Akhtar Abdur Rahman (11 June 1924-17 August 1988) was the Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan from 21 June 1979 to 29 March 1987, succeeding Muhammad Riaz Khan and preceding Hamid Gul.
Biography[]
Akhtar Abdur Rahman was born on 11 June 1924 in Rampur, British India (present-day Rampur, Punjab, Pakistan) to a family of Sunni Muslim Muhajirs, and he became an officer in the Pakistan Army in the aftermath of the First Indo-Pakistani War. In 1965 he fought against the Indian Army in the Second Indo-Pakistani War in Kashmir, and after the war he was promoted to colonel and led a brigade. In 1971 he was promoted to Major-General, and he was very close to Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. He did not support Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's 1977 coup, but when he helped to put down a counter-coup, he was promoted, and he became Director-General of Inter-Services Intelligence, the intelligence agency of Pakistan that was responsible for training both Kashmiri insurgents and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Under the command of General Abdur Rahman, the ISI supplied the Mujahideen with weapons, intelligence, and some "volunteers", and he helped in preventing the possibility of a feared invasion of Pakistan by the Soviet Union. His support of the Mujahideen helped to stave off the Soviet attempts to put down resistance in Afghanistan, but he died in 1988 in an air crash in Bahawalpur, Pakistan.