| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| How the West summoned up a nuclear nightmare in Pakistan |
| 2007-09-03 |
| By Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark General Pervez Musharraf was surprised. Visiting New York for a session of the UN, the last thing the Pakistani president expected was to be confronted with evidence of his country’s secret sales of nuclear bomb technology and equipment to members of the “axis of evil”. Yet here on the polished wooden table of Musharraf’s hotel suite, George Tenet, director of the CIA, was laying out a sheaf of incriminating evidence. There were intricate drawings of Pakistan’s P-1 uranium-enrich-ing centrifuge, with part numbers, dates and signatures. And there were details of the activities of Abdul Qadeer “A Q” Khan, the so-called Father of the Pakistani Bomb: his travels around the world, bank statements, even paperwork showing what his organisation had offered for sale and to which countries. A senior Musharraf aide described it disingenuously as “the most embarrassing moment in the president’s life” – not because of the evidence but because he had felt Pakistan was on a long leash as it was integral to the Americans’ war on terror. It was only three months since President George W Bush had cancelled a $1 billion debt and instigated a new $3 billion military and economic assistance package for Pakistan. “Now the leash was being wound in, but Musharraf got over his surprise. He moved on and thought, so be it. He was a survivor. Pakistan was a survivor. We would adapt to a new reality,” a source said. But he was not going to confess all: “Musharraf would play dumb until he ascertained what the US knew and whom we could blame.” |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #4 According to Mark Hibbs, editor of Nucleonics, the Khan network is very much active.. Pakistan needs to to obtain the components for its bomb program. |
| Posted by: john frum 2007-09-03 14:55 |
| #3 Four years on, Khan is still under house arrest, and Musharraf is still in power. In a further exercise in “realpolitik”, another political deal is being stitched together to keep him in the presidency as America’s best hope of maintaining stability in this geopolitically vital but desperately unstable country. The "realpolitik" of this situation had damn well better include the precise location and coordinates of every single nuclear device and store of weapons grade material within Pakistani borders. Musharraf has run with the fox and hunted with the hounds for far too long. Robert Gallucci, who as a young US diplomat tracked its nuclear programme from inception in 1972 and ended his career as Bush’s adviser on WMD, describes Pakistan as “the number one threat to the world at this moment in time”. He warns: “If it all goes off, a nuclear bomb in a US or European city, I’m sure we will find ourselves looking in Pakistan’s direction.” We had also damn well better have samples of Pakistani fissile material to isotopically fingerprint their nuclear materials. If this has not already been delivered, then Pakistan should be put on notice that a single terrorist nuclear attack upon American soil will see Islamabad and the entire country reduced to fine ash. Much of the programme had been funded using hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid diverted by the Pakistan military. Typical Muslim ingratitude. I'd certainly like to see if it has ever been the case that aid to Islamic countries has not been diverted into channels opposing American interests. Muslim majority countries will never by reliable allies for America. They are inherently unstable and driven by such inimical ideology that there is no useful way for them to participate in global progress. The West must begin a campaign of sequentially toppling Islamic regimes around the world. Not a single one of them is worthy of governing a central African village, much less an entire nation. Political Islam must die. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-09-03 13:44 |
| #2 After Taliban-al-Queda launched aggressive war against America on 9-11, one option was to carpet bomb southern Afghanistan for the Northern Alliance. In World War 2, the USAF - under the Allied framework of "Bomber Command" - unleashed annihilation bombing of "built up areas" in enemy territory. Why the hell did we chose to grant special treatment to Islamofascists, when even the Nazis didn't slaughter over 3000 people on US soil? Kandahar could have been flattened, like Dresden. Either Mushy and Kharzai shape up, or we set up a new "Bomber Command," and make waste of Central Asian savages. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2007-09-03 12:11 |
| #1 Pakistan is Operations central but ideology and funding comes from Saudi!!!!! |
| Posted by: Paul 2007-09-03 07:13 |