Storm Emerging on the Horizon Of Pak-American Relations
Pakistan-Korea Nuclear Link?

Columnist Muhammad Irshad investigates the so-called nuclear cooperation between the two countries.

The Western press has really lived up to its traditions. After every three or four months a regular “leak” that Pakistan is doing something terribly wrong with its nuclear capability or the missile programme, has now become almost an accepted fact. Later all such reports will tell you that America was aware of this misdoing since many years but the “Leakage” has to be made at regular intervals to keep the issue alive. Though such leaks against all the Muslim countries are on the rise, e.g. Iran and Iraq have already been termed as part of “Axis of Evil”, Libya is already a declared rogue state, the once stable government of Afghanistan has already been reduced to trash, Saudi Arabia is being doubted as an active participant of the 9/11 accident, Visible anger is being shown to Malaysia and Indonesia. The list of all such Muslim countries is really very long, but since becoming a country with “Nuclear plans” Pakistan is under constant pressure. (Remember in 1974, when India exploded its nuclear bomb, the Americans did not impose any sanctions but actually increased Indian aid. In response, when Pakistan’s Prime Minister verbally pledged for making atomic bomb even if we have to eat grass, the American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, threatened “To make a horrible example out of Pakistan”). The fact that India exploded their first atomic explosion in that year or Israel has done many international violations to acquire nuclear capability is not considered important, somehow or the other the Americans are more worried of why has Pakistan got nuclear weapons?
It is time again to put extra pressure on Pakistan. Pakistan is being suspected to have given boost to the Iranian nuclear programme; this is being stated by Mr David Albright, president and founder of small think tank, Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). Also, London Time’s story of a Pakistani scientist offering to build Iraq’s nuclear arsenal also fits in the pattern of stories circulating in Washington. It appears that either the forces within the Bush administration are leaking out these stories on purpose, or some other anti-Pakistan elements are trying to discredit that the Pakistan government due to some other ulterior motive. The news which has been real boost for the anti-Pakistan elements was that of alleged Pakistan’s collaboration with North Korean nuclear programme. The blame is on Pakistan for having nuclear links with North Korea. To be more precise, Pakistan is being blamed that it has supplied nuclear know-how to North Korea in return for know-how of long range missiles.
When the Bush Administration presented evidence to North Korean leaders on Oct. 3, 2002 that their country was developing nuclear weapons, it expected the regime to lie about it. A day later came the hair raising shocker. “Yes, we’ve been secretly working to produce nukes”, a top aide to “Dear Leader” Kim Jong II told astonished US envoy James Kelly. And, added, we’ve got “more powerful” weapons — presumably meaning biological and chemical agents. He was not apologetic at all, says a US official, but “assertive, aggressive about it.”
Tightly controlled countries like North Korea typically stonewall such sensitive inquiries. So the admission did more than just confirm long-held suspicions in Washington that North Korea, a charter member in Bush’s “Axis of Evil”, had pursued weapons of mass destruction despite a 1994 agreement to stop. The revelation also jerked a preoccupied world to attention. Why, everyone wondered, was Kim confessing now? And why had Bush pressed the issue, when he was already immersed in two major global confrontations? No wonder the Administration sat on the news for 12 days while it scrambled to figure out how to downsize the crisis. By the time the Bush team went public with the news, it was also trying to reassure citizens and allies that this standoff would be addressed, at least for now, with diplomacy, and not with military might.
Mistrust of North Korea has been a bedrock US policy since war on the Korean peninsula ended in 1953. Pyongyang’s erratic behaviour consistently confirms such skepticism. The latest confrontation was quite deliberate, says a senior Bush aide. For more than two years, the CIA had been collecting shards of information suggesting that North Korea was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons, despite the 1994 Agreed Framework requiring Pyongyang to freeze its programme to extract plutonium from reprocessed reactor fuel.
But North Korea apparently figured it could obtain nukes another way: using the slower but more easily hidden method of enriching uranium to weapons grade in gas centrifuges — the same method some now accuse Saddam Hussein of pursuing. To accomplish that, the reclusive North Koreans needed to buy know-how and equipment abroad, including high-strength aluminium for the whirling centrifuges. By late July, the CIA had picked up enough tip-offs to conclude that Pyongyang was procuring banned supplies. By late summer, a Bush aide says, “things fell in place, and we could say, Aha!”
