’t isolated to just Jammu and Kashmir.

Drugs were also confiscated in Rajasthan and Gujarat, indicating the pipeline spread throughout India.224


THE HAQQAN NETWORK


While the ISI used its covert proxies for influence abroad, it had key stakes in the power structures forming in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The most significant of these is its relationship with the Haqqani network.

The network is the product of a wealthy family that owned land on both sides of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, from Loya Paktia in Pakistan to North Waziristan in Afghanistan,

216 Behera, Demystifying Kashmir, 81. 217 Ibid., 82. 218 Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, “Pakistan: Update to ZZZ32353.E of 5 August 1999 and PAK33645 of 27 January 2000 on the Kashmiri Group Called Hizbul-Mujahideen (Hezbul-Mujahideen or Hezb-e-Mujahideen) (HM) and Its Connections with the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI),” May 21, 2003, Refworld | Pakistan: Update to ZZZ32353.E of 5 August 1999 and PAK33645 of 27 January 2000 on the Kashmiri group called Hizbul-Mujahideen (Hezbul-Mujahideen or Hezb-e-Mujahideen) (HM) and its connections with the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

219 Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 93.

220 Behera, Demystifying Kashmir, 82. 221 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 93. 222 Ibid., 223 James D. Medler, “Afghan Heroin: Terrain, Tradition, and Turmoil,” Orbis 49, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 286. 224 Biswas, “Small Arms and Drug Trafficking,” 22-24. 42 and had been profiting off of smuggling since before World War II.225 226 The Haqqani network, led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, took its name from the Deobandi227 madrassa, Dar al-‘Ulum Haqqaniyya, based outside of Peshawar, that taught Islamist ideology through the prism of Pashtun identity.

228 This school was known for its strong relationships with two Islamist political parties in Pakistan – Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and Jamaat-I Islami (JI) with many of its graduates becoming members of Pakistan’s National Assembly, a connection that the Haqqani network would capitalise on time and again.
Two of the school’s alumni, Yunis Khalis and Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi, each formed a Punjab mujahidin party, Hizb-i Islami Khalis (HIK) and Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islami respectively, during the Soviet-Afghan War. Jalaluddin Haqqani was a senior commander in the HIK.

These two groups joined together with member of JUI to form a network of likeminded militants and politicians who would spread Islamist ideology through the highland tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many future leaders of the Taliban would come out of this group’s formation.

229 While this network shared many of the ideologies of the transnational jihadist movements spawning across the region, they differed in political goals.

The transnational jihadist movement that arose from Afghanistan sought the creation of a global caliphate that would unite under a central Islamist authority, while the Haqqani network sought to protect the traditional tribal political system in which the Pashtun people had autonomy.

This difference explains the behaviour of the Haqqani network to this day, which is very independent and focused on improving its own brand, while being open to collaboration with other extremist groups.

230 Jalaluddin became the successor of this unofficial network, folding it into his own mujahidin group that had already been active since Mohammed Daoud’s coup in 1973.

He soon opened up a number of madrassas set up in the vein of his own education at the Deobandi school.

Under General Zia’s government, Jalaluddin’s madrassas experienced a huge influx of funding as a result of the Zakat Ordinance which introduced an annual tax to all Pakistanis which would be allocated towards all madrassas in the state.

Jalaluddin used these funds to grow his madrassa network to 80 different schools. From these schools Jaulaluddin would grow his army of loyal militants to his syndicate.

231 The network further grew its numbers by recruiting foreign fighters, the first group to openly and consistently welcome foreign fighters into its ranks.

232 The success of this move paved the way for the foreign terrorist fighter movement that spurred the global jihadist cause forward.

During the Soviet Afghan War, the Haqqani network formed several alliances with jihadist groups, political parties, and criminal organisations in the pursuit of driving out the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

The network used its location straddling the Durand line to its advantage, leading many groups involved in the anti-Soviet movement to want to work with the Haqqanis.

233 In 1980, the network furthered its control over the movement by building a series of training facilities for the mujahidin.

In 1981 the network built a massive training complex in the Zhawara Valley where it not only trained its own recruits, but several mujahidin groups.

The network expanded the base over the decade, building a hospital, a machine workshop, and even a hotel for visitors. Most significantly, the base became a major weapons depot for the mujahidin movement.

These efforts made the Haqqani network the centre for mujahidin action against the Soviets, and made it an essential ally to the ISI.

234 225 Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2018), 151. 226 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 22. 227 Ibid., 38. 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid., 38-40. 230 Ibid., 41. 231 Ibid., 42-54. 232 Ibid., 60. 233 Ibid., 55.
234 Ibid., 67. 43 The ISI saw the potential to exert significant influence through the Haqqani network, and increasingly expanded its collaboration with the outfit throughout the conflict.

The Zhawara base presented an ideal location for storing weapons and supplies as well as operational planning for the mujahidin.

The ISI invested in the base early on, hiring contractors to expand the base and fortify the infrastructure.

235 Osama bin Laden was also a notorious patron of the base and was heavily involved in its operations.

236 He personally imported mining equipment to build the tunnels that held the weapons caches.

237 During the height of the conflict, the ISI was shuttling 12,000 tons of supplies per year through the network’s North Waziristan territory, and 60% of the total weapons and supplies cache were held in the Zhawara base and a second Haqqani base in Jaji, Paktia.

238 239 The Haqqani network became so essential to Pakistan’s war effort that the ISI committed to use its own resources to defend the base if it was attacked.

240 As the Haqqani network’s profile rose, it established a strong relationship with Charlie Wilson, who called Jalaluddin “goodness personified.”

241 Always pragmatic, the Haqqani network tried to win over some additional trust by protecting the reopening of a State Department-run school for Afghan refugee girls in Peshawar after it was attacked and shut down.

242 The Haqqani network additionally gained a close relationship with Saudi Arabia at this time.

The network was an early example of a powerful non-state actor that had relative sovereignty over its operations and wielded significant socio-political influence. This was a harbinger of an era of non-state dominance in the region.

243 The ISI not only used the Haqqani network as its own proxy, but worked with the network to bolster its other proxy armies.

As mentioned earlier, the ISI set up training camps for HM fighters in Pakistan to bring those skills to the battlefield in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Haqqani network provided all necessary resources for those training.
While HM rose out of the political party JI, the competing political party JUI did not want to potentially lose out on influencing a future Jammu and Kashmir under Pakistan.

JUI started its own madrassa network with multiple militant training grounds.
They too were provided resources by the Haqqani network.

While the Haqqani network has been a strong ally of the ISI through the years, it has always been a stridently independent organisation.

When the ISI and the Taliban experience periods of conflict, the network straddles between its alliances with both.

The network swore allegiance to Mullah Omar and the Taliban, yet its members followed their own rules.

For example, the network did not share the Taliban’s belief that music or female education was haram, or religiously forbidden, and approved of coeducational schools on its territory.

244 While it has maintained its alliance and business relationship with the ISI, the Haqqani network does not always agree to working with the ISI.

However, the Haqqani network has been a key element to much of the covert action conducted by the ISI and enabled the organisation to engage with many non-state actors while maintaining plausible deniability.

One of the most significant of these is Al-Qaeda, of which the Haqqani network has a direct role in its birth. In what became known as the Battle of Zhawara in 1986, the Soviets along with the Afghan army attacked the Haqqani network’s Zhawara base.

The ISI and Pakistani military rushed in immediately to help to defend the base, alongside Arab fighters whom Haqqani had called for assistance.

Many of these Arab fighters were part of Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), the group started by Abdul235 Ibid., 68. 236 Coll, Directorate S, 151-152. 237 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 68. 238 Coll, Directorate S, 151-152. 239 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 67. 240 Ibid., 68. 241 Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, 1129. 242 Mashal, “Hekmatyar’s Never-Ending Afghan War.” 243 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 68-69. 244 Coll, Directorate S, 152. 44 lah Azzam and Osama bin Laden consisting of Arab foreign fighters who travelled to Pakistan for training to join the mujahidin.

For many of the MAK members, the Battle of Zhawara was their first real combat experience, and gave the group a sense of rejuvenation that brought scores of new recruits.

Bin Laden saw the benefits of aligning closely with the network, while Haqqani appreciated the zeal and assistance of the Arab recruits.

They extended their partnership, with Jalaluddin giving bin Laden three caves in the Zhawara fortress to store his own group’s supplies.

He followed this action the following year with breaking ground in his new base along the pipeline leading from the Zhawara base.

This new base coordinated supplies with the Zhawara base and brought its new recruits to the Zhawara base for preliminary training.

This base was called Ma’sadat al-Ansar, the Lion’s Den of the Supporters, but was more often known by its informal name: al-qa’ida al-‘askariyya, the military base, and eventually shortened to Al-Qaeda.
245 The ISI was creating numerous proxy armies abroad to expand its sphere of influence.

The Haqqani network in particular gave the ISI access to thousands of fighters and a robust infrastructure for training and arming them.

This access extended to Al-Qaeda, which was starting to become the most influential extremist group in the world through which the ISI saw further potential for covert action.

The Haqqani network and the wider Taliban additionally propelled the ISI’s smuggling capabilities to new heights.

The ISI expanded the reach of the smuggling pipeline to Central Asia, the Balkans, and South Asia, effectively creating the northern, Balkan, and southern routes for narcotics trafficking that has been the lifeblood of drug syndicates for decades.

Whether intentional or not, it sprouted multiple branches of the arms and narcotics pipeline that empowered non-state actors across the globe.

As the jihadist organisations became self-sustaining, Pakistan enriched itself in the process.

During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan had become the leading producer of heroin, supplying 70% of the world’s output annually.

246 By 1989, heroin became Pakistan’s most profitable export, netting $2 billion annually.

247 Over the course of the conflict, the Pakistani government had become fully entrenched in the heroin industry.

Numerous cases of government, military, and intelligence officials engaging in the drug pipeline indicate a robust heroin syndicate existed within the government.

A US Congressional report in 1986 revealed the extent of the corruption, showing some of the highest-ranking government officials were heavily involved in heroin trafficking.

In the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the area now known as Khyber Pakhtunkwa, the mujahidin were given safe passage to transport weapons and drugs into and out of the province by its governor, General Fazle Haq.

There were between 100 and 200 heroin refineries in the Khyber District alone by 1988.

248 In 1983, all ISI operatives based in Quetta were dismissed because they were discovered to have been engaging in drug trafficking and selling the US-purchased weapons intended for the mujahidin.

Three years later, both Major Zahooruddin Afridi and Flight Lieutenant Khalilur Rehman were caught on separate occasions transporting narcotics through the pipeline from Peshawar to Karachi with 220 kg of heroin each.

They both were jailed in Karachi until they conveniently escaped without a trace. Many drug lords were members of the National Assembly or had politicians in their pocket to allow their operations to continue unfettered.

By the time of General Zia’s death in 1988, the opium economy was well entrenched in the government.249 245 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 71-75. 246 Rashid, Taliban, 120. 247 Booth, Opium—A History, 290.

248 Ikramul Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade in Historical Perspective,” Asian Survey 36, no. 10 (Oct. 1996): 954-956. 249 Rashid, Taliban, 121. 45


BHUTTO'S MISSION


This all threatened to change when Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister in December 1988.

The daughter of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was hanged by General Zia in 1979, Benazir became a deft politician while spending years in the US and UK in exile.

She formed strategic relationships with influential figures in American think tanks and media outlets, eventually gaining the ear of the Reagan administration.

As the successor of her father’s position as leader of the Pakistani People’s Party (PPP), she aimed to convince the Reagan administration that Pakistan would be a more reliable ally with her in charge.

250 As the Americans were sceptical of her given her father’s socialist background, she made several pledges to gain the Americans’ trust.

She vowed not to pursue nuclear ambitions, something her predecessor General Zia refused to do.She also pledged to continue support for the mujahidin.

251 Most importantly, she presented the potential for a pro-American democracy to form in Pakistan that was strongly against the Soviets, which won her strong support in the West and sealed her victory in the elections.

Having won a plurality but not a majority, she was finally approved to form a government after the Americans paid a critical visit to Pakistani President Ishaq Khan professing their support for Bhutto.

252 After her inauguration, the military, ISI, and Khan continued their business as if she was simply a figurehead.

In the first days of her administration, they froze Bhutto out of the decision-making process entirely.

