Breaking History - Partition’s Ghost: How Pakistan Became a Deep State

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

Last month, two nuclear powers exchanged blows after terrorists mowed down 26 tourists in Kashmir, yet it didn’t turn into a hot war. We got lucky. But sadly, the next India-Pakistan war seems like only a matter of time.  In this week’s Breaking History, Eli Lake explores the origin story of the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan. How did Pakistan become a true ‘deep state nation’ post-partition? And why does it really really matter? ******* Producers: Alex Miller, Bobby Moriarty, Poppy Damon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last month, two nuclear powers exchanged blows after terrorists mowed down 26 tourists in Kashmir and it didn't turn into a hot war. We got lucky. Sadly, the next India-Pakistan war seems like a matter of time. And one big reason why this conflict is not going away is because of Pakistan and specifically its military and intelligence service. After the break, how Pakistan's deep state betrayed its people and betrayed its patron. On April 22nd, a gang of Muslim fanatics armed with assault rifles approached a group of tourists in the mountainous region of Pahulgam and opened fire.

It was a bloodbath. 26 people perished, most of them Indian tourists. Other victims were forced to recite verses from the Quran. Within hours, the Indian government blamed their neighbour, Pakistan. India's defence minister has warned there will be a loud and clear response to the killings of more than 20 of its citizens in Indian-administered Kashmir. There's been no official confirmation yet on who carried out the attack in the picturesque tourist town of Balgham. For most Indians, this accusation was a fait accompli.

No evidence was really required. Pakistan has had deep ties for decades to Lakshari Taiba, or L.E.T., an Islamist insurgent group in Kashmir. And even though L.E.T. did not claim credit for the bloodbath, another group calling itself the Resistance Front did. The assumption is that Pakistan is either directly or indirectly responsible for terrorism in Kashmir. The point is without any evidence, I think is very hard to say.

This is Tufts University professor and biographer of Pakistan's founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Ayesha Jalal. I think it's very hard to say. Just because Pakistan used to support these people or these people can cross and get help from Pakistan, it's not clear to me that they sat in GHQ and planned it. I don't know. I need more concrete evidence. The response was nearly a very dangerous war.

Indian jets pounded nine locations on May 9th. It was the first time India responded with airstrikes into Punjab, the province where most of Pakistan's deep state is from. The Trump administration helped broker a ceasefire, but who knows how long that will hold? This is Pakistan! This is a country where the foxes run the henhouse. Its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, has cultivated, funded, and armed jihadists for decades.

And their gruesome deeds have left a trail of blood. The examples are staggering. There is Mumbai in 2008. Some people have been able to leave this hotel today, and that is the fabulous news for families. The bombings in 2009 and 2008 of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Yet again, the Indian embassy in Kabul was a target. The blast outside the wall of the embassy rocked the Afghan capital. The 2001 bombing of India's parliament.

Right now, it's unclear whether Pakistan directed the mass shootings last month in Pahalghem, but the pattern is unmistakable. The groups that engage in these killings are more often than not intertwined with Pakistan's deep state. Okay, deep state, I know what you're thinking. If ever a phrase has had its meaning beaten out of it, it is this one. But bear with me, because when we're talking about Pakistan, we have to talk about a deep state.

And just so we're clear, a deep state is when the national security bureaucracy is more powerful than the elected or official government. This is why I am reluctant to say America has a deep state as opposed to a national security state. But if I accepted the theory that the CIA murdered John F. Kennedy in 1963, well then I would agree. In Pakistan, though, security state violence against the elected government is not theoretical. Just look at the facts.

There have been four military coups in Pakistan's history since 1947. And this doesn't count other examples of deep state intervention in Pakistani democratic politics, like, for example, the military's pressure to arrest and prosecute former prime minister and cricketer Imran Khan, or the assassination in 2007 of former prime minister and presidential candidate Benazir Bhutto. And to this day, of in 2007, a former prime minister and presidential candidate,

Benazir Bhutto. And to this day, especially in Pakistan, the civilian leaders know that crossing the military risks being driven out in a coup. This is Matthew Rosenberg, a former Pakistan and India correspondent for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. And act accordingly. And that, yes, there are elections, yes, there is a democracy in Pakistan, there are trappings journal. The real power in Pakistan operates in the shadows, and over the course of nearly 80

years, this deep state has not only hobbled the country's democratic institutions, it has created a golem, a network of terror masters, animated by a desire to restore a lost Islamic caliphate. It has both built a nuclear arsenal and shared the technology with other rogues. It taps the phones of Pakistani elites and murders journalists who ask too many questions. And the shame of it all is that this deep state for decades was subsidized by the US government. Pakistan's deep state did not emerge from a vacuum. It would not exist if it were not for the deep wound of partition, the violence of a war that created modern India and Pakistan after the British Empire fell to pieces.

