People's Democracy

Where Have All The WMDs Gone?

Raghu

THE world has been agog the past few weeks at the astounding revelations from Pakistan that Dr A Q Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, had passed on nuclear weapons technologies to Libya, Iran and North Korea over a long period extending over a decade. The story was broken, after some months of suspense involving “de-briefing” of Dr Khan and six other colleagues at the Khan Research Laboratory (KRL), by none other than general Musharraf himself who admitted to Dr Khan’s actions but attributed them to selfish financial motives, denied the involvement of any official agency and stated that the matter was now fully under control with no possibility of any further proliferation. A publicly broadcast “confession” by Dr Khan was quickly followed by a Presidential pardon, later clarified as being “conditional”. The US, the world’s self-proclaimed watchdog over proliferation of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), greeted all this with equanimity and expressed its full understanding of the measures being taken by Pakistan, especially general Musharraf.

Whatever may be taking place behind closed doors, this entire episode has witnessed the world over only a rather mild storm, rarely going above a strong breeze. With the immediacy of the event having now passed, this is perhaps a good time to look at it from different angles and examine its implications both in the short and long terms.

Let it be said at the very outset, though, that whereas many commentators in India and a few abroad would argue that the chickens have finally come home to roost in Pakistan, in reality the hen house is not in Islamabad but in Washington.

The US under George W Bush went to war against Iraq, with its lapdog Britain led by Tony Blair by its side, precisely over the issue of WMDs, none of which were however found or are likely to be. Iraq was a “rogue” state, they argued, having links with al-Qa’ida and potentially capable of transferring WMD capability to terrorist groups. The US with its extreme right-wing neo-con leadership has been leading a virulent campaign against an “axis of evil”, countries which the US regarded also as “rogue” states such as Libya, Iran and North Korea, and who must be stopped at all costs by pre-emptive action as in Iraq if necessary. All of a sudden, a common source for much of these WMDs has been found in Pakistan, a long-time strategic ally of the US, its leading partner in the “war on terrorism” especially against al-Qa’ida. The contrast between the US response to these developments and its actions in Iraq could not have been more striking. The reasons go far beyond the old US-Pakistan axis or molly-coddling general Musharraf and lie at the very heart of US strategic policy and the hegemonic vision of US imperialism. 

WHO KNEW WHAT AND WHEN?

Let us first look at the recent revelations themselves.

That Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and related delivery capability through missiles have involved proliferation in both directions, especially to but also from Pakistan, has been one of the world’s best-known secrets along with Israel’s WMD capability. The former was obtained by a combination of stealing and smuggling of nuclear weapons related know-how and materials (mainly from Holland and Germany by A Q Khan who was then working in the former), clever reverse-engineering and clandestine manufacture of some components abroad. Pakistan’s missiles, especially the long-distance Ghauri are virtual replicas of the North Korean Nodong missiles and were obtained from North Korea in crated ready-to-assemble condition in the mid-‘1990s, in all probability in a barter deal for Pakistan’s assistance in nuclear weapons technology, particularly uranium enrichment, in 1996. Earlier acquisitions of missiles by Pakistan from other countries are also well established with Pakistani nuclear scientist and peace activist Pervez Hoodbhoy recently confirming that Pakistan only had to paint on the crescent and star!

The clinching and no longer deniable Pakistani connection came to light when the UN’s international atomic energy agency (IAEA) were, after prolonged negotiations, invited by Iran late last year to inspect its nuclear energy establishments and found equipment which not only could have been used for uranium enrichment and resembled the Pakistani designs which were familiar to the IAEA inspectors, but also contained traces of enriched uranium! Iran stated that the contamination must have taken place in the country of origin which it did not publicly name but privately confided to the IAEA was Pakistan. In Libya’s case, shipments of equipment related to nuclear weapons programmes were intercepted by German and Italian agencies off Dubai en route from Malaysia (where they had been manufactured on behalf of Khan) to Libya in 2001. Libya’s mercurial leader Colonel Qaddafi was soon to do a policy U-turn, declared his nation’s nuclear weapons programme and invited the IAEA to take over and remove all related equipment. The Pakistani technology and equipment were once again revealed.

