The endgame target: a weak nuclear defanged Pakistan
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Shireen M Mazari
First, a brief comment on the Obama address, since much has already been written about it. Certainly, for a US president, the address was a major shift in approach but it was sad to see how he referred to the 3,000 plus innocent victims of 9/11, but not a word about the well over one million Muslim deaths as a result of the Bush-launched retaliatory war stretching from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nor was Obama willing to concede that the 9/11 attackers were Saudis and not from this part of the world. It was also sad to see rhetoric accepting that force would not resolve Pakistan's problems but the reality of continuing use of force through drones.
The one major positive substantive policy shift – beyond mere rhetoric – was the reaching out to Iran for talks without preconditions. This should be an eye-opener for the servile past and present leadership of this nation – Iran stood by its nationalist posture and brought the US to where it wanted: a dialogue amongst two sovereign powers. On the Middle East one has to wait and see what actually happens on the ground since Obama also seemed unwilling to accept the electoral success of Hamas – which led him to state the bizarre claim that Hamas has "some support amongst the Palestinians!"
But there is little positive for Pakistan that one can expect from the US even under Obama. But then when we have a continuing compliant leadership willing to do all that the US bids, why should Obama adopt a healthier and more positive approach to Pakistan? The sight of the president and a mere ambassador, Holbrooke, standing side by side at a press conference really said it all. International beggars and grovellers – our leaders have stripped us of all national dignity. The cowardice of our leadership was exposed by Holbrooke when he revealed that the Pakistani leadership had not taken up the drone issue with the US leadership at all. It is in this context, that many of us are concerned over the chief justice's meeting with Holbrooke – now held on what can only be termed as terrible advice from the Foreign Office. Was it a deliberate ploy by the government to adversely impact the public perception of the chief justice? Was it simply coincidental that this meeting was advised by the government when the chief justice had made a reference to the NRO?
Meanwhile, with an unabated spread of violence across the country, and the renewed negative focus on our nuclear assets, we need to continue to connect the dots and realise the serious targeting of these assets and of those who will in the final analysis ensure their safety. Coincidences are becoming the hallmark of so many developments across the national spectrum, that there is also a need to see whether there is a deliberateness involved or are the timings truly coincidental. For instance, is it a mere coincidence that the ethnic battle is going on unabated in Karachi just when the nation is focused on the now-widening military action from Swat to FATA? Is this part of the overall plan to keep all parts of the country ignited so that the instability paradigm being plugged by the US and our other foreign detractors continues to sound credible and prepares the ground for taking control of our nuclear assets?
As for the military operation, it is becoming ever more evident that this may be open-ended since there is still no overarching political strategy for the post-military scenario. One sees no effort to build the civil capacity for taking over from the military. It appears as if the civil government has simply handed over all responsibility to the military and has gone into a state of mental paralysis instead of ensuring that local governance and security capacity is created within the civil administration.
Is it a mere coincidence that our military is being propelled into endless operations within the country at a time when India has begun a campaign against the Pakistan army? According to a Times of India report (May 16), Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told Obama that some of Pakistan's nuclear sites are already in 'radical' hands! Reaching out to anti-nuclear lobbies in countries like Japan, Indian analysts like Brahma Chellaney (closely linked to the Indian establishment) have begun a campaign declaring that it is Pakistan's 'military insiders' who are a threat to the country's nuclear assets. Probably basing his erroneous assumption on the fact that the Indian military has become increasingly Hindutva-oriented, he asserts that the Pakistan army has been infiltrated by a jihadist culture and both "Islamists (Jehadi, Islam, Islamists – all these terms are randomly used interchangeably by Chellaney) and US-sponsored generals" are labelled as threats to international peace and security. This theme is played out to its ridiculous conclusion that the US must take over Pakistan's nukes!
Chellaney is just one of a handful of Indian and US analysts who periodically revive the campaign against Pakistan's nuclear weapons. The leader of the pack is David Albright whose histrionics against Pakistan have become so absurd that Peter Lee, a businessman who has been writing on Asian affairs for over thirty years, felt compelled to write an article entitled, "The world does not have a Pakistan nukes problem -- it has a David Albright problem" – the title says it all. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter not only exposed Albright's claims to being a UN weapons inspector in an article "The nuclear expert who never was", he also pointed out that "Albright has a track record of making half-baked analyses derived from questionable sources seem mainstream. He breathes false legitimacy into these factually-challenged stories by cloaking himself in a resume that is disingenuous." Incidentally it was Scott Ritter who also wrote that Holbrooke was the wrong man for the job when Holbrooke was appointed as special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan and many of his arguments are now becoming more evident.
While one expects external detractors to play the anti-Pakistan nuke game, is it a mere coincidence that some of our local papers have suddenly become full of locally written articles full of forebodings regarding our nukes? Is it a mere coincidence that one of the leading native critics of our nuclear weapons, a physicist, has simultaneously appeared in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists alongside physicist Albright for some years now? There is a two-pronged strategy that is now becoming obvious in relation to Pakistan's nukes: externally the drummed-up scare over our command and control – despite the fact that it is the US that has revealed the disarray of its own command and control – and internally using local critics of Pakistan's nuclear weapons to sow doubts regarding the relevancy of atomic weapons (although if this was the case why the US is pursuing a programme for mini-nukes, etc) and to create a falsehood that such a capability is a liability for Pakistan.
Why is there such renewed attention on our nukes? It would appear that we have moved beyond India in certain critical developments. We already had the uranium enrichment advantage (India's was a plutonium-based weapon); now we have managed the plutonium-based skills also. Our delivery systems have moved from trial tests to training tests, and second strike capability is on the horizon also.
No wonder our foreign detractors are desperate to gain access at all costs. A new, third prong has been added to their strategy – the floating of trial balloons of offers of civil nuclear assistance kept deliberately vague to see how much access can be gained through non-US sources that may have more credibility in the country. The talk of French nuclear assistance is part of this game – we had begun to reach out to France during the India-US nuclear deal negotiations; now Sarkozy, a close ally of the US, has moved on this front and there is a deliberate ambivalence that is still being maintained. A story was also leaked of a US offer of civil nuclear assistance – but insiders have denied this.
This is a dangerous game that is being played with Pakistan. Of course, if our leaders had the gumption, they would insist that our new impending safeguards agreements with the IAEA should only be on the Indian model. Our leaders should ask France and the US to support us in our move to demand that the IAEA give us the same country-specific safeguards agreement given to India for civilian facilities. Otherwise, all offers on nuclear cooperation are suspect and should be refuted – but that requires a major shift in our rulers' prevailing subservient mind set.