This continued until she threatened Khan with going public that he ordered officials to exclude her.

253 This initiated a struggle for power between the military establishment and Bhutto. Under the Zia years, the power of the ISI and military were greatly expanded to oversee foreign affairs, specifically the situations in Afghanistan, India and Kashmir.

The opposition PPP had been critical of the government’s involvement in the narcotics industry, but had no power to change anything.

Not only did parliament have little authority over the ISI’s actions, but Zia eventually dissolved parliament entirely when he thought the PPP would threaten the power they had accumulated. Once Zia died, three men rose to the top of the Pakistani power structure: the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, General Aslam Beg, and the new acting President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was the chairman of the Senate before Zia’s death.

They ran the show, and they wanted to keep it that way. Bhutto’s mission as Prime Minister was to launch an all-out war on drugs, calling it the “number one national issue” in her first press conference as Prime Minister. She began by instating a new ministry to fight the harvesting and distribution of narcotics.

254 In defiance of the political establishment in the ISI, she attempted to take on the syndicate operatives in her government. She targeted all state representatives who had ties to the narcotics syndicate to hold them accountable to their corruption while under the Zia government.

She swiftly dismissed two top ISI administrators who were involved in the syndicate and created a new ministry to take on traffickers. She followed that with calling for the arrest of General Fazle Haq, the corrupt NWFP governor.

She was met with fierce opposition within the Pakistani establishment and law enforcement. General Zia’s son spoke with reporters at Pakistani magazine Newsline, calling out the PPP for having close relations with drug trafficker Haji Mirza Mohammed Iqbal Baig (henceforth referred to as Mirza Iqbal Baig).

255 Bhutto believed she needed to make some concessions to win some conservative support.

With this in mind, she succumbed to pressure to support the election of Ishaq Khan for President. This move proved to be the downfall of her premiership.

256 250 Elisabeth Bumiller, “How Bhutto Won Washington,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Dec. 30, 2007, https://www.nytimes. com/2007/12/30/weekinreview/30bumiller.html. 251 Mark Fineman, “Drug Trade Is ‘No. 1 Issue’ Bhutto Declares,” The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), Dec. 4, 1988, https://www. latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-12-04-mn-1480-story.html. 252 Bumiller, “How Bhutto Won Washington.” 253 Brooke Allen, Benazir Bhutto: Favored Daughter, Icons Series (New York, NY: Amazon/New Harvest), 29-30. 254 Richard M. Weintraub, “Bhutto Says Drug Fight Is Top Priority,” The Washington Post (Washington, D.C.), Dec. 4, 1988, https://www. washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/12/04/bhutto-says-drug-fight-is-top-priority/48028d11-ecd9-4a0d-b007-ff47709e9505/. 255 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 960. 256 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 31. 46 In addition to political roadblocks, the Bhutto government faced tremendous public opposition to its war on drugs. Part of her new policy involved introducing programs to shift farmers from harvesting opium and towards alternative crops.

257 By this point, the Pakistani people and the Pakistani economy was heavily reliant on opium. At least 1.5 million Pakistanis were heavily addicted to heroin.

Most importantly, in a country ravaged by endless conflict, opportunities for livelihood were few and far between.

Many poor rural Pakistanis took work as drug mules, smuggling large heroin shipments through maritime ports via the Suez Canal to Turkey, Cyprus, or other Mediterranean countries on behalf of international narcotics organisations.

258 Poppy farming was incredibly attractive to people trying to rebuild their lives after being displaced through one of the many conflicts in the preceding decade.

Poppy farming netted over ten times as much revenue as the next leading crops of fruit, vegetables, or tobacco.259 In the early 90s the illicit market in Pakistan accounted for 30-50% of the total economy.

260 Even though the Pakistani government now attempted to eradicate the opium trade, the industry was too heavily entrenched to stop. Most heroin refineries were located in the poppy-rich NWFP.

The Pakistani government had little hold over the NWFP, where local tribal leaders ruled semi-autonomously.

261 NWFP residents had been economically dependent on opium profits over the years for survival. They saw the government’s war on drugs as a threat to their livelihood, and tribal militias armed with heavy weaponry fended off any attempts by law enforcement to crack down on production.

262 When the central government attempted to circumvent direct eradication efforts by bribing tribal leaders to stop opium processing, narcotics dealers would outbid them.

263 The vigorous tribal protection of opium farming also made any local government attempt at eradication politically risky.

Even if Pakistan stopped all production, the Bhutto government had little control over production in Afghanistan, which would inevitably bleed into Pakistan for refining and distribution. Bhutto’s central government was facing roadblocks on all sides.

264 In addition to attempts to attack the credibility of the Bhutto government, compromised members of the National Assembly had been paid Rs 194 million to call for a no-confidence motion to try to remove Bhutto at the end of 1989.

Bhutto publicly condemned the action, stating that “drug money was being used to destabilise her government.”

265 An FIA investigation in 2018 revealed that 140 million rupees were deposited into 15 bank accounts belonging to numerous politicians and journalists, including Nawaz Sharif. The investigation confirmed those funds were sent by the Chief of Army Staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg and the Director General of the ISI, Lieutenant General Asad Durrani at the behest of President Khan.

266 Meanwhile, the ISI had been gathering intelligence on Bhutto to undermine and discredit her from the moment she had taken office.

The organisation secretly bugged her office and her home to gather damning evidence against her.

Through this, the ISI uncovered corruption by her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who had been taking kickbacks from government contractors and syphoning money from defence contracts, earning him the nickname “Mr. Ten Percent” and landing him in jail.

267 President Khan acted on this intelligence revelation believing he had enough evidence to 257 Weintraub, “Bhutto Says.” 258 Booth, Opium—A History, 310-311. 259 Ibid.

260 Rashid, Taliban, 121. 261 Booth, Opium—A History, 310-311. 262 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 961. 263 Booth, Opium—A History, 311. 264 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 961. 265 Ibid. 266 Mariam Mufti, “Who Rigs Polls in Pakistan and How?,” Herald (Karachi, PK), Jul. 7, 2018, Who rigs polls in Pakistan and how?. 267 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 32. 47 remove her from office.

On August 7, 1990, he dismissed Bhutto under the Eighth Amendment of the Pakistani constitution on charges of corruption, nepotism, and despotism.

268 Criticisms of Bhutto’s nepotism were not without merit.

She appointed numerous family members to high-level government positions, including her mother as senior minister and her father-in-law as chairman of the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee.

She also made multiple autocratic moves, like appointing herself as the treasury minister and changing the state’s appointment policies to allow her to unilaterally pick senior civil service appointments.


269 There were also questionable connections between Bhutto’s PPP and the narcotics industry. In addition to the party’s connection with Mirza Iqbal Baig, a number of people believed to be involved in the narcotics industry held seats in the PPP, including Minister of Tribal Affairs Malik Waris Khan Afridi.

270 There were even reports that her husband sold drugs to western buyers from their residence.

271 It is unclear whether Bhutto’s anti-narcotics agenda was authentic or an excuse for a power grab over the ISI, but regardless, it seems she overplayed her hand and underestimated the extent to which the ISI truly controlled the country.

With Bhutto out of the picture, Khan declared a state of emergency and installed an interim government under Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi until elections could be held. On October 24, 1990, the conservative coalition, Islami Jamhori Ittehad (IJI), won handily and its leader Nawaz Sharif became Pakistan’s next prime minister.

272 While Nawaz Sharif may initially have had reservations of engaging in narcotics trafficking, he was quickly pressured into acquiescence by the ISI. As referenced earlier, Nawaz confirmed the ISI’s involvement in narcotics trafficking in a report in the Washington Post on September 12, 1994, which quoted Sharif explaining, “Drug deals were to pay for covert operations.”

273 General Aslam Beg and General Asad Durrani, who helped fund Sharif’s campaign with drug money, came to him just three months after his election, telling him they did not have the necessary funds to support the covert actions in Jammu and Kashmir, and created a blueprint for a large-scale heroin trafficking operation for Nawaz’s approval.

Sharif contends that he did not grant approval for such action, and ordered Beg to not engage in drug trafficking to fund their covert operations.

Sharif reportedly assumed the ISI complied with his wishes, and maintained that he was unaware of any engagement in trafficking after his denial.

274 While Sharif remained steadfast through his career that he had no involvement with the narcotics trade, his party was knee-deep in collusion with that very industry.

Haji Ayub Afridi was a powerful figure in Sharif’s IJI who won a seat in the National Assembly in 1990.

275 Before getting into politics, Afridi was a powerful smuggler, starting with gold and eventually participating in the mujahidin’s drug pipeline. He was instrumental in bringing opium through the Khyber Pass for refining in Pakistan.

276 A 1992 US report revealed that several members of the IJI received funds from Mirza Iqbal Baig (the same drug dealer that had previous associations with the PPP) including Prime Minister Sharif and President Khan.

This report further claimed the main funding source for the IJI party was drug money and that Nawaz used it personally to bribe members of the military to support him.

277 It seems clear that throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Pakistan, no political party’s 268 Ibid. 269 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 30. 270 Alfred W. McCoy, “The Stimulus of Prohibition:

A Critical History of the Global Narcotics Trade,” in Dangerous Harvest: Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous Landscapes, ed. Michael K Steinberg, Joseph J. Hobbs, and Kent Mathewson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 63. 271 Amir Zada Asad and Robert Harris, The Politics and Economics of Drug Production on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Border (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2019). 272 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 32. 273 John W. Anderson and Kamran Khan, “Pakistan’s Involvement in Narco-Terrorism” (congressional record extension of remarks, Oct. 3, 1994), https://fas.org/irp/congress/1994_cr/h941003-terror-pak.htm. 274 Anderson and Khan, “Pakistan’s Involvement.” 275 McCoy, “The Stimulus of Prohibition,” 63. 276 Richard McGill Murphy, “The Rise and Fall of a Drug Lord,” Forbes (Arlington, VA), Oct. 16, 1997, https://www.forbes.com/1997/10/16/ feat_side1.html#1d42bb483372. 277 Asad and Harris, Drug Production. 48 hands were clean in the growing narcotics nexus.
With the Cold War in the rear-view mirror, the West could no longer excuse away the threats posed by this nexus. It took a while for the West to alter their policy on Pakistan, even with the numerous warning signs that their one-time allies in the ISI and by extension the mujahidin were turning on them.

Many of these signs were not new, as figures like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had been openly hostile towards the West since the Soviet-Afghan War, notoriously refusing to meet with President Reagan when he visited Afghanistan in 1985.

Despite having received millions from the West to aid his mujahidin cause, Hekmatyar publicly denied ever receiving aid from Western nations. For a majority of the mujahidin, their alliance with the US was an ‘enemy of my enemy’ situation.

Many had overt anti-Western sentiments.
278 These sentiments flourished as the US changed gears from the Soviet threat to the Gulf War. The United States saw its one-time allies in the mujahidin aligning with Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

Both Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who had both worked directly with Charlie Wilson, took the side of Saddam Hussein on his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

279 This was an early sign of the shifting attitudes within Pakistan towards the United States.

The fundamentalist leaders that previously coordinated with the US in Pakistan and Afghanistan were spreading extreme ideologies that viewed the US as aggressors against the Muslim world.
280 Wahid Muzhda, a former mujahid with connections to the leadership in Peshawar, reflected, “In those days, anti-American feelings were definitely in fashion in Pakistan.

There was Abdullah Azam, Osama bin Laden and others. There were anti-US publications being circulated.”

281 It became increasingly obvious that the mujahidin ‘freedom fighters’ that the Reagan administration lauded in the 1980s were starting to view the United States in the same way that they used to see the Soviets.

They were no longer reliable allies, and in fact evolved into America’s worst enemies over the next two decades. On top of the shifting attitudes towards the mujahidin, the ‘war on drugs’ in America escalated under the George H. W. Bush administration, and with the Cold War over, journalists focused their attention on the growing opioid epidemic and its causes.

The United States government needed to dramatically shift its approach to Pakistan’s narcotics industry to gain some credibility in its war on drugs. Around the mid 1990s, the United States directly addressed the threat posed by narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In the State Department’s 1994 International Narcotics Strategy Report, it read:

There is no indication that the regime in Kabul has taken any action to suppress opium cultivation and heroin refining… We are concerned about opium poppy cultivation in areas controlled by mujaheddin commanders.

