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Pakistan:
Armed, Dangerous and Unaccountable
K
P S Gill
The
very suspicion of the presence of 'weapons of mass destruction'
in Iraq plunged America into a premature war and increasingly
ruinous engagement in Iraq; yet, incontrovertible evidence of
proliferation by Pakistan only attracts an indulgent 'let bygones be
bygones', and a reaffirmation of 'faith' in General Pervez
Musharraf's 'leadership'. Has the American intelligence and South
Asia policy community been 'embedded' in Pakistan for far too long
to have retained a sufficient measure of objectivity? And could the
succession of unwarranted indulgences towards Pakistan compromise
stability in South Asia as well as America's own future security?
The past weeks' events in Pakistan will certainly go down as one of
the most consummate political charades in recent history, and if
they were not so dangerous, they would be farcical: within weeks of
the cover being blown off Pakistan's nuclear proliferation
activities in Libya (following similar disclosures, first with
regard to North Korea, and then Iran; as well as unconfirmed reports
of involvement in the relocation of Iraq's missing 'nuclear
material' from Syria to Pakistan in October 2002), an
'investigation' was launched and completed; the 'sole culprit', A.Q.
Khan, the 'father' of Pakistan's 'Islamic bomb', was identified,
detained and 'interrogated'; he then appeared on national
Television, abjectly pleading with a 'stern' Musharraf, after which
he made a televised 'confession' of his wrongdoing, taking the full
blame and implicitly exonerating his military masters; with fitting
humility, he also 'apologised to the nation'; it would obviously be
churlish, under the circumstances, not to let 'bygones be bygones',
and worse than churlish to insist that investigations expose all the
other culprits in the proliferation conspiracy - including (heaven
forbid!) the country's present dictator; the Cabinet, consequently,
recommends full clemency for the 'national hero'; and Musharraf,
naturally bound by the collective will of the Cabinet, seals the
amnesty. So, we are to believe, the entire criminal chapter of over
a decade and a half of what CIA director George Tenet
euphemistically describes as 'nuclear profiteering' by Pakistan, is
closed.
All this is also immediately and unhesitatingly endorsed by the US
Administration, which reiterates its faith in President Musharraf's
'stewardship' of his country. The UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan,
also submissively echoes the American position, sympathising with
Musharraf for "the very difficult situation that he has to deal
with - he is dealing with a national hero."
On the sidelines of the grand sweep of this drama, A.Q. Khan had
implicated Pervez Musharraf and three of his predecessor army chiefs
- Jehangir Karamat, Abdul Waheed Kakkar and Mirza Aslam Beg - in the
country's nuclear transgressions, and is also believed to have taken
out an 'insurance policy' for himself by way of 'proof' that he sent
out of the country with his daughter, to be released to the world in
case a prosecution was launched against him.
In the meanwhile, Musharraf declares that his country "will
never roll back its nuclear assets", nor would he accept any
"independent investigation" by international agencies. He
announces the test firing of the 1,240 kilometre-range Shaheen II
missile 'within a month' to reiterate the country's commitment to
its strategic nuclear missile programme, and simultaneously warns
the national media against 'further speculation' on the military's
role in peddling nuclear secrets, as such 'speculation' would be
against the 'national interest.'
An 'anti-national' Press is not alone in its dissent from the
orchestrated spectacle. In Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of
the U.N. nuclear agency, warned that Khan's activities were
"the tip of an iceberg" in the international nuclear black
market. Former US Chief Weapons Inspector, David Kay also declared,
"I can think of no one who deserves less to be pardoned."
It is useful to note here that Musharraf's strategy of response to
the continuous succession of exposures on nuclear proliferation is
identical to the strategy adopted with regard to Pakistan's
sponsorship of terrorism. First, complete denial; when this becomes
unsustainable, denial of state sponsorship or involvement, and
transfer of responsibility to non-state actors and institutions, or
'renegades', with token 'action' against some of these; eventually,
where even this becomes unsustainable, some visible action in which
some of these actors are 'sacrificed' to salvage his regime, with
promises to the international community that past activities would
be 'permanently wound down'. Core capacities, however, are never
dismantled or destroyed.
If, within this context, Khan must be 'sacrificed' to maintain a
minimally credible pretence that the Pakistani state and Army were
not directly 'involved' in nuclear proliferation, so be it. In a few
months, he will be restored to his 'normal' life, as happened
earlier with the two Pakistani nuclear scientists (Sultan
Bashir-ud-Din Mahmood and Chaudhri Abdul Majeed of the Ummah
Tameer-e-Nau) who were in contact with Osama bin Laden and the
Taliban, and were believed to have been trying to help him develop a
'dirty bomb'.
This strategy has generally been referred to as maintaining 'minimal
credible deniability' while engaging in a multiplicity of illegal
and perilous international adventures. Crucially, there are two
sides to the 'credible deniability' coin: the pretence by Pakistan
that it is innocent; and the acceptance of this pretence by the
'international community' despite overwhelming evidence to the
contrary. Generally, America and the West have ignored evidence of
Pakistani involvement in terrorism and proliferation, either because
their interests have not been threatened, or have sometimes been
served, by such activities; or, especially in the post-9/11 period,
because they feel that Pakistan's and Musharraf's 'stability' would
be threatened by any sudden or harsh sanctions, and this is
considered tactically unacceptable in the present context.