In some ways, the purpose of North Korea’s nuclear programme is viewed by diplomatic experts as analogous to that of Pakistan’s. Just as Pakistan has moved to acquire such weapons to counter the threat presented by India, these experts say, North Korea has acquired nuclear arms to protect itself from being overrun by South Korea, a fear that pervades everything from government propaganda to children’s textbooks.
So who assisted the Koreans? US officials suspect Pakistan. Though China and Russia also make centrifuges, but surely neither is considered as wanting a nuclear-armed North Korea next door. Islamabad and Pyongyang, however, allegedly made natural partners: Pakistan had the bomb but no missiles to deliver it, and North Korea is the world’s most active missile proliferator, especially to customers who can’t shop elsewhere. In 1998 Pakistan tested a homemade Ghauri medium-range ballistic missile that the US believes originated in North Korea.
That doesn’t mean the deal was government to government. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf denies that his regime supplied Pyongyang’s enrichment programme. But in 1998 Washington slapped sanctions on the lab of Abdul Qadir Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan’s Bomb. As head of the nation’s nuclear programme, he made the Ghauri as a carbon copy of North Korea’s Nodong missile, say US officials. Khan is believed to have established front companies and smuggling operations to gather and sell nuclear gear and blueprints. Musharraf forced his resignation as the lab’s leader 20 months ago.
“ Pakistan would be a possibility because it used gas centrifuges, and its own nuclear weapons initially used enriched uranium,” said Robert Einhorn, former assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation and now a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Also, North Korea and Pakistan have been known to engage in sensitive trade, including Pakistan’s purchase of Nodong missiles from North Korea,” Einhorn said. “US officials were concerned at the time about what the quid pro quo might be.” “What you have here,” said one official familiar with the intelligence, “is a perfect meeting of interests — the North had what the Pakistanis needed, and the Pakistanis had a way for Kim Jong II to restart a nuclear programme we had stopped.” China and Russia were less prominent suppliers, officials said, according to the newspaper report.
“ This has absolutely nothing to do with reality,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Ympaign rally in Gujarat he said “Let us fight it out face to face. We have fought thrice, Let there be a fourth war”, he said so on the next day of Americans blaming Pakistan.
Pakistan is being blamed on the basis of intelligence reports being reported by the American agencies. Now these agencies are known to have been putting on coloured glasses. In the context of Pakistan, it would be interesting to recall the role of these American intelligence agencies during the month of May 1998, when India and Pakistan exploded nuclear blasts. In case of Indian explosions there were logical reasons to believe that American consent and may be connivance was there. The mysterious failure of the American intelligence in detecting the Indian nuclear testing was simply intriguing (Americans had stated that their intelligence failed to take note of the possible Indian explosion). Was it possible that such a sophisticated intelligence system — where billions of dollars are spent on state of the art satellite systems, and where there is a wide network of human intelligence — was unable to monitor such a massive exercise? Let us keep in mind that we are talking of the same intelligence system which was able to detect the delivery of ring magnets to Pakistan which allegedly was kept in small cartons positioned inside a room in Pakistan’s Sargodha Air Base and which were declared to be the parts of M-11 missiles. It is also amusing to note that Americans claimed to have missed what was written to them by our Prime Minister about 5 weeks earlier, and a Sikh newspaper Chardi Kala had reported in its May 7 issue (four days before Indian detonation). Also their satellites pass over Pokhran after every 30 minutes (they claim to read car number plates) but all of them missed to see the many thousand tons of earth dug for underground explosions, using hundreds of vehicles. With a strange coincidence, During the Israeli attack on Iraqi nuclear complex, on June 7, 1981, Air Warning and Control aircraft stationed at Saudi Arabia but manned by Americans, had temporarily gone unserviceable for few hours.
