May like to see http://www.shelfari.com/o1517291504/shelf
B.Raman
Thursday, July 17, 2008
MUSLIMS & THE PRE-ELECTION POLITICAL SCENE
B.RAMAN
As the date (July 22,2008) for the vote of confidence from the Lok Sabha in the Manmohan Government nears and as the possibility of a premature election to the Lok Sabha looms large, a question often debated is the attitude of the Indian Muslims to the Indo-US nuclear deal. Do they regard it as anti-Muslim because of the perceived anti-Muslim policies of the administration of President George Bush? That is the question which has been raised again and again by the critics of the deal and of Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh.
2. In this connection, it would be pertinent to take note of the attitude of the Muslims in the Ummah as a whole since that could have an impact on the attitude of the Indian Muslims. The strongest criticism of India's developing relations with the US came from sections of the Muslims of the Ummah immediately after the visit of Bush to India in March,2006. The criticism was not specific relating to the nuclear deal. It was more in relation to what they saw as India's co-operation with the US and Israel in the war against jihadi terrorism. They noted with anger and surprise the reluctance of different political formations in India---in the rulling alliance as well as in the opposition--- to criticise the allegedly inhuman conditions in which Muslims arrested in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the world on suspicion of belonging to Al Qaeda were kept in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba and denied the basic human rights and the benefits of the due process of the law. Even the former Tony Blair Government of the UK, which was very supportive of the policies of the Bush Administration, expressed its discomfort over the conditions in which the Muslim detenus were kept in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and in May 2006 publicly called for winding up the Centre and transfering the detenus to the custody of the American civilian authorities from the custody of the military authorities. A similar demand has been voiced by many other democratic countries, by the International Committee of the Red Cross and by all human rights organisations of the West without exception. India's silence in this matter as well as over the repeated air strikes by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, which killed a large number of civilians, was an important source of anger. This silence was seen as the inevitable outcome of the growing Indo-US strategic relatioinship.
3. It was in this context that in the last week of April,2006, Osama bin Laden projected the global jihad being waged by Al Qaeda as directed against a joint conspiracy of the Crusaders, the Jewish people and the Hindus against Islam and the Muslims. However, this characterisation has not been repeated by him since then and the anger over India's silence has not found renewed expression. However, one could not conclude from this that the anger has dissipated.
4.Similarly, the silence of the leftist parties---particularly of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)--- over the renewed campaign of repression by the Chinese authorities against the Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang province bordering Pakistan is being discussed by the various Muslim chat groups in the Internet. They have noted that not only the leftist parties, but even the Indian political class as a whole and the Indian elite have maintained a silence over the recent public execution of two Uighurs, the arrest of about 80 others and the forcible closure of 40 mosques by the Chinese on the ground that they had been started without permission and had become the den of terrorist elements despite the fact that many of these details were carried by the State-controlled media of China. One can legitimately justify this silence on the ground that this was an internal matter of China, but they have noted the energetic manner in which Indian public opinion reacted to the repression of the Tibetans, but maintained a discreet silence on the repression of the Muslims.
5. If the unabated concerns of Israel over Iran's nuclear programme leads to an Israeli air strike against Iran's nuclear establishments with Iranian retaliation against Israel, the consequences of this clash could have an impact of the forthcoming election campaign in India due to a surge of anger in the Indian Muslim community. Al Qaeda and other pro-Al Qaeda Sunni organisations have kept silent over the dangers of a US military strike against Iran. In his messages of last year, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's No.2, implied that Iran, which colluded with the US in its invasion and occupation of Iraq, cannot expect the Sunnis to come to its help against the US.
6. However, if Israel---and not the US--- attacks Iran, the Sunnis could rally to the support of Iran. The Indian Muslim community is unlikely to remain untouched by the anger of the Ummah against Israel. India's close strategic relations with Israel built up over the years by the previous as well as the present Governments could affect the attitude of the Muslims, upsetting the electoral calculations of different political formations.
7. In this connection, one notices that the Government of India has already taken a strong stand earlier this week against any military action against Iran . (17-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
As the date (July 22,2008) for the vote of confidence from the Lok Sabha in the Manmohan Government nears and as the possibility of a premature election to the Lok Sabha looms large, a question often debated is the attitude of the Indian Muslims to the Indo-US nuclear deal. Do they regard it as anti-Muslim because of the perceived anti-Muslim policies of the administration of President George Bush? That is the question which has been raised again and again by the critics of the deal and of Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh.
2. In this connection, it would be pertinent to take note of the attitude of the Muslims in the Ummah as a whole since that could have an impact on the attitude of the Indian Muslims. The strongest criticism of India's developing relations with the US came from sections of the Muslims of the Ummah immediately after the visit of Bush to India in March,2006. The criticism was not specific relating to the nuclear deal. It was more in relation to what they saw as India's co-operation with the US and Israel in the war against jihadi terrorism. They noted with anger and surprise the reluctance of different political formations in India---in the rulling alliance as well as in the opposition--- to criticise the allegedly inhuman conditions in which Muslims arrested in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other parts of the world on suspicion of belonging to Al Qaeda were kept in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba and denied the basic human rights and the benefits of the due process of the law. Even the former Tony Blair Government of the UK, which was very supportive of the policies of the Bush Administration, expressed its discomfort over the conditions in which the Muslim detenus were kept in the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and in May 2006 publicly called for winding up the Centre and transfering the detenus to the custody of the American civilian authorities from the custody of the military authorities. A similar demand has been voiced by many other democratic countries, by the International Committee of the Red Cross and by all human rights organisations of the West without exception. India's silence in this matter as well as over the repeated air strikes by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, which killed a large number of civilians, was an important source of anger. This silence was seen as the inevitable outcome of the growing Indo-US strategic relatioinship.
