Features > September 22, 2006

Why Pakistan Gets A Nuclear Pass

The Bush administration’s pragmatic policy toward Pakistan suggests its foreign policy is less ideological than imperial

By Lakshmi Chaudhry

Why wait?” asked William Kristol in a July 24 Weekly Standard op-ed calling for a preemptive military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later.” By August, the usual array of neoconservative pundits were chanting the “Why wait?” mantra, as their supporters within the administration, most notably Donald Rumsfeld, issued dire warnings against “appeasement.”

Yet in the midst of saber-rattling, the Bush administration was quietly doing its own share of appeasing—in the literal, if not historical, sense. In late July, the Institute for Science and International Security issued a report revealing that Pakistan was building a heavy-water reactor capable of producing enough plutonium for 40 to 50 nuclear weapons a year. The response from Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council, was surprisingly mild: ”The reactor is expected to be substantially smaller and less capable than reported.”

There also wasn’t much hand-wringing on September 6 when Pakistan’s military dictatorship announced a peace treaty with militants in North Waziristan, described by one analyst as al-Qaeda’s “center of gravity.” Vice President Cheney’s response: to praise President Pervez Musharraf as “a man who has demonstrated great courage under very difficult political circumstances and has been a great ally for the United States.”

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Critics of the Bush foreign policy have accused the administration of undertaking a global crusade against radical Islam. Joseph Cirincione, senior vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress, told NPR on August 30 that the Bush administration lumps all groups together in terms of this “Islamic fundamentalist, Islamo-fascist mush. … That al-Qaeda is Hamas is Iran is al-Qaeda is Syria. They’re all one enemy and we have to fight them all. Nonsense!” Their response to this undifferentiated, all-pervasive peril, he says, is a hyper-aggressive policy of preemptive regime change, “what [journalist] Ron Suskind calls ‘The one percent doctrine’—if there’s a one percent chance that Iran could get the bomb, give it to a terrorist group who could deliver it to New York, shouldn’t we overthrow the regime?”

Suskind’s book, The One Percent Doctrine, takes its title from Vice President Dick Cheney’s response in November 2001 to intelligence that revealed meetings between top-ranking Pakistani nuclear experts and Osama bin Laden. At the end of the briefing, Cheney declared, “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” The irony is that the exception to this doctrine is the very nation that inspired its creation.

In stark contrast to its Middle East policy, the Bush administration’s strategy with Pakistan has prioritized pragmatism over ideology, preferred diplomatic persuasion to military aggression and, most strikingly, displayed a willingness to tolerate Islamic extremism that does not directly challenge its interests. Pakistan hints at both a different, realpolitik side to the Bush foreign policy and a disconnect between the administration’s moral and ideological rhetoric and its underlying goals.

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In his 2002 State of the Union speech, President George W. Bush pointed to North Korea, Iran and Iraq as part of the now infamous axis of evil: “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.”

His criteria for membership in this club of rogue states were clear: a dictatorship that possessed or aimed to acquire weapons of mass destruction with documented ties to Islamic terrorist groups. What Bush didn’t mention was that he had already entered into a marriage of expedience with Pakistan, the one regime that fully met each of the three requirements (although he did profess his admiration for “the strong leadership of President Musharraf.”)

Pakistan bears a striking resemblance to Iran, which Bush has described as a country held hostage by an “elite that is isolating and repressing its people, and denying them basic liberties and human rights.” Like Iran, Pakistan is a regime that, in Bush’s words, “sponsors terrorists and is actively working to expand its influence in its [neighboring] region.” But unlike Iran, this sponsor of Islamic radicalism is already a bona fide nuclear power that has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. What’s more, Pakistan has shared its nuclear technology with almost every country on the administration’s sworn enemies list: Libya, North Korea, and, yes, Iran.

Before its hasty switch of allegiances in the wake of 9/11, Musharraf’s military dictatorship had been one of the Taliban regime’s closest allies, and many top-ranking members of the Pakistani Army and the all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had close, long-standing connections to al-Qaeda, dating back to the heydays of the anti-Soviet mujaheddin resistance. In fact, al-Qaeda was founded at a 1988 meeting in Peshawar, Pakistan. As a former diplomat told Seymour Hersh in the November 5, 2001, New Yorker, “If you go through the officer list, almost all of the I.S.I. regulars would say, of the Taliban, ‘They are my boys.’ “

But the Bush administration needed Pakistan’s assistance to wage the war against Afghanistan, a country it knew practically nothing about. The result: a 180-degree reversal in U.S. policy, which in 1998, following Pakistan’s nuclear test, had included economic sanctions and the withdrawal of aid. “The U.S.-Pakistan relationship was fundamentally transformed within a very short period of time under a large amount of pressure after September 11,” says Council for Foreign Relations analyst Michael Levi.

If the U.S. rationale for its change of heart was less than ideal, so was Pakistan’s motive for joining the so-called war on terror, as Musharraf made clear in an September 23 interview with “60 Minutes”: “The intelligence director told me that (then deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage) said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.’ ”

Five years after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship remains unchanged, even as Pakistan continues to flunk the Bush administration’s own sniff test. Far from moving toward democracy, Musharraf is positioning himself to hold yet another round of rigged elections next year in order to stay in power until 2012. And while he may be no Saddam Hussein, Amnesty International has documented a variety of human rights abuses, including the torture and extra-judicial executions of insurgents by the Pakistani army in the ongoing civil war in Baluchistan.

As for ongoing connections with Islamic extremism, unlike the Baathist regime in Iraq or Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship in Egypt, the Pakistani dictators have traditionally used Islamic ideology to secure their power, and Musharraf continues that tradition to this day. According to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, “Gen. Musharraf and the military hierarchy are neither extremist nor remotely fundamentalist. But they have every intention of using the fundamentalists as political allies against national political parties who question the need for military rule.”