I'm Eli Lake, and you're listening to Breaking History. In this episode, we examine the tragedy of Pakistan, how a Muslim homeland in South Asia was destroyed by the generals and spymasters who were supposed to defend it. After the break, Pakistan and Partition, the wound that never healed. We got the buzz You got the plumbers Have you ever been hired for a job and experienced major imposter syndrome? Allow me to make you feel better, because in the history of job imposters, few compare to a British judge named Cyril Radcliffe. In June 1947, the British Empire gave Cyril the task of dividing what the old maps called Hindustan, what we now

call India and Pakistan. Cyril Radcliffe had never been there. He knew nothing of its people, its politics, or its geography. And for a few weeks in 1947, he redrew the borders of the Indian subcontinent. A little backstory. At its peak, the crown jewel of the British Empire was India. It was a misery for the locals, but the Brits were clever. They educated a pliant ruling class, or so they believed, and were able to exploit this rich land with relatively small numbers. But after World War II, this empire was no longer sustainable. England had to rebuild

from the ashes, but there wasn't enough money to take care of its colonial possessions. This was good news for the Indians, who had been agitating for decades for their independence. But there were two visions of independence at this point. One favored by Mahatma Gandhi and his Indian National Congress was a free, democratic, unified Indian subcontinent. The other, favored by the Muslim League and Gandhi's ex-friend and rival, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was to carve out a Muslim-majority homeland from the wider subcontinent. Many Muslims in this period were worried about their fate in a Hindu-majority state, so there was a natural logic to creating a Muslim homeland, Pakistan, which left India behind.

The problem was that the Muslim and Hindu populations were not neatly divided into various provinces. And this is where our inept judge, Cyril Radcliffe, comes in. It was his job to carve out the new Muslim state from the independent India of which he was utterly ignorant. And this ignorance, the Foreign Office hoped, meant that he would be impartial. Oh yeah, one more thing. Radcliffe was only given five weeks to draw up the map.

He had to look at provinces like Punjab and Bengal, places where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had lived side by side for centuries and put a border through it. Once he arrived in the territory, Radcliffe's job didn't get any easier. He suffered from a lot of disease. He ate bad food. He was sick. He was doing terribly. He was in a hurry to get out of there.

This is Gunita Singh Bala, founder of the 1947 Partition Archive, an oral history of partition. He knew what he was doing and he didn't like it once he got the assignment. To do his job, Radcliffe worked from outdated maps, patchy census data, and dodgy legal briefs and under immense political pressure from both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, Radcliffe drew lines that cut through villages, farms, and even homes

in some cases. He knew he was in over his head. Here's Radcliffe in an interview with veteran journalist Khuldeep Nayyar. I had no alternative. The time at my disposal was so short that I could not do a better job. Given the same period, I would do the same thing. However, if I had two to three years, I might have improved on what I did. He was not allowed to consult the public or travel to the regions that he was dividing.

When his work was done, he refused his 40,000 rupee payment and fled India before the new borders were even made public. And that was probably a good idea because what followed was an outbreak of unimaginable violence. They start to try to ethnically cleanse and enact these little genocides in order to change the demographic of their areas. This is Gunita Singh Bala again. She says that even as the lines were being drawn, people started proactively migrating, taking a guess as to where Cyril would draw the lines next.

People call it Karbala. They call it a complete war. It was war massacres. It was horrible. We have interviews from pilots who would do that over the mobs on the ground. This is where you see those long pictures of caravans that are like 40 miles long, people escaping. So it was very violent in that area. We should say there are no clean hands. Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs all killed, raped, and plundered in this awful period. The death count, sometimes estimated as high as 3 million, is officially unknown. Today historians estimate that somewhere between 12 and 20 million people were displaced.