3. It was in this context that in the last week of April,2006, Osama bin Laden projected the global jihad being waged by Al Qaeda as directed against a joint conspiracy of the Crusaders, the Jewish people and the Hindus against Islam and the Muslims. However, this characterisation has not been repeated by him since then and the anger over India's silence has not found renewed expression. However, one could not conclude from this that the anger has dissipated.
4.Similarly, the silence of the leftist parties---particularly of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)--- over the renewed campaign of repression by the Chinese authorities against the Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang province bordering Pakistan is being discussed by the various Muslim chat groups in the Internet. They have noted that not only the leftist parties, but even the Indian political class as a whole and the Indian elite have maintained a silence over the recent public execution of two Uighurs, the arrest of about 80 others and the forcible closure of 40 mosques by the Chinese on the ground that they had been started without permission and had become the den of terrorist elements despite the fact that many of these details were carried by the State-controlled media of China. One can legitimately justify this silence on the ground that this was an internal matter of China, but they have noted the energetic manner in which Indian public opinion reacted to the repression of the Tibetans, but maintained a discreet silence on the repression of the Muslims.
5. If the unabated concerns of Israel over Iran's nuclear programme leads to an Israeli air strike against Iran's nuclear establishments with Iranian retaliation against Israel, the consequences of this clash could have an impact of the forthcoming election campaign in India due to a surge of anger in the Indian Muslim community. Al Qaeda and other pro-Al Qaeda Sunni organisations have kept silent over the dangers of a US military strike against Iran. In his messages of last year, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's No.2, implied that Iran, which colluded with the US in its invasion and occupation of Iraq, cannot expect the Sunnis to come to its help against the US.
6. However, if Israel---and not the US--- attacks Iran, the Sunnis could rally to the support of Iran. The Indian Muslim community is unlikely to remain untouched by the anger of the Ummah against Israel. India's close strategic relations with Israel built up over the years by the previous as well as the present Governments could affect the attitude of the Muslims, upsetting the electoral calculations of different political formations.
7. In this connection, one notices that the Government of India has already taken a strong stand earlier this week against any military action against Iran . (17-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Sunday, July 13, 2008
COUNT-DOWN TO BEIJING OLYMPICS---II
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.411
B.RAMAN
With less than a month to go for the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese authorities are showing increasing signs of nervousness over possible acts of terrorism by the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (IMET) either in the Olympic venues or in Xinjiang or in any of the Central Asian Republics or in Pakistan. This nervousness has been reflected in the forcible closure of nearly 40 allegedly illegal mosques in Xinjiang, more arrests of alleged terrorists and the execution of the death sentences awarded by the courts in the past against alleged Uighur terrorists. The Chinese do not seem to have taken into consideration the danger that such acts by themselves may provoke the Uighur dissidents to retaliate against them.
2. The forcible closure of the so-called unauthorised mosques seems to have been triggered off by fears that some of these mosques may turn out to be the Lal Masjids of Xinjiang. The Lal Masjid of Islamabad became the base of the activities of pro-Al Qaeda and pro-Taliban Pashtun student extremists last year, forcing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to order the Army commandoes to raid the Masjid in July last year to wrest control of the Masjid from the extremists. He ordered this raid after the students kidnapped some Chinese women working in local beauty and massage parlours and accused them of leading an immoral life.
3. The Chinese have been closely monitoring the situation in the tribal belt of Pakistan and having frequent interactions with the Pakistani authorities in order to prevent any act of terrorism mounted from the Pakistani territory before or during the Olympics.
4.On July 9,2008, the Chinese authorities announced the public execution of two Uighurs whose names (Chinese version, not their original ethnic names) were given out by them as Muheteer Setiwalidi and Abdulwaili Yiming after they had been convicted by a Kashgar court on November 9,2007, on charges of separatist activities, attending a terrorist training camp and manufacturing explosives. According to the announcement, the court had awarded three other Uighurs suspended death sentences and sentenced 12 other Uighurs to various terms of imprisonment. All of them were accused of being members of the IMET. They were reported to have joined the IMET in August 2005 and were arrested by the Police in January,2007.
5.The public announcement of the sentences awarded to the 17 Uighurs came a day after the police of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, forcibly entered a flat to arrest 15 Uighurs, who were also projected as members of the IMET. Five of them were killed by the police when they allegedly resisted arrest.
6. While the observance of the birthday of the Dalai Lama on July 6,2008, passed off without any incident in Tibet and other Tibetan-inhabited areas of China, there were reports of unrest and protest meetings by Tibetan nomads in the Lithang area of the Sichuan province when the Chinese banned the holding of the traditional annual horse-racing festival by the nomads. The observance of the festival in the beginning of August last year led to acts of violence when the local police arrested some nomads for shouting slogans praising the Dalai Lama. The Chinese apparently did not want to face the risk of a similar incident this year just a few weeks before the Olympics. They played it safe by banning the festival. The People's Liberation Army was able to bring the protests under control without difficulty, but 600 troops have been sent to the area to reinforce the local security forces.
7.Meanwhile, 116 Tibetans arrested during the anti-Beijing uprising in March last are now being tried by courts in Lhasa on charges of arson, robbery and attacks on public servants. Forty-two of them have already been sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. The trial of the remaining is continuing. The Chinese authorities have not ruled out the possibility that some of the remaining may be sentenced to death and executed.
8. There have been no reports of fresh arrests in Tibet. Though the Chinese officials of Tibet have kept up their patriotic re-education classes, they have been a little more careful to avoid excesses against the Tibetans because of the widespread support for the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan cause in the international community. At a time when the movement for a boycott of the opening ceremony of the Olympics has stopped with many world leaders, including President George Bush, re-affirming their decision to attend the inaugural function, the Chinese have been avoiding any ham-handed action against the Tibetans.
