Author: Selig S. Harrison
Publication: Boston.com
Date: June 29, 2010
URL: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/06/29/us_aid_fuels_dangerous_deal_in_pakistan/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+Editorial%2FOp-ed+pages
WITH ONE hand, Pakistan scoops up its multiplying
millions in US aid. With the other, it buys nuclear reactors from China that
will give it the capability to add 24 nuclear weapons per year to its estimated
existing arsenal of 70 to 90.
The Obama administration is focused narrowly
on the Islamist threat in Pakistan. It has soft-pedaled its opposition to
Islamabad's $2.4 billion, US-subsidized purchase of two 635 megawatt reactors
from Beijing for its plutonium production complex at Chasma. But precisely
because Islamist forces are expanding, the United States should refocus on
the growing danger that Islamist sympathizers in the armed forces and their
intelligence agencies will once again make Pakistan a nuclear rogue state.
It was only six years ago that Pakistan's
nuclear czar, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was arrested for running a global nuclear
Walmart that enabled Iran, North Korea, and Libya to start their nuclear programs.
The CIA and the International Atomic Energy Agency are still barred from questioning
him because the Pakistan Army fears that he would expose the role played by
high-level military officers in colluding with him and in profiting from what
he did.
Several confidantes of Khan have told me that
he is ready to name names. In their study of the Khan scandal, Adrian Levy
and Catherine Scott-Clark concluded that Khan was "the fall guy. This
covert trade in doomsday technology was not the work of one man, but the foreign
policy of a nation and supervised by Pakistan's ruling military clique.''
With the Khan case still in limbo, the acquisition
of more plutonium reactors on top of Islamabad's existing uranium-based nuclear
program is alarming. The Obama administration expressed pro forma opposition
to the Chasma deal at the New Zealand meeting last week of the Nuclear Suppliers
Group, a 46-nation global nuclear watchdog agency. But the United States is
not using its massive aid leverage to block it, despite the fact that US aid
is subsidizing the deal.
Pakistan's economic solvency rests largely
on US financial support. In addition to earmarked economic and military aid
and US-backed international Monetary Fund credits, US aid has included $10.5
billion in cash payments to the armed forces that are nominally to reimburse
counter-terrorism activities but go into the general budget and can be diverted
without US oversight to other uses. Pakistan's foreign debt is nearing $15
billion, and it is only because a US orchestrated aid consortium keeps rescheduling
the debt that Pakistan remains afloat economically.
Although the Chinese-built reactors at Chasma
will be under IAEA safeguards, Pakistan's Kahuta uranium enrichment plant
and another plutonium reactor at Khushab are not under safeguards and are
used for its nuclear weapons program. The Suppliers Group bars nuclear exports
to countries that have not placed all their nuclear facilities under IAEA
inspection. Nevertheless, Beijing argues, Pakistan should be given an "exception''
for the Chasma reactors because India was given one two years ago.
Both India and Pakistan have refused to sign
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India, however, has maintained strict
controls on the export of nuclear technology, in accordance with NPT guidelines,
and for this reason was given an "exception'' to facilitate implementation
of the 2008 US civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with New Delhi. By contrast,
Pakistan has the most egregious record of trampling non-proliferation norms
of any country.
Pakistan, like India, needs nuclear power
for electricity, and hopefully, its future evolution will some day reduce
the risks of a civilian nuclear program. But for the foreseeable future, the
risks of adding to its nuclear capabilities are unacceptable. The repeated
Islamist attacks on Pakistan's nuclear installations in recent years make
clear that the leakage of fissile material and of the components of its nuclear
weapons is a clear and present danger despite IAEA safeguards.
The United States should aggressively seek
China's expulsion from the Suppliers Group unless it cancels the Chasma deal.
It should condition new aid to Pakistan on the termination of nuclear purchases
from China, unfettered access to Khan, the full disclosure of hitherto-suppressed
details of his nuclear transfers and the removal of his collaborators from
Army positions related to nuclear security.
Pakistan poses many dangers to the United
States, notably its aid to Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and the use of
its territory for the training of would-be suicide bombers. But the greatest
of all is that fissile material will be smuggled out of its nuclear facilities
by undetected Islamist sympathizers and that a future leadership infiltrated
by Islamists will risk a nuclear Armageddon in Mumbai or Washington.
- Selig S. Harrison is director of the Asia
Program at the Center for International Policy and the author of five books
on South Asia.
