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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (45566)	2/4/2004 11:58:09 PM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

Recent details carried by the American press about nuclear proliferation from Pakistan to North Korea, Iran and Libya have suddenly put a new complexion on the investigation being carried out by Pakistan against its nuclear scientists. These reports contain details of the revelations made by Dr AQ Khan to his investigators and subsequently leaked to the press in Washington and New York. Mr Khan has allegedly revealed that ‘he helped North Korea design and equip facilities for making weapons-grade uranium with the knowledge of senior military commanders, including Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president’. Meanwhile, chief of the MMA, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, has told the TV channels that Mr Khan had denied to him that he has ever submitted any confessional statement to his investigators as claimed by the government leaks. In this connection, the latest position Wednesday was that Dr AQ Khan had submitted a mercy petition to President Musharraf which would be decided upon by the Nuclear Command and Control Authority. The position taken by Islamabad after the scandal of proliferation broke was that some Pakistani scientists had sold nuclear technology and hardware ‘for their personal financial gain’ without the knowledge of the government and the military establishment. It also absolved President Pervez Musharraf from any suspicion of involvement because the incidents of proliferation are supposed to have taken place before his term in office and because he had made the nuclear programme safe through the setting up of Pakistan Nuclear Command and Control Authority in 2002. This position has now been seriously undermined by what has appeared in the ‘Washington Post’ of 3rd February, 2004. Mr Khan is supposed to have told the investigators that ‘Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the Pakistani army chief of staff from 1988 to 1991, was aware of assistance Khan was providing to Iran’s nuclear program and that two other army chiefs, in addition to Musharraf, knew and approved of his efforts on behalf of North Korea.’ The Post story has come up with more information on the extent of the state’s involvement in what Dr Khan was doing. The paper says: ‘A retired Pakistani army corps commander said Monday that the barter arrangement dates to December 1994, when then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto traveled to North Korea at the request of General Abdul Waheed, the army chief of staff at the time. A few months later, Khan led a delegation of scientists and military officers to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, according to the retired general and a senior active duty officer, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. Musharraf was serving at the time as Waheed’s director general for military operations’. After General Waheed, there is further allegation that in 1997, General Jahangir Karamat, who followed him in the post of the COAS, secretly visited North Korea and then in 1998 ‘presided over the successful test-firing of a medium-range missile the Pakistanis called a Ghauri. According to U.S. intelligence officials and a former Pakistani nuclear scientist, the Ghauri was simply a renamed North Korean-supplied Nodong missile.’ As for General Musharraf’s involvement in this proliferation, new allegations have come to light from the ‘leaks’ from friends of Mr Khan. Dr Khan is supposed to have asserted to his investigators that ‘Musharraf had to have been aware of the agreement with North Korea because Musharraf took over responsibility for the Ghauri missile program when he became army chief of staff in October 1998’. The Pakistani claim that no proliferation activity could have been carried after the establishment of the Nuclear Command and Control Authority in 2002, has been presumably rebutted by another report in ‘The New York Times’ that Libya kept on receiving nuclear ‘help’ from Pakistan till the autumn of 2003! Add to this Dr Khan’s other alleged statement that he supplied nuclear technology to the three countries clandestinely ‘because he thought the emergence of more nuclear states would ease Western attention on Pakistan. He also said he thought it would help the Muslim cause.’ In spite of the above ‘revelations’ in the American press, the Administration in Washington has expressed the view that it is satisfied with the steps that General Musharraf is taking at home to make sure that a clean breast is made of the matter and no further proliferation takes place. But the problem for President Musharraf is no longer related as much to foreign policy as it is to domestic politics. The official position is becoming untenable in the eyes of the people who regard Dr Khan as a national hero. If the state of Pakistan was involved in proliferation how can the scientists be isolated and made the scapegoat? No one believes that the scientists could have smuggled some heavy nuclear hardware abroad without the knowledge of the Pakistan army which has been in charge of the nuclear programme. Considering that Pakistan has remained seriously destabilised on questions of foreign policy, leading to at least three attempts on the life of General Musharraf, it is just the wrong time to hold trials in connection with what has come to light about proliferation. We simply cannot afford to further erode the credibility of the scientists as well as that of the Pakistan army and its chiefs. The only way out of this crisis is to close the nuke scientists file by accepting the mercy petition of the scientists; by making sure that a repetition of what happened should not take place and that the scientists, while being sealed from further proliferation, should be treated in such a way that they are not able to continue to glorify themselves in the public eye or be in any position to ‘leak’ more harmful information to the outside world. This is paramount in the interest of the security of our nuclear programme which should be guarded at all cost. * dailytimes.com.pk