To put this in perspective, Israel's War of Independence in 1948 against five Arab armies and local militias displaced 700,000 Palestinians. And to this day, the Palestinian national movement demands the right of return for the descendants of those refugees. The latest rigorous study comes from Harvard. They say about three million people died. However, I do question that too, because we have a lot of oral histories where people talk about, especially breadwinners, like father figures, dying of heart attacks and strokes within

about a year or two of partition. So I think that was very difficult for people. And those deaths, I don't think are counted, right? I think it's really hard to know the exact number, but I think the Harvard study does a good job of maybe looking at the number who died due to violence, perhaps. When Cyril carved up the provinces of Punjab and Bengal,

provinces with their own leaders who had their own agreements with the British Empire, you could say they were caught in the crosshairs. And this was true for many of the provinces and princely states. One of these princely states was a beautiful, mountainous, spice-rich region at the tippy top of what is now India in the Himalayas that sounds honestly like paradise. A place called Kashmir. Before we get into Kashmir, it's important to return for a moment to that concept of a deep state. Because you can't sustain a military and intelligence service more powerful than an elected government unless you have a constant and terrifying enemy. And the reason that India is Pakistan's eternal foe is because of Kashmir.

Sitting smack in the middle of the new India-Pakistan border, this Muslim majority state, run by a Hindu maharaja, was ripe for conflict. The roots of India and Pakistan's conflict over Kashmir traced back to that pivotal summer when the British rule came to an end. In June 1947, Viceroy Lord Monboton presented his Three June Plan. The British statesmen laid out the options facing the rulers of the 560 princely states once Britain withdrew. join India, join Pakistan, or, in theory, remain independent.

The Union territory of Jammu and Kashmir had a particularly tough choice to make. Here was a majority Muslim state, ruled by Maharaja Hari Singh, a Hindu monarch. With violent communal conflict brewing over competing nationalisms, the Maharaja was faced with a vexing dilemma. Muslim rebels had already launched what became known as the Punch Rebellion in June 1947. What were initially protests over economic and political grievances quickly escalated into violent, sectarian conflict, with the Muslim League mobilizing popular support for joining Pakistan.

When the British withdrew later that summer, Maharaja Singh, desperate to maintain control amid escalating violence, ultimately chose for Kashmir to remain independent. But unfortunately for the Maharaja, the geography made that choice almost impossible to sustain. Straddling the freshly drawn Pakistan-India border, Jammu and Kashmir sits in the Western Himalayas, controlling key mountain passes, river headwaters including the Indus, and vital communications routes between Central and South Asia. Kashmir is home to some of the most important glaciers on Earth. These glaciers provide water for more people than anywhere else on Earth.

I'm talking about they provide water to hundreds of millions in China, in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. So you're talking about these four massive Asian countries. You're talking about like close to half of the world's population, right? So India does control a lot of the glaciers and so does China. So I think that is a huge part of it because whoever controls the glaciers has an upper hand. For both India and Pakistan, though, Kashmir's cultural importance transcends its strategic value. It's a prize to be won between competing nationalisms. Shortly after independence,

Muslim nationalists fomented pro-Pakistan factions into rebellion. So they instead sent in tribals from the northwest, bordering Afghanistan, what you call the tribal areas, into Kashmir. And these tribals did well in the first instance, but then they were pushed back because they were indisciplined.

This is Ayesha Jalal again. And so the Maharaja of Kashmir appealed to New Delhi to assist them. And New Delhi's condition was that you accede to us and then we will send you. It's another matter that this formal instruments of accession, as we discover, has been argued by British historians who have studied this, that it was done after the Indian Army was already in Kashmir. Faced with pressure from Pakistan's Pashtun tribal militias, India made Maharaja Singh an offer. A cede to India or be conquered.

The Kashmiri Maharaja accepted the offer, agreeing for Kashmir to become part of India in exchange for India's military support. As one can imagine, Pakistan was furious. And thus begins the first, but by no means the last, India-Pakistan war. The leader of Pakistan at this point was the nation's founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Born in 1876 in Karachi, he was a British-trained barrister who began his political career in the Indian National Congress, advocating Hindu-Muslim unity. But over time, he became disillusioned.

