Friday, March 12, 2004
Kristof on supping with Nick
A couple of posts back, I had written about Seymour Hersh's take on the extraordinarily dodgy relationship between the United States and Pakistan. Nicholas Kristof addresses some of the same issues in his op-ed on how the U.S. is picking the wrong fight by choosing to go into Iraq (to hunt down WMD's, no less) and then turning a blind eye on Pakistan's proliferation. I have found it quite amusing how guys like Scott McClellan and John Bolton keep a straight face when they say that noone but A.Q.Khan was involved in proliferation activities. Instead they should be hauling the guy into a safe cell someplace (hello, Guantanamo) and get him to reveal whether or not his shady deals involved handing a few centrifuges and some enriched uranium to Al-Qaeda.
Finally, there's the real rogue nation of proliferation, Pakistan. We know that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Islamist father of Pakistan's bomb, peddled materials to Libya and North Korea, and we don't know who else. "It may be that A. Q. Khan & Associates already have passed bomb-grade nuclear fuel to the Qaeda, and we are in for the worst," warns Paul Leventhal, founding president of the Nuclear Control Institute.
It's mystifying that the administration hasn't leaned on Pakistan to make Dr. Khan available for interrogation to ensure that his network is entirely closed. Several experts on Pakistan told me they believe that the administration has been so restrained because its top priority isn't combating nuclear proliferation — it's getting President Pervez Musharraf's help in arresting Osama bin Laden before the November election.
Another puzzle is why an administration that spends hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq doesn't try harder to secure uranium and plutonium in Russia and elsewhere. The bipartisan program to secure weapons of mass destruction is starved for funds — but Mr. Bush is proposing a $41 million cut in "cooperative threat reduction" with Russia.
Perhaps what happened in Madrid only increases the urgency for the United States to push Pakistan into revealing how wide-spread Dr.Khan's network is/was even if means some heads in the upper echelons of the Pakistani military and intelligence have to roll. Another interesting insight in this op-ed is Kristof saying that the conspiracy theory about Osama bin Laden being captured conveniently on Oct/Nov is actually shared by Pakistan experts.
Finally, there's the real rogue nation of proliferation, Pakistan. We know that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Islamist father of Pakistan's bomb, peddled materials to Libya and North Korea, and we don't know who else. "It may be that A. Q. Khan & Associates already have passed bomb-grade nuclear fuel to the Qaeda, and we are in for the worst," warns Paul Leventhal, founding president of the Nuclear Control Institute.
It's mystifying that the administration hasn't leaned on Pakistan to make Dr. Khan available for interrogation to ensure that his network is entirely closed. Several experts on Pakistan told me they believe that the administration has been so restrained because its top priority isn't combating nuclear proliferation — it's getting President Pervez Musharraf's help in arresting Osama bin Laden before the November election.
Another puzzle is why an administration that spends hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq doesn't try harder to secure uranium and plutonium in Russia and elsewhere. The bipartisan program to secure weapons of mass destruction is starved for funds — but Mr. Bush is proposing a $41 million cut in "cooperative threat reduction" with Russia.
Perhaps what happened in Madrid only increases the urgency for the United States to push Pakistan into revealing how wide-spread Dr.Khan's network is/was even if means some heads in the upper echelons of the Pakistani military and intelligence have to roll. Another interesting insight in this op-ed is Kristof saying that the conspiracy theory about Osama bin Laden being captured conveniently on Oct/Nov is actually shared by Pakistan experts.