9. They are not observing a similar caution in respect of the Uighurs, who do not have an iconic leader like the Dalai Lama. Moreover, by projecting every Uighur dissident arrested as a member of the pro-Al Qaeda IMET, which is treated as a terrorist organisation by the US, the Chinese have been able to ensure that their actions in Xinjiang do not become the focus of international scrutiny in the days preceding the Olympics.
10. The Chinese are really nervous about the dangers of an act of jihadi terrorism during the Olympics. The international community, which too is nervous, has been giving the benefit of doubt to the Chinese and is not criticising the action taken by the Chinese against the Muslim Uighurs in the same manner as it criticised their action against the Buddhist Tibetans.
11. The anger in Xinjiang and in the Uighur and Uzbek communities in Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics over the Chinese actions and the perceived silence of the international community because the victims were Muslims might increase the dangers of an act of jihadi terrorism before or during the Olympics either by the Uighurs or by their co-religionists.
12. Meanwhile, the second round of the resumed dialogue between Chinese officials and two representatives of the Dalai Lama in Beijing in the first week of July,2008, did not see any forward movement. Though the Chinese agreed to a third round in October next, the Dalai Lama's reprsentatives have come back with the impression that there has been no change in the Chinese position of refusing to discuss with the representatives of the Dalai Lama their demand for genuine autonomy in Tibet. They feel that the Chinese are just biding their time till the Olympics are over and that once the games are over, the Chinese will go after those in Tibet and other areas, who continue to support the Dalai Lama.
13. The Chinese have been firm that there is no question of any dialogue with the Dalai Lama's representatives on the political set-up in Tibet and on any political role for the Dalai Lama and that the dialogue will be confined to the Dalai Lama's role as a religious leader. According to them, the Tibetan diaspora will not have any political role, which will be confined to the Tibetan members of the Chinese Communist Party. (13-7-08)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
B.RAMAN
With less than a month to go for the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese authorities are showing increasing signs of nervousness over possible acts of terrorism by the Islamic Movement of East Turkestan (IMET) either in the Olympic venues or in Xinjiang or in any of the Central Asian Republics or in Pakistan. This nervousness has been reflected in the forcible closure of nearly 40 allegedly illegal mosques in Xinjiang, more arrests of alleged terrorists and the execution of the death sentences awarded by the courts in the past against alleged Uighur terrorists. The Chinese do not seem to have taken into consideration the danger that such acts by themselves may provoke the Uighur dissidents to retaliate against them.
2. The forcible closure of the so-called unauthorised mosques seems to have been triggered off by fears that some of these mosques may turn out to be the Lal Masjids of Xinjiang. The Lal Masjid of Islamabad became the base of the activities of pro-Al Qaeda and pro-Taliban Pashtun student extremists last year, forcing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to order the Army commandoes to raid the Masjid in July last year to wrest control of the Masjid from the extremists. He ordered this raid after the students kidnapped some Chinese women working in local beauty and massage parlours and accused them of leading an immoral life.
3. The Chinese have been closely monitoring the situation in the tribal belt of Pakistan and having frequent interactions with the Pakistani authorities in order to prevent any act of terrorism mounted from the Pakistani territory before or during the Olympics.
4.On July 9,2008, the Chinese authorities announced the public execution of two Uighurs whose names (Chinese version, not their original ethnic names) were given out by them as Muheteer Setiwalidi and Abdulwaili Yiming after they had been convicted by a Kashgar court on November 9,2007, on charges of separatist activities, attending a terrorist training camp and manufacturing explosives. According to the announcement, the court had awarded three other Uighurs suspended death sentences and sentenced 12 other Uighurs to various terms of imprisonment. All of them were accused of being members of the IMET. They were reported to have joined the IMET in August 2005 and were arrested by the Police in January,2007.
5.The public announcement of the sentences awarded to the 17 Uighurs came a day after the police of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, forcibly entered a flat to arrest 15 Uighurs, who were also projected as members of the IMET. Five of them were killed by the police when they allegedly resisted arrest.
6. While the observance of the birthday of the Dalai Lama on July 6,2008, passed off without any incident in Tibet and other Tibetan-inhabited areas of China, there were reports of unrest and protest meetings by Tibetan nomads in the Lithang area of the Sichuan province when the Chinese banned the holding of the traditional annual horse-racing festival by the nomads. The observance of the festival in the beginning of August last year led to acts of violence when the local police arrested some nomads for shouting slogans praising the Dalai Lama. The Chinese apparently did not want to face the risk of a similar incident this year just a few weeks before the Olympics. They played it safe by banning the festival. The People's Liberation Army was able to bring the protests under control without difficulty, but 600 troops have been sent to the area to reinforce the local security forces.
7.Meanwhile, 116 Tibetans arrested during the anti-Beijing uprising in March last are now being tried by courts in Lhasa on charges of arson, robbery and attacks on public servants. Forty-two of them have already been sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. The trial of the remaining is continuing. The Chinese authorities have not ruled out the possibility that some of the remaining may be sentenced to death and executed.
8. There have been no reports of fresh arrests in Tibet. Though the Chinese officials of Tibet have kept up their patriotic re-education classes, they have been a little more careful to avoid excesses against the Tibetans because of the widespread support for the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan cause in the international community. At a time when the movement for a boycott of the opening ceremony of the Olympics has stopped with many world leaders, including President George Bush, re-affirming their decision to attend the inaugural function, the Chinese have been avoiding any ham-handed action against the Tibetans.
9. They are not observing a similar caution in respect of the Uighurs, who do not have an iconic leader like the Dalai Lama. Moreover, by projecting every Uighur dissident arrested as a member of the pro-Al Qaeda IMET, which is treated as a terrorist organisation by the US, the Chinese have been able to ensure that their actions in Xinjiang do not become the focus of international scrutiny in the days preceding the Olympics.
