including mandatory girls’ education. On propaganda posters, women with red babushkas and red lips held open books under Cyrillic screaming: “IF YOU DON’T READ BOOKS, YOU’LL FORGET THE LETTERS.” For conservative Afghans, it was too much. The Afghan army erupted against the communists.
Initially, the Soviets hesitated as the revolt spread. But in Moscow, diplomacy had been sidelined and the KGB’s influence had swelled. KGB chief Yuri Andropov neatly bypassed Soviet diplomats voicing caution. On Christmas Eve, transport planes loaded with Soviet troops landed at Kabul airport. The Carter administration saw the invasion as a chance to embarrass Moscow. Carter green-lit a covert war orchestrated through the United States’ military alliance with Pakistan. “It is essential that Afghanistan’s resistance continues,” National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote. “This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels … To make this possible, we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.”
Pakistan had not been a paragon of virtue in the late 1970s. Its military dictator, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, hanged the civilian leader he had forced out of office, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and canceled elections. Pakistan was aggressively pursuing the atom bomb, resisting American calls to stand down. In the name of war with the Soviets, as was the case in the later war on terror, all those concerns were secondary.
Over the course of Reagan’s first term, Congress’s approved funding for the covert war swelled from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Zia insisted that guns purchased with those funds be dispersed entirely on Pakistan’s terms. A Top Secret Presidential Finding at the outset of the war called for the CIA to defer to Pakistan. One Islamabad station chief remembered his orders this way: “Take care of the Pakistanis, and make them do whatever you need them to do.” When Zia visited Reagan, Secretary of State Shultz wrote a memo advising that, “We must remember, without Zia’s support, the Afghan resistance, key to making the Soviets pay a heavy price for their Afghan adventure, is effectively dead.” (When I asked Shultz about his advocacy for the Pakistani regime, he was unapologetic. “Zia and President Reagan, they had a relationship. The whole idea was helping the mujahedeen get the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan,” he said, using the Arabic word for Muslim fighters engaged in jihad, like those fighting the Soviets. “And we succeeded.”) And so, as Zia insisted, weapons would be given to Pakistan’s ISI, which would hand-select the mujahedeen who received the spoils. The United States, still stinging from the complexities of managing a proxy war in Vietnam, was happy to leave the details to Pakistan.
AMID THE URGENCY of battle with the Soviets, the partnership’s less pleasant realities were easy to overlook. Pakistani officers sold their CIA-supplied weapons on the black market—once, they even sold them back to the CIA. Pakistan continued to brazenly flaunt its nuclear development. In 1985, the Senate passed the so-called Pressler Amendment, requiring the president to certify, on an annual basis, that Pakistan didn’t possess nukes. The rule was strict: no certification, no assistance. Zia lied to President Reagan about the Pakistani nuclear program. “There is no question that we had an intelligence basis for not certifying from 1987 on,” said one veteran CIA official. But Reagan continued to certify that Pakistan was nonnuclear anyway. Ohio senator John Glenn argued that nuclear proliferation was “a far greater danger to the world than being afraid to cut off the flow of aid to Afghanistan … It’s the short-term versus the long-term.” But he was a rare voice of dissent.
The covert war also required that the Americans turn a blind eye to the brutality of the jihad being armed across the border. The Pakistanis passed the American arms to the most ruthless of the Islamist hard-liners: radicals like Abdul Sayyaf and Burhanuddin Rabbani and Jalaluddin Haqqani, all with strong ties to terrorist networks. One of the ISI’s favored sons was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a vicious fundamentalist who reputedly specialized in skinning captured soldiers alive and whose men indiscriminately murdered civilians. A pugnacious CIA agent named Milt Bearden took over the program in the latter half of the 1980s. By his estimate, the Pakistanis gave nearly a quarter of the American spoils to Hekmatyar. “Hekmatyar was a favorite of the Pakistanis, but he certainly wasn’t a favorite of mine,” he told me. He added flatly: “I really should have shot him when I had the chance.”
International Islamists were attracted like moths to the fires of extremism stoked by the Pakistanis and Americans. A wealthy Saudi patron named Osama bin Laden moved to Pakistan in the mid-1980s and drew close to some of the ISI’s favored jihadis, including Hekmatyar and Sayyaf. He offered cash stipends to fighters from the ISI’s training camps, and eventually established his own, modeled closely after the ISI’s.
And it worked. Within a few years, the CIA declared the covert war cost-effective. The true costs became apparent later.
ROBIN AND ARNOLD RAPHEL had moved to Washington, DC, just before the war with the Soviets broke out and “a lot of stuff went south,” as she would later put it. This was an accurate description of events in both the US-Pakistani relationship and her own. She wanted children; Arnold didn’t. They divorced in the early 1980s. Raphel would have two subsequent marriages, and two daughters. But friends described Arnold as the love of Robin Raphel’s life. One sensed she’d sooner jump out of a window than cop to such sentimentality.
Arnold, still a rising star in the Foreign Service, returned to Pakistan as US ambassador. On a hot afternoon in August 1988, he joined President Zia in a stretch of desert near the provincial city of Bahawalpur for a demonstration of the American Abrams tank—the latest offering to be purchased with Pakistan’s still-ongoing flood of assistance—and then accepted a last-minute invitation to join Zia in his American-made C-130 Hercules, for the commute back to Islamabad. They were joined by Zia’s chief of staff and ISI chief General Akhtar, who had hand-selected the mujahedeen supported by America’s covert war, along with General Herbert M. Wassom, who oversaw US military assistance to Pakistan. Exactly five minutes after they took off, the plane plunged into the desert and exploded into a massive fireball. All thirty souls aboard were dead, including Zia-ul-Haq and Arnold Raphel.
The incident is, to this day, one of the great unsolved mysteries of Pakistani history. Although an American ambassador had been killed and the FBI had statutory authority to investigate, Secretary of State Shultz ordered FBI investigators to stay away. Milt Bearden, likewise, kept the CIA away. The only Americans allowed on the site, seven Air Force investigators, ruled out mechanical failure in a secret report. The only possibility was sabotage. A canister containing VX nerve gas or a similar agent could have wiped out the plane, perhaps. A long-standing conspiracy theory held that nerve gas was secreted in a case of mangoes, loaded onboard before takeoff.
For Pakistan, the crash deepened mistrust of the Americans. General Beg, who seized power afterwards, was as committed as Zia to Pakistan’s nuclear development and support for terrorist proxies—but less friendly to the United States. For Robin Raphel, the tragedy severed her from those early, hopeful days in Tehran. When I asked about losing Arnold, she gave a small, brittle laugh. “It would