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COMMENTARY
February 7, 2004
Pakistan's bombs
We now have a pretty clear idea how Iran North Korea and Libya became or have been in course of becoming nuclear powers; and how several other Islamic countries such as Malaysia became involved in the remunerative trade in parts and technical knowledge. We know this because the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme Abdul Qadeer Khan has confessed -- officially on his own behalf only in return for a quick pardon from President Pervez Musharraf but really on behalf of the whole Pakistani nuclear research establishment and senior military and the Inter-Services Intelligence agency all of them deeply infiltrated by persons who share a militant "Islamist" ideology. The most interesting questions were not answered in Dr. Khan's theatrical confession on Pakistani television. We may assume he and his colleagues have already provided much greater detail -- and about many more countries -- away from the cameras. But his public remarks were directly useful to the U.S. diplomatic effort against Iran and North Korea especially. (Libya having already effectively capitulated to demands to disarm.) One would have to be na?ve to take Gen. Musharraf's official refusal to part with documentation to international investigators at face value. (He says it 's a question of national sovereignty and dignity an argument no one else but the Saudis can try at least with the Bush administration.) The general who prior to seizing power in Islamabad was part of the same circle that yielded Dr. Khan could easily incriminate himself. For the purpose of keeping the external world at bay he has persuaded Dr. Khan to take the fall; and the West agrees to go along with this ridiculous imposture on the condition that Gen. Musharraf continues to supply the same documentation under the table. But in Pakistan itself it is harder to get people to play along with this script. The Islamist opposition parties have set up a hue and cry about the humiliation of Dr. Khan whom they had built up as a national hero. And their leaders are playing the clever political game of demanding that charges made against him be taken to court. For how can the President pardon someone who was never formally charged? No one could envy the fate of "the Mush". His domestic position never ceases to deteriorate but then neither does his foreign position. For George Tenet (the CIA chief who is not himself enjoying much comfort lately) is now compelled for U.S. domestic political reasons to boast of everything the CIA had on Pakistan that contributed to putting pressure on Gen. Musharraf. They "pieced together the picture of the network revealing its subsidiaries its scientists its front companies its agents its finances and manufacturing plants on three continents. Our spies penetrated the network through a series of daring operations over several years." This strikes me as an uncheckable exaggeration. I would myself be more likely to believe that a few windfall discoveries in the course of American action in Afghanistan and elsewhere put them in a position to ask devastating questions. And as I have written before I think much of the credit should go where the American right is least likely to bestow it -- on Colin Powell's ability to intimidate foreign leaders in private. (His very position as "Jeff" in the Bush administration's international Mutt-and-Jeff act gives him extraordinary powers of persuasion.) Malaysia has been exposed as a middleman for parts but (so far unnamed) companies in Japan Germany and South Africa are now known to have been feeding the underground nuclear trade. These made components ostensibly for innocent industrial purposes which just happened to be useful in the construction of e.g. gas centrifuges to enrich uranium for atomic bomb-making. The very prices they were asking helped give their show away. If the purpose of public and media second-guessing of allied intelligence is to improve the prosecution of the war on terror (which it frankly isn't for most on the left) there is now too much pressure being applied on the CIA and through them on Pakistan. There is also too little appreciation of what e.g. the military historian John Keegan has been stressing in his recent journalism. Reliable intelligence has rarely been available to any power in the world's history. It is by messing in with sheer brute force that one soon finds what is going on. And this is the Bush administration's greatest success: messing in. They have not waited for an American or European city to go up in radioactive smoke before doing something. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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