overthrow of the Shah of Iran. As one commentator has observed,
‘He developed a “saviour” or “messiah” complex and ruled the
country with the aura of a God-ordained mission to transform
Pakistani society on Islamic lines’ (Rizvi, 2000: 166).
General Zia’s stance towards Afghanistan was driven by a com-
bination of international and domestic factors. The international
factors were relatively straightforward and understandable. The
Soviet invasion brought the Soviet armed forces directly to
Pakistan’s borders, and for Pakistan this could not but be seen as a
threat, given not only the USSR’s longstanding warm relations
with India, but also Moscow’s support for the fragmentation of
Pakistan barely a decade earlier. However, the Soviet invasion did
not simply confront Pakistan with threats; it also provided it with
opportunities. Pakistan was manifestly the state from which any
international opposition to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan
would need to be mounted. No one grasped this more swiftly than
Zia: as Jalal put it, ‘the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan gave him
just what was needed to establish his regime’s non-existent inter-
national stock without which the domestic agenda of repression
seemed destined to end in tears’ (Jalal, 1995: 103). The upshot was
the eventual approval by the US Congress of a package of eco-
nomic and military assistance to Zia’s regime worth $3.2 billion
over a six-year period, assembled after Zia had scorned an initial
offer of $400 million (Weinbaum, 1994: 18). The significance was
primarily symbolic: Zia had come in from the cold. However, he
was also able to exploit the Soviet presence in Afghanistan in more
overtly domestic ways as well: he managed to find common cause,
over Afghanistan, with Pakistani religious parties such as the
Jamaat-i Islamiwhich thitherto had been wary of what they saw as
the lukewarm character of his Islamisation programme. This was
initially not a very important consideration, but over time,
Pakistan’s religious parties increasingly built their own ties to
Afghan parties and groups which they found congenial, and the
long-run consequences of this were to prove disturbing. In condi-
tions of exile and social dislocation, the severe attitudes of the
more extreme Pakistani religious circles exercised a considerable
70 The Afghanistan Wars