By Bruce Reidel

Rs 499

Bruce Riedel, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer and adviser to several US Presidents, has spent virtually an entire lifetime studying and dealing with Pakistan. He has been privy to Pakistan-related decision-making at the highest levels in his country.

He has also had the opportunity to interact with a range of Pakistani actors, from Prime Ministers to five-star generals. His interest in Pakistan goes back four decades to when he first began studying Islam at Harvard University. “For much of that time”, he writes, “I have been a participant in America’s deadly embrace with Pakistan”.
One result of that deep lifelong association is his latest book, Deadly Embrace. And what he has produced is a grim account of Pakistan’s inexorable descent into the jihadist inferno. Riedel succinctly explains how circumstances and a few committed but twisted individuals came to shape Pakistan’s unfortunate history, starting off with the dictator, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, whom he calls “the grandfather of global Islamic jihad”. Zia, Riedel writes, “was an Islamist. He aligned himself with the country’s Islamic Jamaat-i-Islam Party, depicted himself as a pious Muslim and took steps to Islamise the Army”.
Zia tried to control domestic and regional politics through the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which saw massive expansion during his tenure. “By one estimate, its staff jumped from 2,000 in 1978 to 40,000 in 1988 with a billion-dollar budget.” Riedel recalls a famous remark by a CIA officer: “Zia was a believer. Without Zia, there would have been no Afghan war and no Afghan victory”.
The other person who established the base for global jihad in Pakistan was Abdullah Yusuf Mustafa Azzam, a Palestinian scholar who came to roost at the Islamic University of Islamabad. “There he came under the influence of Zia’s jihad in Afghanistan — and his life changed profoundly… In 1984 he wrote a book crucial to the expansion of jihad, The Defence of Muslim Territories, in which he argued every Muslim had an obligation to join the Afghan struggle, the most important jihadist cause of the time.”
“Azzam’s book became as important to the Afghan jihad as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was to the American Revolution”, observes Riedel. Azzam, along with co-founder Osama bin Laden, created the Maktab al Khadamat in Peshawar to house and feed budding jihadis. Riedel quotes Bin Laden: “Volunteers from all over the Arab and Muslims countries… were trained by the Pakistanis, the weapons supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis”. Zia was killed in an air crash in 1988 and Azzam was assassinated the next year; global jihad nevertheless was on a roll.
The book goes on to chronicle how Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Bin Laden conspired with the ISI to help boost the Kashmir and other jihadi agendas around the world. “At their first face-to-face meeting, (Mullah) Omar introduced Bin Laden to a crowd at the Kandahar mosque as ‘a friend, a brother and a holy warrior’. Then the two led the Friday prayers together”, writes Riedel, remarking that this “was an auspicious beginning for an important partnership”.

Riedel is candid about admitting that the ISI has been involved in many of the major terrorist attacks on India, including the December 2001 attack on Indian Parliament. According to him, that attack was executed by the Jaish-e-Mohammad, an ally of Bin Laden. “I asked myself and still do: Who benefitted from this attack?” Riedel writes, going on to suggest that “by diverting Pakistan’s Army to the east, to the border with India for the next year, the Parliament attack helped save Al Qaeda”, which by then was feeling the heat of the Pakistan Army.
He also believes that when the present Pakistan Army Chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, was the ISI boss “in 2004-2006, the ISI was actively encouraging a Taliban revival and assisting their war effort after two years of training Taliban on a large scale in Quetta and other locations… Several ISI officers were members of the Quetta shura and even participated in Taliban attacks inside Pakistan”.
The bigger problem is, he writes, the radicalisation of the Pakistan Army and society. Riedel explains how Al Qaeda and the Pakistan Army helped create and nurture the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT). The LeT today also operates in Afghanistan where it has not only attacked Indian targets but has also been involved in clashes with Nato forces. Riedel also writes about David Headley’s revelations on the links between the ISI, the LeT and the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai. “The LeT is primarily a Punjabi group”, he points out. “Thus it recruits from the same families and neighbourhood as the Pakistan Army and ISI. As one Pakistani general told me: it is a family affair.”
Going by Riedel’s revelations, terrorism has indeed become a family affair of the Pakistani state. But he seems to believe that worse is possible: the takeover of the Pakistani government by a militant faction of the Army or by militant Sunni Islamists. “A jihadist, nuclear-armed Pakistan is a scenario that must be avoided at all costs”, Riedel warns. “That means working with the Pakistan of today to try to improve its very spotty record on terrorism and proliferation.” Riedel’s conclusion that America can change Pakistani behaviour after all these years sounds like wishful thinking, based as it is on the author’s personal predilections and a compassion that must come from years of association.

The author is an independent security and political risk consultant