Lieutenant-General Mahmud Ahmed (Urdu: محمود احمد; b. 1944) HI(M), is a retired three-star rank army general in the Pakistan Army who served as the Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence from 1999 to 2001.
He commanded the X Corps and was considered to be a well-respected general who led from the front. In 1999 he highlighted the Kashmir issue through his book called “A History of 1965 War” and was identified as one of the four army generals who helped safely land a local passenger plane carrying Lt. Gen Musharraf which was ordered to be sent to India by the then PM Nawaz Sharrif. The plane is said to be carrying innocent civilians and school children. This was ordered by the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999. As the DG ISI, Mahmud actively supported the sponsorship of the Islamic fundamentalism by endorsing the Talibans in Afghanistan under its Emir Mohammad Omar in 2000. This information has not been verified by any official or non official source.
Despite being responsible for stabilizing Lt. Gen.Pervez Musharraf’s presidency in the wake of an economic crisis in Pakistan, Lt-Gen. Ahmed resigned from his commission as he refused to support policies affecting the region negatively. CNN described him as the second most powerful man in the country while he was visiting USA on an official visit. He was invited to the CNN headquarters in Atlanta and was considered to be a dashing gentleman with a penchant for literature and was a prolific writer, artist and quoted Iqbal and Rumi equally well. Later on Wendy Chamberlin described him to be a loyal, professional and an upright soldier of the Pakistan army who propounded peace in the region. She often described him as a man who was well versed in history, art, religion and languages and was a devout Muslim, soldier and family man who wanted peace for both the West and the East.
Biography
Mahmud Ahmed was born in 1944 in Ludhiana, Punjab in India in Arain family,and joined the Pakistan Army in 1964 where he did his combat duty, first participating in second war with India in 1965.:177 His family emigrated from India to Pakistan after India’s partition on 14/15 August 1947.:contents He secured his graduation from the Lawrence College in Murree before attending Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul in 1965.:227:227
He passed out from the PMA Kakul in 1966 where he commissioned as 2nd-Lt in the 16th Self-Propelled (SP) in the Corps of Artillery. Lieutenant Ahmed was the regimental colleague of then army Captain Pervez Musharraf. He participated in the third war with India on the western front.:15
In the 1980s–90s, Ahmed served in the ISI where he worked under Lt-Gen. Hamid Gul.:contents
In 1994–95, Major-General Ahmed commanded the 23rd Infantry Division as its GOC, stationed in Jhelum in Punjab, Pakistan.:227
His career in the military is mostly spent in the military intelligence and became the Director-General of the Military Intelligence (DG MI), when he took it over from then-Maj-Gen. Ali Kuli Khan in October 1995.:82 In June 1998, Maj-Gen. Ahmed was promoted to three-star rank, Lieutenant-General and was moved the President of the National Defence University (NDU) in Islamabad by then-Chairman joint chiefs Gen. Jehangir Karamat.:179
X Corps and Kargil war with India
In October 1998, -Chairman joint chiefs Gen. Pervez Musharraf appointed Lt-Gen. Ahmed as the field commander of the X Corps, and as soon as he was appointed to command the X Corps the planning of the covert infiltration in Indian Kashmir begin to implemented under Lt-Gen. Aziz Khan, the CGS under Gen. Musharraf in Rawalpindi.:309–310 In the military, Lt-Gen. Ahmed was described as ultraconservative, professional and kind to his subordinates though some found him to be control minded with a very short-temper.:179
Lt-Gen. Ahmed greatly aided in providing the tactical support of mass troop infiltration, starting first by closely and micromanaging the troop deployment near the LoC.:310 In July 1999, he provided the briefing to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over the troop deployments, eventually giving a go-ahead for the military operation.:Contents:412
After the Kargil war, the Pakistani Investigative journalist news reports identified that there were four army generals who were in much control of the area contingency plans in Kargil including Lt-Gen. Aziz Khan, the CGS under Gen. Musharraf, Lt-Gen. Shahid Aziz of ISI’s Analysis Wing, and Lt-Gen. Jan Orakzai, commanding the XI Corps, besides Lt-Gen. Mahmud.:101 There were no official military inquiries into this incident nor there were any subsequent evidence that led to the punishments of those responsible for such incidents.