But did all this really come as a surprise to anyone? And who was to blame?

BEYOND BELIEF

At the Pakistani end, it strains credulity to the extreme that such large-scale and selling of nuclear weapons secrets had been taking place clandestinely under the very nose of the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment who were known to have exercised total control over the nuclear weapons and missile programmes, and also closely watched over all the scientists involved. Khan used large military aircraft to transport weapons-related component and machinery to other countries, not to mention taking such material out of the closely-monitored KRL facilities, and had entered into numerous transactions for millions of dollars, many by cheque if you please, all without anyone in the Pakistani Army or ISI or military intelligence knowing anything about it! Can anybody really believe that North Korean missiles were received in Pakistan as a friendly gift without any quid-pro-quo being involved? 

Pakistani ministers and officials have been at pains to point out that their entire nuclear weapons related programme was clandestine, with full autonomy to Khan and his colleagues to pursue their objectives, and this is the reason why no military, intelligence or government official knew any of the details.  Reading between the lines, what is being said is that, so long as the goal was achieved, very wide latitude was given to Khan, including as to raising resources by selling nuclear secrets if necessary on a strict need-to-know principle under which, in retrospect, only Khan knew what was really going on! To any one worried about proliferation, this scenario of nuclear management by a few persons with absolutely no accountability or governmental supervision, is even more frightening than the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment knowingly indulging in some limited proliferation to a few countries. If Khan had sold nuclear weapons technologies in this manner to a few countries, may he not also have done the same to some non-state actors including al-Qa’ida?

General Musharraf and senior officials have sought to allay fears by saying that now the Pakistani nuclear deterrent is an open programme with a Nuclear Command Authority in place, and has also assured the international community that there has been no proliferation since the General took office. This is not likely to inspire great confidence in the light not only of past experience but also of the fact that the transfer to Libya and the interception of the shipment on the high seas took place very much during general Musharraf’s on-going tenure. Another big worry! Is general Musharraf himself now out of the decision-making and need-to-know loop? Is the military intelligence state-within-a-state in Pakistan now bigger than its executive president and Army Chief rolled into one?

US KNEW ALL ALONG

In one the few slips made during this entire episode, general Musharraf claimed that the US had come to him quite late with all their evidence against Khan and nuclear weapons technologies leaking out of Pakistan, and had they done so earlier, he could have done something about it. This was promptly denied by the US State Department, which claimed it had kept Pakistan informed about its suspicions and evidence for a long time, and the by CIA which was especially keen on protecting its image after the Iraq WMD fiasco.

The respected Pakistani daily, Dawn, quoted officials recently as saying that the US dossier presented to Pakistani authorities on Khan’s activities contained details of his movements since 1992 including dates and destinations of foreign travel, bank account numbers and details of financial transactions, finer points of people met etc almost as if, in the words of the official, “the Americans had a trace planted on Khan’s body”! If the US had been tracking Khan for over a decade and had all this information, what were they doing with it?

One simple part of these complex questions must be that US intelligence did not know as much as it now claims it did. The capabilities and hard actionable knowledge in the possession of the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have long been suspect and have now been thoroughly exposed in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. Much of the ten-year tracking of Khan’s travels could therefore have merely been retrospectively compiled so that the embattled CIA Chief George Tenet could stake some claim to respect.

It must be understood, as the handling of Iraq’s WMDs and their use as the reason touted for going to war by the US and Britain show, that intelligence can only provide some information weighing which, however, political decisions must be made.  While both the US and Britain are seeking to deflect public attention by focusing on possible “intelligence failure” and setting up Inquiry Commissions to investigate them, the fact is that in both cases, the onus of failure lies with the decisions taken by the US and British political leadership based on all the inputs of which intelligence is only one part.

