Pakistan’s nuclear programme and scientists are in the gun-sights of the sole superpower. Allegations of wrongdoing (proliferation) are slowly hardening into undeniable facts. Iran and Libya have got off the hook but screwed us in the bargain. Our footprints have even been discerned on the tarmac of Pyongyang’s airport in North Korea. In the event, Islamabad is desperate to limit damage and “close” this potentially explosive case. To this end, General Pervez Musharraf’s strategy seems twofold: admit a degree of guilt but absolve the state by attributing it to a few greedy and wayward scientists. This is savage and naked realpolitik: among the targeted fall-guys is, Dr A Q Khan, the state-acclaimed “father of the Islamic bomb”.
Pakistan’s nuclear programme had survived international pressure until now for several reasons. First, it was supposed to be India-specific. Therefore as long as the world was prepared to accept India’s nuclear programme, it could hardly trample on Pakistan’s nukes. Second, it was supposed to be a defensive deterrent and not a weapon of threat in an aggressive adventure. In other words, it was supposed to keep the peace, not precipitate war, in the region. Third, it was shrouded in secrecy. Indeed, a degree of ambiguity was deliberately cultivated by the state to maximise its deterrent value for India while minimising its threat value for the rest of the world. Fourth, Pakistan’s frontline status in the cold war compelled the “free” world to turn a blind eye to it.
But problems began in the late 1980s, and one by one these benign conditions started to fall by the board. In 1987, following India’s aggressive intents in Operation Brasstacks, Dr A Q Khan seemingly lost his cool and exploded with the scoop of the decade (“We’ve got the bomb”!) before the bewildered Indian journalist Kuldip Nayar. That was the end of the theory of plausible ambiguity. Then the cold war came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spotlight was turned on Pakistan. In April 1990, Washington dispatched Robert Gates of the CIA to the sub-continent when it suspected a nuclear conflict in the offing following Pakistan’s fuelling of low-intensity conflict in Kashmir. This implied that the development of nuclear weapons had emboldened rather than restrained Pakistan from adventuring in the region. Therefore in September 1990, the US ambassador to Islamabad, Robert Oakley, accused Pakistan of having “crossed the nuclear red light” and the Bush Sr administration slapped economic and military sanctions on Pakistan. For the next four years, Washington tried to pressurise Pakistan to “freeze, cap and roll back” its nuclear programme in exchange for a restoration of mutually profitable ties. But Pakistan refused to accept a rollback. Instead, it claimed it had frozen its programme. More critically, it insisted its programme was under tight controls and proliferation was out of the question. But telltale signs to the contrary were aplenty.
In 1991, COAS General Aslam Beg advised Nawaz Sharif to sell nuclear know-how to Iran. The idea was spurned, according to Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and Ishaq Dar of the PMLN. But the nuclear rogues were not to be thwarted. In the mid 1990s, following a series of carefully planted “nationalistic” articles in the press advocating sale of nuclear technology to offset American economic and military sanctions, a full-page advertisement appeared in a national daily hawking nuclear wares to the world at large. When the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad erupted in protest, the nuclear rogues seemed to beat a hasty retreat. But now it transpires that in fact they did quite the opposite: they simply went underground with their business.
Dr A Q Khan has been at the heart of our nuclear programme. His secret “successes” made Kahuta Research Laboratories an unaccountable state institution within the larger, unaccountable praetorian state of Pakistan. Dr Khan has accumulated extraordinary wealth in pursuit of his nuclear dream. He has funded self-serving seminars and books. With the help of pliant journalists, he has bankrolled his image as “the father of the Islamic bomb” so that no one can dare accuse him of any wrongdoing. When colleagues like Dr Munir Ahmad Khan and others in the atomic energy establishment protested his dubious “dealings”, he connived to have them shunted aside as “American
agents”. Those in the media who wondered about his newfound wealth and questionable ways were accused of being “unpatriotic”. Every army chief and every general who headed the strategic nuclear establishment knew much was amiss but preferred to turn a blind eye “in the national interest” to Dr Khan’s comings and goings. But when the national interest changed, efforts were speeded up to quietly wean KRL away from critical elements of the programme and hand these over to the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. Indeed, General Pervez Musharraf was the first army chief who actually confronted Dr Khan and was stunned by the revelations of impropriety.
General Musharraf is absolutely right to insist upon a detailed investigation into the matter, partly to assuage international proliferation concerns and partly to devise better mechanisms of command and control in the future. Both individuals (scientists and generals and civil servants and politicians) and state institutions (intelligence agencies, media, defense organs) are guilty to a greater or lesser extent. He is also right in suggesting that such things happened because of the intrinsic secret nature of the programme and Dr Khan’s pivotal role in it from the outset. But he has omitted to note the most critical factor in such reckoning: the unaccountable status of the Pakistan army as the guardian of our nuclear programme and its overbearing control of civil society. In the final analysis, the buck stops at GHQ rather than at any particular army chief.
At the moment, however, too much is at stake for the state and nation to accommodate some of the more self-righteous protests of so-called “nationalist” elements in our media against the investigations (“debriefings”) underway. To punish some or all of the rogue scientists and army officers or not to punish anyone at all is also not the real issue because the problem is symptomatic of a deep political confusion about the nature of the Pakistani state and society, the role of the armed forces and the “ideology” of Pakistan. But while we mull over how to address such weighty issues, we must urge the government of the day to close this dangerous file as quickly as possible. In this context, General Pervez Musharraf needs all the support he can get from us in cleaning up this act effectively and laying the international community’s suspicions and fears to rest.