Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [117]
From 1989 and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, it is untrue to say that the US was indifferent to Pakistan’s nuclear programme. After a ten-year interval brought about by Pakistan’s help to the US in combating the Soviet occupation, the US administration permitted the re-imposition of the terms of the Pressler Amendment, mandating sanctions against countries which could not certify that they were in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
These sanctions were imposed on both India and Pakistan, but hurt Pakistan very much more, given its smaller size and more vulnerable economy. Indeed, the imposition of these sanctions is one of the chief Pakistani arguments concerning America’s ‘betrayal’ of Pakistan once the Soviet withdrawal diminished Pakistan’s apparent strategic importance to the US.
Fear of India has always been the driving force behind Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Rhetoric of an ‘Islamic bomb’ reflects pride in Pakistan’s role (in this if nothing else) as the leading country of the Muslim world, and has also been used when dealing with other Muslim countries over nuclear issues. According to every Pakistani soldier and official with whom I have spoken, though, it reflects neither the core motive nor the strategic intention behind Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent. As a senior retired general told me,
Look, we knew from the mid-60s that India was seeking the bomb. Given that, any Pakistani who did not want to get the bomb too would have been either a complete fool or a traitor. We needed the bomb at all costs for exactly the same reason NATO needed the bomb in the Cold War, faced with overwhelming Russian tank forces threatening you in Europe. So how can you criticize us?
Part of the problem in South Asia, first in trying to prevent a nuclear arms race and then in managing it, has always been that, unlike in the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, this was never a straight two-way competition. Rather, ever since the Sino-Indian war of 1962, and the first Chinese nuclear test at Lop Nur in 1964, India has been largely motivated by rivalry with China – a rivalry that combines strategic and emotional elements. India’s desire to achieve a balance with China makes it impossible to devise an agreed balance between India and Pakistan – unless of course China were to extend a nuclear shield to Pakistan.
As early as 1965, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told a Western journalist that if India were to acquire a nuclear bomb, ‘then we should have to eat grass and get one, or buy one of our own!’ As prime minister after 1971, Bhutto was instrumental in getting Pakistan’s nuclear programme off the ground – a programme which naturally gathered momentum immensely after India carried out its ‘Smiling Buddha’ nuclear tests in 1974.
Bhutto also began the co-operation with Libya on nuclear development that continued through the 1980s and ’90s until Libya revealed and abandoned its programme as part of its effort for reconciliation with the US after 2001. Secret dealings with Libya, North Korea and Iran were greatly extended under the direction of Dr A. Q. Khan, a metallurgist working in Holland’s nuclear industry who returned to Pakistan in 1976 with information stolen from his then employers.
A. Q. Khan has been well described by Shuja Nawaz as ‘part brilliant and hard-working scientist, part patriot, and partly self-serving, publicityseeking egomaniac’.30 The success of his publicity campaign has indeed been such as to make it very difficult to assess his real importance to the development of Pakistan’s bomb. Where he was clearly of critical importance was in acquiring essential technology, expertise and material from abroad, as part of barter with states dubbed ‘rogues’ by Washington. Since 9/11, these links have naturally attracted immense interest