We fear… that once hostilities end, refugees will turn to poppy cultivation during the period of economic disruption as they seek to rebuild a livelihood interrupted by 10 years of war.

282 The trafficking operations that had long posed a threat to the West finally became a concern. Soon, the United States began to put pressure on the Pakistani government to address the drug trade problem in the country.

During this time, Pakistan underwent several political shake-ups, with a power struggle forming between Sharif and Khan, leading Khan to oust Sharif, giving Bhutto another shot at the premiership in 1993.

283 In Bhutto’s second term, she was careful not to make the same mistake that ended her first term.

Bhutto gave the ISI near free-rein to engage 278 Mashal, “Hekmatyar’s Never-Ending Afghan War.” 279 Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, 1228. 280 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 962. 281 Mashal, “Hekmatyar’s Never-Ending Afghan War.” 282 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 953. 283 Tim McGirk, “Pakistan’s President Sacks ‘Corrupt’ PM: Ghulam Ishaq Khan Dissolves Parliament and Troops Take over State Broadcasting, Preventing Nawaz Sharif from Rallying Support,” The Independent, Apr. 19, 1993, News | The Independent | Today's headlines and latest breaking news | The Independent world/pakistans-president-sacks-corrupt-pm-ghulam-ishaq-khan-dissolves-parliament-and-troops-take-over-1456150.html. 49 in criminal endeavours, looking the other way while it aided the growing Taliban in Afghanistan.

As the United States began to grow concerned over the threat posed by the terror group, Bhutto falsely pledged the Pakistani government had no involvement in aiding them.

She later acknowledged her complicity in an interview in 2002, saying, “Once I gave the go-ahead that they should get the money, I don’t know how much money they were ultimately given... I know it was a lot.

It was just carte blanche.”284 While careful to not impede the Taliban, Bhutto now had to deal with the sudden interest of the United States on trafficking in her country.

In 1994, US drug czar Lee P. Brown warned Bhutto with losing her country’s loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund if it could not get a handle on the opium epidemic.

285 The US allocated $100 million to the Pakistani government to combat narcotics trafficking over the decade.

To satisfy the West, Pakistan massively reduced poppy cultivation, using American aid to fund programmes like crop substitution which was administered with some success in the NWFP, at least in the short term.

However, while Bhutto helped reduce cultivation in Pakistan, heroin refining in the country continued unabated.286 Bhutto threw the US a bone once in a while to keep them off her back.

In 1995, she arrested and extradited to the US two notorious drug dealers: Mohammed Anwar Khattak and Mirza Iqbal Baig.

The latter of course had been a thorn in Bhutto’s side for some time, having tainted her party’s image and later funded the campaign of her adversary, Nawaz Sharif.

She gladly turned him over to the United States to attain some diplomatic support in her quest to get funding from the country, which recently banned all aid to Pakistan when it became aware of its nuclear programme.

287 When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1996, they reignited the heroin industry to a level unseen before.

While they focused production solely in Afghanistan, Pakistan was integral to smuggling Afghan heroin abroad. Like their previous incarnation of the mujahidin, the Taliban utilised the same pipeline and couriers for arms trafficking as for narcotics trafficking, and to great success.

While the Clinton administration called out the lack of a Pakistani effort to crack down on the narcotics trafficking, it did little else. The administration viewed a good relationship with Pakistan as in its national security interest, and did not want to sour diplomatic relations entirely.

As Pakistan’s involvement in the heroin industry grew, so too did its public’s addiction to the drug. In 1992, three million Pakistanis were addicted to opiates. This grew to five million by 1999.

This only exacerbated ongoing internal issues, like corruption, unemployment, and violent extremism.

288 Bhutto’s second tenure as Prime Minister was cut short after her brother and political adversary Murtaza Bhutto was brutally murdered by a group of police officers.

While it is uncertain that Bhutto was involved, it was widely believed in the country that she and her husband were complicit in the murder.

The new president Farooq Leghari dismissed Bhutto and held elections, bringing Sharif back for his second term. Sharif continued the policy of supporting the Taliban, even publicly recognizing its government after it took power in 1996, which put the country at odds with the United States for the first time.

289 Sharif, who previously had solid relations with the military establishment, soon found himself to be in the same boat as his predecessor when he overstepped his authority.

Attempting to stop a repeat of his ousting from his last term, he moved to nullify the Eighth Amendment and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan, which stripped the power of

284 Rosie DiManno, “Bhutto Helped Create Taliban Monster,” The Toronto Star, Jan. 2, 2008, News | The Star gta/2008/01/02/bhutto_helped_create_taliban_monster.html. 285 John-Thor Dahlburg, “Pakistan Extradites Drug Suspects to U.S. : Crime: Turning over Alleged Kingpins Is Latest Move by Islamabad That Pleases American Officials,” The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), Apr. 4, 1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995- 04-04-mn-50864-story.html. 286 Rashid, Taliban, 122. 287 Dahlburg, “Pakistan Extradites Drug Suspects.” 288 Rashid, Taliban, 122.

289 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 34-36. 50 the president to dismiss the prime minister and appoint the head of the armed services and gave the authority of military appointments to the prime minister.

290 This was a threat to the military, which had significant control over the office of the president. The military’s frustration reached a tipping point after General Karamat, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a highly respected and apolitical officer, was called to resign by Sharif.

General Karamat had spoken at the Navy Staff College in October 1998, suggesting the creation of a National Security Council for policy advisory and the introduction of impartial regulators for government oversight.

Feeling his authority being challenged, Sharif replaced Karamat with Lieutenant General Pervez Musharraf.

291 Musharraf was an average officer but who had built a strong relationship with the ISI while assisting them in aiding the Taliban since the second Bhutto administration.

292 By picking Musharraf, Sharif thought he was ensuring military support. What Sharif did not calculate was Musharraf’s dedication to conflict with India.

Sharif viewed himself as a realpolitik pragmatist who could improve relations with India. He arranged a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lahore for February 20, 1999.

293 Musharraf was outraged by this move, especially considering the communications between the two administrations made no mention of Kashmir.

At his insistence, the topic of Kashmir was included, but the army made their feelings known when they declined to greet the Indian prime minister upon his arrival.

294 The meeting went incredibly well, leading to a series of secret talks on the status of Kashmir. The two parties were nearing an agreement that even the ISI and Musharraf seemed to back.

However, soon after the talks began, Musharraf was presented with a plan by some of his closest generals to disrupt India’s supply route that he did not want to pass up.

Musharraf and the military elites backing the plan sold it to Sharif as a way to put pressure on India during their negotiations, to which he eventually agreed.

Pakistan launched an offensive into the Kargil Heights in Indian-administered Kashmir in May 1999.

While the Pakistani military believed India would surrender the land in the face of Pakistan’s nuclear capacity, it underestimated the military capabilities of India and the impact this action would have on international relations.

Pakistan became a pariah state, losing the support of even its most steadfast allies, like China. While this left Musharraf undeterred, Sharif was panicked.

295 In July, Sharif flew to Washington to meet with Bill Clinton where he feigned ignorance of the plan to take Kargil and sought his advice to end hostilities.

Upon Clinton’s advice, Sharif ordered the military to retreat from Kargil. Musharraf resented Sharif for forcing them to pull out and for blaming them for the operation, to which he had given approval.

The army too grew resentful of Sharif, thinking their sacrifices in the conflict in Kargil were for nothing.

Given Sharif’s history of dismissing an army chief who challenged him, the army corps commanders discussed the likelihood that he would do the same to Musharraf.

They feared this would lead to severely diminishing the power of the military, and started planning a potential coup led by Musharraf.

Sensing brewing dissatisfaction from officers loyal to Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif conferred with the United States again telling the Clinton administration he worried that the military would attempt to topple his government.

The Clinton administration sent him correspondence stating: “We hope there will be no return to days of interrupted democracy in Pakistan.” This signalled to Sharif that the United States would support him against a potential coup.

296 On October 12, 1999, Musharraf left for Sri Lanka on a goodwill mission. In his absence, Sharif quickly moved to replace him with Lieutenant General Khawaja Zia-ud-din, who was the director 290 Paul E. Lenze Jr., Civil–Military Relations in the Islamic World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 107. 291 Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2005), 167. 292 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 36. 293 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 168. 294 Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 151. 295 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 168-174. 296 Ibid., 174-176. 51 general of the ISI, and blocked Sharif’s plane from returning to Pakistan.

297 Having planned for this outcome, Musharraf loyalists in the military quickly apprehended Sharif and charged him with attempted murder and corruption. When Musharraf’s plane was finally able to land in Karachi, he became the new leader of the country.

298 A major takeaway from the events that transpired over a decade of weak civilian politics is the dominance of the ISI and military establishment over the government of Pakistan.

Both Bhutto and Sharif feared the ISI and military and the power they wielded, and despite both of them trying to toe the line, once they threatened those institutions’ authority, they were swiftly removed.

The military establishment grew its authority to the extent that it was able to successfully overthrow an elected leader and be greeted by public fanfare.

This power has only grown over time, making the National Assembly of Pakistan a public arm for the ISI and military’s bidding.

As powerful as the military establishment was during Musharraf’s reign, the Islamist terrorist network that it helped create loomed even larger.

While Musharraf supported the Taliban and Kashmiri extremists from a strategic standpoint and even sent officers to aid the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, he feared the influence of extremist elements in his country.

He quickly learned the limitations of his power when he tried to curb that influence. He attempted to add some regulation to the Blasphemy Law, which called for death or life imprisonment for anyone accused of blaspheming the prophet or the Quran.

It had been used by the religious ulema to target religious minorities and stifle more secular-minded politicians.
.
The law as it stood required no formal investigation which allowed it to be easily abused. Already careful not to make an enemy of the religious elite, Musharraf only sought to require a civilian administrator to investigate any claims before charging anyone officially.

This was enough to earn the vitriol of the religious ulema who immediately planned public protests against the regulation.

Musharraf quickly backed down, showing that no matter how powerful the military was, they had empowered a beast that they could no longer control.

299 The extent to Islamists’ hold over Musharraf was realised when Taliban leader and President of Afghanistan Mullah Omar threatened Musharraf that if he did not “enforce Islamic law” in Pakistan then the religious parties in Pakistan would create instability in his country.

Musharraf claimed he tried to exert his own pressure on the Taliban to desist from destroying historical artefacts but his request was ignored.

The Pakistani military establishment expressed some reservations to the Taliban on its decision to attack a Shia Hazara community in the Bamyan province in 1999.

In any case, their half-hearted protest was entirely dismissed and the Hazaras were slaughtered.

Musharraf, who was getting pressured by the US to tell the Taliban to turn over bin Laden, could not even get a member of the group to meet with him.

In a surprising twist in mid 2001, Musharraf followed in Sharif’s footsteps of negotiating with India over the Kashmir issue. In what became known as the Agra Summit, Musharraf met with Prime Minister Vajpayee for an official dialogue over the territory.

However, the summit was doomed from the start, thanks to extremist groups stepping up attacks in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.

300 While the Pakistani government had helped create and empower the global jihadist movement to further its own aims, it flew too close to the sun.

Pakistan was now a tool for the jihadists, which further encouraged more radical elements in the ISI to rise to power, further entrenching their alliance and support of extremist activity.

The era following the Cold War was tumultuous for South Asia, and the world at large. The ‘freedom fighters’ morphed into the Taliban, winning the battle for Afghanistan and liberating the 297 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 177. 298 Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan, 164. 299 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 192-193. 300 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 194-198. 52 people with more destruction and chaos than they had ever seen.

An emboldened Pakistan took advantage of the power vacuum left by the Soviet Union and aimed to fill it by weaponising jihadist movements, funded by the narcotics industry that it helped create.
This helped bring about a global trafficking pipeline for arms and narcotics which has freed jihadist groups from relying on states for funding and enabled them to build criminal empires to fund their terrorism.

The Haqqani network in particular epitomised the birth of terrorist criminal syndicates and ushered in a wave of global recruitment that expanded the jihadist brand, bringing non-state actors a level of power that previously had only been held by countries.

The ISI used these proxies to grow its own power and influence, eventually eclipsing the National Assembly of Pakistan and moulding the government to its will.