So we must understand that Jinnah was, above all, a politician. He was a politician in the Congress Party before Gandhi joined the party and became its leading light. This is Hussein Haqqani, former Pakistani ambassador to Washington and the author of Magnificent Delusions Pakistan the United States and an epic history of misunderstanding. And at that stage he was known as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. He felt marginalized by Gandhi and decided then that he would lead the Muslims. He absorbed a lot of ideas

that were around the world at that time. He was a voracious reader. He traveled to England, stayed there for a few years. In the middle of his political struggles when he faced difficulties in being able to unite the Muslims, a lot of Muslims were not interested in a separate national homeland. And he was influenced, among others, by the Ulster nationalists, for example, who argued

that the Protestant experience of the Ulster counties of Ireland made them a different nation to the Catholics of Ireland and made them a different nation to the Catholics of Ireland. Then he was also influenced partly by the Zionist movement that talked about a national home for Jews, which was not necessarily going to be a religious state, but a state to protect their interests. And so he used all those ideas to formulate what came to be known as the two nation theory in the subcontinent, the Muslims and the Hindus by virtue of their historical experience, the Muslims having been the rulers, the Hindus not having been the rulers, under the British having attained a kind of equality, but now a Hindu numerical superiority, totally threatening the Muslims in the long term.

And the solution to that would be creating a Muslim homeland in the areas where Muslims were a majority. The problem was that one third of the Muslim population of the subcontinent was not going to be part of this homeland. And Mr. Jinnah never really addressed that question. The result of this advocacy for a Muslim homeland is the nation of Pakistan. The name of the country is actually an acronym

and here is how Christopher Hitchens explained it. The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation, but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chowdhry Ramat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir and Indus Sindh. The stand suffix merely means land. In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means land of the pure.

It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies, and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India. Interestingly too, there is no bee in this cobbled together name, despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part of Bengal, now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against genocidal Pakistani repression.

And still includes Baluchistan, a restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste. After the break, Pakistan builds its deep state. The first leader of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a sick man, suffering from tuberculosis

when he finally became governor general of the new country in 1947. He would last in that job for a little over a year. On September 11, 1948, he succumbed to his disease and died. It was estimated a million people turned out for his funeral. This was a tragedy. Jinnah, for his many flaws, was also a reasonable, moderate man. He was nominally Muslim, and he at times appealed to fundamentalists for political support, but he was not an extremist. Like much of Pakistan's Western-educated elites, he drank

alcohol and despite his tuberculosis, he smoked cigarettes and cigars. He was broad-minded, even tinkering with ideas from the early Zionists in his formulation of Pakistan. It's a great what-if of history. Had Jinnah lived a few years longer, he may have been able to focus on building a modern state, the way his contemporaries in India did. Instead, Pakistan's leaders after Jinnah made two fateful decisions that have reverberations to this day. The first is in 1949, when Pakistan's Constituent Assembly passes the Objectives Resolution, which states that Pakistan is to become an Islamic State.

This is the beginning of the slide towards extreme Islamism. At that time, the leaders are secular, but they are promising an Islamic state. Again, this is Hussein Haqqani. So it is inevitable that at some point, the more religious people will say, ah, but these guys are not the ones who will be able to do what is the objective of this country.

And so they started to setting themselves. The military needed to continue to build itself. Again, the leaders of the military were secular, westernized, British educated, but they needed to project to the rest of the world that they were very anti-communist so that they would continue to get American and Western support. What could be better as a way of showing antipathy to communism by saying, but the reason why we are so anti-communist is because communism is godless

and we are religious and we are Islamic. This is very important here. Keep in mind, there is no Pakistani constitution at this point. Jinnah himself began his career as a secular politician and only embraced the concept of Pakistan after being sidelined by Gandhi in the Indian National Congress.

