Author: Editorial
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: February 5, 2004
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14272-2004Feb4.html
While Washington has been debating
the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, an extraordinary
series of revelations has confirmed that Pakistan has been guilty of some
of the worst crimes of nuclear weapons proliferation ever committed. For
some 15 years it has been supplying atomic bomb technology to rogue states
and sponsors of terrorism -- and it did so even after President Bush declared
that governments that conducted such transfers could be subject to preemptive
attack by the United States. Under pressure from the United Nations, Pakistani
officials have acknowledged that nuclear designs and materials were given
to Iran, Libya and North Korea, either directly or through an underground
network involving middlemen in Germany and a secret factory in Malaysia.
Officials claim the traffic was conducted solely by the country's chief
weapons scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and several associates. Hoping to
avoid prosecution, Mr. Khan duly confessed on Pakistani television yesterday
and absolved his government. But the scientist previously gave investigators
a more plausible account: that President Pervez Musharraf and other senior
military leaders approved the deals.
For more than two years the Bush
administration has embraced Mr. Musharraf as a strategic ally and overlooked
his suppression of Pakistani democracy and his coddling of Islamic extremists.
Now the administration must confront the reality that Pakistan's military
leadership has done more to threaten U.S. and global security with weapons
of mass destruction than either al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. Were Pakistan
not a professed ally of the United States, its behavior would meet the
criteria for preemptive military intervention outlined in Mr. Bush's national
security strategy. He is not contemplating such action, nor should he be.
But the United States must ensure that Pakistan never again markets its
nuclear weapons technology. That will require more than extracting further
promises of good behavior from an unreliable general.
Mr. Musharraf, who narrowly survived
two recent assassination attempts, has made lots of promises to Washington
since Sept. 11, 2001. Most have not been fulfilled. When asked about Pakistan's
commerce with Iran and North Korea, he either denied that it occurred or
implied that he put a stop to it. But Pakistani military cargo flights
to North Korea took place as late as 2002. Last fall the United States
arranged the interception of a Libya-bound shipment of industrial equipment
for nuclear weapons. It turns out the goods were supplied by the network
connected to Mr. Khan.
Mr. Musharraf can be expected to
go on denying responsibility for the illegal trafficking while promising
to stop it. His word should not be enough. The Bush administration and
its allies have insisted that other nations guilty of illegal nuclear weapons
activity, including Iran and Libya, submit to strict international inspections.
Pakistan is not a signatory to international nuclear arms agreements; no
outside authority regulates its nuclear programs. That should change. If
it is to remain a friend of the United States and receive the billions
in aid promised by the Bush administration, Pakistan should be required
to commit itself formally to stop proliferating -- and the United States
or the United Nations should have the means to verify its compliance.
