Author: Sarju Kaul
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: October 28, 2007
Every successive American government, from
President Jimmy Carter to incumbent President George W. Bush, has turned a
blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear programme and allowed Islamabad to build nuclear
facilities at Kahuta, near Islamabad, and assemble a vast arsenal of nuclear
weapons by diverting US aid money, according to details revealed by investigative
journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark in their new book Deception:
Pakistan, the United States and the Global Weapons Conspiracy.
Successive US governments even sanitised reports
on Pakistan's nuclear ambitions and capabilities by their own intelligence
agencies by either rewriting them or destroying all evidence painstakingly
collected to enable Islamabad achieve its nuclear goals clandestinely, the
book claims. Evidence was destroyed, criminal files were diverted, the US
Congress was repeatedly lied to, and in several cases, in 1986 and 1987, presidential
appointees even tipped off the Pakistan government to prevent its agents from
getting caught in the US Customs Service stings that aimed to catch them buying
nuclear components in America, the authors claim.
The so-called rouge nations, Iran, North Korea
and Libya, described by US President George W. Bush as the "Axis of Evil,"
got their nuclear technology from Pakistan, the authors added. Describing
Pakistan as a rouge nation at the epicentre of world destabilisation, the
book claims that Pakistan was still busy selling its nuclear secrets in the
world market.
In a chilling warning to the world,the authors
say: "It will only be a matter of time before the rising tide of Sunni
extremism and the fast-flowing current of nuclear exports find common cause
and realise their apocalyptic intent. There are plenty of ideologues, thinkers
and Islamic strategists who are working towards precisely that goal, and here
is a regime in Islamabad that has no hard and fast rules, no unambiguous goals
or laws, and no line that cannot be bent and reshaped."
Describing the genesis of nuclear Pakistan,
the authors have written: "It all started with an ambitious young man
who could not get a job."
Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgical engineer
and the future Father of the Pakistan Bomb, wrote to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in
1974 offering highly classified blueprints for a radical new nuclear process
being developed by a consortium of British, Dutch and German scientists called
URENCO.
Smarting over the American refusal to act
as Pakistan's security guarantor against a nuclear attack by India, which
had tested its bomb in Pokhran on May 18, 1974, Bhutto grabbed the offer and
in October 1975 A.Q. Khan "brought to Pakistan designs, instruction manual
and lists of suppliers for both the CNOR and G-2 prototypes" of centrifuges
developed by URENCO scientists.
Khan, who had given himself a seven-year deadline
to build the bomb, chose Kahuta, outside Islamabad, as the site of the enrichment
facility, the Engineering Research Laboratories, codenamed Project 706. The
construction of the nuclear facility started in the autumn of 1976. The CIA,
the book says, reported about the intense activity in Kahuta to its regional
headquarters in Tehran. "Something strange is happening at Kahuta. Construction
work is going on at a pace quite uncharacteristic of Pakistan. One can see
day-to-day progress."
Western nations kept disregarding warnings
about Khan and Pakistan's network of agents who had begun shopping in Europe
and North America for equipment needed for the nuclear facility at Kahuta.
The first warning came from a colleague of his at URENCO's Almelo centrifuge
project, Frits Veerman, in 1975, and then Nico Zondag, who tipped off the
Dutch intelligence service. However, there was no response to both the complaints.
However, most of the components that Khan
and Pakistani agents were buying were not on any IAEA list of nuclear-sensitive
equipment due to the fact that the centrifuge technology itself was new at
the time.
"Greed, lax customs inspections, an overly
bureaucratic IAEA, governments' pursuit of their national interests, and antiquated
legislation were all being exploited ruthlessly, and clearly Western governments
and suppliers underestimated Pakistan," say the authors.
The US government in 1976 had offered Bhutto
a deal to stop his reprocessing project (Pakistan was in talks with France
over a reprocessing plant) and offered to share products from a US-supplied
facility in Iran. Even at that point, a report ordered by the US state department
had concluded that "Pakistan's nuclear industry is not particularly worrisome
now."
