Whatever the truth, Imam and Gul belonged to a generation of Pakistani military officers who nursed a great bitterness towards the United States over a perceived betrayal. In 1990, a year after the Soviets were routed from Afghanistan, Washington imposed heavy sanctions on Islamabad over its nuclear programme and cut off military ties. The about-turn deeply stung old jihadi warriors, like Imam and Gul, who had worked closely with the Americans, as Milt Bearden, an American spy who ran the CIA station in Islamabad in the late 1980s, told me.
