Posted on 06/01/2002 1:07:18 PM PDT by swarthyguy
Addressing a press conference at New Delhi on May 28,2002, Mr.Jaswant Singh, India's Minister for External Affairs, described as highly disturbing some of the recent statements and interviews of Gen.Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan regarding the readiness/willingness of the Pakistani military to use its nuclear weapons in the event of a military conflict with India and referred to what he described as the danger of "nuclearisation of terrorism" in Pakistani territory.
2. This danger has not received the attention it deserves from the international community. While the USA and the UK have been focussing on the threat likely to be posed to the international community if any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the possession of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq pass into the hands of terrorists and calling for the resumption of a vigorous inspection regime under the UN auspices in Iraq in order to pre-empt this danger, a similar attention is not being paid to this danger in Pakistan.
3. The danger is greater and more real from Pakistan than it is from Iraq. Baghdad's possession of a WMD capability is yet to be established. Apart from the allegations being made and suspicions being voiced by the USA and the UK from time to time in this regard, there is so far no credible evidence of Baghdad having such a capability even though, in the past, it did try to acquire it.
4. As against this, Pakistan is an established nuclear and missile power, which acquired its nuclear and missile delivery capability, partly with the collusion of China and North Korea and partly through thefts of technology and equipment from Western countries. The sanctions imposed on Pakistan by the then Bush Administration in 1990 under the Pressler Amendment did not deter Islamabad from pressing ahead with its clandestine efforts to strengthen this capability.
5. After demonstrating its nuclear and missile capabilities through a series of tests/firings since April 1998, Pakistan refused to subscribe to the "no first use" doctrine, justifying its refusal by citing a similar stand adopted by the NATO powers during the Cold War. Its contention was and continues to be that in view of India's conventional superiority, there could be contingencies where it might not be able to protect its territorial integrity in the event of a military conflict with India except through the use of its nuclear weapons.
6. Certain aspects regarding Pakistan's nuclear capability need to be underlined:
* The development and possession of this capability and the responsibility for developing a nuclear doctrine and a command and control system have been exclusively in the hands of the military-intelligence establishment, with the elected political leaders of the past, even when in power, having been kept totally out of the picture. Bruce Riedel, a senior official of the US National Security Council Secretariat during the former administration of President Clinton, had recently pointed out in an article how at the height of the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999, the Clinton Administration had detected initiation of action by Pervez Musharraf, the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) under Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister, for the deployment of Pakistan's nuclear-capable missiles without the authorisation and even knowledge of Sharif and how the latter was surprised when this was mentioned to him during his visit to Washington DC in July,1999, for talks with Clinton. In her past interviews, Benazir Bhutto had repeatedly mentioned how during her two tenures as the Prime Minister, Pakistan's military leadership had kept her in the dark about developments in the nuclear field despite her being the elected leader of the country.
* The Pakistani nuclear and missile establishment has had rogue elements, often not amenable to any control, either political or military. It is known how Dr.A.Q.Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, had maintained clandestine contacts with the Saddam Hussein regime in the 1990s and had even allegedly paid a secret visit to Baghdad during the days preceding the Gulf War of 1991, without the knowledge or authorisation of Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister. Subsequently, he was also reprimanded by Sharif for allowing a group of Saudi scientists to visit Pakistan's sensitive nuclear establishments without his clearance. *Just as the Pakistan Army has many pan-Islamic extremist elements in the lower and middle levels recruited since the days of the late Zia-ul-Haq, similarly in its nuclear and missile establishment too there are pan-Islamic extremist elements who gained entry during the days of Zia and thereafter. In their accounts of the past annual conventions at Muridke, near Lahore, of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), a member of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front For Jehad Against the US and Israel, which has been in the forefront of suicide terrorism in India's Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) and which was designated by the Bush administratiion as a foreign terrorist organisation in December,2001, Pakistani media had reported about the support enjoyed by the LET even in Pakistan's scientific community and the presence of some of the scientists (not identified) at the annual conventions. The detention and interrogation post October 7,2001, of two Pakistani nuclear scientists (Sultan Bashiuddin Mehmood and Abdul Majid) by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) under pressure from the USA brought out their past contacts with bin Laden under the cover of a non-governmental organisation (Ummah Tamir-e-Nau---Reconstruction of the Ummah), ostensibly doing humanitarian work. This NGO has since been brought within the purview of the UN Security Council Resolution No. 1373 against international terrorism and its bank accounts ostensibly frozen by Pakistan under a directive from the UNSC Monitoring Committee. While no credible evidence could be found that these rogue scientists might have helped bin Laden in his search for WMD, the investigation of their activities brought to light the nexus between some sections of Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishment and international terrorists.
7. Islamic fundamentalism is not unique to Pakistan. There are other Islamic countries which have seen and continue to see the sweep of fundamentalist ideas. However, what is unique to Pakistan is a very pernicious concept of fundamentalism and extremism spawned by the madrasas of Pakistan and particularly by the Binori madrasa of Karachi. The Taliban and its obscurantist ideas and jehadi organisations such as the Harkatul Mujahideen (HUM), the Harkat-ul-Jehad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) and Sunni extremist organisations such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) were the offspring of the Binori madrasa, which has also been training a large number of Muslim students from Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines and giving them jehadi inoculation in the battle fields of Afghanistan . Among the few dead bodies discovered after the recent OP Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan was that of an Indonesian jehadi, reportedly trained in Binori. 8. This pernicious concept holds that:
*A Muslim's first loyalty is to his religion and then only to the nation of which he is a citizen. *Where there is a conflict between considerations of national solidarity and those of Islamic solidarity, considerations of Islamic solidarity should prevail.