This dynamic was put to the test when Sharif tried to subvert the military’s control, only to be easily ousted by the military and the ISI. While the ISI and military became the most powerful entities in the Pakistani government, they did so through empowering a jihadist movement they could no longer control.

They quickly discovered the demon they spawned was no longer their puppet to control. The United States had blinders on through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, refusing to see the growing threat that the jihadist movement had on global security and the narcotics trade.

It was not until Pakistan’s complicity came to light that it took action, but by this point it was much too late.

The Taliban was running Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda was rising to become the most dangerous terror group in history. And it was all powered by narcotics.


STAY TURNED FOR PART THREE

 

[Muuza viatu]

By David R. Winston

Chapter Two

The Puppet Masters and the Trafficking Pipeline


The USSR’s economic decline in the late 1980s coupled with the growing Soviet-American rapprochement fostered significant pressure in the country to end its engagement in Afghanistan.

This brought about a gradual withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan over several months, completing on February 15, 1989.
Unfortunately, this did not lead to an end of conflict.

The PDPA government, now led by Mohammad Najibullah, was not willing to cede control to the mujahidin. While they withdrew combat troops, the Soviets still supplied much needed supplies and funds to the struggling government.

The mujahidin were also too divided to take advantage of the military weaknesses of the Najibullah regime.

163 A few weeks after the Soviets completed their withdrawal, the mujahidin commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom the West had supported via Pakistan, tricked a Tajik faction of the mujahidin into alliance negotiations, only to then torture and slaughter the entire delegation.

164 Within a few months of the Soviet defeat, the mujahidin had devolved into embattled warlords fighting over territory armed with Western-provided weaponry.

165 Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson worked to keep the aid flowing, despite the clear signs that the mujahidin were not the ‘freedom fighters’ he believed them to be. Wilson had taken on the plight of the mujahidin as a career-defining project; he was a major factor in the CIA’s initial decision to provide covert funding.

Two years after the Soviets withdrew their troops, Wilson was still pulling for more aid, and as a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, he was in a position to greatly influence that allocation.

He got Congress to give $250 million in arms and aid to the mujahidin, and with Saudi Arabia promising to match it for a total of $500 million, it was supposed to be enough to give the mujahidin the upper hand to finally take out the Najibullah government.

The plan failed, with the mujahidin again devolving into factionalism and infighting.166 This did not deter Wilson and his supporters, however.

167 As Wilson continued to push for more funding, members of Congress heard increasing reports of the criminality and brutality of the mujahidin.

Reports came in that they hijacked aid trucks, burned down a women’s health clinic, and murdered countless civilians in their attempt to ‘liberate’ cities.

168 John Murtha, chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, was alarmed at reports that the mujahidin were trafficking drugs.

169 As a result of these increasing concerns, the US Senate Intelligence Committee rejected requests for continued funding of covert operations in Afghanistan on September 30, 1991.

This was until Wilson caught wind of it.
After a rousing speech to the House Intelligence Committee, he got them to approve an additional $200 million, as well as a supply of arms acquired during the Gulf War.

170 Even Murtha voted in favour of the bill, placing his allegiance to Wilson over his concerns about the drug trafficking.

171 The 1992 aid packages of the US and Saudi Arabia enabled the mujahidin to at last conquer Kabul in April. Celebrations by the West were premature, and as quickly as the mujahidin came together to take Kabul, they unravelled again, creating further schisms in the mujahidin.

172 Initially, the mujahidin attempted to form an Islamic government with all factions represented.

Mujahidin commander Ahmad Dostam Massoud became Defence Minister and Afghan National Liberation Front founder Sibghatullah Mojaddedi became the President, with the intention of rotating positions

162 Larry P. Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2001), 69. 163 Ibid., 70. 164 George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 543. 165 Ibid., 1224. 166 Ibid., 1227. 167 Ibid., 1228. 168 Ibid., 1229-1230. 169 Ibid., 1238. 170 Jon E. Lewis, The Mammoth Book of Covert Ops:
True Stories of Covert Military Operations, from the Bay of Pigs to the Death of Osama Bin Laden (London, UK: Robinson, 2014), 301-303. 171 Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, 1238. 172 Lewis, The Mammoth Book of Covert Ops, 304. 36 between all mujahidin factions.

173 This plan was supported by every faction except Hezb-i-Islami, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hezb-i-Islami began their onslaught on Kabul the very hour that Mojaddedi took office.

174 Within two months, Mojadeddi handed over the presidency to Jamiat-i Islami leader Burhanuddin Rabbani.

175 Other factions soon engaged in their own brawls, such as between the Shia Hizb-i Wahdat and Saudi-backed Ittihad-i Islami. Several ministers refused to hand over their posts at the agreed rotation schedule, including President Rabbani, and factions receded to their respective ethnic groups vying for the upper hand.

176 During this era of authority constantly changing hands, the only consistent power was opium. Poppy harvesting saw a massive increase in the 1990s, jumping by 38% from 1993 to 1994 alone.

From 1992 to 1995, Afghanistan’s opium business rivalled Burma’s as the largest in the world, producing 2,200-2,400 metric tons a year.

177 After the Soviets left Afghanistan, many refugees in neighbouring states returned. Poppy farming was an easy way for refugees to make a sustainable living quickly, since the former mujahidin needed to rely more heavily on narcotics smuggling after international aid dried up.

178 Opium revenue was of vital importance to every faction to fund their militia and build up local infrastructure to sustain their control. When warlord Mullah Nasim Akhunzada became the ruler of the Helmand Valley, he built on its foundation of opium cultivation and taxed the profits to pay for the weapons needed to fight Hekmatyar’s forces.

He also used the revenue to build schools and roads in the dilapidated valley to win local support. In 1990, the US paid Akhunzada financial compensation of around $2 million in aid on the condition he stop poppy cultivation, to which he agreed.

179 However, this moratorium was short-lived, as regional control continued to rapidly shift hands.

Enter the Taliban

By 1995, the Afghan capital was razed to the ground, with 40% of all housing destroyed, and countless monuments demolished. After the dust settled, the faction that rose to the top with the backing of the ISI was the Taliban.

180 The Taliban, named for its members being former students of Saudi-funded Wahhabi madrassas in Afghanistan and Pakistan, rose to prominence in October 1994. Many were Afghan refugees who had been living in FATA and included many former mujahidin members.

Led by mostly unknown religious scholars, they offered disheartened Afghans a group to unite behind to end the infighting.
They gained popularity in the southwest, and soon grew their support in central and eastern Afghanistan.

They were able to end warlord and drug lord power struggles by paying them to leave or surrender control. By the end of 1995, they controlled half the country and were aiming to take over Kabul.

Hekmaytar grew concerned when he saw his usual ally, Pakistan, begin to back the Taliban. To ward off the Taliban takeover, Hekmaytar joined in an alliance with Rabbani, but it was too late.

181 Hekmatyar’s forces were handily defeated by the Taliban and he fled to Iran, where he lived in exile until 2002.

Most of Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami defected from their group and joined the ranks of the Taliban, which had a similar goal of establishing an Islamic state.182 The Taliban took Kabul in September 1996.

183 173 David B. Edwards, Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002). 174 Edward A. Gargan, “Rebels’ Leader Arrives in Kabul and Forms an Islamic Republic,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Apr. 29, 1992. 175 Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, 73. 176 Edwards, Before Taliban.

177 Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven and London, UK: Yale University Press, 2001), 119. 178 Martin Booth, Opium—A History (London, UK: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2013), 310. 179 James T. Bradford, Poppies, Politics and Power – Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 209. 180 Lewis, The Mammoth Book of Covert Ops, 304. 181 Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, 77-78. 182 Mujib Mashal, “Hekmatyar’s Never-Ending Afghan War: How One Former Anti-Soviet Ally of the US, Who Refused to Meet Reagan, Continues His War Three Decades Later,” Al Jazeera, Jan. 28, 2012.

183 Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, 77-78. 37 The Taliban’s policies on opium production shifted as quickly as Kabul’s leadership had. When the Taliban captured Kandahar in 1994, they made a public announcement that they would ban all drug production and distribution.

This ban did not last very long, as they realised the extent to which the farmers in Kandahar relied on it for survival.

Holding a tenuous control over the public, the Taliban feared backlash if they held to the poppy ban. Head of the Taliban’s anti-drug control force Abdul Rashid explained, “We let people cultivate poppies because farmers get good prices.

We cannot push the people to grow wheat as there would be an uprising against the Taliban if we forced them to stop poppy cultivation. So we grow opium and get our wheat from Pakistan.”

184 They also saw the crop as an opportunity to raise revenue. They began taxing farmers in the form of zakat, charitable alms under Islamic law. These donations were in the form of a 20% opium tax on farmers which would go directly to the Taliban.

On top of that, many local commanders and provincial governors imposed an additional tax to build their enterprise, turning themselves into drug lords.

The Taliban brought in at least $20 million USD in zakat alone excluding additional taxes.185 The Taliban continued to dominate the opium market through the mid-nineties. By 1996, Kandahar alone produced 120 metric tons of opium from 3,160 hectares (7,800 acres) of poppy fields, dwarfing their previous year’s haul of 79 metric tons from 2,460 hectares (6,080 acres).

The next year, after seeing a massive influx of Pashtun refugees return from Pakistan as the Taliban expanded their territory north of Kabul, opium production levels increased by 25% to 2,800 metric tons.186 In 1997, an estimated 96% of all Afghan heroin came from the Taliban.

187 The Taliban’s expansion efforts led to a growth of the drug pipeline that had been established by the mujahidin 15 years earlier. Couriers moved the opium from Helmand out to Pakistan, in Baluchistan or the Makran coast; to Iran, in the west or Tehran; to eastern Turkey; and over to Central Asia through Turkmenistan.

Their operations became so advanced that they were able to start flying opium over to the Gulf in cargo planes in 1997.
188 This widespread expansion was made possible by the machinations of the ISI who turned its covert operations outward at the end of the Soviet-Afghan War.

The ISI seized the opportunity of the crumbling Soviet Union to create its own sphere of influence.

With a robust arms pipeline in place and a slew of loyal jihadists, the ISI launched numerous covert operations through the former Soviet republics. Pakistan had acquired an arsenal from years of skimming off of the mujahidin arms pipeline.

189 The ISI spawned three arms pipelines: one through India; one through the Balkans; and one through Central Asia – all supplying weapons for jihadist groups.

As they had done before, the ISI created a symbiotic pipeline that used the same smugglers and pathways to transit weapons and the narcotics to pay for those weapons.

190 The Central Asian pipeline supplied the fledgling jihadist groups that were the ideological offspring of the mujahidin.

When the former Soviet republics were granted their independence, they couldn’t prevent getting dragged down with the fallen empire.

The panicked Russian Federation cancelled all loans to its former satellites and severely underpaid for imports.

Lacking the infrastructure to operate independently and without any trade relations outside the Soviet sphere, Central Asian states fell into economic catastrophe.

As inflation rose and supplies dwindled, the public began to protest. Echoing the repressive tactics of their Soviet predecessors, the Central Asian governments vio184 Rashid, Taliban, 118. 185 Ibid., 118-119. 186 Ibid., 119. 187 Ibid., 119-120. 188 Ibid., 120. 189 Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks (New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 89. 190 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 90. 38 lently cracked down on protesters.

This rapidly escalating situation gave rise to multiple extremist militant movements.

The ISI was eager to help them further their cause by setting up their arms/ drugs pipeline.

191 This was made even easier by the numerous existing connections between Central Asians already living in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Soviet conquest of Central Asia led hundreds of thousands of Central Asians from various ethnic groups and tribes to seek refuge in Afghanistan since the 1920s.

192 This created communal links to Central Asia that would enable opium traffickers to form what became known as the northern route, where opium cultivated in Afghanistan travels through Central Asia to Russia or Turkey and then the global market.

193 The narcotics trade was extremely prosperous for traffickers in Central Asia. In 2000, a kilo of raw opium worth $50 USD in Afghanistan would be worth $10,000 USD in Russia, and they were the perfect waypoint between the two.

The geographic nature and political landscape of the region provided numerous opportunities for smuggling.

The civil war in Tajikistan in the 1990s created vulnerabilities in its border with Afghanistan that terrorist groups took advantage of. Even when some routes were cut off, they were easily circumvented and new routes were created.

