Responsibility of Pakistan as nuclear weapons state

[Neo]

Responsibility of Pakistan as nuclear weapons state

EISUKE SUZUKI

ARTICLE (August 28 2009): In his book, "War and Power in the 21st Century," the late Professor Paul Hirst of the University of London wrote a rather scathing remark on the risks involved in Pakistan's nuclear capability. Let me quote a paragraph below:

"The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction outside the advanced countries will be almost inevitable. Where competing regional powers acquire nuclear weapons then, the most likely outcome is a local balance of terror, like those of the Cold War, but on a smaller scale. However, if one considers the best current example, that between India and Pakistan, one cannot feel that it is likely to be as robust as that between the superpowers.

Pakistan is close to being a failed state and some future leadership may engage in a reckless adventure in Kashmir to bolster its regime. It might respond to the threat of conventional defeat by a nuclear ultimatum. Pakistan is only one of a number of unstable states, with or close to nuclear capability."

The book was published in 2001, which means Professor Hirst was writing before 2000 and probably before 1999, since the paragraph quote above did not mention Pakistan's advance into the Kargil area of Kashmir in 1999. Hirst foresaw the scene of Kargil where a localised and conventional war ensued, which could develop into a more serious, large scale conventional or even a nuclear conflict.

Ahmed Rashid, one of the most celebrated Pakistani journalists today, writes about the Kargil War in "Descent into Chaos" (2008): "Musharraf had calculated that India would never escalate the conflict for fear it could lead to an unsheathing of nuclear weapons... The world was stunned at Musharraf's audacious threat of using nuclear weapons as a form of blackmail to settle an international dispute."

The Kargil incident did not stop in 1999; Musharraf continued his aggressive line with India, culminating in the launching, by both India and Pakistan in 2002, of the biggest war games in the past fifteen years, along the India/Pakistan border. Given the historical animosity, the possibility of any Indian-Pakistan confrontation quickly escalating into a large scale conventional war and turning into a nuclear exchange was real.

Yet, 9/11 changed the United States' policy toward Pakistan; the United States needed Pakistan's co-operation to deal with al Qaeda and the Taliban, not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan. The Musharraf regime's "yes, but" attitude to the United States demands over the Taliban and Kashmir extremists must have contributed to the growing influence of the Taliban inside Pakistan and the Mumbai attacks in November 2008.

With the war in Afghanistan going on, the both sides of the border, and Kashmir based extremists exploiting the confused situations, concerns about the issue of the security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons are brought back in the front page. Kenneth Waltz cautioned long ago about Western commentators' tendency to be concerned about the recklessness of some new nuclear states.

He considered the thesis that governments and societies are not well-rooted as they are a loose collection of hostile tribes, and therefore, much less constrained than those who rule older and more fully developed states, untenable. He said, "Many Westerners who write fearfully about a future in which third-world countries have nuclear weapons, seem to view their people in the once-familiar, imperial manner as 'lesser breeds without the law'.

As is usual with ethnocentric views, speculation takes the place of evidence." Indeed, all nuclear weapons states have been very cautious in dealing with each other, and none of the earlier fears about the Soviet Union and China materialised.

The Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 was definitely the watershed of nuclear thinking in the Cold War. Even new nuclear weapons states inevitably come to realise that nuclear weapons compel them to adopt a drastically different kind of reasoning because of their inherent risk of annihilation.

Therefore, the revelation by Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, on a state-run television network in Islamabad on February 4, 2004 that he was solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear-weapons materials was shocking. He, who is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country's nuclear bomb, was selling nuclear weapons-making technology and know-how to Iran, Libya and North Korea!

Though he was confined to house-arrest, he was never charged with any crime, as he was pardoned by President Musharraf a day after his confession. He was released in February, 2009. In a telephone interview with The Washington Post early June 2008, he was quoted as saying, "I did whatever my government wanted me to do. I gave them whatever they wanted. We have not violated any laws." Khan noted that Pakistan is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Josh Meyer of The Los Angeles Times documented the details of the multinational schemes for smuggling, in nuclear parts, in his report on May 24, 2004, and two months earlier, Seymour Hersh provided detailed information in The New Yorker magazine, dated March 8, 2004 on Dr Khan's activities in developing his nuclear weapons program and the running of his international black market network for nuclear assets.