It's not crazy to think that Shina may have been able to build a real state had he lived. Instead, you have a state founded on a lie that persists to this day, because many of the elites in modern Pakistan lead secular lives in private, but in public, they pretend to be pious fundamentalists. I remember being at parties, one party in Karachi,

where there was, there were drugs. Again, this is Matthew Rosenberg. People were jumping in the pool, topless, and thinking to myself, like 50 or 100 feet away, everybody's driver is asleep in their car outside. The driver's ride all sleep, and it's in the middle of the west, and if they knew what was going on here,

they would slit everyone's throat. And you have this kind of elite trapped by its own lies. The second major decision the post-Zhina Pakistan made was to seek a new patron. The new regime had a problem. Pakistan inherited an army from their former colonial overlords and they couldn't afford it. This goes back to the schism between Gandhi and Jinnah. Gandhi and his National Congress were neutral in World War II. They discouraged Indians in general from joining the British Army. Jinnah and the Muslim League participated enthusiastically in the war against the Nazis. And it was decided to form two countries Pakistan and India, one Muslim majority and one Hindu majority, the large

part of the Muslim component of the British Indian army came to Pakistan. This again is Hussain Haqqani. So Pakistan ended up with only 17% of the revenue sources of British India, 19% of its population, 21% of its land area, but 33% of its army. And the country had less money, less people than India, but in proportionate terms, it had a very significantly large army. The Pakistani leadership at that time realized that maybe that army was its greatest asset. The Cold War was beginning and they decided that we are going to leverage the large army. So all of this seems like geopolitical kismet, right? Pakistan needed money for its army. America needed an army in South Asia. It was a match!

Between 1947 and 1979, Washington funneled between $18 and $20 billion worth of economic and military aid to Pakistan, and that included early US fighter jets, World War II-era tanks, radar systems, and patrol boats. But even back then, the roots of the problems were there. Let's start with the fact that the Pakistanis tended to over-promise and under-deliver. Washington wanted very much for Pakistan to volunteer troops for the Korean War

and later the war in Vietnam. And Pakistan never did. The other problem was that America was subsidizing a military it wanted in reserve to fight communists in China and the Soviet Union. Pakistan saw its army as a tool to use against India. So when the Indo-Pakistan wars between 1965 and 1971 broke out, military aid was reduced to a trickle. America wanted Pakistan's army to deter China. Pakistan wanted America's weapons to fight India.

This is not to say that America got nothing for its investment. Uncle Sam was given use of a secret base bordering the Soviet Union from which it launched U-2 spy plane missions. It could also count on Pakistani leaders, many of them at the time military dictators, to give stirring speeches about international communism. Nonetheless, both sides were wary. After the break, the rise of an Islamist general. Until the end of 1970, Pakistan was not really a democracy. of 1970, Pakistan was not really a democracy. In 1958, the Chief of Staff of the Army, Ayub Khan, orchestrated a military coup and ruled the country until 1969, when he resigned after suffering a stroke. He was replaced by another general, Yahya Khan, and it was this second

Khan that agreed to relinquish power to an elected government after elections on December 7, 1970. By early 1971, Pakistanis voted in their first election with universal suffrage. It was a close election. Technically, a party that favored secession of Bengal in East Pakistan won the most votes, but they failed to form a coalition, and the winner was the Pakistan People's Party, led by a suave socialist lawyer named Zulfiqir Ali Bhutto.

He came from a wealthy family who owned land in the Sindh province, which was unusual for Pakistani elites, which predominantly came from Punjab. Bhutto's presidency began with promise. He pledged to alleviate the extreme poverty most Pakistanis suffered. But he also took the reins of the state in another crisis.

The forever war with India was back as Pakistan's more powerful neighbor intervened on the side of the secessionists in Bengal and a new country, Bangladesh, was born out of that bloody conflict. Bhutto was no angel. He was not above playing dirty. He once threatened to break the legs of his own party's legislators if they acknowledged the separatist coalition

that had won more votes in the 1970 election. He unleashed the ISI's surveillance powers on his opposition. He was also savvy enough to fear his own deep state. He made himself defense minister when he was president to keep a close eye on the army, aware of their proclivity for military coups. But Buto was not savvy enough. In March 1976, he chose to elevate an undistinguished general, Zia Alhok, to be the next chief of staff

of the army over more qualified and senior officers. A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency profile unearthed by Ambassador Hikani in his book Magnificent Delusions noted that Zia was a mediocre officer with little ambition. Zia has been described as dumb like a fox, and it has been suggested that he may have deliberately cultivated his image as inexperienced and indecisive in order to lull potential opponents into underestimating him. That assessment was prescient. General Zia may have come off like a bumpkin, but he was just as ambitious and cunning as

