[Dialogue] The Road from Washington to Karachi to Nuclear Anarchy - Are You With Us. or Against Us?

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 by TomDispatch.com
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174862>  

The Road from Washington to Karachi to Nuclear Anarchy
Are You With Us. or Against Us?

by Jonathan Schell

The journey to the martial law just imposed on Pakistan by its
self-appointed president, the dictator Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington
on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan's intelligence
chief, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to
meet with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps
the earliest preview of the global Bush doctrine then in its formative
stages, telling him, "You are either one hundred percent with us or one
hundred percent against us."

The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented seven
demands that a Pakistan that wished to be "with us" must meet. These
concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan's Taliban
regime, which had long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services
in Afghanistan and had, of course, harbored Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda
training camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement to rein in the
activities of Mr. A.Q. Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear arms, who,
with the knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely hawking the
country's nuclear-bomb technology around the Middle East and North Asia for
some years.

Musharraf decided to be "with us"; but, as in so many countries, being with
the United States in its Global War on Terror turned out to mean not being
with one's own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in
1999, was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically fateful
additional step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will
of a foreign master. In many countries, people will endure a homegrown
dictator but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from without, and
Musharraf was now courting this danger.

A public opinion poll
<http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/09/11/poll.pakistanis/index.html>  in
September ranking certain leaders according to their popularity suggests
what the results have been. Osama bin Laden, at 46% approval, was more
popular than Musharraf, at 38%, who in turn was far better liked than
President Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7%. There is every reason to believe
that, with the imposition of martial law, Musharraf's and Bush's popularity
have sunk even further. Wars, whether on terror or anything else, don't tend
to go well when the enemy is more popular than those supposedly on one's own
side.

Are You with Us? 

Even before the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, the immediate
decision to bully Musharraf into compliance defined the shape of the
policies that the President would adopt toward a far larger peril that had
seemed to wane after the Cold War, but now was clearly on the rise: the
gathering nuclear danger. President Bush proposed what was, in fact if not
in name, an imperial solution to it. In the new dispensation, nuclear
weapons were not to be considered good or bad in themselves; that judgment
was to be based solely on whether the nation possessing them was itself
judged good or bad (with us, that is, or against us). Iraq, obviously, was
judged to be "against us" and suffered the consequences. Pakistan, soon
honored by the administration with the somehow ridiculous, newly coined
status of "major non-NATO ally," was clearly classified as with us, and so,
notwithstanding its nuclear arsenal and abysmal record on proliferation,
given the highest rating.

That doctrine constituted a remarkable shift. Previously, the United States
had joined with almost the entire world to achieve nonproliferation solely
by peaceful, diplomatic means. The great triumph of this effort had been the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, under which 183 nations, dozens quite
capable of producing nuclear weapons, eventually agreed to remain without
them. In this dispensation, all nuclear weapons were considered bad, and so
all proliferation was bad as well. Even existing arsenals, including those
of the two superpowers of the Cold War, were supposed to be liquidated over
time. Conceptually, at least, one united world had faced one common danger:
nuclear arms.

In the new, quickly developing, post-9/11 dispensation, however, the world
was to be divided into two camps. The first, led by the United States,
consisted of good, democratic countries, many possessing the bomb; the
second consisted of bad, repressive countries trying to get the bomb and, of
course, their terrorist allies. Nuclear peril, once understood as a problem
of supreme importance in its own right, posed by those who already possessed
nuclear weapons as well as by potential proliferators, was thus subordinated
to the polarizing "war on terror," of which it became a mere sub-category,
albeit the most important one. This peril could be found at "the crossroads
of radicalism and technology," otherwise called the "nexus of terror and
weapons of mass destruction," in the words of the master document of the
Bush Doctrine, the 2002 National <http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html>
Security Strategy of the United States of America.

The good camp was assigned the job not of rolling back all nuclear weapons
but simply of stopping any members of the bad camp from getting their hands
on the bomb. The means would no longer be diplomacy, but "preventive war"
(to be waged by the United States). The global Cold War of the late
twentieth century was to be replaced by global wars against proliferation -
disarmament wars - in the twenty-first. These wars, breaking out wherever in
the world proliferation might threaten, would not be cold, but hot indeed,
as the invasion of Iraq soon revealed - and as an attack on Iran, now under
consideration in Washington, may soon further show.

.Or Against Us?

Vetting and sorting countries into the good and the bad, the with-us and the
against-us, proved, however, a far more troublesome business than those in
the Bush administration ever imagined. Iraq famously was not as "bad" as
alleged, for it turned out to lack the key feature that supposedly warranted
attack - weapons of mass destruction. Neither was Pakistan, muscled into the
with-us camp so quickly after 9/11, as "good" as alleged. Indeed, these
distinctions were entirely artificial, for by any factual and rational
reckoning, Pakistan was by far the more dangerous country.

Indeed, the Pakistan of Pervez Musharraf has, by now, become a one-country
inventory of all the major forms of the nuclear danger.

*Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; Pakistan did. In 1998, it had conducted
a series of five nuclear tests in response to five tests by India, with whom
it had fought three conventional wars since its independence in 1947. The
danger of interstate nuclear war between the two nations is perhaps higher
than anywhere else in the world.

*Both Iraq and Pakistan were dictatorships (though the Iraqi government was
incomparably more brutal).

*Iraq did not harbor terrorists; Pakistan did, and does so even more today.

*Iraq, lacking the bomb, could not of course be a nuclear proliferator.
Pakistan was, with a vengeance. The arch-proliferator A.Q. Khan, a
metallurgist, first purloined nuclear technology from Europe, where he was
employed at the uranium enrichment company EURENCO. He then used the fruits
of his theft to successfully establish an enrichment program for Pakistan's
bomb. After that, the thief turned salesman. Drawing on a globe-spanning
network of producers and middlemen - in Turkey, Dubai, and Malaysia, among
other countries - he peddled his nuclear wares to Iran, Iraq (which
apparently turned down his offer of help), North Korea, Libya, and perhaps
others. Seen from without, he had established a clandestine multinational
corporation dedicated to nuclear proliferation for a profit.

Seen from within Pakistan, he had managed to create a sort of independent
nuclear city-state - a state within a state - in effect privatizing
Pakistan's nuclear technology. The extent of the government's connivance in
this enterprise is still unknown, but few observers believe Khan's far-flung
operations would have been possible without at least the knowledge of
officials at the highest levels of that government. Yet all this activity
emanating from the "major non-NATO ally" of the Bush administration was
overlooked until late 2003, when American and German intelligence
intercepted a shipload of nuclear materials bound for Libya, and forced
Musharraf to place Khan, a national hero owing to his work on the Pakistani
bomb, under house arrest. (Even today, the Pakistani government refuses to
make Khan available for interviews with representatives of the International
Atomic Energy Agency.)

*Iraqi apparatchiks could not, of course, peddle to terrorists, al-Qaedan or
otherwise, technology they did not have, as Bush suggested they would do in
seeking to justify his war. The Pakistani apparatchiks, on the other hand,
could - and they did. Shortly before September 11, 2001, two leading
scientists from Pakistan's nuclear program, Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood,
the former Director General of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and
Chaudry Abdul Majeed, paid a visit to Osama bin Laden around a campfire in
Afghanistan to advise him on how to make or acquire nuclear arms. They, too,
are under house arrest.

If, however, the beleaguered Pakistani state, already a balkanized
enterprise (as the A.Q. Khan story shows) is overthrown, or if the country
starts to fall apart, the danger of insider defections from the nuclear
establishment will certainly rise. The problem is not so much that the locks
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/10/AR200711100
1684_pf.html>  on the doors of nuclear installations - Pakistan's
approximately 50 bombs <http://www.newsweek.com/id/68890/output/print>  are
reportedly spread at sites around the country - will be broken or picked as
that those with the keys to the locks will simply switch allegiances and put
the materials they guard to new uses. The "nexus" of terrorism and the bomb,
the catastrophe the Bush Doctrine was specifically framed to head off, might
then be achieved - and in a country that was "for us."

What has failed in Pakistan, as in smashed Iraq, is not just a regional
American policy, but the pillars and crossbeams of the entire global Bush
doctrine, as announced in late 2001. In both countries, the bullying has
failed; popular passions within each have gained the upper hand; and
Washington has lost much of its influence. In its application to Pakistan,
the doctrine was framed to stop terrorism, but in that country's northern
provinces, terrorists have, in fact, entrenched themselves to a degree
unimaginable even when the Taliban protected Al-Qaeda's camps before
September 11th.

If the Bush Doctrine laid claim to the values of democracy, its man
Musharraf now has the distinction, rare even among dictators, of mounting a
second military coup to maintain the results of his first one. In a crowning
irony, his present crackdown is on democracy activists, not the Taliban,
armed Islamic extremists, or al-Qaeda supporters who have established
<http://www.abcnews.go.com/print?id=3839319>  positions in the Swat valley
only 150 miles from Islamabad.

Most important, the collapsed doctrine has stoked the nuclear fires it was
meant to quench. The dangers of nuclear terrorism, of proliferation, and
even of nuclear war (with India, which is dismayed by developments in
Pakistan as well as the weak Bush administration response to them) are all
on the rise. The imperial solution to these perils has failed. Something new
is needed, not just for Pakistan or Iraq, but for the world. Perhaps now
someone should try to invent a solution based on imperialism's opposite,
democracy, which is to say respect for other countries and the wills of the
people who live in them.

Jonathan Schell is the author of The Fate of the Earth, among other books,
and the just-published The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805081291?tag=commondreams-20&camp=0&creative=0&l
inkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0805081291&adid=0Y6Q86S5NF138BZGY6XA&> . He is the
Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a visiting lecturer
at Yale University.

Copyright 2007 Jonathan Schell

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/14/5203/

 

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