10. The Chinese are really nervous about the dangers of an act of jihadi terrorism during the Olympics. The international community, which too is nervous, has been giving the benefit of doubt to the Chinese and is not criticising the action taken by the Chinese against the Muslim Uighurs in the same manner as it criticised their action against the Buddhist Tibetans.
11. The anger in Xinjiang and in the Uighur and Uzbek communities in Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics over the Chinese actions and the perceived silence of the international community because the victims were Muslims might increase the dangers of an act of jihadi terrorism before or during the Olympics either by the Uighurs or by their co-religionists.
12. Meanwhile, the second round of the resumed dialogue between Chinese officials and two representatives of the Dalai Lama in Beijing in the first week of July,2008, did not see any forward movement. Though the Chinese agreed to a third round in October next, the Dalai Lama's reprsentatives have come back with the impression that there has been no change in the Chinese position of refusing to discuss with the representatives of the Dalai Lama their demand for genuine autonomy in Tibet. They feel that the Chinese are just biding their time till the Olympics are over and that once the games are over, the Chinese will go after those in Tibet and other areas, who continue to support the Dalai Lama.
13. The Chinese have been firm that there is no question of any dialogue with the Dalai Lama's representatives on the political set-up in Tibet and on any political role for the Dalai Lama and that the dialogue will be confined to the Dalai Lama's role as a religious leader. According to them, the Tibetan diaspora will not have any political role, which will be confined to the Tibetan members of the Chinese Communist Party. (13-7-08)
( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
AL QAEDA & NUCLEAR WASTE IN NWFP
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM MONITOR---PAPER NO.410
B.RAMAN
Coinciding with the first anniversary of the Pakistan Army's commando raid into the Lal Masjid of Islamabad, there has been a fresh wave of jihadi terrorism in Pakistan, which has reversed the declining trend seen after the new Government headed by Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani came to office in the last week of March,2008.
2. This new wave started even before the first anniversary with the an Al Qaeda-admitted act of suicide terrorism outside the Danish Embassy in Islamabad on June 2,2008. It has picked up momentum since then-----particularly since July 3,2008, which marked the first anniversary of the siege of the Lal Masjid by the Pakistani security forces and ultimately led to the raid into the Lal Masjid.
3. This new wave has affected tribal as well as non-tribal areas, but the tribal areas more than non-tribal areas till now. In the tribal areas, it has affected the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which are directly controlled from Islamabad with the help of the Army, as well as the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), which is ruled by a coalition headed by the reputedly secular Awami National Party (ANP). The ANP has been trying to deal with the situation with the help of the Frontier Corps (FC), a para-military organisation of Pashtun tribals trained and supervised by the Army.
4.The NWFP was badly affected even last year. Of the 56 attacks of suicide terrorism during 2007, 23 were in the FATA, 21 in the NWFP, including four in the Swat Valley, nine in Punjab, two in Balochistan and one in Sindh. Of the 23 in the FATA, only two were in North Waziristan and one in the Bajaur Agency, where, according to the US, the terrorist infrastructure of Al Qaeda is located. The remaining 20 were in South Waziristan, where there are no confirmed reports of any Al Qaeda infrastructure. All the attacks in South Waziristan came from areas which are controlled by the Mehsuds. In the areas controlled by other tribes, there were no incidents of suicide terrorism. Two cantonments saw repeated suicide strikes--- Rawalpindi (5), where the General Headquarters of the Army are located, and Kohat (3) in the NWFP where an Army cadet school is located.
5. The Ministry of the Interior of the Government of Pakistan has not so far come out with official statistics relating to suicide and non-suicide terrorism this year, but according to Hamid Mir, the highly-respected Pakistani journalist, who works for the GeoTV, a private TV channel,there have been 25 acts of suicide terrorism in Pakistan during the first six months of 2008, resulting in 332 fatalities. However, in his analysis carried by "News" of July 10,2008, he does not indicate how many of these incidents took place before the new Government came to office and how many thereafter. According to official figures released by the Interior Ministry at the end of last year, there were only four acts of suicide terrorism during the first six months of 2007. This shot up to 56 after the Lal Masjid raid. According to my collation, there were 17 acts of suicide terrorism this year before the Gilani Government came to office, and there have been only eight since then, but the number is showing an upward trend.
6. According to Hamid Mir, Afghanistan had 160 suicide bombings in 2007 with 836 people dead and it has had 76 suicide bombings in the first six months of 2008 with 466 dead. There were seven suicide attacks in Afghanistan in March 2008 compared to 17 in March 2007.There was a sudden increase in the attacks in June 2008 with 17 suicide bombings compared to just seven suicide bombings in June 2007. Suicide bombings slightly increased in areas close to the Iranian border. Kandahar and Helmand are close to Pakistan while Nimroz and Farah are close to Iran. There were 15 suicide attacks in Kandahar in 2008 compared to 26 in 2007. There were 15 suicide attacks in Helmand in 2008 compared to 22 in 2007. There were only three attacks in Nimroz in 2007 but eight attacks in the first six months of 2008. Farah is close to the Iranian border and had just five suicide attacks in 2007 but this province saw six suicide attacks in 2008. The increasing number of attacks in areas closer to the Iranian border than to the Pakistani border is intriguing and has thus far remained without a satisfactory explanation.
