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Where terror and the
bomb could meet
By Amir
Mir
Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf's June 25-26 unscheduled trip to Saudi
Arabia has raised many an eyebrow in Islamabad's
diplomatic circles, where it is believed the visit
was meant to seek the assistance of the kingdom to
circumvent the ongoing International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) investigations into reports that the
Saudis might have purchased nuclear technology
from Pakistan. The speculation goes that Musharraf
aimed to chalk out a joint strategy on what stance
the two leaders should adopt to satisfy the IAEA
and address its concerns.
Saudi Arabia is
under increasing pressure to open its nuclear
facilities for inspection as the IAEA suspects
that its nuclear program has reached a level (with
Pakistani cooperation) where it should attract
international attention. The pressure has also
come from Europe and the United States, which want
Riyadh to permit unhindered access to its nuclear
facilities.
Well before the IAEA probe
began, the US had been investigating whether or
not the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Dr
Abdul Qadeer Khan, sold nuclear technology to the
Saudis and other Arab countries. Acting under
extreme pressure from the IAEA, the Saudi
government signed the Small Quantities Protocol on
June 16, which makes inspections less problematic.
However, the US, European Union and Australia want
it to agree to full inspections. The Saudi stand
is that they will agree to the demand only if
other countries do so, including Israel.
International apprehensions that Saudi
Arabia would seek to acquire nuclear weapons have
arisen periodically over the past decade. The
kingdom's geopolitical situation gives it strong
reasons to consider acquiring nuclear weapons: the
volatile security environment in the Middle East;
the growing number of states (particularly Iran
and Israel) with weapons of mass destruction; and
its ambition to dominate the region. International
concerns intensified in 2003 in the wake of
revelations about Khan's proliferation activities.
The IAEA investigations show that Khan sold or
offered nuclear weapons technology to Saudi Arabia
and several Middle Eastern states, including Iran,
Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Last year's
unearthing of the black market nuclear technology
network increased international suspicions that
Khan had developed ties with Riyadh, which has the
capability to pay for all kinds of nuclear-related
services. Even before the revelations about Khan's
activities, concerns about Saudi-Pakistani nuclear
cooperation persisted, largely due to strengthened
cooperation between the two countries. In
particular, frequent high-level visits of Saudi
and Pakistani officials over the past several
years raised serious questions about the
possibility of clandestine Saudi-Pakistani nuclear
cooperation.
In May 1999, a Saudi Arabian
defense team, headed by Defense Minister Prince
Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, visited Pakistan's highly
restricted uranium enrichment and missile assembly
factory. The prince toured the Kahuta uranium
enrichment plant and an adjacent factory where the
Ghauri missile is assembled with then Pakistani
prime minister Nawaz Sharif, and was briefed by
Khan. A few months later, Khan traveled to Saudi
Arabia (in November 1999) ostensibly to attend a
symposium on "Information Sources on the Islamic
World". The same month, Dr Saleh al-Athel of the
Science and Technology ministry, visited Pakistan
to work out details for cooperation in the fields
of engineering, electronics and computer science.
Interestingly, Saudi defector Mohammed
Khilevi, who was first secretary of the Saudi
mission to the United Nations until July 1994,
testified before the IAEA that Riyadh had sought a
bomb since 1975. In late June 1994, Khilevi
abandoned his UN post to join the opposition.
After his defection, Khilevi distributed more than
10,000 documents he obtained from the Saudi
Arabian Embassy. These documents show that between
1985 and 1990, the Saudi government paid up to
US$5 billion to Saddam Hussein to build a nuclear
weapon. Khilevi further alleged that Saudis had
provided financial contributions to the Pakistani
nuclear program, and had signed a secret agreement
that obligated Islamabad to respond against an
aggressor with its nuclear arsenal if Saudi Arabia
was attacked with nuclear weapons.
In
2003, Musharraf paid a visit to Saudi Arabia, and
former Pakistani premier Zafarullah Khan Jamali
visited the kingdom twice. But the US had warned
Pakistan for the first time in December 2003
against providing nuclear assistance to Saudi
Arabia. Concerns over possible Pakistani-Saudi
nuclear cooperation intensified after the October
22-23, 2003, visit of Saudi Arabia's de facto
ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, to Pakistan. The
pro-US Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan, who
is next in line to succeed to the throne after
Abdullah, was not part of the delegation. During
that visit, American intelligence circles allege,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia concluded a secret
agreement on nuclear cooperation that was meant to
provide the Saudis with nuclear-weapons technology
in exchange for cheap oil.
