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2 Pakistan, Bush and the
bomb By Jonathan Schell
The journey to the state of emergency just
imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed
president, General Pervez Musharraf, began in
Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it
so happened, Pakistan's intelligence chief,
Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He
was summoned forthwith to meet with then-deputy
secretary of state Richard Armitage, who gave him
perhaps the earliest preview of the global George
W Bush doctrine then in its formative stages,
telling him, "You are
either 100% with us, or 100%
against us."
The next day, the
administration, dictating to the dictator,
presented seven demands that a Pakistan that
wished to be "with us" must meet. These
concentrated on gaining its cooperation in
assailing Afghanistan's Taliban regime, which had
long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence
services in Afghanistan and had, of course,
harbored Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training
camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement
to rein in the activities of Abdul Qade Khan, the
"father" of Pakistan's nuclear arms, who, with the
knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely
hawking the country's nuclear-bomb technology
around the Middle East and North Asia for some
years.
Musharraf decided to be "with us";
but, as in so many countries, being with the
United States in its "war on terror" turned out to
mean not being with one's own people. Although
Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999,
was already a dictator, he had now taken the
politically fateful additional step of very
visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will
of a foreign master. In many countries, people
will endure a homegrown dictator but rebel against
one who seems to be imposed from without, and
Musharraf was now courting this danger.
A
public opinion poll of Pakistanis in September
ranking certain leaders according to their
popularity suggests what the results have been.
Bin Laden, at 46% approval, was more popular than
Musharraf, at 38%, who in turn was far better
liked than Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7%. There is
every reason to believe that, with the imposition
of martial law, Musharraf's and Bush's popularity
have sunk even further. Wars, whether on terror or
anything else, don't tend to go well when the
enemy is more popular than those supposedly on
one's own side.
Are you with us?
Even before the Bush administration
decided to invade Iraq, the immediate decision to
bully Musharraf into compliance defined the shape
of the policies that the president would adopt
toward a far larger peril that had seemed to wane
after the Cold War, but now was clearly on the
rise: the gathering nuclear danger.
Bush
proposed what was, in fact if not in name, an
imperial solution to it. In the new dispensation,
nuclear weapons were not to be considered good or
bad in themselves; that judgment was to be based
solely on whether the nation possessing them was
itself judged good or bad (with us, that is, or
against us). Iraq, obviously, was judged to be
"against us" and suffered the consequences.
Pakistan, soon honored by the administration with
the somehow ridiculous, newly coined status of
"major non-NATO [North Atlantic Treaty
Organization] ally," was clearly classified as
with us, and so, notwithstanding its nuclear
arsenal and abysmal record on proliferation, given
the highest rating.
That doctrine
constituted a remarkable shift. Previously, the US
had joined with almost the entire world to achieve
non-proliferation solely by peaceful, diplomatic
means. The great triumph of this effort had been
the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, under which
183 nations, dozens quite capable of producing
nuclear weapons, eventually agreed to remain
without them. In this dispensation, all nuclear
weapons were considered bad, and so all
proliferation was bad as well. Even existing
arsenals, including those of the two superpowers
of the Cold War, were supposed to be liquidated
over time. Conceptually, at least, one united
world had faced one common danger: nuclear arms.
In the new, quickly developing,
post-September 11, 2001, dispensation, however,
the world was to be divided into two camps. The
first, led by the United States, consisted of
good, democratic countries, many possessing the
bomb; the second consisted of bad, repressive
countries trying to get the bomb and, of course,
their terrorist allies.
Nuclear peril,
once understood as a problem of supreme importance
in its own right, posed by those who already
possessed nuclear weapons as well as by potential
proliferators, was thus subordinated to the
polarizing "war on terror", of which it became a
mere sub-category, albeit the most important one.
This peril could be found at "the crossroads of
radicalism and technology", otherwise called the
"nexus of terror and weapons of mass destruction",
in the words of the master document of the Bush
doctrine, the 2002 National Security Strategy of
the United States of America.
The good
camp was assigned the job not of rolling back all
nuclear weapons but simply of stopping any members
of the bad camp from getting their hands on the
bomb. The means would no longer be diplomacy, but
"preventive war" (to be waged by the United
States). The global Cold War of the late 20th
century was to be replaced by global wars against
proliferation - disarmament wars - in the 21st.
These wars, breaking out wherever in the world
proliferation might threaten, would not be cold,
but hot indeed, as the invasion of Iraq soon
revealed - and as an attack on Iran, now under
consideration in Washington, may soon further
show.
... or against us?
Vetting and sorting countries into the
good and the bad, the with-us and the against-us,
proved, however, a far more troublesome business
than those in the Bush administration ever
imagined. Iraq famously was not as "bad" as
alleged, for it turned out to lack the key feature
that supposedly warranted attack - weapons of mass
destruction. Neither was Pakistan, muscled into
the with-us camp so quickly after September 11, as
"good" as alleged. Indeed, these distinctions were
entirely artificial, for by any factual
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