Book Review: The Bomb, the Bank, the Mullah and the Poppies- By Maj Gen Jagatbir Singh, VSM (Retd)PART 2

 The cause of the air crash killing General Zia on 17 August 1988 remains unsolved, General Akhtar Abdur Rehman the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff and after Zia the second most powerful man also died in the crash. He had headed ISI for ten years. Was someone wanting to cut off the ‘hydra headed monster fuelling nuclear proliferation and narcotics smuggling ‘. 

General Aslam Beg was not on board the aircraft but was airborne in a separate aircraft seeing the crash, he circled over the burning wreckage for a minute and then flew to Rawalpindi in his aircraft was Major General Jahangir Karamat who later also became the Army Chief. 

Iqbal writes how Prime Minister Benazir was ‘disempowered’ as she had a President Ghulam Ishaq Khan who despised her and retained power under the 8th Amendment of the Constitution to dismiss her, Nawaz Sharif the Punjab Governor who was backed by the Army and the Foreign Minister Sahabzada Yakub Khan’s loyalties also lay with the Zia generation. 

The constant warfare between General Beg and Benazir frayed Dr AQ Khan’s nerves and he got in touch with Hussain Haqqani to construct the IJI coalition, he also got Gul worked up regarding the nuclear programme and the later began ‘plotting the assassination of Benazir’ for which he approached (the yet unknown) Osama Bin Laden. Gul then took Osama to meet Nawaz Sharif. Osama wanted $10 million and Nawaz Sharif to transform Pakistan into a strict Islamic State. On getting to know of the plot she replaced Gul with Lieutenant General SR Kallue. General Mirza of course made him realise that he was ‘unwelcomed’ and transferred all responsibilities of the proxy war in Kashmir and the KRL to the DGMI General Asad Durrani.

 The book also tells us about General Asif Nawaz Janjua, who succeeded General Mirza Aslam Beg as the Pakistan Army Chief’. Lieutenant General Asad Durrani the DG ISI, under the secret orders of General Beg and Lieutenant General Hamid Gul one of the most powerful General’s during President Zia’s regime, had started planning to dislodge President Najibullah’s government in Kabul. Gul was of the view that Afghanistan needed to be brought under a strict Islamic regime, which would enable the consolidation of opium cultivation and its processing into heroin for export to Europe and North America.

General Janjua wanted to bring Ahmad Shah Massoud into the post-Najibullah Afghan government and accompanied by Nawaz Sharif and Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Turki bin Faisal, flew to Kabul on 29 April 1992 to welcome the Massoud-supported Sibghatullah Mojadidi government, after Hekmatyar’s forces had been routed from Kabul. Here General Janjua was shocked to learn that Hekmatyar was being advised by Gul not to sign the peace agreement. 

Ultimately, General Shuja died of a heart attack while on his treadmill. His brother then wrote a masterpiece on the Pakistan Army;’ Crossed Swords’ and the family claimed he had been poisoned. Hamid Gul from being a powerful Corps Commander was shunted out as the DG Heavy Industries Taxila. A job he refused to take and resigned. He remained controversial till his death in 2015. 

The book reveals how AQ Khan had targeted Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistan’s leading theoretical nuclear physicist, regarding an article in 1993 questioning the security of Pakistan’s bomb. General Shamin Alam Khan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called him regarding his article in which he wrote of Permissive Action Links (PALs)-command-and-control mechanisms to prevent a bomb from being hot-wired or triggered accidentally. “Hoodbhoy saw Khan emerge and glower at him as he walked out” of General Shamin’s office. When asked by Shamin how PALs worked, a horrified Hoodbhoy revealed that none of them, AQ Khan included, knew anything about PALs or had even thought about securing Pakistan’s bomb.

 Iqbal tells us how the newly appointed DGMO Major General Pervez Musharraf charmed Benazir into ordering the revival and escalation of the Kashmir campaign. However, concealed under this umbrella were the hidden agendas of both KRL and the thrust into Afghanistan. 

Benazir’ took a shine to the wily Musharraf’ because she needed the Army on her side. Musharraf began the recruitment drive at the Afghan refugee camps run by the ISI. The first batches of Talibs from the madrassas run by Maulana Fazlur Rahman were trained near the Baluch border with Afghanistan. 

Next was Markaz Dawa Al Irshad (MDI), an organisation, founded in 1987. Osama bin Laden contributed $1 million to it and the MDI created a Military Wing in 1990 called Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).’ Musharraf’s patronage made LeT the largest jihadi-terror organisation in Pakistan’. Some years later he would pay ‘war lords who stood between the Taliban and Kabul $ 3 million’ to desert Masood.

 The book is fascinating and Iqbal needs to be complimented for connecting all the dots as he gives us a peep into the entrails of the deep state the revelations which make one wonder in disbelief. 

What the book clearly brings out that illegal trades in narcotics cannot survive without end-to-end patronage of both the security agencies and the administration. Iqbal’s research is meticulous and he has compiled the facts backed by references to expose ISI as one of the biggest drug cartels as well as how Pakistan carried out an illegal nuclear materials and technology trade. We now look forward to the sequel and the exposure of the continuing role of Pakistan and the ISI at the centre of this complex web of deceit as there has been no change in the leopard’s spots.