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Proliferation passed the United States
by
By Andrew Tully
WASHINGTON - US Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld did not wait until he returned to
Washington to reassure the world that Pakistan's
government took its nuclear weapons seriously and was
not about to use them without good reason - or share
them.
Speaking with reporters in New Delhi, India's
capital, nearly two months after the September 11,
2001, attacks on the United States and after a visit to Islamabad,
Rumsfeld said: "I do not, personally, believe that there
is a risk with respect to the nuclear weapons of
countries that have those weapons. I think those
countries are careful and respectful of the dangers that
they pose and manage their safe handling effectively."
Now it appears that Rumsfeld, and perhaps even
Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, were
fooled by Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man credited with
developing Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program.
Pakistan's government says it should have
known that, given his lavish lifestyle, Khan was selling
equipment and technical knowledge to some very
well-paying customers. The question is whether US
intelligence also blundered in letting Khan's
free-spending behavior escape notice.
Judith Kipper says it is too early
to say just what happened. Kipper studies Middle
East and Islamic issues at the Council on Foreign
Relations, a New York-based policy-research center. Kipper works
from the group's Washington offices. In an interview,
she questioned whether the United States should have been
expected to know the details of Khan's activities. But
regardless of what Washington's involvement ought to have been,
she says it is clear that Washington accepted
Islamabad's assurances that its nuclear-weapons program
was tightly guarded. "We accepted that Pakistan has a
nuclear weapon, we put them under sanctions for a long
period of time, we checked that they were keeping their
nuclear secrets and nuclear stuff safe - and apparently
that was not the case," she said.
Kipper
said she hopes the bipartisan commission investigating
the apparent intelligence failure on Iraq's suspected
weapons programs also will look into what happened
regarding Pakistan. She said its conclusions could be
far-reaching. "It really needs to be investigated," she
said, "because if we were wrong about Iraq and we were
wrong about Pakistan, what else are we wrong about?"
Anthony Cordesman expresses some
impatience with questions about possible
intelligence failures, especially regarding weapons proliferation.
Cordesman, a former intelligence analyst with the US State
and Defense departments, says intelligence can sometimes
uncover illegal weapons programs, but adds that no one
can expect it to work all the time.
Cordesman says weapons proliferation can defy not
only the trust between friendly nations such as the US and
Pakistan. Even formal international treaties, he says, are
not enough to prevent a government, or a rogue
government official, from developing banned weapons or sharing
them with third parties. "This isn't simply an
intelligence problem," he said. "The warning here is basically
that [it will be as difficult to enforce] arms-control
agreements in detail as it will be to get detailed
intelligence on every aspect of proliferation."
Cordesman says there are ways of improving
intelligence. The best way, he says, is to have reliable
agents - perhaps officials of a suspect country - on the
US intelligence payroll. According to Cordesman, this is
not always feasible. In that case, he says, Washington
can rely on technology, but that, too, can also provide
incomplete intelligence. "There are ways intelligence
can try to cope," he said. "There are new types of
sensors being developed, ranging anywhere from different
kinds of satellite-carried radar to sensors that can be
unattended and covertly placed on the ground. But the
duel at the moment favors the proliferator."
Cordesman says the best way for a
government to cope with the quirks of intelligence
gathering is to be realistic: be aware that spy agencies
only rarely get a complete understanding of something
that another government wants to hide. He says that to
believe in the vast intelligence capabilities portrayed
in popular fiction and film can only lead to
disappointment and, worse, to misinformed security
decisions.
"The real problem here is, in some
ways, the problem of coping with uncertainty and coping
with risk," he said. "You can't remove uncertainty and
risk - you can't get perfect transparency. In fact,
sometimes you see so [incompletely] that your
conclusions are going to be deeply misleading. If we
don't understand that that's as true of intelligence as
of every other aspect of human endeavor, of course we're
going to be in trouble."
Copyright 2004 RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of
Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut
Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036
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