In practice, this has meant not only encouraging militant jihadis to fight a proxy war against India in Kashmir, but also tolerating the pro-Taliban activities of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (JUI) in Baluchistan. “[The Taliban] have been able to set up a major logistics hub, training camps, carry out fundraising and have been free to recruit fighters from madrassas and refugee camps,” wrote Rashid in a June 2 BBC column. “Al-Qaeda has helped the Taliban reorganize and forge alliances with other Afghan and Central Asian rebel groups.”

Though the Bush administration has leaned on Musharraf behind the scenes, it’s heaped extravagant praise on him in public, especially for his role in both foiling this summer’s al-Qaeda plot to blow up planes using liquid explosives and in arresting the terrorists involved in the London subway bombings in 2005. Yet the arrests also point to a less appetizing reality that Pakistan remains, in the words of Rashid, “the global center for terrorism and for the remnants of al-Qaeda.”

Hassan Abbas, author of Pakistan’s Drift Into Extremism and a research fellow at Harvard University, says Musharraf has made an effort to crack down on terrorism in areas that don’t directly undermine his political base, such as the military actions against al-Qaeda in Waziristan, and Pakistan has arrested some of al-Qaeda’s prominent leaders, who “may not be number one or two, but certainly people who are up there in the hierarchy.” But even these efforts are in jeopardy now that Musharraf has ended hostilities in Waziristan—largely to placate the all-powerful Pakistani army, which has lost 350 soldiers in this unpopular campaign—and given permission to foreign militants to remain there in return for a vague promise to end incursions into Afghanistan.

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• Reader Comments

  Chaudrey burns a lot of electrons, but does he have a point?  If so, what is it?  Surely this is not the point of his article:

  The Bush administration’s pragmatic policy toward Pakistan suggests its foreign policy is less ideological than imperial.

  Imperial is when you sail half way round the world to establish a colony.  Imperial is not when you attack someone who has attacked you. Imperial is not when you establish a democracy to replace an Islamofascist terror regime.  Imperial is not when you require terrorist supporters to quit being terrorist supporters. 

  The world is not an ideal place.  Making the world and ideal place will require that democracy and free markets be established everywhere.  This cannot be done overnight, but George Bush has made a magnificent start on a long process.  And all the left can do is quibble and prevaricate.

  Posted by scorp on Sep 23, 2006 at 2:51 PM

  Whethe ror not you believe Bush is motivated by a genuine desire to foster democracy; whether or not you believe establishing a military presence in a former slaughterhouse that sits between Iran and Afghanistan and abuts much of the rest of the Arab middle east, you have to be predisposed to believing the US is acting out of imperial motivations to skip over the possible explanation that “to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil” is not so much an imperial goal as a defensive one. If China became the predominant outside power in the region, how secure would the US, Europe, and Japan be? The author bloviates, but never comes close to making a case.

  Posted by Mitch on Sep 23, 2006 at 7:19 PM

  Critics of the Bush administration’s confrontation with Iran have often pointed to Pakistan as an example of its double standard. As Bill Maher told Larry King, “And could we at least have a debate on whether this is an impossibility, that Iran be allowed the nuclear weapon before we invade them? I mean, Pakistan is a Muslim country full of people who want to kill us. And they have a nuclear bomb. Somehow that’s OK.”

  Actually Pakistan is a modern Islamic nation with strong Western ties in culture and trade. Pakistan has served as a diplomatic go between to China and Iran on many ocassions. The US-Pakistan alliance is difficult and requires a gentle touch. The issue of atomic weapons on the Indian-sub continent is a left over from the Democratic 90’s. The US has remained on friendly terms with India and Pakistan despite 4 wars and a simmering border dispute. At least give the State Department a pat on the back for walking a difficult diplomatic tightrope.

  Posted by texasindependent on Sep 24, 2006 at 3:39 PM

  It seems to me that the Bush administration is just seeking out countries in the Middle East that aren’t outspoken U.S. supporters and looking for/inventing reasons their governments should be lumped in with the Evil Iraq and Iran governments. Syria comes to mind.

  The problem with this administration is that it operates in terms of black-and-white absolutes (except in certain circumstances where the U.S. government would benefit more from turning a blind eye to an offender.) The series of events of the last three years in Iraq, Iran should provide enough context that this tension with Syria is not a surprise.

  This piece does a very good job at looking below the surface of the situation (i.e. the frame in which the Bush administration has presented this global nuclear issue and Syria’s threat) and dissecting other circumstances which are in play. The world doesn’t operate in black-and-white, in fact it’s mostly gray. We’d have a better-adjusted world view if we could keep this in mind. And these numb-nuts running our country wouldn’t look like such hypocrites.

  Posted by everyman on Sep 24, 2006 at 8:48 PM

  everyman, it seems to me that recognizing gray is exactly what the Bush administration has done in the case of Pakistan and it is that grayness that the author is criticizing. Seeing the gray means you recognize that some countries that don’t meet your every criterion for good guy still are better allies, with regard to certain high-priority issues, that other countries. It doesn’t mean you ignore meaningful differences in the strategies, histories, and personalities involved in different countries. Syria is not just not an “outspoken U..S. supporter...”; it was the colonial conqueror of Lebanon for a couple of decades, the assassinator of a popular Lebanese politician within the last several years, and Iran’s ally in funneling guns and arms to Hezbollah. It is actively and unabashedly trying to destroy Israel. I’m not sure how gray that is, really.

  Posted by Mitch on Sep 25, 2006 at 5:51 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 31 posts.

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