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India's US-Pakistan suspicions
deepen
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - Two facts emerged in the
space of a few days last week that have made
India deeply suspicious of Washington's intentions
in the region. One, US secretary of
state-designate Condoleezza Rice told senators that the
administration of President George W Bush has a
"contingency plan" to prevent "Islamic
fundamentalists" from getting access to Pakistan's
nuclear weapons if "something happened" to
Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf and
they succeeded in capturing power.
India
had hardly finished munching on this revelation's
mind-boggling implications for regional stability
when another fact emerged. Award-winning
journalist Seymour Hersh claimed in a New Yorker
article, the substance of which was not refuted by
Washington, that Musharraf is fully cooperating
with the United States in penetrating Iranian soil
and looking for sensitive nuclear-related sites
with the help of highly sophisticated devices, so
that at an appropriate time these can be destroyed
by pinpoint air and missile attacks and
deep-penetration commando strikes.
Hersh claimed that a US commando task force
in South Asia is already working closely with a
group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with
their Iranian counterparts earlier. This task
force, aided by information from Pakistan, has
been penetrating eastern Iran in a hunt for
underground nuclear-weapons installations. In
exchange for this cooperation, an intelligence
official told Hersh, Musharraf has received
assurances that his government will not have to
turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of
Pakistan's atomic bomb, to face questioning over
his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya
and North Korea.
India understood perhaps
more than any other country the magnitude of
danger to which all this exposes the Pakistani
president. Handing over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal
to the US, as Rice's statement in a formal
confirmation hearing implied, is certainly not
going to increase Musharraf's popularity rating
either in the country at large or in the military
he heads. Several army officers are even now
facing trials in cases relating to two recent
assassination attempts on the life of the
Pakistani president in which he barely survived.
It is an open secret that several Pashtoon
officers in the Pakistan army are deeply unhappy
with the president owing to his incursions into
the Pashtoon-populated Waziristan areas of the
North-West Frontier Province in a bid to find
al-Qaeda leaders at the United States' behest.
This had never happened before, not even when the
region was under British control. Pashtoons have
the second-largest presence in the Pakistani
military after the Punjabis. Several hundred
Pakistani soldiers died battling their own people
in the area without achieving any appreciable
success. Top al-Qaeda leadership, likely hiding in
the area, continues to remain intact, forcing the
US recently to double the bounty on Osama bin
Laden's head.
The impact of Musharraf's
involvement in US Special Forces penetration in
Iran is going to be even more devastating. This
would particularly outrage the influential Shi'ite
population in Pakistan. Though a minority of just
about 20% in the country, the Shi'ites are
influential in the Pakistani military, particularly
in the air force. Many believe that Shi'ite air
force officers had a hand in the assassination -
though officially declared an accidental
helicopter crash - of former president General
Zia-ul-Haq. Shi'ites were angry with him for the
repression he had unleashed on the Shi'ites in the
Northern Areas of Pakistan. The army commando
officer who had actually led the repression was
none other than then-brigadier and now general and
president Pervez Musharraf. Clearly no love is
lost between the Shi'ite officers and Musharraf.
How the present revelations regarding US
penetration into Iran with his help will affect
them can hardly be in much doubt.
Already
marked for assassination by Islamic extremists,
with help from elements in the army he heads, why
would Musharraf put his neck even further on the
chopping block? What has the ever-generous US
offered him now? Can this be best explained by
what veteran Indian columnist Inder Malhotra calls
America's "mammoth munificence" toward Pakistan?
Or is there more to it than meets the eye?
Clearly, as a major regional power, India
cannot remain indifferent to what Malhotra called
"these dangerous goings on". But what exactly are
India's worries? It might not be such a bad thing
after all, some strategists feel, if the US
rather than Muslim extremists control Pakistan's
nuclear arsenal in the event "something happens"
to President Musharraf. Opposition Islamist leader
Maulana Fazlul Rehman, the redoubtable mentor of
the Taliban, does indeed remain a serious
candidate for the position of prime minister in
the present political configuration of the
National Assembly.
But
what would be the point
of the US providing Pakistan with credible delivery
systems, such as F-16s, for its nuclear
bombs, particularly if it is worried about
something happening to its best bet in the
country? India has been told that the decision to
supply F-16s to military-ruled, Islamist Pakistan
cannot be reversed. US officials are reported to
have told their Indian counterparts that the
number of F-16s supplied to Pakistan could be as
high as 70, and not 18 as was previously expected.
And this in the face of long-standing objections
from India, a strategic US ally and a natural
partner as the biggest secular democracy on Earth.
And also this decision has been made at a time
when Musharraf, as a former high-level Pakistani
diplomat told Seymour Hersh, has authorized the
expansion of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons arsenal.
India has not forgotten that last
year Musharraf became the first and so far only
South Asian leader to be welcomed at Camp David in
the United States. Even the person hailed then as
a statesman, former Indian prime minister
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was not offered this honor.
President Bush announced a US$3 billion package of
military and economic aid to Pakistan, the first
installment of which has already been sanctioned
by the US Congress. Not long afterward, Pakistan
was given the status of a major non-North Atlantic
Treaty Organization ally, making it eligible for
more military assistance.
So what is
the real extent of US largess to Pakistan
since September 11, 2001? US-based Indian
analyst Kaushik Kapisthalam recently came out with a
study being widely quoted in the Indian media.