On 12 October 1999, Lt-Gen. Ahmed refused to accept to follow the orders of new chain of command set up by then-army chief Gen. Ziauddin Butt and ordered his X Corps to seize the control of the Prime Minister’s Secretariat while Lt-Gen. Aziz Khan, the CGS under Gen. Musharraf, took control of the Jinnah Terminal in Karachi as the PIA aircraft carrying Lt. Gen Musharraf and innocent civilians and children was refused to land in Pakistan.:contents
After the martial law in 1999, Lt-Gen. Ahmed subsequently appointed as the Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and his tenure-ship is marked with alleged terror financing of al-Qaeda and sponsoring the Talibans in Afghanistan.:contents:contents On 17 March 2001, Lt-Gen. Ahmad was appointed as the Colonel commandant of the Corps of Artillery at the Artillery Regimental Center on 17 March 2001. Mahmud was later replaced by Lt General Khalid Kidwai as the colonel commandant on 13 October 2004.
In 2001, Lt-Gen. Ahmad regularly visited the United States where he consulted with The Pentagon and CIA officials in the Bush administration in the weeks before and after terrorist attacks took place in New York on 11 September 2001. In fact, he was with U.S. Republican Congressman Porter Goss and U.S. Democratic Senator Bob Graham in Washington D.C., discussing Osama bin Laden over breakfast, when the attacks of September 11, 2001 took place in New York, United States.
On the morning of Sept. 12, the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, told Mahmood that Pakistan had to make a choice “you are either 100 percent with us or 100 percent against us—there is no gray area.” This statement was later denied by Armitage. Mahmood expressed willingness to cooperate, however in the afternoon, he told George Tenet, the CIA director, that Mullah Omar, the Taliban chief, was a religious man not a man of violence. On September 16, Musharraf sent a delegation to the Taliban with the mission to convince them to hand over Osama bin Laden which included Lieutenant General Mahmood, and other religious figures.
He wrote a book initially titled “The Myth of 1965 Victory”. It was carefully researched and included numerous maps and other details. It questioned the official Pakistani view about winning the war, and acknowledged that the war was initiated “as a clandestine guerrilla struggle”. Upon Musharraf’s directive, almost all the copies of the book were bought by Pakistan Army to prevent circulation because the topic was “too sensitive”. The book was published with the revised title “History of Indo Pak War 1965”. It was published by Services Book Club, a part of the Pakistan military. A few copies of the book have survived in libraries. A version was published in India as “Illusion of Victory: A Military History of the Indo-Pak War-1965” by Lexicon Publishers. A second reprint of the book was published recently in 2017 in Pakistan.
Post-retirement and Islamic missionary activity
After this termination, Ahmed critiqued President Pervez Musharraf’s policy on siding with the United States, without effectively addressing the issue of containing the terrorists organizations.:184
He viewed the American attack on Afghanistan with great suspicion, and had held sympathetic views towards the Talibans in Afghanistan.:184 He later regretted his role in playing his part in bringing to help stabilize Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s role against the civilian government when he joined the Alliance for Restoration of Democracy that viewed to removing Musharraf’s administration.:184 Ahmed opposed the US invasion of Afghanistan.:184 He has been lauded by several authors like Amarinder Singh in his book “A Ridge too Far: War in the Kargil Heights 1999”, Bob Woodward’s “Bush at War”, and Steve Coll’s “Directorate S”. He has vast knowledge of history, science, religion, geography, social sciences and economics and is known to be a great sportsman as he enjoys tennis, hockey, swimming, gunnery and cricket. He has memorized the Quran and can quote several great British, German, Russian, English and Eastern authors when the occasion demands it as he enjoys the turn of the phrase. He and his wife are both artistic and enjoy painting, gardening and philanthropy.