7.In 2007, one saw acts of suicide terrorism as well as conventional attacks not involving suicide terrorism in the tribal areas. The conventional style attacks were more in the FATA than in the NWFP, except in the Swat Valley, which is the stronghold of the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) headed by Mulla Fazlullah. Even though official statistics of conventional style attacks are not available, one can see that there has been an increase in conventional style attacks in other areas of the NWFP too. What one has been seeing is that the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other jihadi groups in the tribal belt not associated with the TTP, have been emulating the tactics of the Taliban of Afghanistan, which consist of a mix of suicide terrorism and conventional guerilla-style attacks. An insurgency-like situation is developing in the tribal belt in the FATA and the NWFP, similar to the situation which has been prevalent in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
8. There has been a deterioration in the control exercised by the ANP-led Government, the army and the para-military forces in the NWFP. This weakening of control is evident in Peshawar too, where the Taliban and pro-Taliban groups are slowly nibbling at the outlying areas bordering the FATA. The worsening situation in the NWFP should be a matter of concern to the international community since many of the areas where Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission stores its nuclear waste are located there. If these sites come under the control of the jihadi terrorists, Al Qaeda's search for a dirty bomb capability could be facilitated. ( 13-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
B.RAMAN
Coinciding with the first anniversary of the Pakistan Army's commando raid into the Lal Masjid of Islamabad, there has been a fresh wave of jihadi terrorism in Pakistan, which has reversed the declining trend seen after the new Government headed by Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani came to office in the last week of March,2008.
2. This new wave started even before the first anniversary with the an Al Qaeda-admitted act of suicide terrorism outside the Danish Embassy in Islamabad on June 2,2008. It has picked up momentum since then-----particularly since July 3,2008, which marked the first anniversary of the siege of the Lal Masjid by the Pakistani security forces and ultimately led to the raid into the Lal Masjid.
3. This new wave has affected tribal as well as non-tribal areas, but the tribal areas more than non-tribal areas till now. In the tribal areas, it has affected the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which are directly controlled from Islamabad with the help of the Army, as well as the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), which is ruled by a coalition headed by the reputedly secular Awami National Party (ANP). The ANP has been trying to deal with the situation with the help of the Frontier Corps (FC), a para-military organisation of Pashtun tribals trained and supervised by the Army.
4.The NWFP was badly affected even last year. Of the 56 attacks of suicide terrorism during 2007, 23 were in the FATA, 21 in the NWFP, including four in the Swat Valley, nine in Punjab, two in Balochistan and one in Sindh. Of the 23 in the FATA, only two were in North Waziristan and one in the Bajaur Agency, where, according to the US, the terrorist infrastructure of Al Qaeda is located. The remaining 20 were in South Waziristan, where there are no confirmed reports of any Al Qaeda infrastructure. All the attacks in South Waziristan came from areas which are controlled by the Mehsuds. In the areas controlled by other tribes, there were no incidents of suicide terrorism. Two cantonments saw repeated suicide strikes--- Rawalpindi (5), where the General Headquarters of the Army are located, and Kohat (3) in the NWFP where an Army cadet school is located.
5. The Ministry of the Interior of the Government of Pakistan has not so far come out with official statistics relating to suicide and non-suicide terrorism this year, but according to Hamid Mir, the highly-respected Pakistani journalist, who works for the GeoTV, a private TV channel,there have been 25 acts of suicide terrorism in Pakistan during the first six months of 2008, resulting in 332 fatalities. However, in his analysis carried by "News" of July 10,2008, he does not indicate how many of these incidents took place before the new Government came to office and how many thereafter. According to official figures released by the Interior Ministry at the end of last year, there were only four acts of suicide terrorism during the first six months of 2007. This shot up to 56 after the Lal Masjid raid. According to my collation, there were 17 acts of suicide terrorism this year before the Gilani Government came to office, and there have been only eight since then, but the number is showing an upward trend.
6. According to Hamid Mir, Afghanistan had 160 suicide bombings in 2007 with 836 people dead and it has had 76 suicide bombings in the first six months of 2008 with 466 dead. There were seven suicide attacks in Afghanistan in March 2008 compared to 17 in March 2007.There was a sudden increase in the attacks in June 2008 with 17 suicide bombings compared to just seven suicide bombings in June 2007. Suicide bombings slightly increased in areas close to the Iranian border. Kandahar and Helmand are close to Pakistan while Nimroz and Farah are close to Iran. There were 15 suicide attacks in Kandahar in 2008 compared to 26 in 2007. There were 15 suicide attacks in Helmand in 2008 compared to 22 in 2007. There were only three attacks in Nimroz in 2007 but eight attacks in the first six months of 2008. Farah is close to the Iranian border and had just five suicide attacks in 2007 but this province saw six suicide attacks in 2008. The increasing number of attacks in areas closer to the Iranian border than to the Pakistani border is intriguing and has thus far remained without a satisfactory explanation.
7.In 2007, one saw acts of suicide terrorism as well as conventional attacks not involving suicide terrorism in the tribal areas. The conventional style attacks were more in the FATA than in the NWFP, except in the Swat Valley, which is the stronghold of the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) headed by Mulla Fazlullah. Even though official statistics of conventional style attacks are not available, one can see that there has been an increase in conventional style attacks in other areas of the NWFP too. What one has been seeing is that the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other jihadi groups in the tribal belt not associated with the TTP, have been emulating the tactics of the Taliban of Afghanistan, which consist of a mix of suicide terrorism and conventional guerilla-style attacks. An insurgency-like situation is developing in the tribal belt in the FATA and the NWFP, similar to the situation which has been prevalent in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
8. There has been a deterioration in the control exercised by the ANP-led Government, the army and the para-military forces in the NWFP. This weakening of control is evident in Peshawar too, where the Taliban and pro-Taliban groups are slowly nibbling at the outlying areas bordering the FATA. The worsening situation in the NWFP should be a matter of concern to the international community since many of the areas where Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission stores its nuclear waste are located there. If these sites come under the control of the jihadi terrorists, Al Qaeda's search for a dirty bomb capability could be facilitated. ( 13-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Friday, July 11, 2008
INDO-US NUCLEAR DEAL: IN PERSPECTIVE
B.RAMAN
It used to be said of former US President Ronald Reagan that he was a bad policy-maker, but a good communicator. His communication skills were so good that he could make a bad policy look good and a policy failure seem a success. He and his advisers followed certain dos and don'ts: Use very simple language which even the man in the street can understand; avoid over-blown adjectives and retoric; avoid demonisation of your domestic critics; and select a simple catchy expression which will stick to the minds of the people. Reagan had the knack of making his individual domestic interlocutors go away after a meeting with him thinking that he or she was the most trusted confidante of the President.
