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COMMENTARY
Pakistan and the North Korea
connection
By B Raman
In
articles written since 1998, I have been saying, on the
basis of information from reliable Pakistani sources,
that North Korea's assistance to Pakistan in the
development of its missile capability has been as a
quid pro quo for the latter's assistance to North
Korea in the development of its military nuclear
capability.
After Pakistan's nuclear weapon
tests at Chagai, near the Afghan border in May,1998, my
Pakistani sources claimed that one of the nuclear
devices tested was of North Korean origin and that North
Korean nuclear scientists were present during the
testing. As this information was not corroborated by
independent sources, I did not disseminate it.
In an article on Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) disseminated on August 1, 2001, I
reported as follows on the basis of information from the
same sources: "Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous:
Responsible for covert actions in other parts of the
world and for the clandestine procurement of nuclear and
missile technologies. Major General (retired) Sultan
Habib, an operative of this division, who had
distinguished himself in the clandestine procurement and
theft of nuclear material while posted as the defense
attache in the Pakistani embassy in Moscow from 1991 to
1993, with concurrent accreditation to the Central Asian
Republics (CARs), Poland and Czechoslovakia, has
recently been posted as ambassador to North Korea to
oversee the clandestine nuclear and missile cooperation
between North Korea and Pakistan. After completing his
tenure in Moscow, he had coordinated the clandestine
shipping of missiles from North Korea, the training of
Pakistani experts in the missile production and testing
facilities of North Korea and the training of North
Korean scientists in the nuclear establishments of
Pakistan through Captain (retired) Shafquat Cheema,
third secretary and acting head of mission in the
Pakistani embassy in North Korea from 1992 to 1996.
"Before Major General Sultan Habib's transfer to
ISI headquarters from Moscow, the North Korean missile
and nuclear cooperation project was handled by Major
General Shujjat from the Baluch Regiment, who worked in
the clandestine procurement division of the ISI for five
years. On Captain Cheema's return to headquarters in
1996, the ISI discovered that in addition to acting as
the liaison officer of the ISI with the nuclear and
missile establishments in North Korea, he was also
earning money from the Iranian and the Iraqi
intelligence by helping them in their clandestine
nuclear and missile technology and material procurement
not only from North Korea, but also from Russia and the
CARs. On coming to know of the ISI enquiry into his
clandestine assistance to Iran and Iraq, he fled to
Xinjiang and sought political asylum there, but the
Chinese arrested him and handed him over to the ISI.
What happened to him subsequently is not known. Captain
Cheema initially got into the ISI and got himself posted
to the Pakistani embassy in North Korea with the help of
Colonel (retired) Ghulam Sarwar Cheema of the PPP
(Pakistan People's Party of Benazir Bhutto)."
Subsequently, in another article titled
"Pakistan and axis of evil: Ghauri Missile" disseminated
on May 25, 2002, I had stated as follows, again based on
information from the same sources: "The firing on May
25, 2002, of a North Korean-made Nodong (II) missile,
baptized Ghauri by Pakistan in 1998 to hoodwink its own
population and the international community that the
missile was the result of research and development by
its own scientists, should be a matter of greater
concern to the Bush administration in the US and Japan
than to India because it provides one more piece of
evidence, if it was needed, of the nexus between
Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment and the
nuclear-missile establishment of North Korea, which has
been placed by President Bush in what he described in
his state of the union message of January, 2002, as the
axis of evil.
"This nexus was first established
during the second tenure of Ms Benazir Bhutto as the
prime minister (1993-96) when she made a clandestine
visit to Pyongyang and subsequently nursed by the Nawaz
Sharif government and the Musharraf regime. Pakistan was
initially paying for the missiles and spare parts partly
in kind (Pakistani, US and Australian wheat to meet
North Korea's acute food shortage in the 1990s) and
partly through supply of nuclear technology to help
North Korea in the development of its own military
nuclear capability.
"During the last three or
four years, Pakistani nuclear scientists and engineers
have been working in North Korea, and North Korean
missile experts in Pakistan. Since September, 2001, the
increased and still increasing cash flow into Pakistan
from the US, the European Union and Japan has enabled
the military regime to pay for the North Korean missiles
and related technology in hard currency.
"Since
the beginning of this year, there has been a large-scale
movement of military goods under military escort to
Pakistan from China along the Karakoram Highway. While
most of these containers were said to contain spare
parts and replacements for the Chinese arms and
ammunition and aircraft in Pakistan's arsenal, one
should not rule out the possibility that the Chinese
might have accepted the Pakistani request for the
movement of the missile-related goods from North Korea
by train and road across China and then along the
Karakoram Highway.