When Kyrgyzstan cut off a major smuggling route in 1999 that spanned from Khoroq, on the Tajikistan border of Afghanistan, to Osh, Kyrgyzstan, the smuggling output actually increased, indicating smugglers found easy alternatives.

194 The ISI sought to further its influence in Central Asia by radicalising and providing training for new recruits to the extremist groups.

In a press conference on July 11, 2002, Kazakhstan’s deputy head of the Almaty Department of the National Security Committee spoke about how a fundamentalist Pakistani religious organisation, Tablighi Jamaat, enticed young men in Kazakhstan to go to Pakistan for a four-month course learning “pure Islam.”

195 While there, multiple extremist group recruiters, including from Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda, attempted to radicalise the Kazakhs and offer them military training.

196 Many of them brought that training back to their home to join local extremist groups or form their own.

Tablighi Jamaat has long had strong ties to the Pakistani ISI, including Lieutenant-General Javed Nasir, who served as the Director-General of the ISI from 1992-1993.

He considered himself someone “who symbolizes Tablighi Jamaat’s most prominent member with international fame and reputation of the most scrupulously honest individual.”

197 The Central Asia Dynamic
Beyond the help of the ISI, militant groups in Central Asia received financial support from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and several Gulf states. They all hoped to replace the vacuum in power left by the Soviet Union.

198 The vast support of extremist groups in Central Asia led to the rise of the most extreme of them, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) in 1998, which started with the goal to overthrow the secular government of Uzbekistan but evolved into a terror group with global aspirations.

The IMU were backed by the Taliban early on, with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar 191 Ibid. 192 Goodson, Afghanistan’s Endless War, 44. 193 UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime), “Afghan Opiate Trafficking Along the Northern Route,” Vienna, Austria: UNODC, June 2018. 194 Glen E. Curtis, “Involvement of Russian Organized Crime Syndicates, Criminal Elements in the Russian Military, and Regional Terrorist Groups in Narcotics Trafficking in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Chechnya,” Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, October 2002, 9-10. 195 “Pakistani Islamists Active in Kazakhstan?,”

Jul. 12, 2002, discussed on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline, https://www.rferl. org/a/1142714.html. 196 Fred Burton and Scott Stewart, “Tablighi Jamaat: An Indirect Line to Terrorism,” Stratfor Worldview, Jan. 23, 2008, https://worldview. stratfor.com/article/tablighi-jamaat-indirect-line-terrorism. 197 Ardeshir Cowasjee, “Three Stars,” Dawn, Jan. 12, 2003, Three stars.

198 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 90. 39 giving them $50,000 USD in 1999.

199 They soon won the backing of Al-Qaeda, receiving $35 million USD from 2000 to 2001, including $20 million USD directly from Osama bin Laden.

200 The rest of their funds came from narcotics trafficking. Central Asian countries produced licit opium for the Soviet Union for decades, but trade was contained within the USSR.

Soviet authorities would regulate poppy field production fiercely between 1986 and 1991, executing several eradication efforts and arresting anyone who tried to engage in a black market.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, poppy farmers took advantage of the chaos by engaging in the illicit market of Afghanistan through the Russian Federation.

201 The IMU turned this smuggling effort into a trafficking empire. The founder of the IMU, Juma Namangani, engaged in opium trafficking as a member of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan during the Tajik civil war before forming the IMU.

He used his connections with militants in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to grow his business, eventually controlling 70% of the opium trade routed through Kyrgyzstan.

202 At this point, a majority of the opium cultivated was smuggled through Central Asia.

203 It also became the main region for smuggling in chemical precursors used for heroin refining in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

204 As its empire grew, the IMU eventually opened its own heroin refineries in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

205 Smugglers in Central Asia sent their products out to Turkish and Iranian dealers who then sent it out to the world.

206 By 1999, Kyrgyzstan’s narcotics exports had even surpassed those of Burma, one of the leading producers in the world.

207 The opium trade in Central Asia vastly expanded the Afghan drug pipeline, enabling much further reach to Russia and Europe.

This was facilitated by their connections with Chechen guerrilla fighters, who were also heavily involved in narcotics trafficking. Much like in the early days of Central Asian militancy, the Chechens were significantly enabled by the ISI.

In 1996, a conference was held in Mogadishu, Somalia to discuss the new frontiers for jihadist struggle: Chechnya and Kashmir.

The conference was attended by the ISI, along with Iranian intelligence, Al-Qaeda, and multiple representatives of extremist groups who all had an interest in expanding the jihadist movement.
One of the more infamous of the attendees was Osama bin Laden, eager to be part of the next jihadist struggle.

The ISI pledged to provide arms and ammunition for the fighters they were planning on sending to the new battlefields that they had helped create.

A major roadblock to Pakistani hegemony in Asia was the Northern Alliance.

Backed by Russia, the Northern Alliance consisted of a group of warlords united in their opposition to Taliban control of Afghanistan.

One of the warlords who received significant support from the Russians, Ahmed Shah Massoud, controlled a region bordering Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, limiting Pakistan’s access to those countries.

The ISI reasoned that if it was able to distract Russia with a conflict elsewhere, that could drain its resources to weaken its support for Massoud and enable the Taliban to get the upper hand, granting Pakistan access to all borders of Afghanistan.

The ISI saw the conflict in Chechnya as the perfect distraction for Russia.

208 The ISI began its covert operation by grooming Chechen field commander Shamil Basayev in 1994.

The Pakistani organisation trained and indoctrinated him and his troops at Amir Muawia camp in 199 Ibid., 91. 200 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 11. 201 Booth, Opium—A History, 317. 202 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 13-14. 203 Ibid.,” 9. 204 Aparajita Biswas, “Small Arms and Drug Trafficking in the Indian Ocean Region” (working paper, Centre for African Studies, University of Mumbai, Mumbai), 22. 205 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 9. 206 Biswas, “Small Arms and Drug Trafficking,” 22. 207 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 9. 208 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 94. 40 Khost province, Afghanistan.

This was one of the camps set up by the ISI to train the mujahidin in the 1980s and was infamously run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

It arranged for the Chechen group to then transit to Pakistan for further training. In addition to training Chechens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the ISI sent mujahidin veterans to Chechnya.

One of those trainers was Khattab, who was part of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle and involved in his funding network. This is likely what led to bin Laden providing $25 mil. USD to the group.

209 In addition to funding from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the Chechens funded their operations through arms and narcotics trafficking.

210 Chechen traffickers took advantage of the instability many Caucus countries were undergoing, like Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, through starting a massive narcotics and arms trafficking operation.

Georgia, in particular, provided access to Turkey and from there the West, leading Chechen militants to establish a large presence there, growing to a billion-dollar industry by 2002.

This Georgian safety hub for jihadists became strategically important to Pakistan and the Taliban, who hid operatives in the Chechen enclave of the Pankisi Gorge.

According to Russian officials, one of those given refuge for a time was Osama bin Laden.

211 As the ISI had planned, the escalating conflict between Russia and the Chechen militants reduced Russian support for the Northern Alliance, and allowed the Taliban to contain the force.

212 The narcotics pipeline further expanded to include the Balkans, which already had existing vulnerabilities to the illicit market.

In the former Yugoslavia, poppies were a government regulated crop, and therefore there were plenty of opium farmers who would risk trading in the illicit market for a huge payout.

The same was true of North Macedonia, which had licit opium production from the 1920s to the 1930s.

213 There was a huge potential market in this region for smugglers to take advantage of.

The success of the Chechen insurgent movement created a ripple effect through the Balkans, giving rise to insurgent groups in Albania and Kosovo.

The mujahidin movement snowballed, bringing fighters that had travelled to Chechnya to join the Balkan struggle, taking Chechen fighters along with them.

They brought their narcotics trafficking businesses with them, expanding the smuggling route to Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, Albania, and former Yugoslavia.

This formed a complex relationship of trading arms and narcotics between insurgent groups, Islamist groups, and organised crime syndicates.

A growing nexus started to form, with the Chechen insurgents working with the Albanian mafia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

The smuggling path created by these militants was soon to be known as the Balkan route, and became a major narcotics trafficking route.

The Balkan route expansion was a turning point in the funding of terrorist organisations.

As the jihadist empire expanded, they relied less on state sponsorship and international donations.

The KLA eventually became major narcotics money launderers, and the trafficking business became much more sophisticated.

214 The first domino in that terrible trajectory was the ISI’s covert actions in Chechnya, leading to a global trafficking route today that has little chance of subsiding.

The other jihadist campaign planned at the conference in Mogadishu was in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, where Pakistan had a long history of covert action.

In the lead up to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar, where it secretly installed 5,000 armed militants into the Kashmir Valley to incite a rebellion against Indian control.

This covert operation was the strategic precursor to the lSI’s modus operandi of arming and training insurgent movements in the 1980s.215 209 Ibid., 94-95. 210 Ibid., 95. 211 Curtis, “Russian Organized Crime Syndicates,” 3-5. 212 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 96. 213 Booth, Opium—A History, 319. 214 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 96.

215 Navnita Chadha Behera, Demystifying Kashmir (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), 77. 41 As it had done with Russia, Pakistan sought to distract India with an internal conflict to gain the upper hand. The ISI believed if it brought the fight to India, then India would have less ability to attack Pakistan directly.
216 Pakistan also feared the potential for Kashmiris to win independence from India and seek to form their own state apart from Pakistan.

The Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in particular advocated for independence and to join the divided parts of Kashmir, which would strip Pakistan of portions of Kashmir and the Northern Areas.

To ensure the secession movement occurred on its terms, Pakistan inserted itself into the rebellion’s operations.

Pakistan steered the rebellion through Operation Gibraltar, where it would distribute arms only to factions seeking Pakistani sovereignty of Jammu and Kashmir and sideline the independence factions.

217 It increased its control over the conflict in 1989 when the ISI funded the creation of Hizbul Mujahideen (HM), the militant arm of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami.

HM reportedly received more funds from the ISI than did any other organisation at the time.

218 Beyond funding HM, the ISI brought HM fighters to Pakistan to receive training in 1985.

219 The ISI augmented the rebellion in the early 1990s by sending in former mujahidin from Jalalabad, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.220 In addition to funds and troops, the ISI massively stepped up its arms smuggling pipeline to Jammu and Kashmir.

This is indicated by reports of progressive weapons confiscations from Indian border control. In 1987, before the extension of the arms pipeline, Indian border guards confiscated 125 guns.

In 1997, some years after the pipeline initiated, they hauled in almost 17,000 in just rifles.221 As in the other theatres of covert action, the ISI facilitated funding arms for militants through narcotics trafficking.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif admitted as much in 1994, recounting how Pakistan’s Chief of Staff for the Army, General Afzal Beg, and the Director General of the ISI asked him for permission to fund this covert operation through heroin trafficking.

222 Not only did the ISI use heroin proceeds abroad to fund its actions in Jammu and Kashmir, but it used the arms pipeline that had just expanded to the region to smuggle narcotics through India and surrounding states.

India had recently experienced a surge in heroin trafficking in the 1980s as a result of the Iran-Iraq War leading smugglers to seek alternative transit routes to Turkey.

This spawned a number of Indian narcotics syndicates to arise. This coupled with the robust transportation infrastructure in the country, vulnerable coastline and weak export regulations, created the prime conditions for a major expansion of the narcotics pipeline from Afghanistan.

223 As evidence of this, Indian border guards recovered 19,450 kg in narcotics from the Kashmir border from 1997 to 1998. Trafficking wasn’t isolated to just Jammu and Kashmir.

Drugs were also confiscated in Rajasthan and Gujarat, indicating the pipeline spread throughout India.224


THE HAQQAN NETWORK


While the ISI used its covert proxies for influence abroad, it had key stakes in the power structures forming in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The most significant of these is its relationship with the Haqqani network.

The network is the product of a wealthy family that owned land on both sides of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, from Loya Paktia in Pakistan to North Waziristan in Afghanistan,

216 Behera, Demystifying Kashmir, 81. 217 Ibid., 82. 218 Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, “Pakistan: Update to ZZZ32353.E of 5 August 1999 and PAK33645 of 27 January 2000 on the Kashmiri Group Called Hizbul-Mujahideen (Hezbul-Mujahideen or Hezb-e-Mujahideen) (HM) and Its Connections with the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI),” May 21, 2003, Refworld | Pakistan: Update to ZZZ32353.E of 5 August 1999 and PAK33645 of 27 January 2000 on the Kashmiri group called Hizbul-Mujahideen (Hezbul-Mujahideen or Hezb-e-Mujahideen) (HM) and its connections with the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

219 Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 93.

