Pakistan's forgotten al-Qaeda nuclear
link By Kaushik
Kapisthalam
Novelists Dominique Lapierre and
Larry Collins, authors of such bestsellers as City of
Joy and Is Paris
burning?, have just written a
new novel titled Is New York Burning? whose plot involves
al-Qaeda members, with help from a Pakistan army
major, successfully smuggling a Pakistani nuclear device
into New York and then using it to try to blackmail the
United States into stopping support for Israel.
The Pakistani jihadi group that plays a
big part in the plot is called Lashkar-e-Tibi.
Even fiction writers have now started connecting the
dots linking Pakistan's nuclear establishment, its home-grown
jihad groups and the possibility of an al-Qaeda nuclear
attack overseas. But US authorities seem curiously blase
about this threat and still appear to be content with
the old shibboleths about the "inviolability" of
Pakistan's nuclear program.
The ones who met
Osama bin Laden In late 2001,
US officials investigating the activities of Osama
bin Laden discovered that the al-Qaeda head had
contacted some Pakistani nuclear experts for assistance in
making a small nuclear device. US officials sought
two veteran Pakistani nuclear scientists in particular,
Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid, for
interrogation. The two admitted working in Afghanistan in recent
years, but said they had only been providing "charitable
assistance" to Afghans.
Mahmood was no low-level
scientist. He was one of Pakistan's foremost experts in
the secret effort to produce plutonium for atomic
weapons. In 1999 he publicly said that Pakistan should
help other Islamic nations build nuclear weapons. He
also made some public statements in support of the
Taliban movement. After more interrogation, both Mahmood
and Majid admitted that they had met with bin Laden and his
deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri during their visits to
Afghanistan and held long "theoretical" discussions on
nuclear weapons.
Then the trail went cold. After
months in Pakistani custody, both Mahmood and Majid were
quietly released. Fearing that Mahmood's charity
organization, Ummah Tameer e-Nau, could be a front for
al-Qaeda, the US government placed the entity in its
terrorist list and designated Mahmood himself "a global
terrorist". Pakistan's government never put the two
scientists on trial, and they are free men today.
The ones who got away In
December 2001, the New York Times reported that while
US authorities were investigating Mahmood and Majid,
they found some links between al-Qaeda and two
other Pakistani nuclear scientists, Suleiman Asad and
Muhammed Ali Mukhtar. Both Asad and Mukhtar had long
experience at two of Pakistan's most secret nuclear-weapons-related
installations. However, before US investigators could
reach them, Pakistan sent the two scientists to Myanmar
on an unspecified "research project".
The
New York Times also quoted Pakistani officials as
saying that President General Pervez Musharraf
personally telephoned one of Myanmar's military rulers
to ask him to provide temporary asylum for the two
nuclear specialists. In January 2002, the Wall Street
Journal reported that Asad and Mukhtar were possibly
aiding Myanmar's efforts to build a 10-megawatt nuclear
"research reactor". Asad and Mukhtar are still in
Myanmar, well away from US reach.
The
Lashkar-Nuke link Lashkar-e-Taiba
(LeT) is a terrorist group based in
Muridke, Pakistan. Although founded by the chief promoter of the
Afghan jihad and bin Laden mentor, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam,
LeT claims ousting India from Kashmir as its main goal.
But experts say LeT shared training camps with al-Qaeda
and that many al-Qaeda-linked Afghan-Arabs have been
found fighting for LeT in Indian-administered Kashmir. The
LeT fought on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan as
well.
An Australian named David Hicks,
who was picked up by coalition forces in Afghanistan and
who is now in Guantanomo prison in Cuba, was trained
by LeT. LeT has also provided training for jihadis from
Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Chechnya. In December
2001, the US banned LeT after it was implicated in a
terrorist attack on India's parliament. Pakistan
subsequently banned LeT in January 2002, but allowed it
to operate under a new name - Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Prior to
being banned, LeT used to hold massive annual conclaves in
Pakistan, preaching jihad against India, Israel and
the United States. Today, it is widely believed that
LeT is operating as a global al-Qaeda "franchisee", even
though it is still active in Indian Kashmir.
In
a sensational claim, French journalist and author
Bernard Henri-Levy stated that Pakistan's disgraced
"father" of the nuclear bomb, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, was
in fact a member of LeT. What is definite is that Khan
did attend the last openly held LeT moot, in April 2001,
as an honored guest. Accompanying Khan on the dais was
none other than Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the
plutonium expert who met bin Laden. According to the
South Asia Analysis Group, bin Laden himself was known
to address LeT annual meets over the phone for many
years, even when he was hiding in Afghanistan and Sudan.
Despite being banned, the Pakistani media
have frequently reported that LeT has openly collected
funds under its new name. Pakistani authorities have
allowed LeT's leader or "emir", Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, to barnstorm
Pakistan, calling for jihad against the United
States, in particular. In the recent past, Saeed has stated
in his public meetings and rallies that Pakistan's
nuclear weapons should be used to benefit all Islamic
nations and that Pakistan must share its nukes with such nations as
Iran and Saudi Arabia. More alarming, in a 2002
statement Saeed released to the LeT website, he claimed
that people loyal to his organization "control two
nuclear missiles". He is claimed to have said that the
two missiles with warheads would be used against
"enemies of Islam".