The inevitable conclusion is that the US knew at least a substantial part of the nuclear proliferation-taking place but for political-strategic reasons, chose not to do anything to stop it.

Pakistan is to date the only country to have been designated and sanctioned in 1979 by the US under the Glenn-Symington amendment to the Foreign Aid calling for such action against nations acquiring nuclear-related technologies. In 1981 this US president waived this under a special provision to assist Pakistan against the Soviets in Afghanistan and resisted subsequent attempts to stop assistance. When the Pressler Amendment was passed in 1985 prohibiting US aid to Pakistan unless it could certify that the latter did not possess nuclear weapons, successive Administrations continued to sign certify that it did not until, after the Soviet threat had ended, president Bush Senior did not certify and aid stopped until his son resumed it after 9/11 and under the strategic objectives of the “US war on terrorism”.

The same strategic reasons were advanced by the present Bush administration when Pakistan’s assistance to North Korea in nuclear weapons technology in 1998 was highlighted by the US Department of Energy and the CIA. Even after general Musharraf came to power in 1999 and assured the US that all such activities had stopped, evidence of such activities continued to surface including the highly embarrassing taped evidence discovered by British intelligence and shared with their US counterparts as late as 2002 when the Pakistani embassy in London was being renovated. 

Today, when the Bush administration is claiming to be in control of things, independent commentators especially in the US print media are coming out with increasing evidence about official Pakistani involvement and tacit US complicity with such proliferation. In the present context, the US is clearly shoring up its own strategic interests by continuing to project general Musharraf as their principal ally in Pakistan not only against al-Qa’ida but also for modernisation. The US is also playing a deeper game, of quietly mounting pressure on the Pakistani establishment to leverage the present situation to obtain greater US control over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

US STRATEGIC GOALS

There is yet another deeper and longer-term strategic game being played out by the US. As this article has tried to show, nuclear non-proliferation is not a general principle in US policy, but only a tool in support of other US policy and strategic goals.

The US is using the recent disclosures to buttress the position long held by the neo-conservatives namely that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and other similar international Treaties are useless and should be abandoned in favour of US-led multilateral arrangements which would also replace such international UN-led bodies such as the IAEA. The US under George Bush has already abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and decided not to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty or CTBT. While India has long refused to join the NPT-CTBT regimes for their discriminatory nature, the BJP-led government broke with the long-standing national consensus on nuclear ambiguity and non-weaponisation of India’s nuclear capability and is now cynically trying to join up with the US efforts to reorganise the international security architecture outside the UN or IAEA frameworks.

In Iraq, the US consistently undermined the IAEA inspections only to be embarrassed by its own failure to find WMDs. The US has now launched a Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) under which, following on from its notorious doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, it plans to set up a US-led coalition of countries which would pre-emptively intercept or otherwise prevent suspected WMD proliferation attempts by select nations or non-state actors. The US is actively seeking to rope India into this nefarious plot into which it has already roped in its close allies in NATO and outside. The PSI is another barely-disguised attempt by the US to set up multi-lateral structures outside the UN or other internationally recognised frameworks so as to project and perpetuate US hegemony. If the examples seen in this article are any indication, nations or other parties identified and targeted under the PSI will be subjectively selected and timed only so as to serve US strategic goals.

It also needs to be emphasised that while the US persists in arguing that other countries do not and should not need nuclear weapons or other WMDs to protect their security interests, the US continues to insist on its own right and need to do so and indeed to expand its own WMD capabilities, clearly exposing its hegemonic ambitions. The US Nuclear Posture Review, National Security Doctrine and other policy pronouncements reinforce the prevailing US view that nuclear weapons are critical to US security. The US budget includes more than US$500 million over the next five years to develop new nuclear weapons.

Nuclear non-proliferation cannot be achieved when some countries believe that nuclear weapons are essential for their security, and are legitimate currency for international power, but this does not apply to other countries. The only long-term guarantee against nuclear non-proliferation is global nuclear disarmament.