Hamid Gul, who has died aged 78, led Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the largest of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, for two years in the late 1980s when it played a vital role in channelling billions of dollars of American and Saudi money and armaments to jihadist groups in Afghanistan that were in the process of driving out the Soviet army of occupation. Gul worked closely with the CIA at this stage and was well enough regarded by the Americans. But he subsequently championed the Taliban, which took control in Afghanistan following the Soviet retreat, gave outspoken support for hardline Islamists in Pakistan and beyond, insisted that Israel had been responsible for the 9/11 attacks in the US and refused to accept that Osama bin Laden was other than “a romantic figure”. While winning him many admirers at home, this made him a figure of loathing in Washington.
Gul also had enemies closer to home. He was vilified in neighbouring India, where he was seen as the principal Pakistani sponsor of Muslim separatist groups and the prime supporter of pro-Pakistan militant groups in Jammu and Kashmir, the territory disputed between India and Pakistan since partition in 1947. He was reviled by secular and liberal political forces inside Pakistan, who never forgave him for “meddling in politics” in 1988, while head of ISI, by cobbling together a rightwing alliance to try to prevent Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples party winning a general election after Gul’s mentor, the military dictator General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, had died in a mysterious plane crash.
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