General Ayub Khan. Butoh had fallen into Zia's trap by underestimating him. By July 5, 1977, Zia executed a coup that ousted Bhutto from power. At the time, Zia said he was responding to credible reports that Bhutto had rigged the election that year, a widespread allegation that once again led to riots and mass protests. He even promised to hold elections soon, like past military coup leaders. Zia presented himself as the defender of a democratic system he was in fact wrecking. Spoiler alert, Zia Al-Haq imposed

martial law to the day he died in 1988. After taking power, General Zia's regime then turned the screws on Bhutto. This is the general himself in an interview from 1979. We started out with an open arm, with an open hand of love and affection for the people of Pakistan. But then I find that at times the squeeze has to be applied. So now I'm trying to close the hand gradually to apply the squeeze where it is necessary. Zia's regime prosecuted Bhutto for allegedly plotting to murder a member of parliament and a political opponent.

Bhutto lost his appeals. Even the Pakistan Supreme Court found him guilty. We should say that in 2024, the Supreme Court reversed that ruling. As he awaited his fate in a fetid cell in Raoul Pindi. Bhutto's supporters made their anger known. Six of them burned themselves alive in protest.

Finally, Zia indicated that he may spare the former president if he would ask for clemency. Bhutto refused and hung from a gallow on April 4, 1979. Convicted of the murder of a political opponent, Mr. Bhutto was widely viewed as the victim of a judicial murder set up by the military regime in Pakistan. His last words as he stood on the scaffold were, Oh Lord help me for I am innocent. Zia at this point was firmly in, and Pakistan was going to change. It's important here to remember that the first leaders of the country, starting with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, were not pious Muslims.

They played up their devotion to the Quran for the masses. Behind the scenes, they were very Western. They formed coalitions with political Islamists, but they did not intend to make Pakistan a theocracy. Zia was different. He was a true believer. And so the process of Islamization started in stages and by the time General Zia-ul-Haq comes, what we have is a person who is personally a zealot, already has a machinery of state that has a willingness to acknowledge the Islamic-ness of Pakistan. Again this is Hussein Haqqani. And inherits a very polarized and complicated

country at that time because there was a lot of support for Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who was a democratic socialist and whom Zia was planning to execute, actually embraces the Islamists in every possible way. In practice, that meant providing imams with a government salary and a high grade in the civil service. Islamist theologians were recruited into the universities. Quoronic punishments, such as amputations and floggings, were introduced into the country's penal code. Military coups have consequences. After the break, Pakistan and America

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Let's go! Truck Month is awesome! Ask your Chevrolet dealer for details. By 1979, U.S.-Pakistan relations were at a low ebb. The president is Jimmy Carter. He made human rights a strategic priority for U.S. foreign policy, and publicly executing the elected president you just removed from power does not look great from a human rights perspective.

But add to that, the CIA was also slowly gathering evidence that Pakistan was trying to build a nuclear bomb. This came to a head on July 4, 1982, Independence Day, and Raoul Pindi, General Vernon Walters, acting as a special envoy for President Ronald Reagan, delivered a very blunt message to General Zia, We know you're going for a bomb and you need to stop it. U.S. intelligence agencies had learned that Pakistani agents were actively trying to acquire specialized equipment and material to make a nuclear weapon.

Zia denied the charges. He placed his hand on his heart and gave his word as a soldier that he had no idea that anyone in his government was trying to acquire a nuclear weapon. Walters concluded in a cable sent after the meeting, Either he really does not know, or he is the most superb and patriotic liar I have ever met. The US government and Congress had gone to great lengths in the past 10 years to dissuade Pakistan from going nuclear, and it clearly wasn't working. 15 years after the meeting with General Walters, Pakistan tested a nuclear weapon.

