The book by Iqbal Malhotra covers the period from the arrest of Dr A.Q. Khan in January 2004 till the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in August 2021.
New Delhi: INTRODUCTION
Iqbal Malhotra is undoubtedly an accomplished author who has the knack of going into details and connecting the dots in the complex region of our Western neighbourhood. His fifth book ‘The Nukes, The Jihad, The Hawala And Crystal Meth’ is once again an offering that is gripping as you start reading the first page and exposes facts that have been staring us in the face but have remained uncovered.
This book covers the period from the arrest of Dr A.Q. Khan in January 2004 till the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 and the manner in which Pakistan deceived one of its most important patrons, the US, and strategically manoeuvred to ensure the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. It also did not hesitate to use the help of international drug cartels for trafficking drugs including crystal meth derived from naturally grown ephedra.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan and the 2004 exposure of Dr AQ Khan’s international nuclear proliferation network shattered Pakistan’s confidence. ‘Dr AQ Khan in a self-incriminating twelve-page confession had admitted to being the world’s greatest nuclear proliferator by providing Iran, North Korea and Libya with technical assistance and components to build nuclear bombs’. Later it was discovered that components had also been shipped to Sudan. However, an emboldened Pakistan, under President Pervez Musharraf, clawed its way back into prominence. No longer confined to the limited double game of clandestinely selling nuclear know-how and overseeing its burgeoning opium-to-heroin business as brought out in Iqbal’s earlier work ‘The Bomb, The Bank, The Mullah and The Poppies: A Tale of Deception’; Pakistan seized the opportunity to expand its narcotics portfolio to include the production and sale of methamphetamines, also known as ‘crystal meth,’ alongside its ongoing heroin trade.
In pursuit of this expansion, Pakistan not only extended structural oversight to the promising ‘crystal meth’ business but also provided a secure environment for its growth. While the former was achieved through extensive collaboration with the Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel, the latter involved initiating a treacherous new jihad against the US to drive its military out of Afghanistan, a goal achieved by August 2021.
In his fascinating account of a complex region, Iqbal has brought to light various issues that have remained unconnected in the public domain. How there was a divide within the US administration and how they turned a blind eye to Pakistan brazenly supporting the return of Taliban. Ironically, the US was willing to aid Pakistan to target terrorism in the form of Al Qaeda, and Pakistan, in turn, was using the US aid and support to rearm and provide sanctuaries to the Taliban through the ISI and the Taliban were in turn targeting both the US troops and the Afghan National Army. The US was cleverly ‘deceived into funding and paradoxically trusting them while they bled with a thousand deceptive cuts.’
Even when the US learnt of the details Al Qaeda safe houses in South Waziristan, instead of pressurising President Musharraf over the relationship between ISI and Taliban they in turn viewed this as a new opportunity to collaborate with Pakistan and gave them $700 million in new assistance and declared them a ‘major non-NATO ally’.
Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan had concluded that ‘Pakistan’s double game was undeniable’. Key supporters of the neo-Taliban clique included General Mohammed Aziz and Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, a former DG ISI apart from other upper echelons of the Army and bureaucracy. After ‘consolidating their power and the medieval practices of neo Taliban soon spread to areas including Bannu, Tank, Kohat and Dera Ismail Khan where barbers were banned, wedding bands left without work and cable TV operators were attacked.’ Jihadi seminaries remained operational as did the indoctrination centres and training camps established by ISI backed militant groups. As per Iqbal this is when President Bush realized that the US being deceived and decided to recognise India as a legitimate nuclear power.
Another issue Iqbal links is the progress on the Indo-US nuclear deal and the reactions by Pakistan who felt that the deal ‘threatened to compromise its strategy of using terror as an instrument of state policy’.
Iqbal links the terrorist attack in Kabul on the Indian Embassy on 07 July 2008 to the meeting Prime Minister Manmohan held in Japan with President Bush the same day and Musharraf’s concern about the progress on the Indo-US nuclear deal. Hamza Shakoor who drove the Toyota Camry was a Directorate S operative. The bombing infuriated Bush because Lieutenant General Nadeem Taj the head of ISI was Musharraf’s closest confidant and relative.
Further, the Mumbai attacks on 26 November by the ten heavily armed Pakistani terrorists came soon after the signing of the signing of the Rice-Mukherjee deal on 10 October 2008. The terrorists had been trained at two LeT Camps with Hafez Saeed delivering motivational lectures. The communications were monitored both by US and UK intelligence agencies but Pakistan denied all evidence that could be presented to an untrustworthy ally.
Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha the head of ISI when coerced into accepting the role of ISI reiterated that no serving ISI officers were connected with the attack. But Iqbal also points out that the US remained relentlessly secretive about David Headley a terrorist scout and Pakistani spy convicted in January 2013 for his involvement in the terror attack.
President Musharraf had earlier told a visiting US Senator Chuck Hagel that ‘the deal had created a strategic rift with Washington that overshadowed personal trust and affection.’ As per Iqbal, by 2008, both civilian and military commentators on national security began identifying the US often referred to as ‘extra regional forces’ as a direct political and military threat to Pakistan and he writes about the responses which included deterrence through a ‘wide range of solutions including the threat of launching nuclear warheads.’
Incidentally, the author reveals that in the October 2005 earthquake in POK ‘wreaked havoc on KRL destroying one third of the centrifuges’ and ‘released clouds of UF6 and partially enriched uranium. ‘He also writes about a clandestine nuclear procurement network through Humayun Khan and Asher Karni an Israeli businessman based in South Africa and how US customs were able to switch ‘the spark plugs for harmless components.’ But later the US State Department effectively derailed the investigation.
According to the author, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had led Osama Bin Laden and his followers away from US troops through the Tora Bora Mountains into Pakistan in November 2001.This is where they lived under ISI protection. In 2010 the US managed to track a courier of Osama Bin Laden called Kuwaiti and traced his SUV to a compound in Abbottabad. But this information was restricted to only a few officers outside its top echelons. Iqbal then unravels details of how they established surveillance on the compound and carried out data profiling through locals including Lieutenant Iqbal Saeed Khan who ran a private security company. By now the US was disillusioned with the ISI and had less confidence in Lieutenant General Shuja Pasha. Admiral McRaven the head of US Special Operations Command then executed the operation to eliminate Osama Bin Laden on 02 May 2011. In Pakistan the ‘anger and humiliation over Abbottabad exceeded the outrage felt over the loss of East Pakistan in December 1971.
As regards drugs the author exposes the links between the ISI, Taliban and also the brother of President Hamid Karzai. The drug problem and related issue of corruption were crucial due to the resurgence of opium cultivation in Afghanistan which mushroomed after 2001. Soon Taliban Commanders transitioned from merely protecting poppy cultivation and logistics to actively operating morphine labs on Afghanistan. For some reason the US had connected war strategy in Afghanistan with its drug policy. Why was Pentagon resisting this? And why was the role of ISI in narcotics production and distribution overlooked?
At the Pentagon Mary Beth Long relentlessly countered DIA and CIA arguments by presenting evidence showing that US troops were encountering narcotics in the same Taliban areas where they found weapon caches resulted in President Bush adapting Plan Colombia for Afghanistan in 2005. But despite this, the Afghan-Opium economy continued to set new records and ‘Lieutenant General Pasha and his superiors laughed all the way to the bank. ‘
There are many other parts of this book to include the role Mexican drug cartels, the rise of the Quetta Shura of the Taliban under Haqqani the concealing of the death of Mullah Omar in April 2013 and the Afghan elections in 2014 in which Dr Abdullah lost to Ashraf Ghani mainly because he was a Tajik and that his strongest ally, Mohammed Fahim, unexpectedly died of a heart attack in March 2014. Instead of a Durrani Pashtun the Presidency would now go to a Ghilzai Pashtun or a Tajik which represented a shift in Afghan’s troubled sectarian history where Islam had failed to unify the various ethnicities and sects within each group.
The response by the ISI to the targeted killing of Mullah Mansur by a US drone in 2016 were frontal assaults by Taliban on several Afghan cities which were a ‘dismal failure’ that then resulted in adopting a strategy of insurgent urban warfare. President Trump was now compelled to take control of this long running war that included an increase in troops and bombing attacks under ‘Operation Iron Tempest’ which failed. ‘Directorate S’s structural oversight of Afghanistan’s narcotics industry was unparalleled’.
The role of Zalmay Khalilzad, General Kayani, General Asim Munir and the negotiations with the Taliban are also covered in a great detail. Lieutenant General Munir as DG ISI ‘ordered Hibatullah Akhundzada to reconcile with Sirajuddin Haqqani and unite around a dual strategy of simultaneous talks and combat against the US. Unfortunately, the Khalilzad-Baradar talks avoided addressing the elephant in the room, that is the ISI. Iqbal also writes about the cancelling of the Camp David talks in September 2019 as he realized that the US was making most of the concessions.
CONCLUSION
Packed with facts, the book can be considered as a masterpiece and is a must read for all those who wish to understand a tale of treachery and the complexity of Pakistan’s duplicity.
* Maj Gen Jagatbir Singh, VSM, retired from the Indian Army.