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Sleeping
with the Nuclear Snake
Kaushik
Kapisthalam
In
the furor following the surreal nuclear drama in Islamabad
culminating with Pakistan’s dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s
“pardon” of Dr.A.Q.Khan, the world media missed another, more
farcical event. It was US President George W. Bush and his
administration spinning the Khan episode as a “major success” in
cracking down on global nuclear proliferation activities. As the
famous boxing promoter Don King likes to say – “Only in
America!”
The
idea that A.Q.Khan was solely responsible for proliferating nuclear
technology and material to Libya, Iran and North Korea is nonsense
and accepted as such by most neutral experts and retired diplomats.
Former Pakistan army chief Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg openly called for
nuclear ties with Iran in the early 1990s when the nuclear transfers
supposedly began. Libya has had long standing ties with the
Pakistani nuclear program starting with the funding of the then
nascent Pakistani nuclear program by Col. Gaddafi when Z.A.Bhutto
was the Pakistani leader in the 1970s. Surely the wily Libyan leader
was not doing this out of the solidarity with a fellow Islamic
nation. The Pakistan-North Korea nuclear relationship was a simple
nukes for missiles barter deal by which Pakistan was able to acquire
North Korean NoDong ballistic missile by paying for it with nuclear
technology, at a time when Pakistan was facing a financial crisis.
The fact that Pakistan Air Force planes were involved in
transferring this technology clearly shows state involvement in
nuclear proliferation.
Reports
quoting unnamed senior Bush administration officials in the media
state that the US policy is now focused on uprooting the nuclear
underground network that A.Q.Khan and his Pakistani associates had
leveraged successfully to build the Pakistani nuclear program. For
that reason, US officials argue, it would be worthwhile to ignore
the A.Q.Khan pardon and not embarrass Gen.Musharraf by talking about
Pakistan army and even his own links to the nuclear proliferation
and focus on extracting promises from the embattled General to shut
down the network for good.
This
theory looks good on paper but ignores certain facts, such as
Gen.Musharraf’s track record in keeping his word. Be it action on
the madrassas, cracking down on the Taliban or shutting down
Pakistani terrorist groups, Gen.Musharraf’s record is abysmal. He
usually makes grandiose promises in speeches to mainly Western
audiences only to renege on them later. So why would
Gen.Musharraf's promises on nuclear trade be any different?
Another
point that the US seems to be ignoring is the critical role the
nuclear underground has in Pakistan's nuclear program. Because of
its weak indigenous scientific capacity, Pakistan has
long relied on Western sources for sophisticated nuclear components.
Even as the A.Q.Khan saga was unfolding, US Federal prosecutors were
looking at the case of a South Africa based middleman who was caught
in a sting operation sending nuclear bomb triggers to Pakistan. A
UPI report mentioned that the South African's Pakistani contact was
a person with ties to Pakistani intelligence. Clearly, for
Gen.Musharraf to cooperate in dismantling the nuclear network would
require him to give up details of his own army and intelligence
service's hitherto secret ties to the nuclear underworld. In
addition, were this network be dismantled, Pakistan would lose is
nuclear component supply chain, bringing its nuclear weapons program
to a grinding halt.
In
this context, it is very likely that Gen.Musharraf's nuclear
cooperation would be like his efforts in the terror and madrassa
front - give misleading clues and eliminate low level expendable
assets so that the Pakistani army interests are left unharmed, while
doing just enough for America not to dump him totally. How
does that help US National Security? The fact is that US
policymakers have totally failed to grasp one point. American
national security and Pakistani army interests are completely
divergent. No amount of co-opting would make the Pakistani army
destroy the nuclear proliferation or terrorist networks and
logically so. Having a world devoid of pan-Islamic terrorists and a
nuclear netherworld is simply not in the interests of the
Pakistani establishment.
So
what are the reasons behind this apparently injudicious US policy
towards Pakistan? Outlook magazine’s excellent Washington reporter
Seema Sirohi wrote in a recent column about a recent event she
attended in Washington. The topic was “Pakistan and
Proliferation” and the person giving the talk was Robert Einhorn,
the former US State Department non-proliferation Czar under the
Clinton administration. Even though the topic was Pakistan,
Ms.Sirohi reported, Einhorn wasted no time before he mentioned India
as part of the “regional problem” and said introducing nuclear
weapons to South Asia was India’s “original sin”. The best way
forward with Pakistan, Einhorn said, was to “forget the past and
look to the future.”
In
a nutshell, Mr. Einhorn illustrated the malaise afflicting US
policymakers when it comes to Pakistan. It is called bureaucratic
memory. In the 1970s and 80s, the US non-proliferation bureaucracy
came to view Pakistan’s nuclear program as “India’s
problem.” After all, if India did not pursue nukes, why would the
Pakistanis need them? Never mind that Pakistan’s nuclear program
started after their defeat in 1971 by India and was a response to
India’s conventional military superiority. The problem now
is that this idea of associating India with Pakistan’s nuclear
program and downplaying the clear and continuing Westward nuclear
proliferation pattern coming out of Pakistan is so ingrained in the
US diplomatic bureaucracy that it has become impossible to change.
If
the decision makers in the US stopped to think about it, they would
realize that the non-proliferation bureaucracy has been proven wrong
time and again when it came to Pakistan. They believed Gen.
Zia-ul-Haq’s assurances about not building a nuclear weapon in the
1980s, which proved to be a tissue of lies. As Einhorn himself
admitted, the Pakistanis assured him the 1990s to look into the Iran
dealings which we now know continued until recently. Gen.Musharraf
gave his “400%” assurance of non-proliferation to Colin Powell
after the North Korea revelations came out in 2002. We now know that
Pakistan continued to send nuclear material to Libya until late last
year. We have seen Wall Street stock analysts called to account for
their mistakes during the Dot Com disaster. We have seen US
intelligence now being called to explain its recent failures in
Iraq. Yet, the State Department South Asia Desk seems to be able to
continuously make poor decisions with impunity.
The
cliché goes – “If you sleep with snakes, you will get
bitten.” One hopes that the American people don’t get a nuclear
bite as a consequence of their government’s inexorable desire to
consort with the Pakistani snake. | 