So with such a debatable intelligence system, why has the American administration started playing this ugly music for Pakistan? Is the newly revived Pak-US honeymoon with vows of very long duration about to be over? Has Pakistan once again outlived its utility to Washington? Is it to force Pakistan to give-in for their desired attack on Iraq, because as yet Pakistan has not given any commitment to lend support in case of American attack on that Muslim country. Or is it to extract something much more from President Musharraf who is already doing so much for Bush administration that many in western press write him as “Busharraf”, and even the recent elections in Pakistan indicate a clear thinking different from President Musharraf’s blind support to America. Supposing the alleged cooperation did exist, which particular law has been violated, and if it has been violated, why such violations are not considered about US-India and US-Israel nuclear link? Or is it a kind of threat to Pakistan because MMA has emerged as the third strongest party in Pakistan’s elections and MMA with strong grip on both the provinces bordering with Afghanistan is known to have a pro-Pakistan stand, meaning every American command is not to be obeyed blindly, Or is it that when Saudi Arabia is not willing to give a blind support for attack on Iraq, the American patience with all the Muslim states is running out?. Only time will probably define the exact American mood. Nevertheless, it is clear that Pakistan has been served a notice to control the spread of nuclear capability it has achieved or face the wrath of Washington. Many believe that a big trouble for Pakistan is in store after dealing with Iraq and Iran.
However, the American government has been quick in informing their public that in spite of all the wrong doings North Korea case is very different from that of Iraq.(or should we say that treatment to Muslims and non-Muslims is going to be very different in American world order). The Bush administration responded to the disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme with a strategy of urgent diplomatic pressure free of military threats or even a tone of crisis. It was a marked contrast with the drumbeat of warnings about force and the mobilization of troops against Iraq, also a member of the “Axis of Evil” identified by President Bush, but one he says poses the most serious danger to the United States.
The two separate and in some respects contradictory strategies reflected the administration’s desire not to let North Korea derail Washington’s plans to confront Saddam Hussein. The risk was that some Americans might wonder why conciliation ought not to be tried toward both countries. Aides to Mr. Bush were quick to assert that the two situations are entirely different. “There is not one policy that fits all,” said Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman. “Each situation has to be dealt with on its own.”
Administration officials say that although Iraq probably does not yet have nuclear weapons, it poses a more serious threat to its region because its record of using chemical weapons against its enemies and of invading two neighbouring countries in the past. Whereas North Korea is described by many experts as wanting weapons to deter an invasion, Iraq is feared generally as a nation willing to use its weapons to bully others. This concern is what the administration says justifies its policy of pre-emptive action against Baghdad. “North Korea is a fundamentally conservative dictatorship,” said a former diplomat who has dealt with the Korean peninsula over three decades. “They’re the worst kind of totalitarian regime, and their willingness to cheat is unquestioned. But they do not pose an imminent threat to regional stability. The fundamental threat from North Korea is still deterred by the presence of American troops in South Korea. So the administration is right to focus on Iraq.”
A State Department official said Iraq was different from North Korea not simply because Baghdad had used weapons of mass destruction and has ties with terrorists, but because North Korea had proved itself to be “at least sometimes susceptible to international pressure.” As a result, he said, diplomacy was justified, at least for now. The administration’s low-key strategy toward North Korea was being carried out by the four partners with which it has been working for years to coax North Korea into living peacefully with its neighbours. The clear hope at the White House was that the four —Japan, South Korea, China and Russia — could salvage the possibility of negotiation to remove an advanced nuclear threat from a nation as isolated, dictatorial and unpredictable as any on earth.
For Iraq, by contrast, the administration was continuing to threaten to use force as a way of bludgeoning President Hussein to accept inspections of its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes,
followed by disarmament.
Perhaps inevitably, many
policy-makers focused on why engagement with North Korea —which included the implication that economic aid could resume some day — might not also be valid for Baghdad. “The American reaction shows you the difference between dealing with a country that already may have nuclear weapons, and one that doesn’t,” said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms and a leading expert on nuclear proliferation issues.
As early as 1993, the North Koreans were thought to have one or two nuclear bombs from their plutonium programme, and the latest revelations about their parallel development of highly enriched uranium means they could have more. This means, according to Mr. Milhollin, that North Korea could have the capacity to attack Tokyo, Seoul or even the United States right now, which necessitates a cautious approach. Indeed, North Korea’s artillery, rockets and other conventional weapons — which experts say could easily destroy large parts of Seoul — have for decades served as a deterrent against any possibility of an attack by the United States. Military experts say that for all its erratic conduct, North Korea is not planning to blackmail or coerce neighbouring countries.
A simple question arising in the minds of many readers could be, “If Americans do not want to take any serious action against North Korea, why highlight the issue at this particular time?” And a simple answer to that could be that if you take out the word “North Korea” from the American media’s hysteria then, all that is left will read as “American war on terrorism means war against Muslims only”.