Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq

So let me give you a concrete example from Pakistan, where I am from.

In the late 1970s and 80s, under Zia-ul-Haq, who came into power after a coup, there was a state-led effort to Islamicize the country.

But what that meant in practice was a very particular version of Islam being elevated and institutionalized.

with significant support from Saudi Arabia and the petrodollars that come from Saudi Arabia.

A slogan with the shelf life of plutonium.

Pakistan's military ruler, General Zia-ul-Haq, used the conflict to strengthen both his regime and his program of Islamization.

Millions of Afghans crossed into Pakistan as refugees.

Peshawar became a junction for spies, journalists, clerics, aid workers, weapons dealers, charities and young men arriving to fight a holy war.

faceless... 2,977 people were killed.

By the time the towers fell, the Pentagon burned, and a field in Pennsylvania became a crime scene.

Pakistan had not been attacked, and Pakistan had not carried out the attack, but it contained the supply routes into Afghanistan, long-standing Taliban relationships, two decades of intelligence, and a military ruler who had seized power in a coup... and was now being asked to choose a side in a war whose boundaries had not yet been defined.

Within hours, Washington began drawing up its demands.

So...

But he used to keep going to Pakistan, and Zia would host him and lionize him.

And any- anytime he'd, he'd come to Pakistan, Zia would invite him for dinner.

And at one of these dinners, he said-- he asked Zia, said, "General Zia, you keep saying all these nice things to me, but still you banned my book.

Why have you done so?" So he said, "You've written a very fine book.

It's the best book anybody could write on Pakistan army, but there is only one problem with it." "What's the problem?" "You've said in the book that Pakistan has the finest army in the world that never won a war.

Zia Ul Haq.

When Zia-ul-Haq took over in 1977, the economy wasn't at its best.

Relations with the United States were not good either.

So from that, and then what you see in 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

So a lot of material, a lot of equipment that was supposed to come Couldn't come.

But that is because 1980s by 85, those Geneva Accords, which Pakistani, by the way, military tried to stop.

Zia-ul-Haq was not happy with Geneva Accords.

And the same goes with Musharraf.

In 1977, she held an election and voters removed her, which is the kind of plot twist democracy still occasionally remembers it's allowed to have.

That same year, however, General Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Pakistan's Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

Bhutto was hanged in 1979 after a deeply disputed trial.

Over in Italy, the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered former Prime Minister Aldoro Moro in 1978.

But there have been exceptions.

I mean, interestingly, the future dictator, Colonel, uh, General Zia-ul-Haq, was serving with King Hussein of Jordan in 1970 and helped organize the crushing of the PLO and the p- the Popular Front, um-

Black September

...

There are enormous numbers of But personal and ideological disputes, usually the two going together, as is so often the case.

We should say that one year before this, General Zia has been assassinated in a similar sort of, uh, strike.

A, a bomb has gone off.

A- a- and we don't know who did that either.