Forty-nine years ago, General Zia-ul-Haq’s tanks moved on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government. I was twenty. Two months later, I, together with a group of students sat in a room at 70 Clifton Karachi with Bhutto himself, hours before the regime arrested him a second time. I have spent a lot of time trying to work out where Pakistan’s decline actually starts. Not the 1971 war, which was a catastrophe of a different order — a bounded rupture, however bloody, that ended with a new international border. Not any of the crises since.

July 5, 1977, is the date that deserves the designation, because it did not just remove a government. It set in motion a political order – a machinery - that has shaped Pakistan’s body politic for nearly five decades, entrenching patterns of power that continue to define how the state actually functions. This is an argument for why that date, more than any other in Pakistan’s history, marks the start of the darkest chapter — made from the documentary record, not from nostalgia for the man it deposed.

The Appointment Was Not a Routine Seniority Decision

General Zia-ul-Haq was appointed Chief of Army Staff in March 1976 by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. His selection involved bypassing several lieutenant-generals senior to him in the Pakistan Army hierarchy, as recorded in standard accounts of Pakistan’s civil–military history and in Lt Gen Faiz Ali Chishti’s memoir of the period.

Zia’s military career included service in Jordan during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Pakistani military personnel were present in advisory roles during Jordan’s internal conflict involving Palestinian armed groups, an episode widely discussed in historical accounts of the Black September period.

Mehmood Ali Khan Chaudhary, who served as Secretary of the Interior Ministry through 1977, records (in his book Martial Law Ka Siasi Andaaz) a small but pointed episode from the last days before the coup. Around the time, when the PNA agitation against Bhutto's government at its peak, American ambassador Henry Byroade was being transferred out of the country, and General Zia-ul-Haq — then Chief of Army Staff — hosted an elaborate farewell reception for him at his own residence.

Chaudhary, who received an invitation in his capacity as Interior Secretary, found the gesture strange: a change of ambassador ordinarily called for a routine Foreign Ministry reception, hosted at most in the Foreign Secretary's or Foreign Minister's name; army chiefs did not personally host such farewells except, occasionally, on a country's national day, and even then only as a formality. A serving army chief throwing a lavish, personally hosted party for a departing American ambassador, in the middle of a political crisis actively threatening the government, unsettled him enough that he raised it with the Prime Minister the next day.

This is not merely Chaudhary's word for it. Bhutto himself corroborated the episode independently, in his own written reply to Zia's statement before the Supreme Court, stating that Zia had given "the lavish reception to the departing Ambassador" without the required Foreign Office clearance, that his Interior Secretary had briefed him on it, and that he had told colleagues at the time that the reception, held without proper authorization, was "the signal for the Coup." Two days later, it was.

A Coup and a Judicial Murder

Operation Fair Play was, on its face, bloodless. What followed was not.

Bhutto was arrested, released, arrested again, tried on a conspiracy-to-murder charge that most independent legal scholars, then and since, have treated as a pretext, and hanged on 4 April 1979 after a Supreme Court process widely regarded as compromised. The Court had already legitimised Zia’s takeover in the first place by invoking the “Doctrine of Necessity” — the same judicial device Pakistan’s courts would reach for again in later crises, each time a general needed his coup blessed after the fact. That is the first piece of the machine: a judiciary that learned, in 1977, that it could rubber-stamp the abrogation of the constitution and survive. It has never fully unlearned the lesson.

Washington’s Fingerprints

The dismissal of American involvement as pure conspiracy theory does not survive the scrutiny of declassified material.

On 6 December 1971, recorded conversations between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger referred to Bhutto in explicitly hostile terms — “that son-of-a-bitch” and “a terrible bastard” (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Vol. E-7, Document 171). The record captures not policy disagreement, but personal animus at the highest level of U.S. decision-making.

A CIA memorandum titled “Prospects for Pakistan,” dated 30 May 1975, assessed scenarios for Pakistan’s political future, including Bhutto’s sudden removal or assassination, two years before either happened (CIA memorandum, declassified via CREST,........

© The Friday Times