Author: Chidanand Rajghatta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 16, 2009
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/India-thinks-Pak-N-sites-already-in-radical-hands-Report/articleshow/4537037.cms
India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has
told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan's restive frontier province
are "already partly" in the hands of Islamic extremists, an Israeli
journal has said, amid considerable anxiety among US pundits here over Washington's
confidence in the security of the troubled nation's nuclear arsenal.
Claims about the high-level exchange between
New Delhi and Washington were made in the Debka, a journal said to have close
ties with Israeli intelligence, under the headline "Singh warns Obama:
Pakistan is lost." The brief story said the Indian prime minister had
named Pakistani nuclear sites in the areas which were Taliban-Qaida strongholds
and said the sites are already partly in the hands of "Muslim extremists."
A sub-head to the story said "India gets ready for a Taliban-ruled nuclear
neighbor."
There was no official word from either Washington
or New Delhi about the exchanges, with India in the throes of an election
and US winding down for the weekend. But US experts have been greatly perturbed
in recent days about what they say is Washington's misplaced confidence in,
and lackadaisical approach towards, Pakistan's nuclear assets. The disquiet
comes amid reports that Pakistan is ramping up its nuclear arsenal even as
the rest of the world is scaling it down.
"It is quite disturbing that the administration
is allowing Pakistan to quantitatively and qualitatively step up production
of fissile material without as much as a public reproach," Robert Windrem,
a visiting scholar with the Center for Law and Security in New York University
and an expert on South Asia nuclear issues told ToI in an interview on Thursday.
"Iraq and Iran did not get a similar concessions... and Pakistan has
a much worse record of proliferation and security breaches than any other
country in the world."
Windrem, a former producer with NBC whose
book "Critical Mass" was among the first to red flag Islamabad's
proliferation record going back to the 1980s, referred to recent reports and
satellite images showing Pakistan building two large new plutonium production
reactors in Khushab, which experts say could lead to improvements in the quantity
and quality of the country's nuclear arsenal. The reactors had nothing to
do with power-production' they are weapons-specific, and are being built with
resources who diversion is enabled by the billions of dollars the US is giving
to Pakistan as aid, he said.
Windrem also pointed out that Khushab's former
director, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood met with Osama bin Laden and his deputy,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, and offered a nuclear weapons tutorial around an Afghanistan
campfire, as attested by the former CIA Director George Tenet in his memoir
"At the Center of the Storm." Yet successive US administrations
had adopted an attitude of benign neglect towards Pakistan's nuclear program
and its expansion at a time the country was in growing ferment and under siege
within from Islamic extremists.
US officials, going up to the President himself,
have repeatedly said in public that they have confidence the Pakistani nuclear
arsenal will not fall into the hands of Islamic extremists, and they have
Islamabad's assurances to this effect. But scholars like Windrem fear Pakistan's
nuclear program may already be infected with the virus of radicalism from
within, as demonstrated by the Sultan Bashiruddin incident.
