Pakistan: Another problem created by our foreign policy

Say you're a member of Congress, and a Pentagon expert tells you that top officials are secretly letting Taiwan go nuclear, to contain China's emerging threat.

   Do you: (1) start an investigation, with an eye toward hearings to grill officials on the facts, or (2) drop it and stand aside as officials run your whistleblower out of town?

   In the real-life case of Pakistan and nuclear weapons, the answer from Congress has been (2). Twenty years ago, the House Foreign Affairs Committee learned that officials in the Reagan and Bush administrations were looking the other way while Pakistan acquired U.S. technology for its clandestine nuclear weapons program. Later, the United States allowed Pakistan to tweak its U.S.-supplied F-16s to carry nuclear bombs over India.

   Why? Because Washington was dependent on Pakistan for arming and supplying the Islamic warriors battling the Soviet Red Army next door in Afghanistan.

   Congress had passed legislation in 1985, aimed at Pakistan, that required the administration to cut off all military and economic aid to any country that was clandestinely pursuing nuclear weapons.

   When the last beleaguered Soviet unit withdrew from Afghanistan on Feb. 15, 1989, CIA officials in Langley, Va., clinked champagne glasses. But the glasses were hardly dry when into the vacuum came the Taliban, followed by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.

   Talk about unintended consequences.

   Barlow found a pattern of behavior within the State Department and the Pentagon whereby officials very close to the Reagan White House, rather than interdicting the Pakistan nuclear program, were physically aiding and abetting it. The Pentagon was shipping to Pakistan proscribed dual use components that other departments had barred from exporting to Pakistan.

   In fact, Barlow discovered that two president appointees were tipping off the Pakistanis about investigations run by U-S customs officials and the CIA, leading to all these undercover operations being blown.

   It got to the point where the CIA would only tip off the State Department and the Pentagon 12 hours ahead of any investigation and they in turn would tip off the Pakistanis.

   But Barlow's findings were politically inconvenient. News that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet invasion.

   The report was re-written to say Pakistan doesn't have a bomb and the American F16s are not capable of dropping one anyway. The Pentagon downplayed Pakistan's nuclear capabilities in testimony to Congress.

   What was on the line? A deal to send $4.2 billion in F16s to Pakistan to back the American proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviets. A congressional investigation would've killed the deal. With the re-written report, Ronald Reagan approved the deal, perhaps never knowing what Barlow wrote.

   When Barlow protested, he was squashed. The agency denied his clearance, fired him, turned his wife against him (she was also a CIA operative) and subsequently destroyed his career and ruined his life. There are some who say it was engineered by the powers that be. It sounds remarkably familiar, doesn't it?

   Three years later, in 1992, a high-ranking Pakistani official admitted that the country had developed the ability to assemble a nuclear weapon by 1987. In 1998, Islamabad detonated its first bomb.

   In 2007, the Senate Judiciary Committee investigated the Barlow report. Though they found he had breached no national security regulations and was vindicated, Barlow did not receive his government pension and has had trouble finding employment. The authors of The Nuclear Jihadist, a biography of A-Q Khan, caused a sensation in 2005 when they revealed that they had tracked Barlow down to a motor home in Montana where he lived with two dogs.

 

Ignoring proliferation

In 1989, when the Soviet war in Afghanistan was winding down, the U-S told Pakistan that foreign aid would be cut off, Pakistan told the United States, well, then we're going to start selling our nuclear technology elsewhere because we're broke. This stuff is worth a fortune and if you're going to pull the plug then we're going to start selling it and our first customer is going to be Iran. That message was delivered to, among others, Robert Oakley, the U-S ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad and to General Norman Schwartzkopf, the head of CentCommand at the time. The messages were sent back to Washington and no action was taken because the U-S apparently had its eye on something else. Pakistan went ahead and started selling its nuclear technology.

   How is this possible, to illicitly aid in a covert WMD program for an unstable regime like Pakistan? This is a country today that is more unstable than any other in the region.

   We're talking about a succession of administrations that helped Iran and North Korea with their nuclear programs and yet, today, here we are in a twist with Iran over their nuclear program --some even suggesting we bomb their installation.

