Arsonist as firefighter: Musharraf to Munir, how the Pakistan Army thrived after 9/11

Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, 2001, the world watched in horror as two hijacked passenger aircraft crashed into the twin World Trade Centre towers in the US. A third hijacked jet crashed into the Pentagon, the seat of US military power. A fourth jet, headed towards Capitol Hill, the heart of US political power, crashed into an open field in Pennsylvania after the heroic passengers grappled with the hijacker-pilots.

Nearly three thousand Americans died in the attacks -- hundreds fell to their deaths from the collapsing towers. These images were seared into global collective memory and led to the US declaring a global ‘War on Terror’ against Al Qaeda. This War was a series of wars -- first against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and two years later, the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in which hundreds of thousands died. The two-decade-long Global War on Terror cost the lives of 15,000 US military personnel and contractors and $10 trillion in expenditure.

An extraordinary consequence of this war was Pakistan’s switch into becoming a frontline US ally. Not without some coercion. The Bush administration had reportedly threatening to ‘bomb Pakistan into the stone age’ if they didn’t cooperate. Pakistan cooperated, but with caveats.

"Pakistan made just enough concessions to dodge the American wounded bear while continuing with its old policies of supporting Islamist militant proxies. It missed a historic opportunity to change course," writes Myra Macdonald, in her 2016 book, Defeat is an Orphan.

This was not the Pakistan Army’s first brush with geopolitical windfall. A 1977 military coup by General Zia ul-Haq overthrew and later executed President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. The country was running a clandestine nuclear weapons program.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan proved to be the turning point in the Pakistan Army’s fortunes. From a global pariah, Pakistan turned into a frontline ally in the USA’s proxy war against the USSR. Billions of dollars worth of arms, including F-16s, were transferred to Pakistan, and crucially, the US turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation.

Under the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, Pakistan set up an elaborate network which recruited, trained and deployed into battle, tens of thousands of Afghan, Pakistani and global Muslim youth against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Arms worth billions, from bolt-action rifles to Stinger missiles, were funneled to the Mujahideen through the ISI.

When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, Pakistan pivoted this infrastructure, including arms stockpiles, against India -- first in Punjab, and then in Jammu and Kashmir. The chaos in Afghanistan between 1992 and 1996 saw the emergence of the Pakistan-supported Taliban. When both Taliban and Al Qaeda were expelled from Afghanistan, Pakistan pretended to help the US in its fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, even as it sheltered the Taliban in its territory.

As the US deployment in Afghanistan continued into its second decade, it became rapidly evident to analysts that Pakistan’s double game under Musharraf was leading it to strategic failure.

‘Directorate S’, a 2018 book by veteran journalist Steve Coll analyses how Washington’s inability “to solve the riddle of ISI and to stop its covert interference in Afghanistan became, ultimately, the greatest strategic failure of the American war.”

Musharraf, the mastermind of the disastrous Kargil operation in 1999, had other plans. He expanded the Pakistan Army’s terror infrastructure to step up attacks in Jammu and Kashmir and carry out strikes across India’s heartland. Between 2001 and 2008, Pakistani terrorist attacks targetted multiple Indian cities -- Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad -- and killed hundreds of Indian civilians.

Until 1971, Pakistan used US arms and political support to wage conventional wars with India. The blowback from the 1965 war shook its economy and ousted its first dictator Field Marshal Ayub Khan; The 1971 war saw it lose half its country and over 50,000 troops in Indian captivity. Proxy war, shielded by nuclear weapons, was thus a low-cost option for GHQ Rawalpindi to fight India.

The Army blamed these attacks on ‘non-state actors’ like LeT, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the Indian Mujahideen. In 2011, US special forces raided a safe house in Abbottabad and killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. It was no accident that bin Laden and his family lived a stone’s throw away from the Pakistan Military Academy at Kakul.

In her 2014 book ‘The Wrong Enemy’ Carlotta Gall, who spent 12 years as the New York Times’ Pakistan correspondent, made a bombshell revelation. The Pakistan Army’s ISI, she said, had sheltered Osama bin Laden for nearly a decade.

An inside source told her that the ISI ran a special desk assigned to handle the Al Qaeda leader. ‘It was operated independently, headed by an officer who made his own decisions. He did not have to pass things by a superior. He handled only one person: bin Laden. What he did was of course wholly deniable by everyone at the ISI. Such is how super-secret intelligence units operate. But the top bosses knew about the desk, I was told.’

One reason the CIA chose not to inform the Pakistan Army of the Abbottabad raid, Gall writes, was an assessment made after remote surveillance of bin Laden’s compound. There was no back route, no tunnel in the compound. OBL was relying on being forewarned to escape. This was damning proof of Pakistan’s perfidy.

A few months later, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the Pakistani government released full-page advertisements in the Wall Street Journal claiming it had incurred heavy losses during the Global War on terror—thousands of civilian casualties and tens of thousands killed. The ad was titled "Which Country Can Do More for Your Peace?"

The US response came from visiting Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton in Islamabad in October 2011. “You can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in their backyard.”

As per the Al Qaeda sanctions committee in 2023, Pakistan hosts nearly 150 individuals or UN-designated terrorists within its country or along the Af-Pak border, the largest number in any country. The snakes did eventually turn on the Pakistani state -- in the last 25 years, Pakistan has lost close to 90,000 civilians and security personnel to terror attacks. The economy is in the doldrums -- inflation is high, public debt is 70 per cent of GDP, and the state relies on IMF handouts to stay afloat.

The result of decades of prioritising the military over civil infrastructure means the country has a fleet of modern submarines, but no dams to store river water.

Operation Sindoor, an 88-hour war triggered by the April 22, 2025, massacre of Indian civilians, saw Pakistan military bases being targeted for the first time through missile strikes and the drawing of new red lines on India’s zero tolerance to Pakistan’s state-sponsored of terror.

In 2026, it is Pakistan wracked by the biggest upsurge of terrorist violence in a decade, with two large provinces, Khyber Pakhtunkhawa and Balochistan in flames.

Speaking at a public event on September 5, Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz, said the province faced ‘a bigger security threat from adjoining provinces (Balochistan and KPK) than from neighbouring countries’.

The belated realisation from Pakistan’s political class comes at a time when a constitutional dictator Field Marshal Asim Munir has usurped power, and vowed to turn Pakistan into a ‘hard state’.

Munir has turned into Trump’s ‘favorite Field Marshal’, but is yet to deliver on his promise to extricate the US from its ongoing war with Iran. Zia, Musharraf and now, Munir. In Pakistan, history never repeats, but it always rhymes.- EndsPublished By: Sayan GangulyPublished On: Sep 11, 2026 08:00 IST