Author: Udayan Namboodiri
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: February 15, 2004
As farces go, General Pervez Musharraf's
question "why didn't the US tell us earlier about Dr A Q Khan's nuclear
smuggling activities", does take the cake.
For, if Pakistan had not been "told
earlier", why then in January 2002 did the ISI whisk away two nuclear scientists
Dr Sulaiman Asad and Dr Ali Mukhtar to Myanmar? Then CIA chief George Tenet
had visited Islamabad that month to provide clinching proof that Dr Sultan
Bashiruddin Mehmood, a Sitara-e-Imtiaz awardee, headed a thriving racket
supplying nuclear knowhow to Osama-bin- Laden's Al Qaeda in 1999. The Tenet
visit had led to Musharraf ordering the arrest of Dr Mehmood and Chaudhury
Abdul Majid. The CIA chief supplied copies of bank statements of the two
Pakistani nuclear establishment personalities, proving they were receiving
funds from Al Qaeda's front organisations.
Under interrogation, the two admitted
to having met bin Laden and discussing with him designs of nuclear and
chemical weapons. Four other scientists, Azfar Hasan Zaidi, Kishwar Ali,
Taha Hussain and Jabbar Khan, were subsequently booked.
The revelations stunned the world
community, reeling as it was then from the shock of 9/11. Nuclear knowhow
in the hands of terrorists, supplied by scientists steeped in fundamentalism,
could lead to catastrophes making the twin tower bombing look like a teddy
bear picnic.
The question was no longer "is Pakistan's
nuclear establishment safe from jehadis?" The country, which just missed
being officially dubbed a terrorist state, was now a confirmed leaker of
nuclear secrets.
The big worry dominating governments
then was: How much has got out and to whom?
A prominent Pakistani nuclear scientist,
Dr A H Nayyar of the Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, told Newsline
magazine in January 2002: "There is no doubt that Pakistan's nuclear assets
are safe.
The concern of the international
community is that the religious lobby in Pakistan is openly vowing to use
nuclear weapons for the protection of the Muslim community in the world.
So there is fear they might try to obtain access to such weapons".
That was 2002. This is 2004. What
happened in the interregnum? Have Bashiruddin Mehmood and his group been
persecuted in a Pakistani court? No. Sure, they were put under "house arrest"
for a while. Their bank accounts, presumably the known ones, were "frozen"
on the UN Security Council's recommendation which included their names
in an old list of individuals and entities linked to Al-Qaeda.
After that, they went back to their
daily lives. Washington, grateful to Musharraf for allowing use of Pakistani
bases (denied officially) and other logistics, let sleeping dogs lie.
And where are those two - Asad and
Mukhtar - who were sneaked out to Myanmar the moment the FBI team landed
in Islamabad to interrogate the group?
Well, New Delhi followed their fortunes
for a while and applied pressure on Myanmaar to evict them. South
Block sources reveal that by mid-2002
they had moved out, possibly to China. Very little is known about these
two have answers to a lot of questions.
The Mehmood affair paled in comparison
to another development that year. In October, the New York Times quoted
US Intelligence officials saying that
Pakistan not only gave North Korea
knowhow, but also supplied gas centrifuges used to create weapons grade
uranium.
It was part of a barter deal, the
paper said. Islamabad gave the nuke, Pyonyang the missiles it could use
to counter India.
While more details of this "perfect
meeting of minds" are now in public domain after Dr A Q Khan's "confession",
a nagging worry pertaining to a related quarter remains. Dr Khan, Dr Mehmood
and the others may just represent the tip of the iceberg. In January 2003,
the lid was blown off another controversy. Many nuclear scientists, most
of them trained in China and attached to the country's nuclear power plant
- CHASNUPP - had emigrated without official permission.
Some had simply vanished into thin
air. A memo sent from CHASNUPP to higher authorities, leaked to the Karachi-based
web newspaper South Asia Tribune, listed nine absconders. It only speculated
where they could have gone, for the absconders had not left a forwarding
address. The ramifications of this are scary.
Here too, the blame leads to the
Pakistani Government, for it is illegal under its law for technical persons
attached to the nation's nuclear establishment to leave country for greener
pastures.
The memo stated that the defections
began in April 1997. Between February and October 2000, six more scientists
had walked away into the fog.
It is anybody's guess if the phenomenon
is still continuing. Many of them could have been exposed to the use of
dual use technology, which rogue powers can use.
Can Musharraf still be allowed to
bury his face in the sand?