*A Muslim does not recognise national frontiers. He or she recognises only the frontiers of the Ummah. A Muslim has the right and the religious obligation to go to the assistance of Muslims anywhere in the world suffering from oppression.
*Pakistan's atomic bomb belongs to the Ummah and not to Pakistan alone. Pakistan has a duty and a religious obligation to share its nuclear knowledge and technology with other Islamic countries which may need them for the protection of Islam.
*Muslims have not only the right, but also the religious obligation to use WMD for protecting their religion if there was no other way of doing so.
9. bin Laden's advocacy of the right and duty of Muslims to seek WMD and to use them, if necessary, to protect Islam was the result of the influence of the Mullas of Pakistan, and particularly of the Binori madrasa, and his ISI mentors during his long years of interactions with them since the 1980s. WMD seeking terrorism is a typical product of the madrasas of Pakistan. One does not find such irrational ideas about the right and obligation of Muslims to acquire and use WMD to protect their religion in the ideologies propagated by jehadi terrorists in countries not influenced by Pakistan. 10.The tenor and language of the highly irresponsible statements recently emanating from Musharraf and his senior colleagues and officials such as Munir Akram, Pakistani Permanet Representative to the UN in New York, remind one disturbingly of the tenor and language of the irrational statements emanating from time to time from bin Laden and the jehadi organisations. They show that nuclear irrationality is not confined only to bin Laden and his brand of international terrorists, but is also found in the mindset of Musharraf and other leaders of Pakistan's military intelligence establishment.
11. The interenational community and the UNSC should take urgent note of this and impose international control and inspection over the WMD assets of Pakistan and initiate action to have them dismantled to prevent their falling into the hands of international terrorists. This is a task, which is far more important and urgent than the task of similar action in Iraq.
12. In this connection, reference is also invited to this writer's paper of November 27,2000, on "International Islamism", at http://www.saag.org/papers2/paper163.htm .
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai
Nevertheless, the analysis should not be discounted.
FMCDH
To me Pakistan is a bigger threat than even Iraq and Iran put together at present.
I don't think an analysis by India of Pakistan at the present time would be worth reading. So I didn't. Likewise a Pakistani analysis would be useless as well.
The Strategery of the Nuclearisation of Terrorismness.
I've been thinking this since shortly after 9/11. Let's look at the record:
*** BCCI - the most prolific money-laundering and criminal enterprise of the 20th century - was created specifically and solely to finance "the Islamic bomb", according to repeated statements by its founders.
*** Pakistan even today harbors al Qaeda, the Taliban, Kashmir Jihadists, Saudi-financed schools of Jihadist hatred (madrassas). Its people currently share a savage bloodlust against Americans, Brits, Hindus, Christians, French engineers, Jews, Western journalists, etc.
*** Pakistan and its military serve as the refining and distribution end for 70 percent of the global heroin business.
Pakistan has become a seething cesspool of global evil. In the context of its general lawlessness and support for Islamic terrorism, Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons is a threat to world security.
Surely someone in Washington must be aware of this?
First of all the US has required Pakistani help…. Ooops, sorry, I meant Pakistani airspace and land to root out the al Queda bases last year. Thus they had to be in the good graces of the Pakistani government, and accusing them as terrorists (like the British Foreign Secretary did last week by calling Pakistan the leading terrorist supporter in the world today) would have made the use of airspace and land curtailed.
Secondly it seems that feigning ignorance and unawareness is in vogue within the intelligence circles. In other countries this is not the case. For example the Israeli Mossad has been collaborating with the Indian RAW and carrying out aggressive forays into Pakistan. They know they inherent danger posed by the Pakistanis, and they are willing to do something about it. However at present the US seems complacent, and is targeting Iraq and leaving Pakistan behind in a bid to make ‘our Muslim allies’ to not get angry and leave the ‘coalition.’
The reason we are doing this is because if we were to start naming Pakistan as a threat then we would alienate many Islamic nations that would accuse us of religious xenophobia and encapsulation.
However the problem with that is that based on past experiences, government shifts occur through coup de tats! And there is a likelihood that the next Pakistani government may be radical….. and armed with a nuke arsenal! And with a mindset that would allow them to attack the US (and no other threat to the states has been so dangerous. The old block communists would never have launched since they knew a retaliation would take place… thus the concept of MAD. The current N. Koreans and the Chinese would also not do such a dumb thing. And the slew of Islamic countries seeking a nuclear arsenal are primarily doing it for egoistical and Israeli-deterrence reasons, since their governments are not as radical. For example Iraq is a virtual aethist state since Saddam fears Islamic revolution, and Iranian government is becoming extremely moderate.). However recent interviews with Pakistani generals show them as individuals who would be willing to see their own destruction if it meant destroying even one Indian city…. And in the future India will be substituted for the USA, just as the Mujahadeens substituted the occupying Soviet forces for the United states once that threat went.
Yet we sleep. I hope we are not woken up by another atrocity against the US populace!
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