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The United States applied the pressler amendment, cutting off aid to Pakistan for violating its nuclear proliferation law, after ouch "hedging and fussing" as then President George Bush had scant room to avoid imposing sanctions, a former US Ambassador Dennis Kux says.
"The facts were no longer in doubt. ... With one voice, the intelligence community told that that Pakistan possessed a nuclear device. Bush had scant wiggle room to avoid imposing sanctions," Kux writes in his book, disenchanted allies, on US-Pakistan relations.
He writes: "After `hedging and fussing' as long as possible, the President reluctantly accepted inter-agency recommendations that he (should) not issue the certification" needed to permit the continuous flow of military and economic aid to Pakistan.
Bush was "genuinely sad" about taking the action but felt his hands were tied, Kux quotes then National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft as saying.
"The Bush administration made a half-hearted attempt to delay sanctions in order to give a chance to the Government, that the Pakistanis would elect in 1990, to deal with the nuclear problem," says Kux.
Bush's delay in implementing the sanctions was not only criticised by the democrats but Republicans as well.
"If we lower the (nuclear) standards again, who is going to take the standards seriously?" Kux quotes then Senator William Cohe, who later became Defence Secretary, as saying.
In October 1990, the aid was passed without certification but the dollar 564 million economic and military programme, approved for 1991 fiscal, was frozen.
It was in May 1990 that US intelligence analysts concluded that Pakistan had taken the final step towards "possession" of a nuclear weapon by machining uranium metal into bomb cores, Kux writes.
When visiting then Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates (who later became CIA Director) raised the issue with Pakistan's then President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Chief of Army Staff Mirza Aslam Beg, they vehemently disagreed, asserting that Pakistan's capability had not changed from the previous year, he says.
But Gates had warned that unless Pakistan melted down the bomb cores that it had produced, Bush would not be able to issue the pressler certification, Kux writes.
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was travelling in the middle east and did not meet Gates and was cautioned by Ambassador Robert Oakley that Pakistan was "committing suicide" so far as relations with the US were concerned -unless it agreed to roll back its nuclear capability.
The envoy was similarly frank in separate conversations with Ishaq Khan and General Beg.
Apart from denying that Pakistan
had advanced the programme, the response was one of disbelief that the
Americans would actually implement "draconian" pressler amendment sanctions,
he writes. (PTI)
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