"This carefully-nursed
cooperation between North Korea and Pakistan could not
only help North Korea to develop a nuclear capability
which could pose a threat to the USA and Japan, but
could also make these missiles in Pakistan a tempting
target for acquisition for the dregs of the present
Afghan war from the al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the
Pakistani jihadi organizations, which have made Pakistan
the new staging ground for their anti-US and anti-West
activities.
"What Pakistan carried out on the
morning of May 25, 2002, was not a test firing of a
missile under development through indigenous efforts as
projected by Musharraf, but the demonstration firing of
a ready-to-fire missile acquired clandestinely from
Bush's axis of evil. It was meant as a demonstration of
Pakistan's self-proclaimed capability to the Pakistani
public as well as to its armed forces in order to keep
up their morale at a time when Pakistan has come under
great pressure from the international community to stop
using terrorism as a weapon against India.
"It
was also meant to refurbish Musharraf's image in the
eyes of his people at a time when his recent referendum
stands discredited due to large-scale rigging, large
sections of the political class have been questioning
the wisdom of his continuing in power at a time of
national crisis and there have been growing signs of
disquiet in the military over his erratic ways of
functioning and over his hugging desperately the post of
the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) in the hope of
thereby pre-empting any threat to him from inside the
armed forces.
"He received a jolt during the
recent referendum when more than 20 percent of the votes
cast in the military barracks were reportedly against
him, whereas only about 3 percent of the civilian votes
went against him. This would show that the support for
him in the military was not as overwhelming as he liked
to think. His colleagues and subordinates might not
express their opposition to him in public, but did not
hesitate to do so when they had an opportunity of doing
so anonymously during the referendum. Musharraf is
hoping that his action in carrying out the missile
firing would dilute, if not remove, the reservations in
their minds about him and about his determination to
resist outside pressure vis-a-vis India.
"While
India should take note of the firing, there is no reason
to be concerned. India was already aware of Musharraf's
nexus with the axis of evil and of Pakistan's possession
of the North Korean missiles under the camouflage of
indigenous missiles, and one can be certain that this
must have been factored into our thinking and planning.
This was essentially an exercise of whistling in the
dark by Musharraf. What is important is that India
should highlight to the US, Japan and other countries
the nuclear-missile nexus between Pakistan and North
Korea and the threat that this could pose to them and to
international peace and security."
Quoting from
an article carried by the New York Times on October 18,
2002, the Hindu, the prestigious daily of Chennai,
India, reported as follows on October 19, 2002: "The New
York Times cites American intelligence officials as
coming to the conclusion that Islamabad was a major
supplier for Pyongyang's nuclear weapons' program; and
that this was more of a barter deal that involved North
Korea supplying Pakistan with missiles to counter the
nuclear arsenal of India. What we have here is a perfect
meeting of interests - the North Koreans had what the
Pakistanis needed and the Pakistanis had a way for Kim
Jong-il to restart a nuclear program we had stopped, the
Times quotes an official familiar with intelligence
matters."
The American surprise at the recent
North Korean admission of its nuclear weapon program and
the role of Pakistan in assisting North Korea in the
implementation of this program would show, first, that
the US intelligence community is not as well informed as
it should be over developments in Pakistan and North
Korea; and second, that even when it gets intelligence
about Pakistan's actions either in assisting North Korea
in developing its military nuclear capability or in
assisting al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to evade
capture, the State Department and the US political
leadership, for reasons not at all clear, choose to turn
a blind eye to it.
As I have been reporting
repeatedly, Omar Sheikh, presently under detention in
connection with the kidnapping and murder of Daniel
Pearl, the US journalist, told the Karachi police during
his interrogation that during one of his visits to
Kandahar in Afghanistan last year he had come to know of
the plans of al-Qaeda to launch the terrorist strikes of
September 11 against the US and had mentioned this to
Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, the present director
general of the ISI, who was then Corps Commander,
Peshawar. President General Pervez Musharraf and Ehsan
ul-Haq are very close personal friends. It is,
therefore, inconceivable that Haq would not have
mentioned this to Musharraf. Why did Haq and Musharraf
keep silent on the information and did not immediately
warn the US about it?
Nobody in the US seems to
have gone into it just as they had not gone deeper into
Pakistan's nuclear assistance to North Korea. For how
long is the US going to choose to close its eyes to
Pakistan's perfidies and at what cost to innocent
American lives and interests?
B Raman
is Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat,
Government of India, and presently director, Institute
For Topical Studies, Chennai; member of the National
Security Advisory Board of the Government of India.
E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the
counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
(©2002 Asia Times
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