Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [118]
The extent of US pressure on Pakistan over the nuclear proliferation issue has been modified by two facts well known to US intelligence. The first is that A. Q. Khan is not an Islamist, but a secular Pakistani nationalist. His wife is of Dutch – South African origin. There is no evidence at all of any links between him and Al Qaeda or other terrorist organization.
The second fact is that, while A. Q. Khan certainly profited personally from some of his deals, at no stage was he a truly ‘rogue’ element. Rather, as my military acquaintance quoted above told me, every Pakistani president and chief of the army staff knew in broad outline what A. Q. Khan was doing. They might not necessarily have approved in detail – but then again, they took good care not to find out in detail. ‘He had been told, “get us a bomb at all costs”, and that is what he did.’
As far as US intelligence is concerned, this means that, on the one hand, they cannot really pursue A. Q. Khan for fear of unravelling their relationship with the entire Pakistani military and political establishment. On the other hand, the fact that this establishment was always ultimately in charge means that US fears concerning potential terrorist access to Khan’s network are less than the Western media have sometimes suggested. As a result, the private US line to Pakistan on nuclear links to ‘rogue states’, in the off-the-record words of a US official, has been ‘We know what you did and we will let you off this time. But don’t do it again. Since 9/11, everything has changed. If you do it again, we will have no choice but to hit you very hard.’
The most worrying aspect by far of the A. Q. Khan network concerns not the network as such, or the proliferation to Iran and North Korea (which are also not about to commit suicide), but the links to Al Qaeda before 9/11 of two Pakistani nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudhry Abdul Majeed. Neither of these men was part of the A. Q. Khan network or concerned with the weapons programme as such, and it would be impossible for people like this to produce a nuclear bomb. If, however, terrorist sympathizers in the nuclear structures could get their hands on radioactive materials, what such figures could do is help terrorists to produce a so-called ‘dirty bomb’. This is the greatest fear of US diplomats, as revealed by WikiLeaks.
It is certain that if there ever seemed a serious chance that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were going to fall into the hands of Islamist radicals, the US would launch some kind of strike to capture or disable them. Barring a split in the army and the collapse of the Pakistani state, such a danger is in fact minimal. There is no chance at all of the Pakistani military giving them to terrorists. The Pakistani army exists to defend Pakistan. That is its raison d’être. A move which would ensure Pakistan’s destruction for no strategic gain would contradict everything the military stands for. Moreover, these weapons are Pakistan’s greatest military asset. ‘We are not going to cut off our own crown jewels and give them to terrorists,’ an officer told me.
Nor is there any chance – once again, unless the state and army had already collapsed – of terrorists somehow seizing the weapons, which are the most heavily defended objects in Pakistan, and protected by picked men carefully screened to eliminate extremist sympathizers of any kind. The weapons are not on hair-trigger alert, and a majority may well be disassembled at any given time. According to a report of 2007 by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London:
A robust command and control system is now in place to protect Pakistan’s nuclear assets from diversion, theft and accidental misuse. For the most part, these measures have been transparent and have worked well. Indeed, Pakistan’s openness in explaining its command and control