more promising theatre for the achievement of their interests
than the negotiating table, and were deeply suspicious of Cordovez
and the UN because of the way in which they had been excluded
from the Geneva negotiations.
The death of Zia
Pressure from President Zia of Pakistan might have forced the
more obdurate resistance leaders to shift ground, but on 17 August
1988, Zia was killed in an aircraft accident. His C–130 Hercules
crashed shortly after taking off from the city of Bahawalpur, which
he had been visiting with a high-level delegation to inspect M-1
tanks. Not only Zia died in the crash, but also 29 other senior fig-
ures, including former ISI Director-General Akhtar Abdul Rahman,
and US Ambassador Arnold Raphel. The cause of the crash was
never established, with theories ranging from a disabling gas
smuggled aboard in a crate of mangoes, to sabotage of the plane’s
main and auxiliary hydraulic systems (Kaplan, 1989). The effect
on Pakistan’s politics was dramatic. Elections had been scheduled
following Zia’s dismissal of Junejo, and Zia’s successor, Senate
President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, determined that they should pro-
ceed. Victory went to the Pakistan People’s Party led by Zia’s
arch-enemy Benazir Bhutto, and it was no more in her interest to
devote resources to investigating the death of a ruler she loathed
than it was in America’s interest to risk compromising relations
with Pakistan’s new leader by pursuing inquiries which could have
unpredictable outcomes.
The death of Zia empowered the Director-General of ISI, Major-
General Hamid Gul, and the new Chief of Army Staff, General
Mirza Aslam Beg. Gul had been lucky to survive an early scandal,
namely the explosion of an arms dump near Islamabad on 10 April
1988, which destroyed weapons that had been stockpiled for the
resistance, and rained ordnance on the civilian population, killing
around a hundred people and injuring over a thousand (Yousaf and
Adkin, 1992: 220–33). Whereas Zia had shown some interest
before his death in Cordovez’s moves towards an internal
The Road to Soviet Withdrawal 147