Ojhri Camp occupied a site in Rawalpindi Cantonment, the military district of a city with millions of residents. It served as the primary transit depot for weapons flowing from the CIA to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and onward to mujahideen commanders fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The arrangement was the backbone of Operation Cyclone, the largest covert operation in CIA history at the time. Rockets, grenades, small arms, and ammunition passed through the camp on their way to the Afghan frontier. The year before the disaster, a fire caused by leaking white phosphorus grenades had been caught and extinguished in time. That near-miss changed nothing about the camp's operations or its location between two capital cities.

The fire that destroyed Ojhri Camp started small. A box of Egyptian-made rockets, armed with fuses before shipment in violation of safety protocols, ignited. For eight to ten minutes, the fire burned while the enormous stockpile sat untouched. Then the ammunition began to cook off. Rockets launched themselves from their storage crates, arcing over rooftops and slamming into residential neighborhoods. Shells detonated in sympathetic explosions that shook buildings miles away. Civilians in Rawalpindi and Islamabad -- people commuting to work, children in schools, shopkeepers opening for the day -- found themselves under a bombardment from their own military's depot. Khaqan Abbasi, father of future Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, was killed when a missile struck his car. His son Zahid suffered shrapnel wounds to the skull, fell into a coma, and remained bedridden for seventeen years until his death in 2005.

In the immediate aftermath, U.S. Defense Department officials pointed to the Soviet Union and the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, noting that the explosion resembled the pattern of previous attacks against Pakistani military installations. But competing theories quickly emerged. Some speculated the camp had been deliberately destroyed to cover up the theft of weapons from its stocks. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who had headed the ISI's Afghan Bureau from 1983 to 1987, suggested a more provocative possibility: while the Soviets had the most obvious motive, the CIA itself might have had reason to destroy evidence, since an Islamic fundamentalist government in Kabul posed risks to American interests just as a communist one did. No definitive investigation has settled the question.

Prime Minister Mohammad Khan Junejo made what would prove to be a fateful decision: he ordered a parliamentary inquiry into the Ojhri Camp disaster. It was the kind of accountability that civilian governments are supposed to provide over military operations, and it was precisely the kind of scrutiny that Pakistan's military establishment could not afford. The inquiry threatened to expose the inner workings of the ISI's Afghan operations at a moment when billions of dollars in covert aid were flowing through Pakistani hands. President Zia-ul-Haq responded by sacking Junejo and dissolving Parliament entirely. The man who had asked for answers lost his office. The answers themselves were never delivered.

Today, the site of Ojhri Camp bears little trace of the catastrophe. The Cold War that fueled it ended, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the mujahideen whom the weapons were meant to supply fractured into factions that would reshape Central and South Asian politics for decades. But for the families in Rawalpindi and Islamabad who lost relatives to rockets fired from their own government's stockpile, the disaster remains an open wound -- a reminder that the costs of proxy wars are often paid by people who had no say in starting them.