Ex-DG ISI Gen Hamid Gul dies

RAWALPINDI: Former DG Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul died of a brain hemorrhage at the Combined Military Hospital (CMH), Murree on Saturday evening.
He was 79 and is survived by his widow, two sons Abdullah Gul and Umer Gul, daughter Uzma Gul and seven grandchildren.
His body was shifted to his residence in Rawalpindi in the small hours of Sunday. The decision when and where to bury him would be made today (Sunday).
Air Commodore (retd) Yousaf Gul told The News that his father-in-law developed a headache while he was in Murree on Saturday evening and was immediately rushed to the CMH but he became unconscious on the way to the hospital. Doctors tried to revive him but failed and announced his death after an hour of his reaching the hospital.
General Gul had gone to Murree for recreation. He was hypertensive and developed high blood pressure around 10 years ago. The late general had been attending functions and delivering lectures and speeches till the last month of his life.
He was a brave soldier and an ardent flag-bearer of Islam and its ideology. He was Corps Commander Multan when he developed differences with the then army chief General Asif Nawaz Janjua. He was moved to Rawalpindi and assigned a menial job forcing him to quit the army in a dignified way.
He served as the head of the Military Intelligence. He was liked by the late President General Muhammad Ziaul Haq for his professional commitment. Gen Gul was born on November 20, 1936 and received the Hilal-e-Imtiaz and Sitara-e-Basalat for his gallantry.
He served as director general ISI between 1987 and 1989 during the late and post-stages of the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
Gul is widely credited for pressing for his hard-line policies on India in 1989.
He was instrumental in the establishment of the Taliban and was once known as the “father of the Taliban”. Incidentally, General Gul’s tenure as DG ISI coincided with Benazir Bhutto’s term as Prime Minister.
Later, he established the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) for which he openly took credit despite the fact that he was director general ISI then. General Hameed Gul’s family was originally from Swat (KP) and then migrated to Lahore and after a few years settled in Sargodha. Hameed Gul belonged to the Mohmand tribe of Pashtuns. He was born to Muhammad Khan in Sargodha. He got his early education from a school in his village.
He briefly got admission in Government College Lahore before reporting to the 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 Ziaul 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.
General Gul was then sent to the GHQ as DG MI under General Muhammad Ziaul Haq who then nominated him to be the ISI chief succeeding General Akhtar Abdur Rahman in March 1987. He was later replaced as the ISI commander by PM Benazir Bhutto in May 1989 and was transferred as the commander, II Corps in Multan. In this capacity, Gul conducted Zarb-e-Momin military exercise in November–December 1989, the biggest Pakistan armed forces show of muscle since the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war.
General Asif Nawaz upon taking over the reins of the Pakistan Army in August 1991 transferred Gul as the DG Heavy Industries, Taxila. A menial job compared to Gul’s stature, Gul refused to take on the assignment and resigned.
During his time as the head of the ISI and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Gul was blamed for planning and executing an operation to capture Jalalabad from the 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. But the Pakistan Army was intent on installing a fundamentalist-dominated government in Afghanistan, with Jalalabad as their provisional capital, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf as Prime Minister and Gulbaddin Hekmatyar as Foreign Minister. During his tenure as the ISI chief in 1988, General Gul successfully gathered right-wing politicians and helped them create the IJI, a religio-political conservative coalition against the left-leaning liberal Pakistan People’s Party. He recently acknowledged this fact in various interviews.
According to Indian strategic analyst B Raman, Gul actively backed Khalistan militants. “When Bhutto became prime minister in 1988”, Raman says, “Gul justified backing these insurgents as the only way of preempting 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.”
General Gul worked closely with the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan when he was the ISI chief. But, he became passionately anti-American after the United States 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 programme. General Gul then went on to declare that “the Muslim world must stand united to confront the US 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 Gul personally met Osama Bin Laden in 1993 and refused to label him a terrorist unless irrefutable evidence was provided linking him to alleged acts of terrorism.
On March 12, 2007, Gul marched shoulder to shoulder with activists from the liberal democratic parties and retired former senior military officers against General Pervez Musharraf. He faced down riot police when they tried to arrest him at a rally outside the Supreme Court in Islamabad protesting against attempts to dismiss Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.
He turned against the restored Supreme Court chief justice after a bench allowed Musharraf to contest elections in uniform.
In July 2010, Wikileaks released over 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009. In those documents Gul was accused of backing the Taliban insurgency against western forces to disrupt US presence in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, Information Minister Pervaiz Rashid, Chairman Pakistan Awami Tehreek Dr. Tahirul Qadri and PML-Quaid leaders Chaudhry Shujaat and Ch Pervez Elahi condoled the death of the retired general. Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif expressed his heartfelt condolences over the death of Gen Hamid Gul and prayed to Allah Almighty to grant eternal peace to the departed soul. He also commiserated with the bereaved family.
Federal Minister for Information Senator Pervaiz Rashid expressed his deep grief and sorrow over the death Lt. Gen (R) Hamid Gul. In his condolence message, the minister prayed to Almighty Allah to rest the departed soul in eternal peace and grant courage to the bereaved family to bear this loss with fortitude.
Pakistan Awami Tehreek Chairman Dr. Tahirul Qadri condoled the death of General Hameed Gul and prayed to Almighty Allah to grant eternal peace to the deceased and grant courage to the bereaved family to bear this loss with fortitude.