According to him, the US provided Pakistan with $600
million in emergency assistance to save Islamabad from
defaulting on repayment of foreign loans. This was
followed by the writing off of $1.5 billion of
Pakistani debt, pressure on the International
Monetary Fund to pay more than $1.5 billion for
poverty reduction, pressure on Western donors for
rescheduling the bulk of Pakistan's $38 billion
external debt, and annual economic assistance of
$500 million to $700 million.
Pakistan
received a total of more than $1.1 billion in
military and economic assistance in 2002 alone. It
also received $1.32 billion in military assistance
between January 2003 and September 2004.
Meanwhile, the United States pays Pakistan $100
million every month for using military bases and
facilities on Pakistani territory.
Another and even more suspicious aspect of
US behavior toward Pakistan is what strategic
analyst G Parthasarathi, a former Indian
high commissioner to Pakistan, calls "an astonishing
measure of American forbearance in dealing with
a Pakistani terrorist involved in kidnapping
American tourists in India, killing an American
journalist in Karachi, the [September 11] attacks on New
York and Washington and the attack on our
parliament". Parthasarathi is referring to Omar
Sheikh Mohammad, who was released from an Indian
jail in Kashmir along with two other prominent
terrorists and escorted to Kabul by then Indian
external affairs minister Jaswant Singh as a deal
to save the lives of the passengers of Indian
Airlines flight IC814 that had been hijacked from
Kathmandu and taken to Kabul. Sheikh was later
arrested for his involvement in the murder of
American journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi and
sentenced to death.
Parthasarathi
documents the instances of US forbearance toward
this terrorist. Even though sentences of
anti-terrorism courts in Pakistan are
expeditiously confirmed and implemented, he says,
Sheikh's appeal still lies pending. Eyebrows were
raised when Sheikh surrendered to an
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) official,
Brigadier Ejaz Shah, in Lahore and not to the
police. Shah was known to be a protege of generals
Musharraf and Aziz Khan.
Shah's subsequent
nomination as high commissioner to Australia was
rejected by the Australian government. He is now
Pakistan's ambassador to Indonesia. What is
interesting to note is that ambassadorial
appointments are normally given in Pakistan to
retired generals and not low-ranking ISI
brigadiers.
It has now been reported by
a respected Lahore-based Pakistani journalist,
Amir Mir, continues Parthasarathi, that during
his interrogation by US and Pakistani
investigators, Sheikh revealed that he had been on
the payroll of the Pakistani ISI and that the
terrorist attacks on the Kashmir State Assembly
building in October 2001 and the Indian parliament
in December 2001 had the backing of the ISI.
Amir Mir has also confirmed that
Sheikh transferred a sum of $100,000 that had
been provided to him by then ISI chief General
Mahmood Ahmed to Mohammad Atta - the leader of
the hijackers involved in the September 11
terrorist attacks. He also alleges that the United
States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
believes that Omar met Atta during one of his visits
to Kandahar and knew of his plans for the
September 11 terrorist strikes. On October 9, 2001,
the Pakistani daily Dawn reported that the
ISI director general, Lieutenant-General Mahmoud
Ahmed, was fired after FBI investigators
established a link between him and a $100,000 wire
transfer to Atta in the summer of 2000. This
report was also carried by the Wall Street
Journal. Parthasarathi's comment: "There does
appear to be a conspiracy of silence on this
score, because Syed Omar Sheikh is evidently a man
who knows too much and can embarrass both the
Musharraf dispensation and the Bush
administration."
Meanwhile, Indian
suspicions at these intriguing developments
between Pakistan and the US are continuing to
deepen. What exactly is Washington's game in South
Asia? What used to be muted speculation confined
to living rooms in Delhi is now being articulated.
To the question of why Musharraf is putting his
life on line for the sake of the US in such a
blatant fashion, for instance, Malhotra answers:
"The obvious answer is that Musharraf expects to
extract from the US a far higher price than he has
received so far. What can that price be? This,
dear Watson, is elementary. For a man who hopes to
go down in history as the leader who achieved
Pakistan's objectives in Kashmir, he needs
America's powerful support for an Indo-Pakistani
agreement on Kashmir that 'does justice to
Pakistan'. War can never attain this result, and
what has been lost on the battlefield cannot be
won back at the conference table."
India has been agonizing over the real
nature of US-Pakistan relations for
years. After September 11, New Delhi expected Washington
to come down hard on Pakistan, known to be a hub
of Islamic extremism and terrorism in the
region. Instead, the US came to the rescue of what
was then a clearly failing state under a
blatant military dictatorship. Even after facts
of Pakistani intelligence's involvement in
September 11 came to light, the US has been not
only forgiving but supportive to an
extraordinary degree. As a result, Indian strategists are
now finding it difficult to counter
conspiracy theorists who continue to claim that the "war
on terrorism" is mere shadow-boxing and that
September 11 had been organized by Islamabad with
the help of al-Qaeda at US behest after the
neo-conservatives ruling the US needed a pretext
for fulfilling their imperialist agenda. There
used to be few takers for such wild imaginings in
India; but apparently things are changing. There
are too many discrepancies and inconsistencies in
official US claims that even the most incredible
conspiratorial claims are beginning to gain
credence.
Sultan Shahin
is a New Delhi-based writer.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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