Pentagon Helped Pakistan Become a Nuclear Horn

Khan the Father of Islamic Nukes

Pentagon blamed for Pakistan nuclear bomb
Updated: July 4, 2016 01:35 IST | Kallol Bhattacherjee

The U.S. Department of Defense resisted moves by the Congress to curtail Gen. Zia’s nuclear programme, a key U.S. policy maker of the time says in a new book.

The book titled Senator Pressler: An Independent Mission to Save Our Democracy sheds new light on U.S. attempts to deal with the Pakistan nuclear programme which under the Presidency of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq thrived due to an elaborate international smuggling network led by Dr. A.Q. Khan.
The book which is dedicated to Larry Pressler’s political life as a Senator from South Dakota recounts that the Pentagon backed by a section of the academia, media, think tanks and military-industrial complex did not support the Pressler Amendment which aimed to impose a trade embargo on Pakistan in the late 1980s for lying to the American government regarding its nuclear programme.
“The Pentagon strongly opposed it at the time,” he says in his autobiography, revealing that it was President Ronald Reagan who found his expertise on India-Pakistan ties of interest and encouraged him to come up with an amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act 1961 which became known as the “Pressler Amendment”.

The Pressler Amendment was used by President George H.W. Bush to force Pakistan to go slow on the nuclear programme during the four years, 1989 to 1993. Mr. Pressler blames the military-industrial complex of the U.S. for stalling the campaign to stop the Pakistani nuclear programme which went overt with a series of nuclear tests in the Chagai mountain range of Balochistan in May 1998. Many believe that Pakistan could have been prevented from going nuclear had the U.S. acted on time and acted tough with Gen. Zia.

Mr. Pressler reportedly is trying to stage a comeback as an advocate of India in Washington DC and sent his autobiography to Prime Minister Narendra Modi through Shivraj Singh, a politician of NDA coalition partner Rashtriya Lok Shakti Party (RLSP) who was in the U.S. for supporting the visit of Mr. Modi to the White House. Mr. Pressler’s comments are significant as the U.S. at present is pushing for India’s membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, while being silent on Pakistan’s claims for a similar membership.

Mr. Pressler confirmed in an email to The Hindu that he is working on a new book on India-U.S. diplomacy which will shed light on nuclear issues and his ties with Indian political leaders like the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Mr. Pressler has enjoyed good ties with Indian IT giant Infosys where he served on the board of directors for several years.

The upcoming book is being published by Penguin Random House and will be out in 2017, Mr. Pressler said.

Extortion from the Pakistani and Korean Nuclear Horns

Pakistan and North Korea’s Nuclear Extortion

Two troubled countries. Two similar strategies.

By Seth Oldmixon
January 16, 2016

Two important and unsettling events took place earlier this month: North Korea claimed to have detonated a thermonuclear bomb, and India’s Pathankot airbase was the victim of an attack by Pakistan-based militants. While seemingly unrelated, the two events have more in common than readily apparent: Each fits a long established pattern of behavior intended to extort international concessions by exploiting global anxiety about nuclear terrorism.

The most immediate connection between these two events is the provenance of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program: Pakistani metallurgist A.Q. Khan, the man who stole nuclear secrets from his employer in Holland and passed them on to Pakistan’s military. In the 1990s, Pakistan sold nuclear weapons technology to North Korea, as well as Iran, Libya and possibly other states. A.Q. Khan was briefly held under house arrest until he received a full pardon from Pakistan’s military dictator and president Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Yet, there is another commonality between North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and a fidayeen attack on an Indian airbase: strategy.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Sung-Yoon Lee and Joshua Stanton described North Korea’s foreign policy in this way: “Offer a fake overture of peace; raise the stakes for your foes with a provocation; act unstable and threaten to escalate even further; and finally, call for talks and act reasonable. Pyongyang seizes and maintains the initiative from beginning to end and leaves its adversaries anxious for negotiations in the face of provocations.”

Such a strategy should sound remarkably familiar to South Asia watchers, as it echoes the strategy employed by Pakistan.

The Hudson Institute’s Aparna Pande has chronicled four recent examples of Pakistan making overtures of peace, followed by a vicious jihadi attack, and finally culminating in the Pakistani government declaring its desire to proceed with peace talks so that the terrorists don’t win. The attack on Pathankot airbase also follows this pattern.

Increasingly, the Pathankot attack appears to have been carried out by jihadi militants associated with Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), a transnational terrorist organization founded by Masood Azhar under the patronage of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the country’s premier military intelligence organization. After having been dormant for several years, JeM resurfaced in early 2014 when Masood Azhar addressed a rally well orchestrated in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir shortly after Gen. Raheel Sharif took over as Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff.