   Every administration has ignored it or encouraged it. The Clinton administration chose to bury their head in the sand about it. The Bush administration, because of 9/11, chose to foster it. The Obama administration? Joe Biden seems to have it right and he knows foreign affairs as well as anyone in that White House: Since Last March, he'd been wanting to tilt the administration's efforts more toward Pakistan --to make the problem "pakaf, not afpak":

During a long Sunday meeting with President Obama and top national-security advisers on Sept. 13, the VP interjected, "Can I just clarify a factual point? How much will we spend this year on Afghanistan?" Someone provided the figure: $65 billion. "And how much will we spend on Pakistan?" Another figure was supplied: $2.25 billion. "Well, by my calculations that's a 30-to-1 ratio in favor of Afghanistan. So I have a question. Al Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And yet for every dollar we're spending in Pakistan, we're spending $30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?" The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.

 

The Iraq distraction

Before 9/11, there was a huge dossier assembled by western and American intelligence agencies. All of it pointed to one Islamic state that was sponsoring and nurturing al-Qaeda and the Taliban and that also had been enabling this kind of WMD proliferation --and it wasn't Iraq; it was Pakistan. But the need to create a feasible target was the emerging narrative in Washington and it was that Iraq was the danger, not Pakistan. Then it was Iran in the role of the most dangerous country in the region. Of late, we're understandably pre-occupied with Afghanistan. Part of our narrative has been to portray Pakistan as an ally in the war on terror. How do you declare an ally a major enabler in the war on terror? I don't know; how do you sit there and tell me Saudi Arabia is a completely reliable ally?

   When American foreign aid to Pakistan was suspended in 1990, it began selling nuclear materials to buyers whenever they could find them, including rogue nations like Libya, Iran and North Korea. The U-S looked the other way and eventually suspended sanctions after the country announced its support in the fight against terrorism after the 2001 attacks. Hey, back then, we were taking anyone to be part of that coalition (and don't forget Poland!).

   Pakistan has betrayed the United States time and again; the documents are there. Whether this country was, at times, enabling and encouraging the Taliban and al-Qaeda, or whether it was selling

Pervez Musharraf (AP file)

nuclear secrets to whomever would buy them.

   Look at the number of promises made to the administration by President Musharraf after 9/11. He failed to deliver on every single promise. He said he would cut back on the number of madrassas in Pakistan. He didn't. In fact, under his watch, there was a threefold increase in the number of madrassas.

   He said he would raid the camps where extremists are being trained. Didn't happen. Insurgents, terrorists and other rogue tribal groups based in northwestern Pakistan operate unimpeded, more in number than existed 10 years ago.

   He said he'd increase arrests of al-Qaeda members operating inside Pakistan. It only happened when there was a visiting U-S delegation. Then we get an airstrike on some village in a border region.

 

Who's zoomin' who?

When we talk about being the big United States that dictates the direction the world will take because we can steer foreign policy, influence it, manipulate it, bribe member states and so forth, I'm here to tell you that in large measure, we have been played by countries like Pakistan. As smart and important as we think we are, Pakistan played the United States like a sap trying win at three card monte.

   Now, a NY Times piece from just the other day delivered some ominous news: native Pakistani militants, known as jihadi groups, are joining forces with the Taliban and al-Qaeda to combat the government. The cooperative effort "has made the militant threat to Pakistan more potent and insidious than ever."

Pakistani police carry wounded after recent attack (AFP/Getty images)

   Finally, over the weekend, after weeks of violence, the Pakistani military launched a 30,000-man ground offensive against Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds in South Waziristan. But the remote area's rugged, mountainous terrain will make defeating the insurgents difficult if not impossible. The landscape is described as "perfect guerrilla territory," the local population is relatively sympathetic to the Taliban, and locals tell journalists that the insurgents are putting up stiff resistance to the Pakistani Army's ground offensive.

   And we wanted to invade Iran? We're in knots over what to do about Afghanistan? We haven't got a clue. But I'll tell you, we'd better get one.

   The result will be that the West --us-- will have sided against the people of that country. People who used to be our friends become increasingly radical and anti-western.

   And guess who knows best how to play on that? That's right, radical Islamists.