So one might expect that America would cool relations with Pakistan and keep these rogue proliferators at arm's length. And yet, five months after General Walters met with Zia, this happened. Begum Zia, it's a great pleasure for Nancy and me to welcome you to Washington today. Your visit to the United States this week both symbolizes and strengthens the close ties which exist between our two countries. Yes, a state visit for the military dictator of Pakistan. The man who introduced floggings into his country's criminal code, a world leader that

was likely lying about nuclear proliferation, a man who had just publicly executed his political opponent, was welcomed with open arms in Ronald Reagan's Washington. Now, to understand why, we have to go back to 1979, the year that Butoh was executed. That same year, the Soviet army invaded Pakistan's neighbor, Afghanistan. Here is how Dan Rather described the stakes in a report for 60 Minutes in 1980. We were smuggled into Afghanistan by a young mujahideen. Mujahideen, the Muslim word for freedom fighter or fighter in a holy war. In this case, as the Mujahideen see it, a holy war against the Soviets. A war they say that if they get weapons from us or anyone

else in the free world, they will win. Now, some listeners may remember the 2007 Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson's War about a Texas Democratic congressman who is portrayed as single-handedly boosting the secret CIA budget for arming those Mujahideen in the 1980s. That's only part of the story though. Helping Pakistan's holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan was a natural fit for Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. The Reagan doctrine was avoid direct military interventions like the Vietnam War, but double down on anti-communist proxies or indirect interventions against the Soviets all over

the world. In some ways, the new partnership between the CIA and the Pakistani ISI was the fulfillment of the original American vision of its alliance with Pakistan. Arm the Muslim homeland in South Asia to fight the commies abroad. And in fairness, it worked. In 1989, Soviet troops were forced out, humiliated, to return to an empire in the process of collapsing. Credit where it's due, Charlie Wilson's war was a masterstroke from the perspective of fighting the Soviet Union.

And at the same time, the billions of dollars America and Saudi Arabia invested in this war subsidized and strengthened Pakistan's own deep state to the detriment of Pakistan's democratic institutions, not to mention regional and global security. He and throughout this period of course of military rule, there is a deep state. There is an intelligence apparatus. But when Zia-ul-Haq comes he has two or three fronts to take care of. Again, this is Hussein Haqqani. One is the domestic, then there is of course the international,

but then there is the India front as well. And he thinks I can find a solution to all of that by expanding the deep state. The ISI, which was headed by a Colonel at one time, then a Brigadier now becomes big enough to be headed by a two-star general. And by the end of Zia-ul-Haq's 10-year rule, it is headed by a two-star general. And by the end of Zia-ul-Haq's 10-year rule, it is headed by a three-star general. And the intelligence service has the job of managing

domestic politics. It has the job of getting intelligence on international and external matters. It has the job of arming, training, and supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan. And it's the primary interface with the central intelligence agency for that purpose. And at that time you remember billions of dollars were coming from Saudi Arabia and the United States for the jihad against the Soviets. So the ISI just bloated and became bigger and bigger. After the Soviets were kicked out of Pakistan, once again America's relationship with the country began to wane. The war-torn nation devolved into a civil war with different warlords claiming different territory.

But one faction, comprised of the students of the extremist madrassas funded by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, prevailed. The Taliban. Now, when it comes to this part of the story there's a popular concept loved by academics known as blowback. It refers to the unintended consequences of intelligence operations or foreign policy. Now when it comes to this part of the story there is a popular concept loved by academics known as blowback. It refers to the unintended consequences of an intelligence operation or a foreign policy, and the textbook example of blowback is

the CIA's policy to arm the Mujahideen in the 1980s through the ISI. Osama bin Laden, after all, would end up in Afghanistan as an honored guest of the Taliban before his organization plotted the 9-11 attacks. So does this mean that the US.S. should not have come to the aid of the Afghan resistance? Not necessarily. Perhaps the policy error was when America washed its hands of Afghanistan after the holy warriors won the war.

That is what Gustav Avrakadas tells Charlie Wilson at the end of the movie. The good guys won, but the crazies are coming in. You need to get money for rebuilding Afghanistan. Send them money. You can start with the roads, move on to the schools. Back gusts. Now it's a party. Restock the sheep herds.

Give them jobs. Give them hope. I'm trying. I'm trying. Now try harder. I'm fine for every dollar. Yeah. I took you from five million to a billion. I broke the ice on the sting in the Milan.

I got a Democratic Congress in lockstep behind a Republican president. Well, that's not good enough because I'm going to hand you a code word classified NIE right now, and it's going to tell you that the crazies have started rolling into Kandahar like it's a fucking bathtub drain.

