LESSONS FROM THE PRISONERS OF WAR UPRISING AT BADABER

Thirty five years ago, April 26th,  witnessed the start of the heroic last stand of the Soviet and Afghan prisoners of war at Badaber, a former US Air Base on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan.

The details, which exposed the Pakistan Army's -- specifically General Zia ul Haq's-- complicity, were suppressed by Pakistan's military junta fearful of the 'Great Bear' right at its doorstep.

The duplicitous General, however, wasn't just trying to deceive the Soviets. Nope, he was trying to play BOTH Super Powers for fools.  And he did it rather well, cunning as he was...until the Badaber uprising which exposed the illegal confinement, in brutal conditions, of Russian and other Soviet soldiers and their Afghan comrades.

The Soviet invasion, and occupation, of Afghanistan (1979-1989) gave the Pakistan military an inflated sense of its own self importance.  Which would lead to further actions that would ultimately destabilize the entire region and far beyond, not to mention the state itself, due to inevitable blow back. 

You can't play dirty and expect to stay "clean."

With the Soviet invasion, General Zia, and his cohorts, quickly realized --at the same time Lebanese militias did in Beirut-- that the feared (thus respected) United States government could be manipulated/leveraged/played for more than the "peanuts" Zia so famously declined from Jimmy Carter. 

How dare a Super Power offer "peanuts" for clandestine access to deal the Soviets a big blow in return for Vietnam?!

Thus was set in motion a convoluted US policy in the Eighties vis-a-vis Pakistan whose disastrous effects still resonate today in Afghanistan.

Back to the prisoners of war's uprising at the Badaber base. The details are to be found in my April 26th, 2015 blog post on this site:

http://shireenkhanburki.blogspot.com/2015/04/30th-anniversary-of-prisoner-uprising.html


The key takeaway from this forgotten historical footnote was that General Zia, and his merry band of Generals, were capable of violating international law via the illegal captivity of uniformed prisoners of war held in horrendous conditions.  

Sure the Soviet regime would extract a costly price from the Pakistan Army; just as they did from a certain militia in Beirut when the Lebanese tried identical tricks, which worked so successfully with the Reagan Administration, in order to extract generous ransoms. One backfired attempt.

There was a movie made in the 90s called "Peshawar Waltz" about this brave last stand of these prisoners of war at Badaber.


Footnote: Finding Bin Laden in Abbottabad military cantonment should've been expected given the duplicitous Pakistani track record.