It was only after March 1979, when a German
TV channel unmasked A.Q. Khan as the head of Pakistan's nuclear programme,
that then US President Jimmy Carter ordered the CIA to investigate. With the
imposition of a Communist government in Afghanistan in 1978 and the Soviet
invasion of that country the following year, and the overthrow of the pro-US
Shah of Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1979, Mr Carter's national
security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski lobbied for a change in US non-proliferation
policy in order to fight the Soviets through a proxy war by Afghan rebels.
The US by now had a detailed picture of Pakistan's
nuclear programme, but had decided to go on the backfoot to protect its strategic
interests in the region. However, the real deceit on the Pakistan nuclear
issue began with the Reagan administration. "US officials converged on
Islamabad carrying cash (for the proxy war in Afghanistan routed through the
ISI) and with the message that America would ignore Pakistan's growing nuclear
programme," say the authors. However, in the US, President Reagan insisted
that non-proliferation remained a key policy, they add.
Senior Reagan officials went on the offensive
to prevent any opposition in Congress to its plans to use Pakistan as "a
staging post to bleed the Soviets." In order to get Congress to agree
to unprecedented aid for Pakistan, the Reagan advisers began promoting the
theory that the "way to gain assurance that A.Q. Khan would roll back
the nuclear programme was to give Islamabad F-16 jets and money."
The theory rapidly bloomed into a complex
conspiracy as the US state department officials started "actively obstructing
other arms of government which could not help but fall over intelligence about
Pakistan's nuclear trade."
In December 1981, the US Senate approved an
$3.2 billion aid package for Pakistan, and although it had nuclear caveats
attached, the Pakistanis were informally told that they could do what they
wanted.
"The White House had a wellspring of
intelligence on Khan, most of which never reached Congress. Much of it related
to Khan's ongoing shopping operations in North America and Europe, which were
needed in order to fit out the main centrifuge hall at Kahuta and finish off
other essential workshops and research facilities at the plant."
After British intelligence caught Khan's network
shopping in the UK, President Reagan, instead of putting pressure on Islamabad
over the issue, sent his envoy Vernon Walters to warn Gen. Zia-ul Haq to be
more discreet in nuclear trading, says the book.
Pakistan cold-tested its bomb in March 1983
and just around the same time President Reagan had "certified to Congress
the third year running that Gen. Zia-ul Haq was not involved in nuclear weapons
design."
Instead of acting on evidence that showed
China was teaching Pakistan how to build a bomb, the US was lobbying with
China to join the IAEA. Beijing had signed up to "purchase US-manufactured
nuclear technology worth billions of dollars with which it intended to modernise
and expand its overworked power generation facilities."
Again, despite the arrest of three Pakistanis,
including one Nazir Ahmed Vaid, in Houston in June 1984 for trying to export
a box of krytrons (cold-cathose gas-filled tubes intended for use as high-speed
switches and an important component for the trigger mechanism of a nuclear
bomb), President Reagan again told Congress that Pakistan posed no "significant
risk."
Vaid, incidentally, "had had his criminal
file rewritten, his charges whittled pencil-thin" and was bundled out
of the US three weeks after being awarded the smallest possible sentence in
October 1984.
The major triumph for the Reagan administration
and Pakistan was the passage of the Pressler Amendment in April 1984, which
the book says was described by Peter Galbraith as "a pro-Pakistan initiative
to undermine a tougher non-proliferation regime."
By the end of 1985, the US defence department
withdrew the requirement for licences for military exports to Pakistan totally.
"An invisible tide of military hardware and software was heading for
South Asia which was immune from investigation."
European governments too were up to date about
the nuclear shopping activities being pursued by Khan. However, the authors
say: "The customs and investigating agencies could not keep pace with
the nuclear trades being made on behalf of Khan. There was also a lack of
political will, with European governments reluctant to interfere in a lucrative
industrial sector that generated tens of thousands of jobs."
However, new evidence with the intelligence
agencies was more alarming: it appeared that Pakistan was working on creating
a nuclear export programme.