One undeniable consequence of Charlie Wilson's war was that it supercharged Pakistan's deep state. The CIA funded a golem. Just consider Bill Clinton's response to Al QQaeda's 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One of the targets of a cruise missile strike was a training camp where U.S. intelligence believed Bin Laden and other senior leaders of Al-Qaeda were meeting. They were not there when the camp was hit, but three ISI officers were, along with jihadists operating

in Kashmir. This is Hussain Akani again. Remember, when you are training people in the name of an ideology, you can't be completely aloof from that ideology. So when they were training these guerrillas to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan and training them to be hardline fundamentalists. Some of them ended up growing beards just to be like the guys they were training. But subsequently, many of them actually became very strong fellow believers to the extent

that some of them ended up being killed in US droneS. drone strikes when the U.S. was trying to kill Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in the aftermath of 9-11. And here we get to a problem that has plagued Pakistan since its inception. Jinnah, Bhutto, and other early leaders were not the kinds of Islamists one finds today, comprising the ranks of the military and the ISI. Indulging the ideology of political Islam from the state's very inception was a slow-acting poison. Over time, the elites could not continue the double game.

Pakistan is hardly the only country who tried to triangulate between jihad and modernity. Saudi Arabia for decades funded the madrasas, mosques, and charities that bolstered this ideology. But the Saudis have at least begun to turn a corner. Pakistan remains mired in its founding lies. And those lies were exposed on May 2, 2011, when a SEAL team shot its way into Osama Bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Then you see blood going up the stairs. And right behind me there, if you can see the trees down on the corner, that's only about a thousand feet from the house. That's the Pakistani Military Academy.

That is the equivalent of West Point. And there's a lot of questions today about West Point being so close to the house where Bin Laden was killed. That's right. The most wanted man in the world, the leader of the terrorist organization that brought down the Twin Towers and a wing of the Pentagon, was safely harbored only 1,000 feet from Pakistan's premier military academy, its West Point. After the Bin Laden raid, which President Barack Obama kept hidden from the Pakistani government until it was in motion. The relationship began to fall apart.

The CIA station chief was outed in a major Pakistani newspaper. Another CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, was detained for killing two men trying to assault him. There were massive demonstrations. At first, Obama tried to bribe the Pakistanis, offering massive U.S. economic assistance for schools and universities, as massive U.S. economic assistance for schools and universities as well as weapons packages. Hussain Akhani, who was the ambassador at the time, explains.

What they were hoping to do was to bribe the Pakistanis into giving up their belief that supporting the Taliban was in Pakistan's interest. And that didn't happen. Now, of course, as a Pakistani and a critic of the Taliban, I always told the Pakistanis that the Taliban are not necessarily going to be useful to us and be our friends, but that was an internal debate which people like me totally lost. Those in charge kept on thinking that maybe a low-cost sub-conventional war against India in Kashmir, and supporting groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan would make Pakistan more secure at a time when Pakistan's economy was not generally growing.

The bribes didn't work. After Bin Laden was found in Abbottabad, the entire argument for American subsidy of Pakistan's deep state was exposed. No longer could one say with a straight face that Pakistan would be more reckless, more dangerous without America's lavish subsidies. Here is how the late Christopher Hitchens put it

in 2011 for Vanity Fair. If we ever cease to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse or behave worse,

it was handsomely rewarded by the United States. We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state's counter-revolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. In the last decade, America has finally begun to walk away from Pakistan. After the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan now relies on China to prop up its deep state.

This month, it used Chinese high-tech fighters to down at least one of the Indian jets striking targets in the Punjabi province. A Defense Intelligence Agency report this month also says that China has provided key material through third parties to Pakistan's own weapons of mass destruction programs, including its nuclear arsenal. The pattern continues. Pakistan today has a new patron, its military and intelligence services are more powerful than ever, and the forever war against India continues. In other words, Pakistan's deep state has survived at the expense of the nation it purports to defend. Thanks for listening to Breaking History.

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and leave us a five-star rating and a nice comment, too. Also, if you loved this episode, there's more great content at TheFP.com. Please become a subscriber today, and until then, I'll see you next time. Oh summer goes on the quah When the blast destroys the calm With the bomb against the bomb Parade in patient quah I had sought to regulate, said they don't remember it Good job, it's not the GIA summer We got the tubes, you got the number To call us up, we are not your friends

We got the guns, from losing brothers We got the guns from losing brothers We drop in lights, see how they suffer We got the tools, here's to love of love. Yeah, but we like to come. you