2. Our Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh is quite the contrast of Reagan---- a good policy-maker, but a bad communicator. His communication skills and those of his advisers are so inadequate and bad that instead of disarming the critics of the Indo-US nuclear deal one by one they have added to their ranks during the last three years. Manmohan Singh's natural inclination to be secretive----arising from his years as a bureaucrat before he entered politics---- has made him seem to his critics as manipulative whereas he is not. Is there a single person in New Delhi whom one can characterise as the most trusted confidante of the Prime Minister? No. Confiding in people, humouring them, making them feel good and sharing secrets with them to tickle their ego do not come naturally to him.
3. Manmohan Singh came to office as Prime Minister a few months before George Bush was re-elected as the President in November,2004.Policy-making during the first term of a US President tends to be affected by his anxiety to get re-elected. They avoid too many innovations. The real innovations in policy-making often come in the second term when this anxiety no longer influences policy-making.
4. One has been seeing this happening in the case of Bush too. Bush 2005-2008 is different from Bush 2001-2004. During his first term, he was surrounded by Cabinet members , who were the relics of the past and looked at India through the eyes of their friends in Pakistan. Gen.Colin Powell, the Secretary of State in the first term, was a good example.
5. During his second term, he has been surrounded by Cabinet members whose vision of India is not unduly influenced by their vision of Pakistan. They look at Pakistan as an intractable problem inherited from the past and India as an opportunity of the future. Ms.Condolleezza Rice, the present Secretary of State, is a good example.
6. The second term of Bush has been marked by two major concerns arising from the growing Chinese military and economic muscle and the growing jihadi power in the tribal areas of Pakistan. In a recent interview, Bush has been quoted as saying that while Iraq and Afghanistan were his major preoccupations, Pakistan would be the major preoccupation of his successor. In fact, Pakistan has already started becoming a major preoccupation of even Bush.
7. It was in this context that Bush, Rice and others of similar thinking started looking at India as a possible geopolitical asset in dealing with not only China, but also Pakistan.Two characteristics of India appealed to them. First, its enduring success as a democracy, which could provide a positive model to other countries in the region. Second, the inability of Al Qaeda and its associates to make an impact on the Indian Muslim community barring some small pockets. In his remarks and speeches during the Prime Minister's visit to Washington DC in July,2005, it was these two aspects which Bush highlighted.
8. It was against this background that Bush's offer of the nuclear deal came during his discussions with Manmohan Singh. The late R.N.Kao, the founding father of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), India's external intelligence agency, used to say that policy leaders and analysts should be able to detect when a door, which had remained firmly shut, shows signs of slightly opening.They should immediately put their leg in to prevent the door from closing again and try to make it open more and more.
9.Manmohan Singh, being an alert analyst and a good policy maker, detected the slight opening of the Indo-US door and put his leg in by accepting the offer of a nuclear deal. Since then, he has been frantically trying to keep the leg in and make the door open more and more, but his critics and detractors have been desperately trying to force him to take his leg out.
10. The nuclear deal has been significant from the geopolitical angle as well as from the angle of India's energy supply security. Instead of explaining both these aspects in a simple language which would carry conviction to people, he and his advisers have been over-playing the energy supply security aspect by flooding the people with statistics which bore them. They are trying to project the deal as a manna from heaven in our quest for energy supply security. It is not. The result: they have added to the prevailing skepticism instead of dissipating it.
11. Even the deal's significance from the point of view of our energy supply security has not been properly explained. The contract with Russia under which two nuclear power stations are presently being constructed by it at Koodankulam in Tamil Nadu is the last contract entered into by India before the restrictions imposed by the Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG) on nuclear trade with India came into force. Once the Russians implement this contract. we cannot enter into a fresh contract with any power or company in the world unless the NSG's restrictions against India are removed.
12. Bush's offer of the nuclear deal provided a small window of opportunity to have these restrictions removed thereby enabling new contracts. Manmohan Singh grabbed this opportunity. The merits of this deal have to be examined from the technical as well as political angles before deciding whether it is good or bad for the country.
13.In the technical examination, the questions to be asked are: Will the deal affect our present military nuclear capability and come in the way of our further improving it in future if forced to do so by future geopolitical situations vis-a-vis China and Pakistan? Will it come in the way of our research and development of the fast breeder and thorium-based technologies? Will the deal really strengthen our energy supply security?
14. In finding answers to these questions, one has to go by the professional advice of our serving scientists of today who are in the leadership position in our nuclear community. All of them, without exception, have stated categorically that by and large the deal will be beneficial to India and is necessary in the present context.
15. The negative voices have been coming from some senior and highly distinguished scientists, who occupied leadership positions in the nuclear scientific community during the days of our own cold war with the US, when the bilateral relations were marked by bitterness. The younger generation of our scientists, who make the policies today, have a more open mind to the US and do not allow memories of past bitterness to come in the way of innovative policy initiatives. Should the retired scientists of yesterday try to inhibit innovative re-thinking by making the debate emotional instead of remaining professional? They have every right and even duty to draw attention to what they look upon as pitfalls and traps. Once their comments have been considered by the serving scientists of today and they have come to the conclusion that the deal is worth giving a try, should the retired scientists carry on their dogged opposition and mobilise public and political opinion to prevent the impementation of the deal?
