Hey! Careful with that feather! You almost knocked me over!
The Bush administration’s success in persuading Libya to reveal its weapons of mass destruction programs has created a new and potentially embarrassing problem: Pakistan a vital U.S. ally in the war on terror appears to have been a main supplier of nuclear know-how to Libya, and possibly to North Korea and Iran.
| Comes as a surprise, huh? I know. It floored me, too... |
Libya pledged to name its suppliers when it announced last month it was giving up its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. Officials say many of the names probably will be Pakistani. They say evidence points to Pakistani nuclear experts as the source of at least some technology Libya used in its nuclear weapons program. Similar reports have arisen about probable Pakistani assistance to Iran and North Korea, countries President Bush said comprised an "axis of evil" with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. "This ought to get front-and-center attention," said Henry Sokolski, a Pentagon arms control official in the first Bush administration. The United States has given Pakistan evidence that its scientists were involved in the spread of nuclear weapons technology, Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week. Powell said he didn’t have enough information to say whether Pakistan was a source for Libya’s program.
While strongly denying government involvement, Pakistani authorities last month detained two top nuclear scientists and questioned the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan. Pakistani officials said they were acting on information from Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Pakistan presents a difficult diplomatic problem for Washington. Critics say the idea that a major ally is giving nuclear technology to three countries on Washington’s list of terror exporters is an embarrassment to President Bush, who has argued his top priority is keeping weapons of mass destruction away from terrorists and rogue states. They want the Bush administration to lean harder on Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, to stop his country’s clandestine nuclear activities.
| Pakland is a rogue state. We all know that. Eventually it will either reform or be declared a rogue state and treated accordingly. Perv knows this, Bush knows this, Powell knows this, and all are pretending it's not the case in the hope that the Paks will reform instead of making us do terrible things to them... |
Other experts say that if Washington pushes Musharraf too far, Pakistan could scale back its anti-terrorism help. In a worst-case scenario, Musharraf could fall, and Islamic extremists hostile to the United States could get their hands on Pakistan’s nuclear technology. "How do you stop Pakistan? No one has found a way," said David Albright, a former United Nations nuclear inspector. "We have this set of conflicting priorities. The United States is reluctant to crack down too hard."
| That's why we try diplomacy first. If the diplomacy doesn't work, then we can invade them... |
At issue are high-speed centrifuges that can separate uranium into its highly enriched form to be used in nuclear bombs. Khan helped start Pakistan’s program when he stole uranium centrifuge designs in the 1970s from Urenco, a European uranium processing consortium. Among evidence pointing to Pakistan’s proliferation is that centrifuges and centrifuge parts found in both Iran and Libya are similar to the Urenco designs, both U.S. officials and outside experts say. Pakistani scientists distributed a brochure several years ago offering to sell parts and plans for such centrifuges. The United States last year sanctioned Pakistan’s Khan Research Laboratory, its main nuclear weapons lab, for cooperating with North Korea on missile technology. "It shows the countries who are outside the system cooperate with each other, and that’s very important to recognize," said Lee Feinstein, a top State Department arms control official under former President Clinton.
Powell says he has raised the nuclear proliferation problem repeatedly with Musharraf. "We know that there have been cases where individuals in Pakistan have worked in these areas, and we have called it to the attention of the Pakistanis in the past," Powell said last week. "And I’m very pleased now that President Musharraf is aggressively moving to investigate all of that." In the past, the U.S. government sanctioned Pakistan repeatedly for its nuclear weapons program, even before it went public with a 1998 nuclear test. President Bush lifted most of those sanctions shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks when Musharraf agreed to help fight al-Qaida. American experts are skeptical of Pakistan’s denial of government involvement in nuclear technology transfers.
| That's because they're neither stoopid nor blind... |
"These activities were tightly held, state-run activities," said Sokolski, the first Bush administration official who now heads the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington. "The idea that they would be shared with countries of this sort, without the knowledge of people senior in the government, strikes me as very unlikely." If Musharraf’s government was not involved in the transfers but its scientists were, Islamabad’s control over its nuclear complex would be questionable. That raises the possibility of al-Qaida or other terrorists being able to get their hands on some of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, materials or technology. Pakistan already has questioned some of its nuclear scientists about links to al-Qaida and the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan. In past years, Pakistan has asked for U.S. help with security at its nuclear sites, former Energy Department nuclear official Rose Gottemoeller said at a 2001 conference. |