Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

Pakistan’s Unholy Alliance
holy warriors joined the Afghan war from 1979 to 1989. 10 The largest
number came from the Middle East. Some were Saudis, among whom
was a young man called Osama bin Laden. The 23-year-old son of a
wealthy construction magnate said he arrived in Peshawar for the first
time in 1980. He was a very shy person who had no experience of
war and, as a fresh graduate from the King Abdul Aziz University, bin
Laden had left the luxury of his home to help the mujahidin fighting
jihad in Afghanistan. It was the beginning of his long association with
Afghan and Pakistani Islamic radicals. By 1984 he was spending most
of his time in Peshawar, sometimes with Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian
Islamic scholar and an ideologue who inspired the rush of foreign
Muslims to fight in Afghanistan. 11 It was also during this period that he
developed links with the ISI, which had become the main conduit for
arms and training for the Islamic warriors.
The Afghan war placed enormous resources at the agency’s
disposal. Weapons provided by the CIA were channelled to Afghan
fighters through the ISI. By the mid 1980s, every dollar given by the
CIA was matched by another from Saudi Arabia. The funds, running
into several million dollars a year, were transferred by the CIA to the
ISI’s special accounts in Pakistan. 12 The backing of the CIA and the
funnelling of massive amounts of US military aid helped the ISI develop
into ‘a parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of
government.’ It became all-pervasive and there was an unprecedented
expansion in the surveillance of political opponents.
Even those in the army were not spared. According to a former
senior intelligence officer, part of the ISI’s function was to keep a
careful watch on the generals and ensure their loyalty to the regime.
In the words of Brigadier Yousaf, ‘So powerful had the ISI become
that apprehension, even fear, of what the ISI could do, was real.’ 13
The Afghan war provided the agency with the public profile that it
did not have before. Former ISI officials point out that the general
expansion the agency underwent as a consequence of its Afghan role
had a bearing on its overall functioning. While its role in supervising
a successful covert operation in Afghanistan won the ISI international
acclaim, at home it was a dreaded name.
The Afghan resistance was projected as part of the global jihad against
communism. The ISI’s training of guerrillas was integrated with the
teaching of Islam. The prominent theme was that Islam was a complete
socio-political ideology under threat from atheistic communists. The
Afghan war produced a new radical Islamic movement. Besides the
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