However, in
2005, the US claims to have acquired fresh
evidence that suggests a broader
government-to-government Pakistani-Saudi atomic
collaboration that could be continuing. According
to well-placed diplomatic sources, chartered Saudi
C-130 Hercules transporters made scores of trips
between the Dhahran military base and several
Pakistani cities, including Lahore and Karachi,
between October 2003 and October 2004, and
thereafter, considerable contacts were reported
between Pakistani and Saudi nuclear scientists.
Between October 2004 and January 2005, under cover
of the hajj (pilgrimage), several Pakistani
scientists allegedly visited Riyadh, and remained
"missing" from their designated hotels for 15 to
20 days.
The closeness between Islamabad
and Riyadh has been phenomenal and it is not
without significance that the first foreign tour
of Musharraf, who ousted Sharif in October 1999,
was to Saudi Arabia. Moreover, Sharif himself, his
younger brother, Shehbaz Sharif and their families
live in Saudi Arabia after a secret exile deal
between Musharraf and Sharif, in which Riyadh had
played a key role. During Sharif's prime
ministerial tenure, the Americans believe, Saudi
Arabia had been involved in funding Islamabad's
missile and nuclear program purchases from China,
as a result of which Pakistan became a nuclear
weapon-producing and proliferating state. There
are also apprehensions that Riyadh was buying
nuclear capability from China through a proxy
state, with Pakistan serving as the cut-out.
Following Khan's first admission of
proliferation to Iran, Libya and North Korea in
January 2004, the Saudi authorities pulled out
more than 80 ambassador-rank and senior diplomats
from its missions around the world, mainly in
Europe and Asia. The pullout is widely thought to
have been meant to plug any likely leak of the
Pakistani-Saudi nuclear link.
Before
September 11, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab
Emirates and Pakistan were the only countries that
recognized and aided Afghanistan's Taliban regime,
which had been educated in Pakistan's religious
schools (madrassas). Despite the fall of
the Taliban regime in late 2001, the Saudis
continue to fund these seminaries that are a
substitute for Pakistan's non-existent national
education system and largely produce Wahhabi
extremists and Islamist terrorists. Also, a
substantial proportion of their curricula,
including the sections which preach hatred, has
also emerged from Saudi Arabia.
Pakistan,
with a crushing defense burden, only spends 1.7%
of gross domestic product on education (compared
to 4.3% in India and 5% in the United States). An
estimated 15,000 religious schools provide free
room and board to some 700,000 Pakistani boys
(ages six to 16) where they are taught to read and
write in Urdu and Arabic and recite the Holy Koran
by heart. No other disciplines are taught, but
students are indoctrinated with anti-American,
anti-Israeli and anti-Indian propaganda, and
encouraged to engage in jihad to defeat a "global
conspiracy to destroy Islam". These schools
supplied thousands of recruits for the Taliban
militia in Afghanistan and are still being used to
recruit militants to fight the US-led forces and
Afghan troops in that country.
While Saudi
Arabia actively uses charities to promote Wahhabi
extremism across the world, Pakistan has been the
recipient of huge direct economic assistance from
the desert kingdom. The Saudis have bailed out
Islamabad over the past decade by supplying
Pakistan with an estimated $1.2 billion of oil
products annually, virtually free of cost. Just
after the visit of Khan to Saudi Arabia in
November 1999, a Saudi nuclear expert, Dr Al
Arfaj, stated in Riyadh that "Saudi Arabia must
make plans aimed at making a quick response to
face the possibilities of nuclear warfare agents
being used against the Saudi population, cities or
armed forces".