220 Behera, Demystifying Kashmir, 82. 221 Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 93. 222 Ibid., 223 James D. Medler, “Afghan Heroin: Terrain, Tradition, and Turmoil,” Orbis 49, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 286. 224 Biswas, “Small Arms and Drug Trafficking,” 22-24. 42 and had been profiting off of smuggling since before World War II.225 226 The Haqqani network, led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, took its name from the Deobandi227 madrassa, Dar al-‘Ulum Haqqaniyya, based outside of Peshawar, that taught Islamist ideology through the prism of Pashtun identity.

228 This school was known for its strong relationships with two Islamist political parties in Pakistan – Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and Jamaat-I Islami (JI) with many of its graduates becoming members of Pakistan’s National Assembly, a connection that the Haqqani network would capitalise on time and again.
Two of the school’s alumni, Yunis Khalis and Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi, each formed a Punjab mujahidin party, Hizb-i Islami Khalis (HIK) and Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islami respectively, during the Soviet-Afghan War. Jalaluddin Haqqani was a senior commander in the HIK.

These two groups joined together with member of JUI to form a network of likeminded militants and politicians who would spread Islamist ideology through the highland tribal regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many future leaders of the Taliban would come out of this group’s formation.

229 While this network shared many of the ideologies of the transnational jihadist movements spawning across the region, they differed in political goals.

The transnational jihadist movement that arose from Afghanistan sought the creation of a global caliphate that would unite under a central Islamist authority, while the Haqqani network sought to protect the traditional tribal political system in which the Pashtun people had autonomy.

This difference explains the behaviour of the Haqqani network to this day, which is very independent and focused on improving its own brand, while being open to collaboration with other extremist groups.

230 Jalaluddin became the successor of this unofficial network, folding it into his own mujahidin group that had already been active since Mohammed Daoud’s coup in 1973.

He soon opened up a number of madrassas set up in the vein of his own education at the Deobandi school.

Under General Zia’s government, Jalaluddin’s madrassas experienced a huge influx of funding as a result of the Zakat Ordinance which introduced an annual tax to all Pakistanis which would be allocated towards all madrassas in the state.

Jalaluddin used these funds to grow his madrassa network to 80 different schools. From these schools Jaulaluddin would grow his army of loyal militants to his syndicate.

231 The network further grew its numbers by recruiting foreign fighters, the first group to openly and consistently welcome foreign fighters into its ranks.

232 The success of this move paved the way for the foreign terrorist fighter movement that spurred the global jihadist cause forward.

During the Soviet Afghan War, the Haqqani network formed several alliances with jihadist groups, political parties, and criminal organisations in the pursuit of driving out the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

The network used its location straddling the Durand line to its advantage, leading many groups involved in the anti-Soviet movement to want to work with the Haqqanis.

233 In 1980, the network furthered its control over the movement by building a series of training facilities for the mujahidin.

In 1981 the network built a massive training complex in the Zhawara Valley where it not only trained its own recruits, but several mujahidin groups.

The network expanded the base over the decade, building a hospital, a machine workshop, and even a hotel for visitors. Most significantly, the base became a major weapons depot for the mujahidin movement.

These efforts made the Haqqani network the centre for mujahidin action against the Soviets, and made it an essential ally to the ISI.

234 225 Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2018), 151. 226 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 22. 227 Ibid., 38. 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid., 38-40. 230 Ibid., 41. 231 Ibid., 42-54. 232 Ibid., 60. 233 Ibid., 55.
234 Ibid., 67. 43 The ISI saw the potential to exert significant influence through the Haqqani network, and increasingly expanded its collaboration with the outfit throughout the conflict.

The Zhawara base presented an ideal location for storing weapons and supplies as well as operational planning for the mujahidin.

The ISI invested in the base early on, hiring contractors to expand the base and fortify the infrastructure.

235 Osama bin Laden was also a notorious patron of the base and was heavily involved in its operations.

236 He personally imported mining equipment to build the tunnels that held the weapons caches.

237 During the height of the conflict, the ISI was shuttling 12,000 tons of supplies per year through the network’s North Waziristan territory, and 60% of the total weapons and supplies cache were held in the Zhawara base and a second Haqqani base in Jaji, Paktia.

238 239 The Haqqani network became so essential to Pakistan’s war effort that the ISI committed to use its own resources to defend the base if it was attacked.

240 As the Haqqani network’s profile rose, it established a strong relationship with Charlie Wilson, who called Jalaluddin “goodness personified.”

241 Always pragmatic, the Haqqani network tried to win over some additional trust by protecting the reopening of a State Department-run school for Afghan refugee girls in Peshawar after it was attacked and shut down.

242 The Haqqani network additionally gained a close relationship with Saudi Arabia at this time.

The network was an early example of a powerful non-state actor that had relative sovereignty over its operations and wielded significant socio-political influence. This was a harbinger of an era of non-state dominance in the region.

243 The ISI not only used the Haqqani network as its own proxy, but worked with the network to bolster its other proxy armies.

As mentioned earlier, the ISI set up training camps for HM fighters in Pakistan to bring those skills to the battlefield in Jammu and Kashmir.

The Haqqani network provided all necessary resources for those training.
While HM rose out of the political party JI, the competing political party JUI did not want to potentially lose out on influencing a future Jammu and Kashmir under Pakistan.

JUI started its own madrassa network with multiple militant training grounds.
They too were provided resources by the Haqqani network.

While the Haqqani network has been a strong ally of the ISI through the years, it has always been a stridently independent organisation.

When the ISI and the Taliban experience periods of conflict, the network straddles between its alliances with both.

The network swore allegiance to Mullah Omar and the Taliban, yet its members followed their own rules.

For example, the network did not share the Taliban’s belief that music or female education was haram, or religiously forbidden, and approved of coeducational schools on its territory.

244 While it has maintained its alliance and business relationship with the ISI, the Haqqani network does not always agree to working with the ISI.

However, the Haqqani network has been a key element to much of the covert action conducted by the ISI and enabled the organisation to engage with many non-state actors while maintaining plausible deniability.

One of the most significant of these is Al-Qaeda, of which the Haqqani network has a direct role in its birth. In what became known as the Battle of Zhawara in 1986, the Soviets along with the Afghan army attacked the Haqqani network’s Zhawara base.

The ISI and Pakistani military rushed in immediately to help to defend the base, alongside Arab fighters whom Haqqani had called for assistance.

Many of these Arab fighters were part of Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), the group started by Abdul235 Ibid., 68. 236 Coll, Directorate S, 151-152. 237 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 68. 238 Coll, Directorate S, 151-152. 239 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 67. 240 Ibid., 68. 241 Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, 1129. 242 Mashal, “Hekmatyar’s Never-Ending Afghan War.” 243 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 68-69. 244 Coll, Directorate S, 152. 44 lah Azzam and Osama bin Laden consisting of Arab foreign fighters who travelled to Pakistan for training to join the mujahidin.

For many of the MAK members, the Battle of Zhawara was their first real combat experience, and gave the group a sense of rejuvenation that brought scores of new recruits.

Bin Laden saw the benefits of aligning closely with the network, while Haqqani appreciated the zeal and assistance of the Arab recruits.

They extended their partnership, with Jalaluddin giving bin Laden three caves in the Zhawara fortress to store his own group’s supplies.

He followed this action the following year with breaking ground in his new base along the pipeline leading from the Zhawara base.

This new base coordinated supplies with the Zhawara base and brought its new recruits to the Zhawara base for preliminary training.

This base was called Ma’sadat al-Ansar, the Lion’s Den of the Supporters, but was more often known by its informal name: al-qa’ida al-‘askariyya, the military base, and eventually shortened to Al-Qaeda.
245 The ISI was creating numerous proxy armies abroad to expand its sphere of influence.

The Haqqani network in particular gave the ISI access to thousands of fighters and a robust infrastructure for training and arming them.

This access extended to Al-Qaeda, which was starting to become the most influential extremist group in the world through which the ISI saw further potential for covert action.

The Haqqani network and the wider Taliban additionally propelled the ISI’s smuggling capabilities to new heights.

The ISI expanded the reach of the smuggling pipeline to Central Asia, the Balkans, and South Asia, effectively creating the northern, Balkan, and southern routes for narcotics trafficking that has been the lifeblood of drug syndicates for decades.

Whether intentional or not, it sprouted multiple branches of the arms and narcotics pipeline that empowered non-state actors across the globe.

As the jihadist organisations became self-sustaining, Pakistan enriched itself in the process.

During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan had become the leading producer of heroin, supplying 70% of the world’s output annually.

246 By 1989, heroin became Pakistan’s most profitable export, netting $2 billion annually.

247 Over the course of the conflict, the Pakistani government had become fully entrenched in the heroin industry.

Numerous cases of government, military, and intelligence officials engaging in the drug pipeline indicate a robust heroin syndicate existed within the government.

A US Congressional report in 1986 revealed the extent of the corruption, showing some of the highest-ranking government officials were heavily involved in heroin trafficking.

In the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the area now known as Khyber Pakhtunkwa, the mujahidin were given safe passage to transport weapons and drugs into and out of the province by its governor, General Fazle Haq.

There were between 100 and 200 heroin refineries in the Khyber District alone by 1988.

248 In 1983, all ISI operatives based in Quetta were dismissed because they were discovered to have been engaging in drug trafficking and selling the US-purchased weapons intended for the mujahidin.

Three years later, both Major Zahooruddin Afridi and Flight Lieutenant Khalilur Rehman were caught on separate occasions transporting narcotics through the pipeline from Peshawar to Karachi with 220 kg of heroin each.

They both were jailed in Karachi until they conveniently escaped without a trace. Many drug lords were members of the National Assembly or had politicians in their pocket to allow their operations to continue unfettered.

By the time of General Zia’s death in 1988, the opium economy was well entrenched in the government.249 245 Brown and Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad, 71-75. 246 Rashid, Taliban, 120. 247 Booth, Opium—A History, 290.

248 Ikramul Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade in Historical Perspective,” Asian Survey 36, no. 10 (Oct. 1996): 954-956. 249 Rashid, Taliban, 121. 45


BHUTTO'S MISSION


This all threatened to change when Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister in December 1988.

The daughter of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who was hanged by General Zia in 1979, Benazir became a deft politician while spending years in the US and UK in exile.

She formed strategic relationships with influential figures in American think tanks and media outlets, eventually gaining the ear of the Reagan administration.

As the successor of her father’s position as leader of the Pakistani People’s Party (PPP), she aimed to convince the Reagan administration that Pakistan would be a more reliable ally with her in charge.

250 As the Americans were sceptical of her given her father’s socialist background, she made several pledges to gain the Americans’ trust.

She vowed not to pursue nuclear ambitions, something her predecessor General Zia refused to do.She also pledged to continue support for the mujahidin.

251 Most importantly, she presented the potential for a pro-American democracy to form in Pakistan that was strongly against the Soviets, which won her strong support in the West and sealed her victory in the elections.

Having won a plurality but not a majority, she was finally approved to form a government after the Americans paid a critical visit to Pakistani President Ishaq Khan professing their support for Bhutto.

252 After her inauguration, the military, ISI, and Khan continued their business as if she was simply a figurehead.

In the first days of her administration, they froze Bhutto out of the decision-making process entirely.

This continued until she threatened Khan with going public that he ordered officials to exclude her.

253 This initiated a struggle for power between the military establishment and Bhutto. Under the Zia years, the power of the ISI and military were greatly expanded to oversee foreign affairs, specifically the situations in Afghanistan, India and Kashmir.

The opposition PPP had been critical of the government’s involvement in the narcotics industry, but had no power to change anything.

Not only did parliament have little authority over the ISI’s actions, but Zia eventually dissolved parliament entirely when he thought the PPP would threaten the power they had accumulated. Once Zia died, three men rose to the top of the Pakistani power structure: the head of the ISI, Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, General Aslam Beg, and the new acting President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who was the chairman of the Senate before Zia’s death.

