However, when Masood graduated in 1988, aged twenty, Khalil again offered him a place at a mujahideen training camp. This time Masood could not refuse, and a few weeks later found himself at a Holy Warriors base in Yawar Kili, a sprawling mud-brick compound in the bronze desert outside the southern Afghan border town of Khost. Camp Yawar, with its subterranean classrooms, dormitories and bomb shelters carved from the bedrock, came as a severe shock to a young cleric more accustomed to air-conditioned prayer halls. Swarming with brawny recruits, who scrambled on their hands and knees under nets and peppered distant targets with bullets, it was run by Saifullah, the Binori Town graduate turned mujahid, whose abilities were by now legendary. Although he was pleased to meet a warrior about whom he had heard so much, Masood, exhausted by his three-day journey by pickup and pony and overwhelmed by the 50°C heat, confided to his private journal that he was ‘appalled’ by what greeted him.
Overweight and short of breath, Masood failed to make it through the forty-day basic training. But as the young man had been sent with the personal blessing of Maulana Khalil, Saifullah could not return him to Karachi uninitiated in battle, so he dispatched him to the front line anyway. Needing to relieve himself in the middle of the night, Masood emerged from the dugout where his unit was sleeping and forgot, in the darkness, to utter a password to the guards. Believing that Soviet-backed Afghan forces were mounting an ambush, they opened fire, and Masood received a bullet wound to the leg. Saifullah was horrified, and arranged for Masood to be stretchered back to Karachi immediately, accompanied by one of his most trusted lieutenants. The calamitous story was reported to the ISI, whose agents still recall reading it incredulously. For a lesser recruit, this incident would have signalled an ignoble exit from the world of jihad. But Master Alvi was too important a figure in the Deobandi movement for his son to be cast aside. After recuperating, Masood was asked to become editor of Sadai Mujahid (Voice of the Mujahid), the Holy Warriors’ weekly magazine and recruiting officer.
Masood enthusiastically embraced his new position. It gave him a chance to spread his message to a far wider audience, and he let his imagination run wild, creating in one edition a fantastical story of how a young mujahid named Masood, who was filled with a passion for jihad, had been cut down by a Russian sniper, but bravely struggled back to his trench. ‘This left a lasting impact on me and caused a revolution in my heart and mind,’ Masood wrote, imagining himself as the semi-fictional character in the narrative. ‘That’s why I resolved with Allah to spread the message of jihad (besides waging practical jihad at every opportunity).’
Available for five rupees outside mosques and bookshops throughout Pakistan, Masood’s magazine became a smash, selling tens of thousands of copies every Friday. In its pages he wove a spell around the battle being fought in the dusty mountains of Afghanistan, concluding later, in an unpublished memoir, that his words had been responsible for ‘the spread of the jihad task on a vast scale’. A speaking tour followed, visiting ‘maktabs, masjids, streets and bazaars of Karachi … without ever taking a holiday’. Soon Masood was in demand all over Sindh and the Punjab, too, where he was introduced, often with his father Master Alvi at his side, as a war veteran who ‘ignited fire in the hearts of the people’.
Wherever he went, the Russian sniper story preceded him, and after a while he began using it to explain his pronounced limp. Despite his youth, the twenty-one-year-old Masood was now addressed with the epithet ‘Hazrat’, the respected one. But by 1989, with the conflict in Afghanistan on the wane, and Soviet forces retreating from Kabul, Masood was at a loose end. Many battle-hardened Afghani jihadis and their Pakistani counterparts had begun spilling over the border into Peshawar and Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s south-western Balochistan province. Tens of thousands more set up home in Karachi’s outer suburbs. For a time it looked as if the Holy Warriors would stagnate completely – until a spook with a new project emerged from the woodwork.
Privately he was known as ‘Brigadier Badam’ because of the almond milk he drank like whisky, in shots from small glasses, having given up alcohol during the dry years of the Afghan mujahideen. An ISI veteran with more than thirty years’ service, the Brigadier had been one of those responsible for distributing the CIA’s cash for the past decade, US dollars that had been flown into Islamabad, stacked up on wooden pallets. The Brigadier, who is now retired, although he continues to dabble in politics and religion, knew back then how to get the most from his money. One day it would be a truckload of Kalashnikovs for a tribal elder who was running out of steam, and the next a wad of banknotes for an unruly mujahideen commander complaining about the carnivorous Soviet front. He had become an expert in unconventional warfare, and knew how to build and maintain a private army. He also had some ideas about how to redeploy the Holy Warriors, sending them to fight for a new cause that would benefit the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Ever since the Soviets had begun withdrawing from Afghanistan, with refugees flooding into Peshawar, fearful of what would replace the Red Army, Pakistan had been secretly preparing, in the words of General Zia-ul-Haq, the country’s most recent military dictator, to ‘make something of Kashmir’. Now the eyes of the army and the ISI had been drawn by the fortuitous events taking place on the other side of the LoC. The local insurgency had just exploded there, with hundreds of thousands of people rising up in the Muslim-dominated valley. ‘Pakistan’s security agencies, the army and the ISI, would never pass up an opportunity to make India, the perennial enemy, bleed,’ Badam said.
In the Brigadier’s mind was an idea to send battle-hardened veterans from the Afghan war over the border into Indian-administered Kashmir to boost the insurgency. Almost as soon as it had come into being following Partition in 1947, Pakistan had felt that it had got the dirty end of the stick. The new Islamic republic was awkwardly formed of two halves: West Pakistan, the area west of India that is the Pakistan of today, and East Pakistan, the region east of India that is now Bangladesh. Maps of the subcontinent resembled two green Muslim batwings encircling a great saffron-coloured Hindu heart. A deep sense of insecurity settled over the divided country, an unfading paranoia about the bigger, wealthier and better-armed India that sat in the middle.
In its hurry to leave the subcontinent, Britain had left such haphazard borders that the two new countries began fighting over territory immediately. One of the most contested areas was East Pakistan, where a sizeable proportion of the population wanted independence, and the Himalayan principality of Jammu and Kashmir, whose Hindu monarch had sided with India against the wishes of his Muslim subjects. The deal that Maharaja Hari Singh had signed with India’s last Governor General, Lord Mountbatten, had resulted in the mountain kingdom being divided up like spoils: a small portion of western Kashmir, Gilgit and Baltistan going to Pakistan, while Hindu-dominated Jammu, the Muslim Kashmir Valley and tiny, Buddhist Ladakh remained with India. Later, Pakistan had gifted bits and pieces to China, which went on to seize another slice from India. Ever since, India had continued to claim all of Kashmir while holding just over 40 per cent of it, while Pakistan, administrating just under 40 per cent, wanted it too, but publicly insisted that every Kashmiri had the right to decide his or her own destiny,
The two countries had fought many times over these disputed territories. The most serious conflagration came in December 1971, when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had ordered an assault on East Pakistan, which had ended after barely two weeks, with the Pakistan Army forced into a humiliating surrender at Dhaka racecourse. Pakistan had never recovered from what it regarded as a deeply shameful moment in its young history, and ever since, its military leaders and the ISI had been searching for the right lever to pull so as to reassert themselves. Now, in 1989, with the war in Afghanistan coming to a close, tens of thousands of pumped-up Muslim guerrillas at a loose end