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2 Pakistan, Bush and the
bomb By Jonathan Schell
and rational reckoning,
Pakistan was by far the more dangerous country.
Indeed, the Pakistan of Musharraf has, by
now, become a one-country inventory of all the
major forms of the nuclear danger.
*Iraq
did not have nuclear weapons; Pakistan did. In
1998, it had conducted a series of five nuclear
tests in response to five tests by India, with
whom it had fought three conventional wars since its
independence in 1947. The
danger of interstate nuclear war between the two
nations is perhaps higher than anywhere else in
the world.
Both Iraq and Pakistan were
dictatorships (though the Iraqi government was
incomparably more brutal). But Iraq did not harbor
terrorists, Pakistan did, and does so even more
today.
Iraq, lacking the bomb, could not
of course be a nuclear proliferator. Pakistan was,
with a vengeance. The arch-proliferator Khan, a
metallurgist, first purloined nuclear technology
from Europe, where he was employed at the uranium
enrichment company EURENCO. He then used the
fruits of his theft to successfully establish an
enrichment program for Pakistan's bomb. After
that, the thief turned salesman.
Drawing
on a globe-spanning network of producers and
middlemen - in Turkey, Dubai in the United Arab
Emirates and Malaysia, among other countries - he
peddled his nuclear wares to Iran, Iraq (which
apparently turned down his offer of help), North
Korea, Libya and perhaps others. Seen from
without, he had established a clandestine
multinational corporation dedicated to nuclear
proliferation for a profit.
Seen from
within Pakistan, he had managed to create a sort
of independent nuclear city-state - a state within
a state - in effect privatizing Pakistan's nuclear
technology. The extent of the government's
connivance in this enterprise is still unknown,
but few observers believe Khan's far-flung
operations would have been possible without at
least the knowledge of officials at the highest
levels of that government.
Yet all this
activity emanating from the "major non-NATO ally"
of the Bush administration was overlooked until
late 2003, when American and German intelligence
intercepted a shipload of nuclear materials bound
for Libya, and forced Musharraf to place Khan, a
national hero owing to his work on the Pakistani
bomb, under house arrest. (Even today, the
Pakistani government refuses to make Khan
available for interviews with representatives of
the International Atomic Energy Agency.)
Iraqi apparatchiks could not, of course,
peddle to terrorists, al-Qaeda or otherwise,
technology they did not have, as Bush suggested
they would do in seeking to justify his war. The
Pakistani apparatchiks, on the other hand, could
-- and they did. Shortly before September 11, two
leading scientists from Pakistan's nuclear
program, Dr Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the former
director general of the Pakistan Atomic Energy
Commission, and Chaudry Abdul Majeed, paid a visit
to Osama bin Laden around a campfire in
Afghanistan to advise him on how to make or
acquire nuclear arms. They, too, are under house
arrest.
If, however, the beleaguered
Pakistani state, already a balkanized enterprise
(as the Khan story shows) is overthrown, or if the
country starts to fall apart, the danger of
insider defections from the nuclear establishment
will certainly rise. The problem is not so much
that the locks on the doors of nuclear
installations - Pakistan's approximately 50 bombs
are reportedly spread at sites around the country
- will be broken or picked as that those with the
keys to the locks will simply switch allegiances
and put the materials they guard to new uses. The
"nexus" of terrorism and the bomb, the catastrophe
the Bush doctrine was specifically framed to head
off, might then be achieved - and in a country
that was "for us".
What has failed in
Pakistan, as in smashed Iraq, is not just a
regional American policy, but the pillars and
crossbeams of the entire global Bush doctrine, as
announced in late 2001. In both countries, the
bullying has failed; popular passions within each
have gained the upper hand; and Washington has
lost much of its influence. In its application to
Pakistan, the doctrine was framed to stop
terrorism, but in that country's northern
provinces, terrorists have, in fact, entrenched
themselves to a degree unimaginable even when the
Taliban protected al-Qaeda's camps before
September 11.
If the Bush doctrine laid
claim to the values of democracy, its man
Musharraf now has the distinction, rare even among
dictators, of mounting a second military coup to
maintain the results of his first one. In a
crowning irony, his present crackdown is on
democracy activists, not the Taliban, armed
Islamic extremists, or al-Qaeda supporters who
have established positions in the Swat Valley only
a few hundred kilometers from Islamabad.
Most important, the collapsed doctrine has
stoked the nuclear fires it was meant to quench.
The dangers of nuclear terrorism, of proliferation
and even of nuclear war (with India, which is
dismayed by developments in Pakistan as well as
the weak Bush administration response to them) are
all on the rise.
The imperial solution to
these perils has failed. Something new is needed,
not just for Pakistan or Iraq, but for the world.
Perhaps now someone should try to invent a
solution based on imperialism's opposite,
democracy, which is to say respect for other
countries and the wills of the people who live in
them.
Jonathan Schell is the
author of The Fate of the Earth, among
other books, and the just-published The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of
Nuclear Danger. He is the Harold
Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute, and
a visiting lecturer at Yale University.
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