They ran the show, and they wanted to keep it that way. Bhutto’s mission as Prime Minister was to launch an all-out war on drugs, calling it the “number one national issue” in her first press conference as Prime Minister. She began by instating a new ministry to fight the harvesting and distribution of narcotics.

254 In defiance of the political establishment in the ISI, she attempted to take on the syndicate operatives in her government. She targeted all state representatives who had ties to the narcotics syndicate to hold them accountable to their corruption while under the Zia government.

She swiftly dismissed two top ISI administrators who were involved in the syndicate and created a new ministry to take on traffickers. She followed that with calling for the arrest of General Fazle Haq, the corrupt NWFP governor.

She was met with fierce opposition within the Pakistani establishment and law enforcement. General Zia’s son spoke with reporters at Pakistani magazine Newsline, calling out the PPP for having close relations with drug trafficker Haji Mirza Mohammed Iqbal Baig (henceforth referred to as Mirza Iqbal Baig).

255 Bhutto believed she needed to make some concessions to win some conservative support.

With this in mind, she succumbed to pressure to support the election of Ishaq Khan for President. This move proved to be the downfall of her premiership.

256 250 Elisabeth Bumiller, “How Bhutto Won Washington,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Dec. 30, 2007, https://www.nytimes. com/2007/12/30/weekinreview/30bumiller.html. 251 Mark Fineman, “Drug Trade Is ‘No. 1 Issue’ Bhutto Declares,” The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), Dec. 4, 1988, https://www. latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-12-04-mn-1480-story.html. 252 Bumiller, “How Bhutto Won Washington.” 253 Brooke Allen, Benazir Bhutto: Favored Daughter, Icons Series (New York, NY: Amazon/New Harvest), 29-30. 254 Richard M. Weintraub, “Bhutto Says Drug Fight Is Top Priority,” The Washington Post (Washington, D.C.), Dec. 4, 1988, https://www. washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/12/04/bhutto-says-drug-fight-is-top-priority/48028d11-ecd9-4a0d-b007-ff47709e9505/. 255 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 960. 256 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 31. 46 In addition to political roadblocks, the Bhutto government faced tremendous public opposition to its war on drugs. Part of her new policy involved introducing programs to shift farmers from harvesting opium and towards alternative crops.

257 By this point, the Pakistani people and the Pakistani economy was heavily reliant on opium. At least 1.5 million Pakistanis were heavily addicted to heroin.

Most importantly, in a country ravaged by endless conflict, opportunities for livelihood were few and far between.

Many poor rural Pakistanis took work as drug mules, smuggling large heroin shipments through maritime ports via the Suez Canal to Turkey, Cyprus, or other Mediterranean countries on behalf of international narcotics organisations.

258 Poppy farming was incredibly attractive to people trying to rebuild their lives after being displaced through one of the many conflicts in the preceding decade.

Poppy farming netted over ten times as much revenue as the next leading crops of fruit, vegetables, or tobacco.259 In the early 90s the illicit market in Pakistan accounted for 30-50% of the total economy.

260 Even though the Pakistani government now attempted to eradicate the opium trade, the industry was too heavily entrenched to stop. Most heroin refineries were located in the poppy-rich NWFP.

The Pakistani government had little hold over the NWFP, where local tribal leaders ruled semi-autonomously.

261 NWFP residents had been economically dependent on opium profits over the years for survival. They saw the government’s war on drugs as a threat to their livelihood, and tribal militias armed with heavy weaponry fended off any attempts by law enforcement to crack down on production.

262 When the central government attempted to circumvent direct eradication efforts by bribing tribal leaders to stop opium processing, narcotics dealers would outbid them.

263 The vigorous tribal protection of opium farming also made any local government attempt at eradication politically risky.

Even if Pakistan stopped all production, the Bhutto government had little control over production in Afghanistan, which would inevitably bleed into Pakistan for refining and distribution. Bhutto’s central government was facing roadblocks on all sides.

264 In addition to attempts to attack the credibility of the Bhutto government, compromised members of the National Assembly had been paid Rs 194 million to call for a no-confidence motion to try to remove Bhutto at the end of 1989.

Bhutto publicly condemned the action, stating that “drug money was being used to destabilise her government.”

265 An FIA investigation in 2018 revealed that 140 million rupees were deposited into 15 bank accounts belonging to numerous politicians and journalists, including Nawaz Sharif. The investigation confirmed those funds were sent by the Chief of Army Staff, General Mirza Aslam Beg and the Director General of the ISI, Lieutenant General Asad Durrani at the behest of President Khan.

266 Meanwhile, the ISI had been gathering intelligence on Bhutto to undermine and discredit her from the moment she had taken office.

The organisation secretly bugged her office and her home to gather damning evidence against her.

Through this, the ISI uncovered corruption by her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who had been taking kickbacks from government contractors and syphoning money from defence contracts, earning him the nickname “Mr. Ten Percent” and landing him in jail.

267 President Khan acted on this intelligence revelation believing he had enough evidence to 257 Weintraub, “Bhutto Says.” 258 Booth, Opium—A History, 310-311. 259 Ibid.

260 Rashid, Taliban, 121. 261 Booth, Opium—A History, 310-311. 262 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 961. 263 Booth, Opium—A History, 311. 264 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 961. 265 Ibid. 266 Mariam Mufti, “Who Rigs Polls in Pakistan and How?,” Herald (Karachi, PK), Jul. 7, 2018, Who rigs polls in Pakistan and how?. 267 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 32. 47 remove her from office.

On August 7, 1990, he dismissed Bhutto under the Eighth Amendment of the Pakistani constitution on charges of corruption, nepotism, and despotism.

268 Criticisms of Bhutto’s nepotism were not without merit.

She appointed numerous family members to high-level government positions, including her mother as senior minister and her father-in-law as chairman of the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee.

She also made multiple autocratic moves, like appointing herself as the treasury minister and changing the state’s appointment policies to allow her to unilaterally pick senior civil service appointments.


269 There were also questionable connections between Bhutto’s PPP and the narcotics industry. In addition to the party’s connection with Mirza Iqbal Baig, a number of people believed to be involved in the narcotics industry held seats in the PPP, including Minister of Tribal Affairs Malik Waris Khan Afridi.

270 There were even reports that her husband sold drugs to western buyers from their residence.

271 It is unclear whether Bhutto’s anti-narcotics agenda was authentic or an excuse for a power grab over the ISI, but regardless, it seems she overplayed her hand and underestimated the extent to which the ISI truly controlled the country.

With Bhutto out of the picture, Khan declared a state of emergency and installed an interim government under Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi until elections could be held. On October 24, 1990, the conservative coalition, Islami Jamhori Ittehad (IJI), won handily and its leader Nawaz Sharif became Pakistan’s next prime minister.

272 While Nawaz Sharif may initially have had reservations of engaging in narcotics trafficking, he was quickly pressured into acquiescence by the ISI. As referenced earlier, Nawaz confirmed the ISI’s involvement in narcotics trafficking in a report in the Washington Post on September 12, 1994, which quoted Sharif explaining, “Drug deals were to pay for covert operations.”

273 General Aslam Beg and General Asad Durrani, who helped fund Sharif’s campaign with drug money, came to him just three months after his election, telling him they did not have the necessary funds to support the covert actions in Jammu and Kashmir, and created a blueprint for a large-scale heroin trafficking operation for Nawaz’s approval.

Sharif contends that he did not grant approval for such action, and ordered Beg to not engage in drug trafficking to fund their covert operations.

Sharif reportedly assumed the ISI complied with his wishes, and maintained that he was unaware of any engagement in trafficking after his denial.

274 While Sharif remained steadfast through his career that he had no involvement with the narcotics trade, his party was knee-deep in collusion with that very industry.

Haji Ayub Afridi was a powerful figure in Sharif’s IJI who won a seat in the National Assembly in 1990.

275 Before getting into politics, Afridi was a powerful smuggler, starting with gold and eventually participating in the mujahidin’s drug pipeline. He was instrumental in bringing opium through the Khyber Pass for refining in Pakistan.

276 A 1992 US report revealed that several members of the IJI received funds from Mirza Iqbal Baig (the same drug dealer that had previous associations with the PPP) including Prime Minister Sharif and President Khan.

This report further claimed the main funding source for the IJI party was drug money and that Nawaz used it personally to bribe members of the military to support him.

277 It seems clear that throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Pakistan, no political party’s 268 Ibid. 269 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 30. 270 Alfred W. McCoy, “The Stimulus of Prohibition:

A Critical History of the Global Narcotics Trade,” in Dangerous Harvest: Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous Landscapes, ed. Michael K Steinberg, Joseph J. Hobbs, and Kent Mathewson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 63. 271 Amir Zada Asad and Robert Harris, The Politics and Economics of Drug Production on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Border (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2019). 272 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 32. 273 John W. Anderson and Kamran Khan, “Pakistan’s Involvement in Narco-Terrorism” (congressional record extension of remarks, Oct. 3, 1994), https://fas.org/irp/congress/1994_cr/h941003-terror-pak.htm. 274 Anderson and Khan, “Pakistan’s Involvement.” 275 McCoy, “The Stimulus of Prohibition,” 63. 276 Richard McGill Murphy, “The Rise and Fall of a Drug Lord,” Forbes (Arlington, VA), Oct. 16, 1997, https://www.forbes.com/1997/10/16/ feat_side1.html#1d42bb483372. 277 Asad and Harris, Drug Production. 48 hands were clean in the growing narcotics nexus.
With the Cold War in the rear-view mirror, the West could no longer excuse away the threats posed by this nexus. It took a while for the West to alter their policy on Pakistan, even with the numerous warning signs that their one-time allies in the ISI and by extension the mujahidin were turning on them.

Many of these signs were not new, as figures like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had been openly hostile towards the West since the Soviet-Afghan War, notoriously refusing to meet with President Reagan when he visited Afghanistan in 1985.

Despite having received millions from the West to aid his mujahidin cause, Hekmatyar publicly denied ever receiving aid from Western nations. For a majority of the mujahidin, their alliance with the US was an ‘enemy of my enemy’ situation.

Many had overt anti-Western sentiments.
278 These sentiments flourished as the US changed gears from the Soviet threat to the Gulf War. The United States saw its one-time allies in the mujahidin aligning with Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

Both Hekmatyar and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who had both worked directly with Charlie Wilson, took the side of Saddam Hussein on his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

279 This was an early sign of the shifting attitudes within Pakistan towards the United States.

The fundamentalist leaders that previously coordinated with the US in Pakistan and Afghanistan were spreading extreme ideologies that viewed the US as aggressors against the Muslim world.
280 Wahid Muzhda, a former mujahid with connections to the leadership in Peshawar, reflected, “In those days, anti-American feelings were definitely in fashion in Pakistan.

There was Abdullah Azam, Osama bin Laden and others. There were anti-US publications being circulated.”

281 It became increasingly obvious that the mujahidin ‘freedom fighters’ that the Reagan administration lauded in the 1980s were starting to view the United States in the same way that they used to see the Soviets.

They were no longer reliable allies, and in fact evolved into America’s worst enemies over the next two decades. On top of the shifting attitudes towards the mujahidin, the ‘war on drugs’ in America escalated under the George H. W. Bush administration, and with the Cold War over, journalists focused their attention on the growing opioid epidemic and its causes.

The United States government needed to dramatically shift its approach to Pakistan’s narcotics industry to gain some credibility in its war on drugs. Around the mid 1990s, the United States directly addressed the threat posed by narcotics trafficking in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In the State Department’s 1994 International Narcotics Strategy Report, it read:

There is no indication that the regime in Kabul has taken any action to suppress opium cultivation and heroin refining… We are concerned about opium poppy cultivation in areas controlled by mujaheddin commanders.

We fear… that once hostilities end, refugees will turn to poppy cultivation during the period of economic disruption as they seek to rebuild a livelihood interrupted by 10 years of war.

282 The trafficking operations that had long posed a threat to the West finally became a concern. Soon, the United States began to put pressure on the Pakistani government to address the drug trade problem in the country.

During this time, Pakistan underwent several political shake-ups, with a power struggle forming between Sharif and Khan, leading Khan to oust Sharif, giving Bhutto another shot at the premiership in 1993.