Surely, there must be a difference between developing nuclear weapons for one's own country and selling such technology and know-how to third countries. It just defies common sense. It is feared, therefore, that Pakistan's nuclear materials could be obtained by terrorists, or used by elements in the Pakistani government. All nuclear weapons states take measures against the possibility of losing control over a bomb, weapons-related material or information on technology and know-how.

It is their obligation to exercise utmost diligence to secure nuclear weapons software as well as hardware. According to a 2007 Foreign Policy magazine's survey of 117 nongovernmental terrorism experts, 74 percent consider Pakistan the country most likely to transfer nuclear technology to terrorists in the next three to five years. Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen expressed US concern about the matter on September 22, 2008:

"[T]he weapons there are secure.. And that even in the change of government, the controls of those weapons haven't changed. That said, they are their weapons. They're not my weapons. And there are limits to what I know. Certainly, as a worst-case scenario with respect to Pakistan, I worry a great deal about those weapons falling into the hands of terrorists and either being proliferated, or potentially used."

Former President Musharraf and his successor Asif Ali Zardari, as well as their army and intelligence chiefs, repeatedly have stated that their more than 70 nuclear weapons are secure. Under Benazir Bhutto's regime, the Pakistani authorities developed what is now referred to as " the Benazir Nuclear Doctrine" in April 1989.

Under this doctrine, the Pakistani authorities have separated warheads from delivery systems and stored them in different secret locations, but they can assemble the weapons fairly quickly. Although separate storage may provide protection, by physical separation against accidental launch or preventing the theft of an assembled weapon, it may be easier for unauthorised personnel to remove a weapon's fissile material core if it is not assembled.

Dispersal of the assets also creates more access points for acquisition and may increase the risk of diversion. Moreover, Pakistan's secret nuclear storage sites are known to Islamist extremists and have been attacked at least three times over the last two years, according to an article written by Shaun Gregory, director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford in Britain.

It was published in the Center's "Sentinel" newsletter in July 2009, which was widely reported in the media. But I suspect all these attackers were captured on the spot by the military guarding the sites concerned. The real danger is not so much a break-in by Taliban, or al Qaeda terrorists as an "inside job" from within Pakistan's expanding nuclear facilities through either the military route or the scientist route.

The Pakistan army and the Inter-Services Intelligence have long supported the Taliban. It is natural to assume that there are segments of the Pakistani armed forces, which are sympathetic to the Taliban's cause. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudri Abdul Majid, former heads of the Khushab reactor and chief technician, weapons design at the A.Q. Khan Facility, respectively, had met al Qaeda leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, in Afghanistan to discuss nuclear bombs.

Again, it is natural to assume that there are some scientists who are sympathetic to radical forces. There are more than 7000 scientists working in Pakistan's nuclear plants. It is not easy to screen and check all of their personnel, including various groups of non-scientists.

To secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, it is incumbent on the government of Pakistan to complete the filtering out, from both the military and the science establishments of "closet Islamists" sympathetic to the Taliban extremists and al Qaeda elements. In the long term, it is also incumbent on the international community to help stabilise the region by protecting Pakistan.

As Ahmed Rashid concluded, "The key to peace for the entire region lies with Pakistan. Pakistan's strategic goals, in Afghanistan, place it at odds, not just with Afghanistan, India, and the United States, but with the entire international community."

As a nuclear weapons state, Pakistan, too, has a responsibility to humanity. Rashid suggests the following: "The Pakistan army has to put to rest its notion of a centralised state, based solely on defence against India and an expansionist Islamist strategic military doctrine, carried out at the expense of democracy.

Musharraf deliberately raised the profile of jihadi groups to make himself more useful to the United States and to enhance his country's strategic importance in Western eyes. With the advent of the Pakistani Taliban now threatening the state, no Pakistani leader can afford to take such a deadly gamble again. Pakistan needs national reconciliation that brings an end to the demonization of politicians by the army; a new military culture that is taught to respect civilian institutions and a major reform of the Inter Services Intelligence."