Hamid Gul

Lieutenant General Hamid Gul HI(M) SI(M) SBt (‎; 20 November 1936 – 15 August 2015) was a Pakistani three-star general and defence analyst.

Hamid Gul was born on 20 November 1936 in Sargodha in the Punjab Province of British India (now in Punjab, Pakistan) into a Punjabi-Pathan family to parents Muhammad Khan and his wife, who originated from Buner Tehsil in Swat District.

Gul ancestrally descended from the Yusufzai tribe of Pashtuns.

His father, who was a Subedar-Major in the British Indian Army, moved from Swat to Lahore before settling down in Sargodha, where he got arable land, his grandfather was a Khilafat Movement activist while his great-grandfather Faiz Khan was a Deobandi who participated in the jihad of Syed Ahmad Barelvi and Shah Ismail Dehlvi.

He got his early education from a school in his village.

He then received admission into Government College Lahore, before being admitted to Pakistan Military Academy Kakul.

Hamid Gul was commissioned in the Pakistan Army in October 1956 with the 18th PMA Long Course in the 19th Lancers regiment of the Armoured Corps.

He was a squadron commander during the 1965 war with India.

He attended the Command and Staff College Quetta in 1968–69.

During 1972–1976, Gul directly served under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq as a battalion commander, and then as Staff Colonel, when General Zia was GOC, 1st Armoured Division and Commander II Corps at Multan.

Thus, Gul had already cemented his ties with General Zia by serving under him when both were officers in the Armoured regiments of the II Corps.

Gul was promoted to Brigadier in 1978 and steadily rose to be the Martial Law Administrator of Bahawalpur and then the Commander of the 1st Armoured Division, Multan in 1982, his appointments expressly wished by Zia himself.

Gul was notable for serving as the Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan's premier intelligence agency, between 1987 and 1989.

During his tenure, Gul played an instrumental role in directing ISI support to Afghan resistance groups against Soviet forces in return for funds and weapons from the US, during the Soviet–Afghan War, in co-operation with the CIA.

Gul was then sent to GHQ as the Director-General or DG Military Intelligence (DGMI) under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq who then nominated him to be the ISI chief succeeding General Akhtar Abdur Rahman in March 1987.

In 1988 Gul also played a role in the creation of the IJI, a conservative political alliance formed to oppose the PPP of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

During his tenure as ISI chief in 1988, General Gul successfully gathered conservative politicians and helped them create IJI, a centre-right conservative coalition united against the left-leaning PPP.

Gul later acknowledged his role in IJI's formation in various interviews for which he was harshly rebuked in one of the editorials of a major Pakistani newspaper, which asked the general to apologise first to the PPP for having done so and after that, apologising for a lack of intelligence because the IJI could not maintain its two-thirds majority for long.

According to accusations by Indian commentator B Raman, Gul actively backed Khalistan movement.

"When Bhutto became prime minister in 1988", Raman says, "Gul justified backing these insurgents as the only way of pre-empting a fresh Indian threat to Pakistan's territorial integrity. When she asked him to stop playing that card, he reportedly told her: Madam, keeping Punjab destabilized is equivalent to the Pakistan army having an extra division at no cost to the taxpayers."

"Gul strongly advocated supporting indigenous Kashmiri groups", adds Raman, "but was against infiltrating Pakistani and Afghan mercenaries into Jammu and Kashmir. He believed Pakistan would play into India's hands by doing so."

Even if the ISI, under General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, was already aiming beyond the region, for instance establishing contacts with jihadi groups like the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, it was under Hamid Gul that the ISI took a definitely pan-Islamist turn, as he not only wished for a Pakistan-led Islamic coalition against India, in his own words "a strategic depth concept that links Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan in an alliance" which "would be a jeweled Mughal dagger pointed at the Hindu heart", but also called for what he perceived as the liberation of persecuted Muslim groups all over the world, such as the Eritreans, the Bosniaks, the Rohingyas, the Uzbeks and the Uighurs.

At the time of his death, journalist Abbas Nasir, while offering a critical review of his life and career, said that "commitment to jihad - to an Islamic revolution transcending national boundaries, was such that he dreamed one day the "green Islamic flag" would flutter not just over Pakistan and Afghanistan, but also over territories represented by the (former Soviet Union) Central Asian republics."

General Gul worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when he was the ISI head.

In addition, Gul was widely credited for expanding covert support to Kashmiri freedom fighters against neighbouring rival India in the disputed Kashmir region from 1989, Gul earned a reputation as a "Godfather" of Pakistani geostrategic policies.

For his role against India, he has been considered by A. S. Dulat, former director of RAW, as "the most dangerous and infamous ISI chief in Indian eyes."

He was later replaced as the ISI commander by PM Benazir Bhutto in May 1989 and Gul was transferred as the commander, II Corps in Multan.

In this capacity, Gul conducted the Zarb-e-Momin military exercise in November–December 1989, the biggest Pakistani Armed Forces show of muscle since 1971 Indo-Pakistani War.

During his time as head of the ISI amid the Soviet–Afghan War, Gul planned and executed the operation to capture Jalalabad from the Soviet-backed Afghan army in the spring of 1989.

This switch to conventional warfare was seen as a mistake by some since the mujahideen did not have the capacity to capture a major city, and the battle did not yield expected ground results.

However, the Pakistani army was intent on installing a resistance-backed government in Afghanistan, with Jalalabad as their provisional capital, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf as Prime Minister, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as Foreign Minister.

Contrary to Pakistani expectations, this battle proved that the Afghan army could fight without Soviet help, and greatly increased the confidence of government supporters.

Conversely, the morale of the mujahideen involved in the attack slumped and many local commanders of Hekmatyar and Sayyaf concluded truces with the government.

However, he became dispassionate with the United States after it turned its back on Afghanistan following the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, as the United States had promised to help build a prosperous Afghanistan.

He was further disconcerted when the US began punishing Pakistan with economic and military sanctions for its secret nuclear program.

General Gul then went on to declare that "the Muslim world must stand united to confront the U.S. in its so-called War on Terrorism, which is in reality a war against Muslims. Let's destroy America wherever its troops are trapped."

General Asif Nawaz upon taking the reins of Pakistan Army in August 1991, had transferred Gul as the DG Heavy Industries Taxila.

A menial job compared to Gul's stature, Gul refused to take the assignment, an act for which he was retired from the army.

General Gul personally met Osama bin Laden in 1993 and refused to label him a terrorist unless and until irrefutable evidence was provided linking him to alleged acts of terrorism.

On 15 August 2015, he died after suffering a brain haemorrhage.