Following the departure of
American troops from its soil, the biggest problem
for the Saudi Kingdom is how to deal with such
nuclear contingencies. More recently, Saudi
officials have discussed the procurement of new
Pakistani intermediate-range missiles capable of
carrying nuclear warheads. Some concern remains
that Saudi Arabia, like its neighbors, might be
seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, apparently by
purchase rather than indigenous development. The
2,700-kilometer range CSS-2 missiles the kingdom
obtained from China in 1987 are useless if fitted
only with conventional warheads. One cannot,
therefore, avoid the inference that, like the
Pakistan-North Korean "nukes for missiles deal",
Khan might have struck an "oil for nukes" deal
with Saudi Arabia on behalf of Islamabad at a time
when there was a growing homogeneity of strong
pan-Islamic affiliations worldwide. If Khan's
interaction with the scientists of Saudi Arabia,
Iraq and Libya were similar to those during his
reported visits to North Korea, norms of the
non-proliferation regimes can be expected to have
been more brazenly violated.
While the
aspirations of a few Islamic countries to acquire
nuclear weapons are wedded to the idea of the
"Islamic bomb", al-Qaeda's quest for components
and know-how relating to weapons of mass
destruction reflect on the potential rise of
nuclear terror throughout the world. The role of
wealthy and politically connected Saudi Arabian
families in secretly funding al-Qaeda and other
Islamist terror organizations has, until now, been
kept deliberately in the background by Washington,
largely out of sensitivity to the precarious
internal situation in Saudi Arabia itself.
King Fahd is near death, and his
designated successor, Crown Prince Abdullah, is
known to be more actively hostile to American
foreign policy, and more sympathetic to militant
Wahhabi Sunni currents in the Islamic world.
Washington knows well that a head-on clash with
the Saudi royal house at present would serve the
interests only of the radical faction inside the
Royal family. A major strategic goal of al-Qaeda's
terror attacks within Saudi Arabia in recent years
has been to escalate pressure on what are regarded
as Westernized corrupt elements of the Saudi royal
house, with the aim of replacing them with
fanatical feudal Wahhabi elements - a kind of
Talibanization of the Saudi Kingdom.
The
internal Saudi situation is complicated by the
fact that many powerful Saudi families financially
support the al-Qaeda effort as part of a strategy
to purge the kingdom of "infidels and Western
corruption". In many cases these influential
Saudis reach into the extended royal family,
including the murky figure of the former Saudi
intelligence chief, Turki al-Faisal, son of the
late King Faisal. The Americans had accused
Turki's Faisal Islamic Bank of involvement in
running accounts for bin Laden and his associates.
Turki himself maintained ongoing ties with
bin Laden even after the latter fled Saudi Arabia
in the mid-1990s, after imprisonment by order of
the king. Considered close to both bin Laden as
well as Khan, it was Turki who had persuaded King
Fahd to grant diplomatic recognition to the
Taliban. The possibility of Turki having played a
role in a nuclear deal between bin Laden and Khan
cannot, consequently, be ruled out, especially
when many members of the Pakistani military and
nuclear establishments have been found involved in
holding meetings with the al-Qaeda leader.
The first indications of the presence of
pro-jihadi scientists in Pakistan's nuclear
establishment came to notice during the US-led
allied forces' military operations in Afghanistan
against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, when documents
recovered by troops reportedly spoke of the visits
of Pakistani nuclear scientist, Sultan Bashiruddin
Mahmood, to Kandahar when bin Laden was operating
from there before September 11. Bashiruddin was
the first head of the Kahuta uranium enrichment
project before Khan, who replaced Bashiruddin in
the 1970s.
Subsequent investigations
carried out by American intelligence discovered
that bin Laden had contacted these scientists for
assistance in making a small nuclear device. On
February 12, 2004, Khan appeared on Pakistan's
state-run television after holding a lengthy
meeting with Musharraf and confessed to having
been "solely responsible" for operating an
international black market in nuclear-weapon
materials. The next day, on television again,
Musharraf, who claimed to be shocked by Khan's
misdeeds, nonetheless pardoned him, citing his
service to Pakistan (he called Khan "my hero").
For two decades, the Western media and
their intelligence agencies have linked Khan and
the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence to
nuclear-technology transfers, and it was hard to
credit the idea that the successive governments
Khan served had been oblivious of these
activities. In the post-September 11 period,
analysts continue to express fears about the
possibility of extremist Islamic groups like
al-Qaeda gaining access to Pakistan's nuclear
weapons or fissile or radioactive materials.
Secret deals with Saudi Arabia can only aggravate
such risks and concerns.
Amir
Mir is a senior Pakistani journalist
affiliated with the Karachi-based monthly,
Newsline.
(Published with permission
from the South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
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