By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : The United States is said to be worried about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal following the imposition of emergency rule by President Pervez Musharraf in apparent defiance of Washington.
While Musharraf had cited his need to combat growing extremism in Pakistan, editors of Foreign Policy magazine published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a leading US think tank, noted it’s also a country with a violent history of coups, political instability, and nuclear weapons.
Pakistani officials such as Ambassador to the US Mahmud Ali Durrani, whom they interviewed about the 2007 Failed States Index (Pakistan ranks 12th), will tell you that the nukes are safely under lock and key, they said in a blog piece.
“Nothing to worry about! A.Q. Khan (disgraced father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb) is under control!” they were told even as pro-Taliban militants, Islamist sympathisers, and straight-up terrorists may indeed be on the march there.
“But insiders with deep experience at the top levels of the US foreign-policy apparatus are worried,” the magazine said. Nearly three quarters of the more than 100 US foreign policy experts it surveyed for its Terrorism Index said that Pakistan is the country most likely to transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists.
At the State Department, spokesman Sean McCormack however parried a question about whether the constitutional crisis in Islamabad had caused any revisiting of the question by the US of the security of the nuclear facilities in Pakistan.
“I believe questions about Pakistani nuclear facilities are best put to the Pakistani government… They’re in the best position to speak about those issues,” he said.
Time magazine too in its latest issue notes that whenever the question of the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal comes up, the official US response has been that the weapons are in safe hands.
That position is, like the US position on Russian nukes, based on trust — on high-level, personal contacts between military commanders on both sides.
For now, Washington can maintain that line about Pakistan because that country’s two highest military leaders have close ties to the US or Britain. Musharraf, who is also president, was trained in Britain, and his likely military successor General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani was trained in the US.
Soon, however, that trust and fellow feeling will no longer be available, Time said. That is because of the estrangement between the US and a rising generation of Pakistani officers.
For about 10 years, the US Congress barred contacts between American and Pakistani military officials as part of sanctions on Islamabad for pursuing nuclear weapons in the first place.
In an ironic boomerang, it is now those officers, ascending to ever more senior ranks, who soon could be overseeing various elements of the Pakistani military, including the security of the several dozen atomic weapons Pakistan is believed to have in its arsenal. Their provincialism, US officials fear, could make them sympathetic to the Al Qaeda and Taliban elements now in the ascendant in Pakistan.
Pentagon officials cited by Time say they have no idea whether Musharraf’s imposition of what is essentially martial law will succeed or fail in stemming the radical Islamist tide. “Sure it works in the short term,” one Army officer says. “But if the country is too brittle it could break.”
Pentagon officials added that the US is reviewing some $300 million in foreign military sales financing for Pakistan in 2008, $32 million for law enforcement and anti-narcotics efforts, and $2 million for military training.
These are the same kinds of programme whose scrapping in the 1990s so upset Anthony Zinni, a retired four-star Marine general, who was in charge of the US Central Command when Musharraf took over as army chief.
The very first time he met the Pakistani leader, Zinni told Time: “He said his No. 1 concern was that over half his officers had not been outside of Pakistan.”
Zinni, who last met Musharraf in Pakistan about two months ago, believes that country’s nuclear arsenal is secure. “I think the military has a handle on it,” he says. But he too believes that the estrangement in the 1990s has led to a re-orienting of sympathies among Pakistan’s officers.
Another regional scholar cited by Time concurs. “There were 10 years in which there was no military-to-military relationship with Pakistan,” Marvin Weinbaum, a scholar at the Middle East Institute, told Congress last month.
“And that generation of people, who did not have the contacts with us … we’re going to be seeing, very shortly, those people rising to positions of importance … This is an unfortunate consequence of having turned our back on Pakistan in 1990,” he told Time.