The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

“Doesn’t matter. It’s only the Cadillac that counts.” Raphel leaned back in the plush velour and was quiet the rest of the way to the embassy.

Arnie Raphel had taken over from the crusty career ambassador Dean Hinton as ambassador to Islamabad a month earlier. His arrival in Pakistan coincided with a growing but far from universal conviction in Washington that the Soviets were finally moving toward signing an agreement to pull out of Afghanistan. Raphel knew there was much work to be done before a deal would be sealed, but he arrived in Islamabad as the first American ambassador in seven years who would be more challenged by a probable peace in Afghanistan than by a seemingly unending war.

I had just accompanied Raphel to ISI headquarters for an unofficial call on Hamid Gul. We were bantering aimlessly for the benefit of the ambassador’s Pakistani driver, an alert man who always had at least one ear tuned to the conversations in the backseat. We would wait until we were in the American compound before discussing our meeting with the ISI chief.

Raphel had extensive prior service in Pakistan and knew the language and the country better than any American on his staff, or probably anyone in the State Department. He had known Zia before the general was named chief of Army staff by Bhutto eleven years earlier, and he easily picked up his old relationship with the president and, by extension, with the president’s men, who were aware of Zia’s fondness for the ambassador. As a result, the important doors opened easily for Raphel, giving him a leg up on his new job.

Back at his residence, Raphel spoke more freely. “Why do I look at Hamid Gul and see a plucky little general who might one day take over the country?” he asked.

“Because one day he just might do it,” I said.

“Seeing him takes me back to when I met Zia for the first time. I thought then that he’d eventually be running the place.”

“Bhutto didn’t see it, though. He thought Zia was a little dim, right to the end.”

“Isn’t it always that way. The guy who ought to figure it out never does.”

“It sure was with Bhutto and Zia.”

“Well, maybe you should add keeping an eye on the PLG to your list of things to do,” Raphel said.

“PLG?”

Raphel grinned. “Yeah, plucky little general.”

“He’s plucky all right.” It was curious that military officers who were diminutive in stature were almost always characterized as tough or plucky. Raphel’s name for Gul would stick.

“Do you think he really got your message about the raids across the Amu Dar’ya? I’d have liked to talk to him about it, since that was the big thing on Shultz’s Soviet-Afghan agenda last month.”

“He got the message from Yaqub Khan and, I guess, Zia,” I said. “I don’t think he needed another reminder from you or me.” I’d asked Raphel not to raise with Gul the raid into Uzbekistan that had caused such a flap a month earlier. I told him the matter had been settled and that he might want to start off with the ISI chief on a positive note rather than opening an old wound at his first meeting.

“We can expect attacks on about everything Gul and ISI do from now on. As long as it was about winning a war, the hill was quiet. But with it looking like the Soviets are quitting, the sharks have already started circling your plucky little general.”

“You mean our plucky little general, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Raphel said. “Our PLG.”

Arnie Raphel and I would work together closely during his next fifteen months in Pakistan, with a notable absence of the usual CIA–State Department tensions I’d seen over the years. Our goals were common and concentric, the prime one being getting the Soviets out of Afghanistan. If that actually happened, we’d have to begin thinking of the next steps for a post-Soviet Afghanistan trying to come to grips with peace. That would be a tough task for a country that had known little else but war for a generation.

The Kunjerab Pass, June 1987

The Kunjerab Pass between Pakistan and China is as close to the roof of the world as one can reach in a wheezing Toyota Land Cruiser. At 16,400 feet above sea level, a carburetor-fed, low-compression engine like the Land Cruiser’s could go the distance far better than its more high-strung, fuel-injected cousins, but the oxygen-thin air at that altitude still made it tough going on car and driver. My wife and I had made the trip from Islamabad to Kunjerab, a wrenching journey on the Chinese-built Karakoram Highway, in three days, only briefly delayed by a landslide that had to be cleared with a blast of dynamite by Pakistani Army engineers. We reached the Kunjerab, the wide plateau that rolls back down into China’s Xinjiang Province, as the first of the old British Bedford and shiny Japanese Hino trucks with their loads of mules crested from the other direction, heading back to Pakistan and to the heavier air below.

I knew from my own shortness of breath and light-headedness that the Pakistani drivers and their cargoes of mules must have been suffering. And sure enough, as the first of the convoy of trucks shifted into low gear for the descent, one of the Bedfords veered off the road and set off on a wobbly course across the tabletop plateau on the top of the world. It had gone no more than a hundred yards before it turned up the gradient and almost lazily flipped over on its side, its wheels still spinning and its load of mules tumbling out on the ice-hard surface. Surprisingly, all of the animals struggled to their feet, checked things out, and then just stood their ground. A groggy driver, also unhurt, and his relief crawled out of the cab of the capsized truck and joined the other Pakistanis trying to get halters on the loose mules, a task