283 In Bhutto’s second term, she was careful not to make the same mistake that ended her first term.

Bhutto gave the ISI near free-rein to engage 278 Mashal, “Hekmatyar’s Never-Ending Afghan War.” 279 Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, 1228. 280 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 962. 281 Mashal, “Hekmatyar’s Never-Ending Afghan War.” 282 Haq, “Pak-Afghan Drug Trade,” 953. 283 Tim McGirk, “Pakistan’s President Sacks ‘Corrupt’ PM: Ghulam Ishaq Khan Dissolves Parliament and Troops Take over State Broadcasting, Preventing Nawaz Sharif from Rallying Support,” The Independent, Apr. 19, 1993, News | The Independent | Today's headlines and latest breaking news | The Independent world/pakistans-president-sacks-corrupt-pm-ghulam-ishaq-khan-dissolves-parliament-and-troops-take-over-1456150.html. 49 in criminal endeavours, looking the other way while it aided the growing Taliban in Afghanistan.

As the United States began to grow concerned over the threat posed by the terror group, Bhutto falsely pledged the Pakistani government had no involvement in aiding them.

She later acknowledged her complicity in an interview in 2002, saying, “Once I gave the go-ahead that they should get the money, I don’t know how much money they were ultimately given... I know it was a lot.

It was just carte blanche.”284 While careful to not impede the Taliban, Bhutto now had to deal with the sudden interest of the United States on trafficking in her country.

In 1994, US drug czar Lee P. Brown warned Bhutto with losing her country’s loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund if it could not get a handle on the opium epidemic.

285 The US allocated $100 million to the Pakistani government to combat narcotics trafficking over the decade.

To satisfy the West, Pakistan massively reduced poppy cultivation, using American aid to fund programmes like crop substitution which was administered with some success in the NWFP, at least in the short term.

However, while Bhutto helped reduce cultivation in Pakistan, heroin refining in the country continued unabated.286 Bhutto threw the US a bone once in a while to keep them off her back.

In 1995, she arrested and extradited to the US two notorious drug dealers: Mohammed Anwar Khattak and Mirza Iqbal Baig.

The latter of course had been a thorn in Bhutto’s side for some time, having tainted her party’s image and later funded the campaign of her adversary, Nawaz Sharif.

She gladly turned him over to the United States to attain some diplomatic support in her quest to get funding from the country, which recently banned all aid to Pakistan when it became aware of its nuclear programme.

287 When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1996, they reignited the heroin industry to a level unseen before.

While they focused production solely in Afghanistan, Pakistan was integral to smuggling Afghan heroin abroad. Like their previous incarnation of the mujahidin, the Taliban utilised the same pipeline and couriers for arms trafficking as for narcotics trafficking, and to great success.

While the Clinton administration called out the lack of a Pakistani effort to crack down on the narcotics trafficking, it did little else. The administration viewed a good relationship with Pakistan as in its national security interest, and did not want to sour diplomatic relations entirely.

As Pakistan’s involvement in the heroin industry grew, so too did its public’s addiction to the drug. In 1992, three million Pakistanis were addicted to opiates. This grew to five million by 1999.

This only exacerbated ongoing internal issues, like corruption, unemployment, and violent extremism.

288 Bhutto’s second tenure as Prime Minister was cut short after her brother and political adversary Murtaza Bhutto was brutally murdered by a group of police officers.

While it is uncertain that Bhutto was involved, it was widely believed in the country that she and her husband were complicit in the murder.

The new president Farooq Leghari dismissed Bhutto and held elections, bringing Sharif back for his second term. Sharif continued the policy of supporting the Taliban, even publicly recognizing its government after it took power in 1996, which put the country at odds with the United States for the first time.

289 Sharif, who previously had solid relations with the military establishment, soon found himself to be in the same boat as his predecessor when he overstepped his authority.

Attempting to stop a repeat of his ousting from his last term, he moved to nullify the Eighth Amendment and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan, which stripped the power of

284 Rosie DiManno, “Bhutto Helped Create Taliban Monster,” The Toronto Star, Jan. 2, 2008, News | The Star gta/2008/01/02/bhutto_helped_create_taliban_monster.html. 285 John-Thor Dahlburg, “Pakistan Extradites Drug Suspects to U.S. : Crime: Turning over Alleged Kingpins Is Latest Move by Islamabad That Pleases American Officials,” The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), Apr. 4, 1995, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995- 04-04-mn-50864-story.html. 286 Rashid, Taliban, 122. 287 Dahlburg, “Pakistan Extradites Drug Suspects.” 288 Rashid, Taliban, 122.

289 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 34-36. 50 the president to dismiss the prime minister and appoint the head of the armed services and gave the authority of military appointments to the prime minister.

290 This was a threat to the military, which had significant control over the office of the president. The military’s frustration reached a tipping point after General Karamat, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a highly respected and apolitical officer, was called to resign by Sharif.

General Karamat had spoken at the Navy Staff College in October 1998, suggesting the creation of a National Security Council for policy advisory and the introduction of impartial regulators for government oversight.

Feeling his authority being challenged, Sharif replaced Karamat with Lieutenant General Pervez Musharraf.

291 Musharraf was an average officer but who had built a strong relationship with the ISI while assisting them in aiding the Taliban since the second Bhutto administration.

292 By picking Musharraf, Sharif thought he was ensuring military support. What Sharif did not calculate was Musharraf’s dedication to conflict with India.

Sharif viewed himself as a realpolitik pragmatist who could improve relations with India. He arranged a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lahore for February 20, 1999.

293 Musharraf was outraged by this move, especially considering the communications between the two administrations made no mention of Kashmir.

At his insistence, the topic of Kashmir was included, but the army made their feelings known when they declined to greet the Indian prime minister upon his arrival.

294 The meeting went incredibly well, leading to a series of secret talks on the status of Kashmir. The two parties were nearing an agreement that even the ISI and Musharraf seemed to back.

However, soon after the talks began, Musharraf was presented with a plan by some of his closest generals to disrupt India’s supply route that he did not want to pass up.

Musharraf and the military elites backing the plan sold it to Sharif as a way to put pressure on India during their negotiations, to which he eventually agreed.

Pakistan launched an offensive into the Kargil Heights in Indian-administered Kashmir in May 1999.

While the Pakistani military believed India would surrender the land in the face of Pakistan’s nuclear capacity, it underestimated the military capabilities of India and the impact this action would have on international relations.

Pakistan became a pariah state, losing the support of even its most steadfast allies, like China. While this left Musharraf undeterred, Sharif was panicked.

295 In July, Sharif flew to Washington to meet with Bill Clinton where he feigned ignorance of the plan to take Kargil and sought his advice to end hostilities.

Upon Clinton’s advice, Sharif ordered the military to retreat from Kargil. Musharraf resented Sharif for forcing them to pull out and for blaming them for the operation, to which he had given approval.

The army too grew resentful of Sharif, thinking their sacrifices in the conflict in Kargil were for nothing.

Given Sharif’s history of dismissing an army chief who challenged him, the army corps commanders discussed the likelihood that he would do the same to Musharraf.

They feared this would lead to severely diminishing the power of the military, and started planning a potential coup led by Musharraf.

Sensing brewing dissatisfaction from officers loyal to Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif conferred with the United States again telling the Clinton administration he worried that the military would attempt to topple his government.

The Clinton administration sent him correspondence stating: “We hope there will be no return to days of interrupted democracy in Pakistan.” This signalled to Sharif that the United States would support him against a potential coup.

296 On October 12, 1999, Musharraf left for Sri Lanka on a goodwill mission. In his absence, Sharif quickly moved to replace him with Lieutenant General Khawaja Zia-ud-din, who was the director 290 Paul E. Lenze Jr., Civil–Military Relations in the Islamic World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 107. 291 Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2005), 167. 292 Allen, Benazir Bhutto, 36. 293 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 168. 294 Stephen P. Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 151. 295 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 168-174. 296 Ibid., 174-176. 51 general of the ISI, and blocked Sharif’s plane from returning to Pakistan.

297 Having planned for this outcome, Musharraf loyalists in the military quickly apprehended Sharif and charged him with attempted murder and corruption. When Musharraf’s plane was finally able to land in Karachi, he became the new leader of the country.

298 A major takeaway from the events that transpired over a decade of weak civilian politics is the dominance of the ISI and military establishment over the government of Pakistan.

Both Bhutto and Sharif feared the ISI and military and the power they wielded, and despite both of them trying to toe the line, once they threatened those institutions’ authority, they were swiftly removed.

The military establishment grew its authority to the extent that it was able to successfully overthrow an elected leader and be greeted by public fanfare.

This power has only grown over time, making the National Assembly of Pakistan a public arm for the ISI and military’s bidding.

As powerful as the military establishment was during Musharraf’s reign, the Islamist terrorist network that it helped create loomed even larger.

While Musharraf supported the Taliban and Kashmiri extremists from a strategic standpoint and even sent officers to aid the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, he feared the influence of extremist elements in his country.

He quickly learned the limitations of his power when he tried to curb that influence. He attempted to add some regulation to the Blasphemy Law, which called for death or life imprisonment for anyone accused of blaspheming the prophet or the Quran.

It had been used by the religious ulema to target religious minorities and stifle more secular-minded politicians.
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The law as it stood required no formal investigation which allowed it to be easily abused. Already careful not to make an enemy of the religious elite, Musharraf only sought to require a civilian administrator to investigate any claims before charging anyone officially.

This was enough to earn the vitriol of the religious ulema who immediately planned public protests against the regulation.

Musharraf quickly backed down, showing that no matter how powerful the military was, they had empowered a beast that they could no longer control.

299 The extent to Islamists’ hold over Musharraf was realised when Taliban leader and President of Afghanistan Mullah Omar threatened Musharraf that if he did not “enforce Islamic law” in Pakistan then the religious parties in Pakistan would create instability in his country.

Musharraf claimed he tried to exert his own pressure on the Taliban to desist from destroying historical artefacts but his request was ignored.

The Pakistani military establishment expressed some reservations to the Taliban on its decision to attack a Shia Hazara community in the Bamyan province in 1999.

In any case, their half-hearted protest was entirely dismissed and the Hazaras were slaughtered.

Musharraf, who was getting pressured by the US to tell the Taliban to turn over bin Laden, could not even get a member of the group to meet with him.

In a surprising twist in mid 2001, Musharraf followed in Sharif’s footsteps of negotiating with India over the Kashmir issue. In what became known as the Agra Summit, Musharraf met with Prime Minister Vajpayee for an official dialogue over the territory.

However, the summit was doomed from the start, thanks to extremist groups stepping up attacks in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.

300 While the Pakistani government had helped create and empower the global jihadist movement to further its own aims, it flew too close to the sun.

Pakistan was now a tool for the jihadists, which further encouraged more radical elements in the ISI to rise to power, further entrenching their alliance and support of extremist activity.

The era following the Cold War was tumultuous for South Asia, and the world at large. The ‘freedom fighters’ morphed into the Taliban, winning the battle for Afghanistan and liberating the 297 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 177. 298 Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan, 164. 299 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 192-193. 300 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, 194-198. 52 people with more destruction and chaos than they had ever seen.

An emboldened Pakistan took advantage of the power vacuum left by the Soviet Union and aimed to fill it by weaponising jihadist movements, funded by the narcotics industry that it helped create.
This helped bring about a global trafficking pipeline for arms and narcotics which has freed jihadist groups from relying on states for funding and enabled them to build criminal empires to fund their terrorism.

The Haqqani network in particular epitomised the birth of terrorist criminal syndicates and ushered in a wave of global recruitment that expanded the jihadist brand, bringing non-state actors a level of power that previously had only been held by countries.

The ISI used these proxies to grow its own power and influence, eventually eclipsing the National Assembly of Pakistan and moulding the government to its will.

This dynamic was put to the test when Sharif tried to subvert the military’s control, only to be easily ousted by the military and the ISI. While the ISI and military became the most powerful entities in the Pakistani government, they did so through empowering a jihadist movement they could no longer control.

They quickly discovered the demon they spawned was no longer their puppet to control. The United States had blinders on through the 1980s and much of the 1990s, refusing to see the growing threat that the jihadist movement had on global security and the narcotics trade.

It was not until Pakistan’s complicity came to light that it took action, but by this point it was much too late.

The Taliban was running Afghanistan and Al-Qaeda was rising to become the most dangerous terror group in history. And it was all powered by narcotics.


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