   In Pakistan, the military has made it virtually impossible now if you are a middle class Pakistani to get a visa to the United States. People are stuck inside Pakistan and it is increasingly difficult for them to get their money out. They become forced into a situation between the military and the religious parties, and right now, they are choosing the religious side, becoming more radicalized because it's the only way they can survive. Who do they blame? The military. Who are we siding with? The military.

   And we made up this fish tale about WMD in Iraq? And we're ginning up fear about Iran pursuing nuclear capabilities? All this time our government knew Pakistan was sharing its nuclear knowledge with countries like North Korea, Libya and Iran, and we looked the other way. Administrations for three decades hid this from the American people, from Congress, from their own intelligence agencies.

 

Anyone looking for WMDs?

Forty drums of highly enriched uranium are missing. It was in laboratories outside Islamabad, the base where highly enriched uranium is made. When AQ Khan confessed in 2004 to being a one-stop nuclear shop, selling materials to other countries, those 40 drums disappeared. They're still out there. It wouldn't take much to make a dirty bomb out of it. You'd need no more than a 5-pound bag of sugar's worth, and all that fissile material is out there.

   But because of our deal with Musharraf, we didn't have access with those scientists at that lab to find out where that stuff is gone, and things aren't any more stable. Could Osama bin Laden have access to it? Now you know why intelligence agents stay awake nights. Now you know, incidentally, the kind of work Valerie Plame was doing before she was outed by some underling somewhere in the last administration.

   We know those al-Qaeda operatives are looking for it. If you ask what happened to the WMD in Iraq that we never found, let me tell you, it was never there. But in Pakistan it went missing. Even some Pakistani scientists allied to their military reached out at various points to al-Qaeda while they were still in Afghanistan and offered their services. The logical conclusion: It's only a matter of time.

   We're not talking about the Pakistani people here. We're talking about a clique within the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment that have manipulated their relationship with America with the west and manipulated their own people to avert democracy in Pakistan at every stage and also to line their own pockets.

 

An impossible problem

The problem is that we have funded Pakistan's military for 20 of the last 30 years, and it was only during that 10 year stretch that there was any semblance of democracy in Pakistan. That was during the 1990s, by the way. At this point, delivering democracy to Pakistan will be a very complicated and long-winded process, longer than it will take Iraq to reach that goal if they ever do, and far more complicated than anything we're facing in Afghanistan. The question is, if we have the patience for a place like Iraq, which hadn't the nuclear weapons, or Afghanistan, which hasn't any nuclear weapons, why wouldn't we have the patience for a place like Pakistan which does?

   It would involve all the things that don't grab headlines, like withdrawing money from the military, nation-building, school building, empowering its citizens to actually rebuild their own political parties and not be living in fear that they have to sign up to either a military party or a religious one in order to survive. We're not that good at that, as evidence by Iraq. We're looking for shortcuts, as evidenced by Iraq. We're looking for headline grabbing deals which have to do with politics and nothing to do with solutions. "Mission Accomplished."

   It's funny. Dictatorships are far easier to manage than Democracies, which can be messy. Maybe that's why we threw Moussadeq out in Iran in 1953, the incident that led to the eventual revolution in 1979.

   One of our failures in Pakistan: We never allowed there to become a sophisticated separation between the military and civilian society. In India, they managed that very well so in India, there's a parliament and there's a military and it's all enshrined by the Constitution. In Pakistan, the military IS a political party.

   I don't see how the current state of American foreign policy can rectify this problem but I can tell you this: Iraq was never the problem; Iran isn't the problem. Sending troops to Afghanistan isn't going to solve the problem.

 

 

Contributing sources well worth your time:

   --"The Nuclear Bombshell That Never Went Off," Jeff Stein, National Security Editor, Congressional Quarterly, Oct. 19, 2007

   --"Cheney + Pakistan = Iran," Jason Leopold, Global Research, August 9, 2005

   --The Nuclear Jihadist: The True Story of the Man Who Sold the World's Most Dangerous Secrets...and How We Could Have Stopped Him, Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Twelve Books

   --"What happens when U.S. spies get the goods-- and the government won't listen?" Ken Silverstein & David Isenberg, Mother Jones, January/February 2002

   --"Don't mention the Afghan–Pakistan War," Fraser Nelson, Spectator, 23rd July 2008

   --Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, Adrian Levy & Catherine Scott-Clark, Walker Books