16. Immediately after signing the deal in July,2005, the Prime Minister said:" I told the Chairman of our Atomic Energy Commission. You have the veto power. If you say sign, I will sign it. If you say, don't sign, I won't." After examining the draft, the Chairman of our Atomic Energy Commission advised the Prime Minister to accept it and he did. Since then, the Chairman has been consistent in his support for the deal. His technical judgement and that of his serving colleagues should be accepted without seeking to create doubts about them in the minds of the public.
17. The political aspect of the deal is more complex because many suspect---particularly the leftists--- that the deal is not a stand-alone policy gesture by the US, but has come as part of a strategic relationship package.Many subsequent developments such as the talk of India and the US taking the initiative for a concert of democracies, growing military-military relationship, bilateral and multilateral military exercises etc are seen by the critics as indicating that the deal is as a quid pro quo for India joining as an undeclared ally of the US against China and accepting constraints on its policy-making with regard to countries such as Iran, which are anathema to the US.
18. The over-dramatisation of the malign nature of the Hyde Act in this context is misplaced. True, the Hyde Act seeks to impose a large number of extraneous dos and don'ts on the President in implementing the nuclear deal. In the US, the President is unimaginably powerful in foreign policy matters. How effectively any President adheres to the Hyde Act will depend on the state of over-all Indo-US relations and his own perception of India as a benign or a malign power. If a President continues to attach importance to India and has a favourable perception of India, he can find dozens of ways of circumventing the Act in order not to needle India. If the relations become bad and a future President does not like India, he can with equal ease find dozens of ways of needling India even if there be no Hyde Act.
19. We saw an example of this in the way George Bush, the father of the present President, avoided invoking the Congressionally-enacted Pressler Amendment against Pakistan for a long time. This Amendment called for economic and military sanctions against Pakistan if the President determined that Pakistan had embarked on a military nuclear programme and had acquired a military nuclear capability. Even though the CIA had been repeatedly telling him about Pakistan acquiring a military nuclear capability with Chinese assistance, he refrained from making any declaration against Pakistan and invoking the Amendment so long as the US needed Pakistan for the proxy war against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. He invoked it only in 1990 long after the Soviet troops had left.
20. We are right in being concerned about many provisions of the Hyde Act and giving expression to them, but we should not allow these concerns to be over-blown and come in the way of further opening the Indo-US door.
21. Yes, it is a fact that the nuclear deal is not an act of charity by the US in a moment of magnanimity to India.It is part of a strategic package. Our examination of the package should be influenced not by our past memories of our relations with the US, but by our present experience of it and our future expectations ftom it. If we examine objectively, we will have to accept that a strategic partnership with the US can act as a much-needed catalysts in enabling us to catch up with China economically despite our belated start and moderating its military and big-power ambitions.
22. We have many valid grievances against the US---- its double standards on the continued use of terrorism by Pakistan against India and its reluctance to support India becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council, to cite only two examples. While continuing to be articulate on such grievances, we should not let them come in the way of the Indo-US door opening more and more. (12-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail:seventyone2@gmai.com )
It used to be said of former US President Ronald Reagan that he was a bad policy-maker, but a good communicator. His communication skills were so good that he could make a bad policy look good and a policy failure seem a success. He and his advisers followed certain dos and don'ts: Use very simple language which even the man in the street can understand; avoid over-blown adjectives and retoric; avoid demonisation of your domestic critics; and select a simple catchy expression which will stick to the minds of the people. Reagan had the knack of making his individual domestic interlocutors go away after a meeting with him thinking that he or she was the most trusted confidante of the President.
2. Our Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh is quite the contrast of Reagan---- a good policy-maker, but a bad communicator. His communication skills and those of his advisers are so inadequate and bad that instead of disarming the critics of the Indo-US nuclear deal one by one they have added to their ranks during the last three years. Manmohan Singh's natural inclination to be secretive----arising from his years as a bureaucrat before he entered politics---- has made him seem to his critics as manipulative whereas he is not. Is there a single person in New Delhi whom one can characterise as the most trusted confidante of the Prime Minister? No. Confiding in people, humouring them, making them feel good and sharing secrets with them to tickle their ego do not come naturally to him.
3. Manmohan Singh came to office as Prime Minister a few months before George Bush was re-elected as the President in November,2004.Policy-making during the first term of a US President tends to be affected by his anxiety to get re-elected. They avoid too many innovations. The real innovations in policy-making often come in the second term when this anxiety no longer influences policy-making.
4. One has been seeing this happening in the case of Bush too. Bush 2005-2008 is different from Bush 2001-2004. During his first term, he was surrounded by Cabinet members , who were the relics of the past and looked at India through the eyes of their friends in Pakistan. Gen.Colin Powell, the Secretary of State in the first term, was a good example.
5. During his second term, he has been surrounded by Cabinet members whose vision of India is not unduly influenced by their vision of Pakistan. They look at Pakistan as an intractable problem inherited from the past and India as an opportunity of the future. Ms.Condolleezza Rice, the present Secretary of State, is a good example.
6. The second term of Bush has been marked by two major concerns arising from the growing Chinese military and economic muscle and the growing jihadi power in the tribal areas of Pakistan. In a recent interview, Bush has been quoted as saying that while Iraq and Afghanistan were his major preoccupations, Pakistan would be the major preoccupation of his successor. In fact, Pakistan has already started becoming a major preoccupation of even Bush.
7. It was in this context that Bush, Rice and others of similar thinking started looking at India as a possible geopolitical asset in dealing with not only China, but also Pakistan.Two characteristics of India appealed to them. First, its enduring success as a democracy, which could provide a positive model to other countries in the region. Second, the inability of Al Qaeda and its associates to make an impact on the Indian Muslim community barring some small pockets. In his remarks and speeches during the Prime Minister's visit to Washington DC in July,2005, it was these two aspects which Bush highlighted.
