During his tenure, Gul played an instrumental role in directing ISI support to Afghan resistance groups against Soviet forces in return for funds and weapons from the US, during the Soviet–Afghan War, in co-operation with the CIA.

[15][16] Hamid Gul was born on 20 November 1936 in Sargodha in the Punjab Province (British India) into a Punjabi-Pathan family to parents Muhammad Khan and his wife, who originated from Buner Tehsil in Swat District.

His father, who was a Subedar-major in the British Indian Army, moved from Swat to Lahore before settling down in Sargodha, where he got arable land, his grandfather was a Khilafat Movement activist while his great-grandfather Faiz Khan was a Deobandi who participated in the jihad of Syed Ahmad Barelvi and Shah Ismail Dehlvi.

Gul was promoted to Brigadier in 1978 and steadily rose to be the Martial Law Administrator of Bahawalpur and then the Commander of the 1st Armoured Division, Multan in 1982, his appointments expressly wished by Zia himself.

[citation needed] General Asif Nawaz upon taking the reins of Pakistan Army in August 1991, had transferred Gul as the DG Heavy Industries Taxila.

[20] During his time as head of the ISI amid the Soviet–Afghan War, Gul planned and executed the operation to capture Jalalabad from the Soviet-backed Afghan army in the spring of 1989.

Contrary to Pakistani expectations, this battle proved that the Afghan army could fight without Soviet help, and greatly increased the confidence of government supporters.

"When Bhutto became prime minister in 1988", Raman says, "Gul justified backing these insurgents as the only way of pre-empting a fresh Indian threat to Pakistan's territorial integrity.

When she asked him to stop playing that card, he reportedly told her: Madam, keeping Punjab destabilized is equivalent to the Pakistan army having an extra division at no cost to the taxpayers."

"Gul strongly advocated supporting indigenous Kashmiri groups", adds Raman, "but was against infiltrating Pakistani and Afghan mercenaries into Jammu and Kashmir.

"[25] Even if the ISI, under General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, was already aiming beyond the region, for instance establishing contacts with jihadi groups like the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, it was under Hamid Gul that the ISI definitely took a pan-Islamist turn, as he not only wished for a Pakistan-led Islamic coalition against India, in his own words "a strategic depth concept that links Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Afghanistan in an alliance" which "would be a jeweled Mughal dagger pointed at the Hindu heart", but also called for what he perceived as the liberation of persecuted Muslim groups all over the world, such as the Eritreans, the Bosniaks, the Rohingyas, the Uzbeks and the Uighurs.

"[28] Originally unnamed in the 9/11 Commission Report, U.S. officials suspected that Gul had warned the Taliban and Osama bin Laden of the impending cruise missile strike (Operation Infinite Reach) on al-Qaeda's training camps in eastern Afghanistan.

[30] General Gul personally met Osama bin Laden in 1993 and refused to label him a terrorist unless and until irrefutable evidence was provided linking him to alleged acts of terrorism.

General Gul faced down riot police when they tried to arrest him at a rally outside the Supreme Court in Islamabad protesting against attempts to dismiss Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

[45] On 14 December 2008, President Asif Ali Zardari in an interview with Newsweek described Hamid Gul as a "political ideologue" of terror rather than a physical supporter.

[46] According to the Daily Telegraph, following the death of Osama bin Laden, Gul opined that US forces had killed him in Afghanistan and moved the body to Abbottabad to humiliate Pakistan.