From the point of view of the enemies of the Jehad the timing was perfect. Within a few days the Soviets signed the Geneva Accord and the following month began their withdrawal in the knowledge that the Mujahideen had been deprived of all their reserves of ammunition at a stroke. The explosion occurred when the depot was fully stocked, in fact it was overflowing with at least four months’ supply. While I was at Ojhri we tried to keep stock levels as low as possible, using the camp as a transit facility with daily deliveries forward to Peshawar. General Gul’s new system of building up special composite packages of various types of weapons and ammunition for numerous Commanders required all kinds of supplies to accumulate at Ojhri. Only when sufficient quantities of all types had built up could individual arms packages be made up. As the CIA’s part of the pipeline was so erratic, with shipments often being deficient of particular items, there was inevitably delay at Rawalpindi. On this occasion hundreds of packages had to lie at the depot for weeks. It was made worse by the fact that, for the previous three months, those packages destined to go straight to Commanders at the border had been held up because of the winter weather. At the exact moment when the Mujahideen would be expecting their depleted reserves to be replenished at the start of the spring operations there was nothing. If it was deliberate sabotage, it was a masterstroke. Before the last rocket had fallen the verbal accusations and recriminations were flying thick and fast. How could it happen? Why was so much ammunition stored in a densely populated area? Who was responsible? The civil authorities, led by the Prime Minister, blamed the Army and the ISI. The Army accused the ISI of gross incompetence, and both the Prime Minister and the Army turned on General Akhtar. It had been over a year since he had left ISI, but it was he who had authorized Ojhri as the main arms dump for the Jehad, so he must take the blame, or so his accusers thought. The fact that both the President and Prime Minister knew the camp’s location, had visited it and had made no complaint as to its whereabouts were conveniently forgotten. This was the ideal opportunity to destroy General Akhtar and condemn the Army and ISI. President Zia, who was still Chief of Army Staff, was left with little option but to defend the military. His relations with the civil government and the Prime Minister were already strained, so there was no way he could meekly agree that it was all the Army’s or ISI’s fault. He supported his generals, Akhtar and Gul, in particular. The civil government used this tragedy to push their opposition to the military too far. Within a few weeks Zia had sacked the Prime Minister and dissolved the national and provincial assemblies when the Prime Minister tried to block the promotion of some generals, and insisted that the findings of any inquiry be made public.

An official military Court of Inquiry was immediately set up to investigate the disaster. It was headed by Lieutenant-General Imran Khan, the corps commander at Rawalpindi. He did not relish the job. There is no doubt in my mind that he did not know what to do, as he was being pushed by the Prime Minister in one direction and pulled by Zia in another. The former, I believe, wanted General Akhtar to be blamed, while the latter was insisting everything be hushed up, with no finger pointing at a culprit. The result was that Imran Khan dithered, which infuriated both his civil and military seniors. Eventually, perhaps not surprisingly, the court reached a finding that did not attribute blame to any individual. Whether or not the explosion was put down to an accident or sabotage I do not know for certain, as the court’s conclusions were never made public. I do know that nobody was punished. Both Generals Akhtar and Gul continued in their careers. It was the Prime Minister who lost his job.

I was called as a witness to the inquiry, but was not greatly impressed with its methods or motives. Nevertheless, some basic facts emerged. A fire had started from one of the boxes containing Egyptian rockets, which had been sent to the ISI by the CIA for trials, before issue to the Mujahideen. Contrary to all safety regulations, these rockets had been armed with fuses by the Egyptians before shipment. A box fell down, either as a result of mishandling by the loading party, then in the warehouse, or due to a small explosive device. When it fell there was a minor explosion which started a fire. At that time several personnel in the warehouse were injured so there was a rush to treat and evacuate them by nearby staff. There was no attempt to extinguish the fire that had started as everybody was too busy moving the injured. After some eight to ten minutes the entire dump went up with one gigantic bang.

As to how it occurred there is no definitive answer that I know of. It could have been accidental, it could equally have been sabotage. If it was an accident then it could not have happened at a worse time as far as its effect on the prosecution of the war was concerned. The accident scenario has the fused Egyptian missiles falling due to mishandling; one went off causing a fire, perhaps in the wooden crate. The fire was not tackled as everybody was too concerned with the injured, so it took hold and set off the main explosion. This was not the first fire at Ojhri.

Almost exactly a year before fire had broken out in the same ammunition warehouse. On that occasion it had been due to some old World War 2 WP (white phosphorous) smoke grenades leaking and igniting. The NCO in charge had broken down the door and dragged out the offending box with complete disregard for his own safety. The fire was extinguished so there was no explosion. The inquiry recommended improved precautions. The staff at Ojhri were therefore conscious of the dangers and of the need to fight fires.

Those who feel it was sabotage base their argument on the fact that it could have been done and, perhaps equally importantly, on the perfection of the timing, on the amazing coincidence that at that moment the depot had never been so full, that the Soviets were about to start their withdrawal and they wanted to do so with the least possible harassment, and that the Mujahideen were depending on these supplies for their spring offensive. The sabotage theory has the rockets being tampered with in Egypt or in Pakistan, possibly at the request of the KGB. Once they were in the store then the device was detonated by a remote-control exploder from outside the camp. Alternatively, the device was planted by somebody who had access to the warehouse. It was guarded 24 flours a day, St! no outsider could enter. In this case the initial explosion? which caused the box to fall, could have been triggered by a timing or remote-control device.

If it was sabotage the Soviets had the most obvious motive, but. far-fetched though it may appear, the Americans also had reasons to wish the Soviets an uninterrupted retreat. As I have stressed, their policy was changing, they now wanted a stalemate, they wanted to prevent fundamentalists winning the war, and so Mujahideen without ammunition at this critical juncture coincided nicely with their objectives. The suspicion that, just perhaps, the US was not entirely blameless is heightened by the fact that the explosion was followed by the cutback in their shipments of arms. Had they really wanted to, I feel sure that strenuous efforts would have been made to replenish Ojhri Camp. No such efforts materialized; in fact it was not until the following December that further supplies arrived. The CIA knew that delivering arms at that time of the year effectively meant that nothing would reach the Mujahideen for a further three months, by which time the Soviets had gone. It all fell into place rather too neatly. For me, the destruction of all the Mujahideen’s war reserves of weapons and ammunition was one of the turning points of the war. At the very time that the Soviets were pouring munitions and equipment into Afghanistan at an unprecedented rate, the Mujahideen were deprived of the means of carrying out any prolonged or large-scale operations. ISI remained in a state of shock for some time. They did not recover sufficiently to formulate strategic plans to clinch a victory in the field either during or after the Soviet withdrawal. A crucial period was wasted. To achieve the victory that everybody expected it was vital that the period of the withdrawal be used to plan, train, coordinate and dump the logistic requirements of the Mujahideen in various parts of Afghanistan. These activities should have been carried out in accordance with a sound military strategy, and should have been completed prior to the onset of winter. Nothing of the sort happened. No sooner had ISI begun to show signs of recovery than President Zia’s aircraft was sabotaged, killing both him and General Akhtar. Within the space of sixteen months General Akhtar had been removed from ISI, Ojhri Camp was destroyed, the President, along with Akhtar and other senior generals, murdered, and the US was making it obvious that its support for the Jehad was now half-hearted at best.