'The Nukes, The Jihad, The Hawala And Crystal Meth' review: An in-depth analysis of security affairs in Pakistan, Afghanistan
Lqbal 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 not just gripping, but also exposes uncovered facts that have been staring us in the face.
This book covers the period from the arrest of Dr AQ 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 maneuvered to ensure the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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 manner in which they turned a blind eye to Pakistan brazenly supporting the return of Taliban.
It’s ironic that 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 to rearm and provide sanctuaries to the Taliban through the ISI; the Taliban were in turn targeting both the US troops and the Afghan National Army. The US was “deceived into funding, and paradoxically trusting them while they bled with a thousand deceptive cuts”.
Another issue Iqbal links is the progress on the Indo-US Nuclear deal and the reactions by Pakistan that 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 July 7, 2008 to the meeting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh 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.
Further, the Mumbai attacks on November 26 by the 10 heavily armed Pakistani terrorists came soon after the signing of the Rice-Mukherjee deal on October 10, 2008. 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 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 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.
With regards to drugs, the author exposes the links between the ISI, Taliban and also the brother of then President Hamid Karzai. The drug problem, and related issue of corruption, were crucial due to the resurgence of opium cultivation in Afghanistan that 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, in spite of 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 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 realised that the US was making most of the concessions.
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.
The range of actors is immense: Presidents and Prime Ministers, Generals, Heads of Intelligence Agencies, Drug Dealers, Terrorists, all depending on each other and turning against each other when the situation demands. Iqbal has tried to untangle the knots in what is a volatile region that has a direct impact on the security and stability of India—Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has exposed the key players and thrown light on the dark and deep state of Pakistan. But as one reads the book, one realises that fact is indeed stranger than the fiction.