In 2002, top al-Qaeda
leader Abu Zubaida was arrested from a LeT safe house
in Faisalabad, Pakistan. Pakistani officials did
not, however, arrest LeT leader Hameedullah Khan Niazi,
who had housed Zubaida. In late 2003, the brother
of Indonesian terrorist Hambali and many of his
Indonesian and Malaysian associates were also arrested from
a LeT-owned seminary in Karachi.
In what is
now known in the United States as the
"Virginia Jihad" conspiracy, nine terrorist suspects
were recently arrested from Maryland, Virginia and
Pennsylvania. The men were later convicted on
terrorism-related charges. As per the indictment, all
were members of LeT and trained in LeT camps in
Pakistan.
Last October, a French-born
terrorist named Willie Brigitte was arrested in connection
with his actions in Australia. Brigitte admitted to be a
member of LeT. Australian police later arrested a Pakistani
architect - Faheem Lodhi, who was also a member of LeT,
and was supposedly Brigitte's co-conspirator in a plot to
conduct a major terrorist attack in Australia. Reports
indicate that Lodhi's and Brigitte's target was
supposedly the electrical grid. Other targets considered
included the Lucas Heights nuclear research center
outside Sydney and various military facilities and natural-gas
pipelines. It is also known that both Lodhi and
Brigitte received funds and took orders from a mid-to-high-level LeT member
in Pakistan named Sheikh Sajid. More alarming,
Brigitte told interrogators that he had personally seen a
Chechen chemical-weapons expert named Abu Salah experiment with
chemical weapons in an LeT camp in Pakistan.
Why the Pakistan threat is
real Despite all
the ominous-sounding facts mentioned above, some readers might
wonder whether the Pakistan nuclear-terrorism threat is a credible
one. Indeed, some analysts do feel that the idea
of Pakistan's nuclear warheads falling into the hands
of terrorist groups such as LeT is an exaggeration. After all,
it is widely believed that Pakistan's nuclear weapons
are under the secure safekeeping of the nation's army,
the only institution in Pakistan that is supposedly free
of al-Qaeda influence. But is that really so?
Just recently, Musharraf
revealed that some "junior" Pakistani army and air
force officers had colluded with al-Qaeda terrorists in the
two attempts on his life last December. The Pakistani newspaper
the Daily Times revealed that the "junior officers"
referred to by Musharraf may include an army captain,
three majors, a lieutenant-colonel and a colonel. This
is extremely significant. While many retired
Pakistani generals and intelligence chiefs have openly
associated with groups such as al-Qaeda, their actions have been
glossed over because they weren't in active service. But
when we know that serving Pakistani military officers
have been conducting joint operations with al-Qaeda, the
possibility of a Pakistani nuclear device falling into
the hands of al-Qaeda appears more credible.
Even if al-Qaeda
never gets hold of a Pakistani
nuclear warhead, thanks to US technical safeguards, the
possibility of it building a Pakistani-designed
radiation dispersal device or a "dirty bomb" looks
plausible. A recent analysis by US nuclear experts
David Albright and Holly Higgins found strong
evidence that Pakistani nuclear scientists Sultan Mahmood
and Abdul Majid "provided significant assistance to
al-Qaeda's efforts to make radiation dispersal devices".
Therein lies the most overlooked Pakistani threat - the
knowledge in the heads of nuclear experts sympathetic
to the jihad movement, and jihadi groups with
weapons-of-mass-destruction ambitions such as LeT operating secure facilities and
training camps in Pakistan with only the most minimal of
restraints.
Assuming that the US might be
secretly monitoring Pakistani nuclear fuel and weapons
sites, such actions would not be enough to prevent, for
instance, radioactive materials stolen from the former
Soviet Union by Chechen LeT members and delivered to Pakistan,
packaged into a dirty bomb designed by a Pakistani
nuclear scientist (or an improvised nuclear device based
on a Pakistani warhead design) in an LeT compound and
delivered by a Pakistani-trained Western citizen taking
orders from a handler in Karachi or Lahore.
For those who are skeptical of such a scenario
it is worthwhile to recall that there have been
reports of every one of its individual elements over the
past three years, including the smuggling of
radioactive and fissile material in to the region. This March,
Tajik authorities arrested a man with a small
quantity of plutonium that he allegedly planned to sell
in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistan remains the
single most important country of focus in preventing an
attack using a dirty bomb or even an improvised nuclear
device.
Even
before September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda had
been interested in launching suicide attacks on nuclear
reactors, turning them in effect into huge dirty bombs.
For instance, in a 2002 interview with alJazeera
reporter Yosri Fouda at a secret location in Karachi,
September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his
associate Ramzi bin al-Shibh claimed that the September
11 attacks were originally going to target nuclear
reactors, but they "decided against it for fear it would
go out of control". Scientists and engineers from
Pakistan's nuclear program could provide essential
advice that could make the difference between success
and failure. For instance, Sultan Mahmood, who played an
important role in the construction of Pakistan's Khushab
nuclear reactor, could have given specific tips to
terrorists on how to breach nuclear reactors.
Unlearning the lessons of September 11
This summer is slated to be a period of high tension
for the West, the United States in particular, with
multiple threats of terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda
and its affiliates, according to US officials. As horrific
as the September 11 attacks on the US were, many terrorism
experts have been warning that the next al-Qaeda attacks
could be much worse. Even as the US struggles to deal with
the aftermath of a war to remove Saddam Hussein from
Iraq, where the threat from weapons of mass destruction
was highly ambiguous, it appears that US policymakers
are unresponsive to a more alarming threat from
Pakistan.
Kaushik Kapisthalam is a
freelance journalist based in the United States.
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