The fact is, Pakistan's role in nuclear proliferation (as in its
sponsorship of terrorism) has been an 'open secret' for a long time.
Since the late 1980s, Pakistan has been 'marketing' nuclear
technologies with little effort at secrecy - at one point through
advertisements published in national newspapers, as well as through
printed brochures that were widely circulated among potential
clients by the AQ Khan Research Laboratories at Kahuta, and a copy
of which was recently published by The New York Times. It is
also well known that Pakistan had developed and projected its
nuclear programme as an 'Islamic bomb' and had received enormous
financial support from a number of Islamic countries, including
Iraq, Libya and Saudi Arabia, on an implicit quid pro quo
agreement that would have involved sharing of technologies with the
'Islamic world'. Pakistan's missiles-for-nuclear-technology deal
with North Korea is also well known, and these transfers had been
documented by intelligence agencies years before 9/11. Indeed, there
is not a single security commentator who would not be aware that
virtually every single missile 'developed' by Pakistan was, in fact,
nothing more than a reassembled version of a North Korean 'knock
down kit'. At least some of these various proliferation activities
have demonstrably taken place under the Musharraf regime. To pretend
or believe that any or all of this could be done without explicit
state and military sanction is the most arrant nonsense. Yet, all
this was deliberately ignored by America and by the West.
This naturally forces the disturbing questions: has America, or have
American agencies, in fact, been complicit in at least some of these
proliferation activities? And have successive US Administrations
deliberately misled the American people? While the immediate and
malevolent shadow of Pakistan's activities has fallen within the
region, particularly on Afghanistan and India, it is the inescapable
truth that the 'nuclear dagger' is aimed irrevocably at the heart of
the world's 'sole superpower', and the leakage of these technologies
to rogue states and terrorist non-state actors across the world
constitutes the gravest threat to the US. Peripheral players as well
as recipients of the proliferating technologies have been targeted
with the full force of punitive American and international
sanctions, yet the primary proliferator and central protagonist in
the sponsorship of international Islamist terrorism escapes
unscathed, again and again, irrespective of the enormity of its
transgressions. Every US Administration in the recent past has
downplayed Pakistan's role in international terrorism and nuclear
proliferation, and the present Administration is no exception.
America's 'strategy' for stabilizing Pakistan - indeed, South Asia -
appears to be based on a single premise: unqualified support to
Musharraf, with a combination of rewards and pressures to urge him
to restore control over the jehadi elements in his country.
This exclusive reliance on a single individual is substantially
based on Musharraf's deceptive persona, his 'westernised' ease of
attire and intercourse, and his apparent servility under US
pressure. Apart from the dangers of operating without viable
alternatives, such an approach is also based on a poor understanding
of the man. Musharraf is, evidently, opportunist par excellence;
his present perceptions tie him closely to the most immediate US
interests. But the current 'global war' is a war of ideologies.
Musharraf's fundamental commitments, and the Islamic Republic of
Pakistan itself, are founded on an ideology in irreducible conflict
with that of America. To fail to recognize this is to imperil all
freedoms everywhere. To fail, equally, to recognize, behind the
veneer of westernisation, the sheer absence of scruples and the
ruthlessness of Musharraf's character is to create the circumstances
for inevitable betrayal. This is the man who 'hijacked a country';
who betrayed his own elected prime minister; who has subverted
democracy through a rigged national 'referendum' and a fraudulent
election in which fringe Islamist extremist political formations
were manoeuvred to the centre-stage of national electoral politics;
who planned and executed the Kargil misadventure, which brought
India and Pakistan to the brink of nuclear confrontation; who has
directly supported terrorism, not only in India, but
internationally, through the Al Qaeda-Taliban combine and its
affiliates - openly before 9/11, and covertly and opportunistically
since then; who led a campaign of pillage and slaughter in 1988 to
crush an uprising in Gilgit in the Northern Areas of occupied
Kashmir - a campaign that earned him the title, 'butcher of
Baltistan'. He is a man, moreover, who constantly shifts stance, and
who has blatantly misled and lied to the international community
again and again, on matters of critical concern. To repose 'faith'
in such a man is to succumb to a dangerous selective blindness.
From the very moment of its creation, Pakistan has been little more
than an organized criminal enterprise masquerading as a
nation-state. For years now, I have been arguing that Pakistan's
nuclear capabilities will have to be shut down. Countries that
cannot control their nuclear establishment and prevent illegal
transfers of technology cannot escape the ambit of international
controls. Countries that actively promote such illegal proliferation
must draw upon themselves the harshest of international sanctions
and inspection regimes. To fail in this course is to ignore the
grave danger that such rogue states constitute, not only to peace,
but to human survival itself.
K
P S Gill is Publisher, SAIR and President, Institute for Conflict
Management, New Delhi |
