The sordid underbelly of sinister ploys

I was privileged to spend two months under the tutelage of the distinguished academic Stephen Cohen—the well-known author on the armies of Pakistan and India— at the Brookings Institution, Washington DC, during my Humphrey Fellowship year in 2000. Cohen had popularized the remark that, “while nations had armies, Pakistan was an exception. This was a country in which the army had a nation.” Back then, even Cohen did not realize the extent to which the ‘deep state’ had its tentacles in financial transactions and the narcotics trade. All this, and much more, comes out in Iqbal Malhotra’s excellent study The Bomb, the Bank, the Mullah and the Poppies: A Tale of Deception. By an interesting coincidence, one of the key dramatis personae referred to in this book, General Jehangir Karamat, was a scholar in residence at the Brookings Institution at the same time. As his father had been in the ICS, I enjoyed a good rapport with him, though our worldviews were quite apart.

Malhotra’s book shows how, over the years, the Pakistan army ensured that its operations were not dependent on budgetary allocations from its Finance Ministry. It had developed its own independent sources and resources—both in the public and underground terrain. Organizations like the Fauji Foundation (FF), a trust established by the Army, were corporate-style ‘entrepreneurs and realtors’ in their own right. But like all trusts, FF had to maintain a public account of its profit and loss statement and a balance sheet. There was a third source of funds for the Pakistan army and the nuclear establishment—a financial institution, the Bank of

Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which funded the ‘extra-constitutional agenda’ of Pakistan’s deep state. It did so by acquiring and investing money from heads of state and billionaires to finance the cultivation and processing of poppies in Afghanistan, with supply routes across the world, the street value of which has been assessed at 33 billion US dollars.

The book covers a timeline starting from 1965 to the making of the bomb. Agha Khan Abedi was Pakistan’s ‘first banker to fund the jihad against India’ through the United Bank Limited (UBL). Overseen by AB Awan, a police officer who had the ear of Ayub Khan, UBL gave the initial funds for the ‘Master Cell’ in Kashmir. The UBL was set up by the Saigols and supported by the Gokuls—both part of the twenty top business families that controlled Pakistan. As Habib Jaleeli succinctly said: Bees Gharane Hai Abaad, Aur Kroron hain Nishad, Sadar Ayub Zindabad, Sadar Ayub Zindabad (Twenty families are growing wealthier by the day, even as crores are languishing. Long live President Ayub, long live President Ayub). This bank later morphed into the BCCI, which at one stage became the fastest growing bank in the world; it had branches in Colombia, Luxembourg, London, and, of course, Pakistan, thereby ensuring both financial and logistical support to the Afghan opium trade.

The backstory of the bank’s link to the bomb is that after the humiliating defeat of Pakistan by India in the 1971 war, the quest to acquire an atomic weapon to counter future Indian aggression became an obsession with the deep state of Pakistan. Bhutto called all eminent physicists and scientists in for a meeting in Multan on January 20, 1972 to discuss a plan to make a bomb. Bhutto’s doublespeak was clear, for all this was on the back of his mind long before he came to Shimla for talks with Mrs. Gandhi to negotiate the return of the 93,000-odd Pakistani Prisoners of War. The Shimla agreement saw a “public declaration that India and Pakistan would resolve all issues, including that of Jammu and Kashmir, bilaterally”. Meanwhile, Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi “was willing to support Pakistan in creating a financial vehicle that would ostensibly be private and at arm’s length from both governments.” Kamal Adham, the Chief of Saudi Intelligence, who was the CIA’s principal liaison man for the entire Middle East, was a frontman for the BCCI takeover of an American bank. Tom Clausen, chairman of the Bank of America, invested USD 625,000 in the BCCI for a 30 per cent stake, thereby giving BCCI the credibility to draw in investors worldwide, including the cartels of Colombia. This money filled the coffers of Pakistan’s nuclear fund, handled by generals and politicians, from General Zia-ul-Haq to, eventually, Pervez Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif, and Benazir Bhutto, and their cronies who monitored the poppy plantations of Afghanistan along with the Taliban’s pliable tribal chiefs. Time Magazine carried a cover story on BCCI—the world’s sleaziest bank.

Meanwhile, AQ Khan, the self-styled Bhopal-born father of the Pakistan A-bomb, who was more of a fixer than a serious atomic scientist, had built the required facilities to fulfill his mission. Khan was then encouraged to look at exporting bombs, and the related know-how to North Korea, Iran, and Libya for a price. Ironically, US intelligence agencies—the chief patrons of non-proliferation—knew of the rot in Pakistan’s ‘deep state,’ and CIA’s dossiers named the players and the money in this ‘great game.’ Its dubious role is quite obvious, for even after the plane crash that killed Gen Zia, the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, and the Military Attaché Brig Gen Herbert Wassom in 1988, ten weeks before the US presidential elections, there was no serious attempt to uncover the plot.

The book is also the story of the systematic state failure in Afghanistan. Caught, as it was, in a proxy war between the Soviets and the Americans, Pakistan felt it could leverage the situation by installing friendly Mullahs—but the money that the narcotics trade could get to the Taliban was multiple times that of the financial aid and support that the US and all the UN agencies together could provide. We also learn that generals in Pakistan could enter into direct negotiations with Iran, North Korea, and China, independent of the foreign ministry and the Prime Minister’s office, and over time, the foreign powers also understood that the real power in Pakistan was the ‘deep state’—represented by the army and the ISI.

It is important for everyone interested in the contemporary polity of the subcontinent to study this meticulously researched book, for it gives a very nuanced view—not just of the generals and the Pakistan elite, but also their inherent contradictions: those between its nuclear experts, the contest between the judiciary and the political leadership on the one hand and the army on the other, the questionable ‘doctrine of necessity’ invoked by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, as well as the contradictions between Pakistan’s closest allies—the godless Chinese on the one hand and the proponents of the state of Medina on the other. But it should be clear to all, even those who light candles for peace on the Attari-Wagah border, that in the immediate to short term, the possibilities of a meaningful settlement with Pakistan do not appear to be a practical proposition.

The writer, a former Director of LBS National Academy of Administration, is currently a historian, policy analyst and columnist, and serves as the Festival Director of Valley of Words — a festival of arts and literature