Gen. Raheel has declared a policy of “zero tolerance” for militancy, a position that he reiterates after each militant attack. In practice, however, certain militant groups are tolerated, if not directly sponsored by the military. Last year, the State Department praised Pakistan for following through on its international obligations to ban Islamist militant groups including the Haqqani Network and Jamaat-ud-Dawa, only to find out that the groups were not actually banned at all. Even nominally-banned groups, such as the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ), a virulent anti-Shia organization, are expanding.

This is no accident. Pakistani National Security Advisor Sartaj Aziz has openly admitted that the state has no interest in shutting down militant groups that it deems friendly to Pakistan’s interests. Well-meaning sympathizers accept the Pakistani contention that they can’t actually go after all militants because doing so would present an insurmountable threat – there are so many militants that taking them all on would destabilize the entire country, putting at risk its ever expanding nuclear arsenal. This conveniently ignores the fact that the problem is one of Pakistan’s own making.

Pakistan cultivated jihadi militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and JeM for decades both as force multipliers and proxy forces that can carry out attacks without the clear imprint of the state. The last part is key: Pakistan’s jihadi assets provide the cover of plausible deniability that allows the state to approach India or the U.S. and pretend that it is sincerely working to change the situation. The problem is that Pakistan’s jihadi monster has grown bold enough that it’s turned on its patron. Around 30,000 Pakistanis have been killed by jihadi militants, including over 1,000 in 2015. After militants killed 140 schoolchildren in 2014, Pakistan’s security establishment promised to change its ways, but “pro-Pakistan” militants have continued to flourish.

If North Korea’s international strategy is based on Richard Nixon’s “Madman theory” – the gamble that other countries will not risk provoking them for fear of an unpredictable and disproportionate response, Pakistan uses a slightly more sophisticated technique: “Good Cop, Bad Cop.” The “good cop” being the Pakistani state, the “bad cop” being jihadi militant groups. Pakistan promises to restrain its jihadis if only the U.S. or India will make certain concessions. As a result, the U.S. has provided Pakistan’s military with billions of dollars in cash payments and arms sales. In return, Pakistan has continued to support a variety of jihadi militant groups, including those responsible for attacks on American soldiers.

The White House has cast doubt on North Korea’s claims, saying that early evidence is inconsistent with the detonation of a thermonuclear device. Nevertheless, it is clear that North Korea is once again turning to its tried and true strategy to improve its negotiating position. Regarding Pakistan, White House Spokesman John Kirby told reporters following the Pathankot attack that “the Government of Pakistan has said publicly and privately that it’s not going to discriminate among terrorist groups.” Of course, Pakistan has said this before, and it will continue to so as long as Washington continues to believe them. And the cycle will repeat until either Washington decides to break it, or Pakistan finally loses control completely.

Seth Oldmixon is president of Oldmixon Group, a Washington, D.C. public affairs firm and the founder of Liberty South Asia, a privately funded campaign dedicated to religious freedom and political pluralism in South Asia.

Khan and Iran: The Nuclear Horns (Daniel 8:8)

Iran’s nuke ambitions confirmed: Former president reveals meetings with Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan

Special to WorldTribune.com

Iran has long intended to attain nuclear weapons capability, going so far as to enlist the help of rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan, former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said.
In an interview with state-run IRNA news agency, Rafsanjani said Iran’s nuclear ambitions became clear amid the Iran-Iraq War that began in 1980 and ended in 1988.

“At the time that we started, we were at war and we were looking to have this capability [the nuclear bomb] for the day that our enemy would want to resort to the nuclear bomb,” Rafsanjani said.
The Persian-language interview was translated by Iranian opposition group the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

Rafsanjani, Iran’s president from 1989-1997, said in the interview that Iran’s “basic doctrine was peaceful usage of the nuclear technology,” but added “we never abandoned the idea that if one day we are threatened and it is imperative, we would have the capability for going the other path [to nuclear weapon] as well.”

Rafsanjani also admitted that Teheran had sought the assistance of Khan. The former president said that he, along with current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then a senior official in Ayatollah Khomenei’s regime, traveled to Pakistan to meet with Khan, who is believed to have sold nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

“There were some talks with the Pakistanis. There was a nuclear scientist called Abdul Qadeer Khan in Pakistan… In a trip to Pakistan, I asked to see him. They did not show him to me,” he said.
Though he did not meet with Khan, Rafsanjani said that “it seemed that Mr. Abdul Qadeer Khan himself believed that the Islamic World should have the nuclear bomb. He believed in this and it was he who built Pakistan’s nuclear bomb although it took time to build the bomb. In any case, they agreed to help us a bit.

“We implemented part of our nuclear activity when we were still at war and Iraq was close to securing enrichment when Israel destroyed all of it,” he said, referring to Israel’s daring raid on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility which destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program.

“Those years, we were all thinking that we should arm ourselves with deterrent elements since the war was not about to end and in our defensive policies we had the word of Imam [Khomeini] in mind that the war may last 20 years,” Rafsanjani said in what the NCRI believes is an admission of the “regime’s intentions to acquire (a) nuclear weapon.”