How Zia’s Death Helped the U.S.
By Robert D. Kaplan
Aug. 23, 1989
It’s now generally suspected that the K.G.B. either had prior knowledge of, or actually planned, the Aug. 17, 1988, plane crash that killed Pakistan’s President, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, most of his top generals, the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, and an American military attache. What isn’t so widely recognized, however, is how little the assassination has helped the Soviet Union. If anyone has benefited, it’s the U.S. A report on the technical causes of the disaster by the Pakistan Government’s Board of Inquiry - aided by six U.S. Air Force specialists - indicated that the crash was not an accident. Explosives were found in the wreckage, the investigators said, and the plane was likely brought down by the deliberate contamination of the main hydraulic system and its back-up, which would have made the plane almost impossible to control. The board concluded that ‘‘the use of ultra-sophisticated techniques would necessitate the involvement of a specialist organization well versed with carrying out such tasks and possessing all the means and abilities for its execution.’’
Only three organizations active in Pakistan at the time against the Government fit that description: the K.G.B., the K.G.B.-created Afghan intelligence group, WAD, and the research and analysis wing of Indian intelligence.
The State Department blamed WAD for many terrorist bombings in Pakistan’s cities in 1987 and 1988. In a few cases, Radio Kabul even announced the bombings before they occurred. Every WAD section reportedly has a K.G.B. adviser at the top. There are reports that as many as 1,500 Soviet personnel have been working at WAD’s Kabul headquarters.
India’s involvement in the air crash seems less likely. President Zia was certainly not India’s friend, but his actions as an adversary were relatively predictable. And there was no consensus among the experts about who would succeed him in the event of his death. Even Indian involvement would not get the K.G.B. off the hook. Indian and Soviet intelligence services were assumed by Western diplomats to be cooperating in Pakistan. Moreover, India’s strategic motives for such cooperation were well-founded: President Zia was bent not just on evicting the Soviets from Afghanistan but on establishing Afghanistan as his satellite.
And in that lies the irony that his death best served U.S. interests.
President Zia was Moscow’s most formidable adversary in the third world. But just as the forced withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan is part of his legacy, so is the defeat of the mujahadeen in the Afghan city of Jalalabad and the recent slaughter of mujahadeen commanders by a fundamentalist guerrilla faction.
President Zia’s drive to create an Afghan satellite caused him to arm mujahadeen who were loyal to him, but who fought badly in the field and were politically extremist. This led to a bullying of the entire resistance by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence. It was Pakistan intelligence, still staffed by the President’s cronies after his death, that planned the head-on assaults on Jalalabad, which resulted in much bloodshed, little territorial gain and a loss of prestige for the mujahadeen.
Since early 1988, mujahadeen commanders had warned - even pleaded with - Pakistan intelligence not to force them to attack Jalalabad. They pointed out that an even larger Afghan city, Kandahar, was more ripe for collapse and presented fewer tactical problems for the resistance. But because moderate guerrillas were stronger around Kandahar than the fundamentalists loyal to his Government, President Zia concentrated on Jalalabad instead.
President Zia was the savior of more than three million Afghan refugees, but by the time of his death he was despised in Pakistan’s main population centers, the provinces of Sind and Punjab. Since the Afghan war was seen to be his, financed by America, the attendant hardships that befell Pakistan’s population were blamed on both President Zia and the U.S.
Thus, were President Zia still alive, the assault on Jalalabad would have gone ahead as it did, leading to mass protests in Pakistan against both the President and his American patrons. That the Jalalabad defeat has been contained as a purely Afghan issue, with little or no anti-American fall-out in Pakistan, is due to the presence of President Zia’s successor, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Merely by being elected democratically, with the clear encouragement of the U.S., Mrs. Bhutto lanced the boil of anti-Americanism in Pakistan.