8. It was against this background that Bush's offer of the nuclear deal came during his discussions with Manmohan Singh. The late R.N.Kao, the founding father of the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW), India's external intelligence agency, used to say that policy leaders and analysts should be able to detect when a door, which had remained firmly shut, shows signs of slightly opening.They should immediately put their leg in to prevent the door from closing again and try to make it open more and more.
9.Manmohan Singh, being an alert analyst and a good policy maker, detected the slight opening of the Indo-US door and put his leg in by accepting the offer of a nuclear deal. Since then, he has been frantically trying to keep the leg in and make the door open more and more, but his critics and detractors have been desperately trying to force him to take his leg out.
10. The nuclear deal has been significant from the geopolitical angle as well as from the angle of India's energy supply security. Instead of explaining both these aspects in a simple language which would carry conviction to people, he and his advisers have been over-playing the energy supply security aspect by flooding the people with statistics which bore them. They are trying to project the deal as a manna from heaven in our quest for energy supply security. It is not. The result: they have added to the prevailing skepticism instead of dissipating it.
11. Even the deal's significance from the point of view of our energy supply security has not been properly explained. The contract with Russia under which two nuclear power stations are presently being constructed by it at Koodankulam in Tamil Nadu is the last contract entered into by India before the restrictions imposed by the Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG) on nuclear trade with India came into force. Once the Russians implement this contract. we cannot enter into a fresh contract with any power or company in the world unless the NSG's restrictions against India are removed.
12. Bush's offer of the nuclear deal provided a small window of opportunity to have these restrictions removed thereby enabling new contracts. Manmohan Singh grabbed this opportunity. The merits of this deal have to be examined from the technical as well as political angles before deciding whether it is good or bad for the country.
13.In the technical examination, the questions to be asked are: Will the deal affect our present military nuclear capability and come in the way of our further improving it in future if forced to do so by future geopolitical situations vis-a-vis China and Pakistan? Will it come in the way of our research and development of the fast breeder and thorium-based technologies? Will the deal really strengthen our energy supply security?
14. In finding answers to these questions, one has to go by the professional advice of our serving scientists of today who are in the leadership position in our nuclear community. All of them, without exception, have stated categorically that by and large the deal will be beneficial to India and is necessary in the present context.
15. The negative voices have been coming from some senior and highly distinguished scientists, who occupied leadership positions in the nuclear scientific community during the days of our own cold war with the US, when the bilateral relations were marked by bitterness. The younger generation of our scientists, who make the policies today, have a more open mind to the US and do not allow memories of past bitterness to come in the way of innovative policy initiatives. Should the retired scientists of yesterday try to inhibit innovative re-thinking by making the debate emotional instead of remaining professional? They have every right and even duty to draw attention to what they look upon as pitfalls and traps. Once their comments have been considered by the serving scientists of today and they have come to the conclusion that the deal is worth giving a try, should the retired scientists carry on their dogged opposition and mobilise public and political opinion to prevent the impementation of the deal?
16. Immediately after signing the deal in July,2005, the Prime Minister said:" I told the Chairman of our Atomic Energy Commission. You have the veto power. If you say sign, I will sign it. If you say, don't sign, I won't." After examining the draft, the Chairman of our Atomic Energy Commission advised the Prime Minister to accept it and he did. Since then, the Chairman has been consistent in his support for the deal. His technical judgement and that of his serving colleagues should be accepted without seeking to create doubts about them in the minds of the public.
17. The political aspect of the deal is more complex because many suspect---particularly the leftists--- that the deal is not a stand-alone policy gesture by the US, but has come as part of a strategic relationship package.Many subsequent developments such as the talk of India and the US taking the initiative for a concert of democracies, growing military-military relationship, bilateral and multilateral military exercises etc are seen by the critics as indicating that the deal is as a quid pro quo for India joining as an undeclared ally of the US against China and accepting constraints on its policy-making with regard to countries such as Iran, which are anathema to the US.
18. The over-dramatisation of the malign nature of the Hyde Act in this context is misplaced. True, the Hyde Act seeks to impose a large number of extraneous dos and don'ts on the President in implementing the nuclear deal. In the US, the President is unimaginably powerful in foreign policy matters. How effectively any President adheres to the Hyde Act will depend on the state of over-all Indo-US relations and his own perception of India as a benign or a malign power. If a President continues to attach importance to India and has a favourable perception of India, he can find dozens of ways of circumventing the Act in order not to needle India. If the relations become bad and a future President does not like India, he can with equal ease find dozens of ways of needling India even if there be no Hyde Act.
19. We saw an example of this in the way George Bush, the father of the present President, avoided invoking the Congressionally-enacted Pressler Amendment against Pakistan for a long time. This Amendment called for economic and military sanctions against Pakistan if the President determined that Pakistan had embarked on a military nuclear programme and had acquired a military nuclear capability. Even though the CIA had been repeatedly telling him about Pakistan acquiring a military nuclear capability with Chinese assistance, he refrained from making any declaration against Pakistan and invoking the Amendment so long as the US needed Pakistan for the proxy war against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. He invoked it only in 1990 long after the Soviet troops had left.
20. We are right in being concerned about many provisions of the Hyde Act and giving expression to them, but we should not allow these concerns to be over-blown and come in the way of further opening the Indo-US door.
21. Yes, it is a fact that the nuclear deal is not an act of charity by the US in a moment of magnanimity to India.It is part of a strategic package. Our examination of the package should be influenced not by our past memories of our relations with the US, but by our present experience of it and our future expectations ftom it. If we examine objectively, we will have to accept that a strategic partnership with the US can act as a much-needed catalysts in enabling us to catch up with China economically despite our belated start and moderating its military and big-power ambitions.
22. We have many valid grievances against the US---- its double standards on the continued use of terrorism by Pakistan against India and its reluctance to support India becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council, to cite only two examples. While continuing to be articulate on such grievances, we should not let them come in the way of the Indo-US door opening more and more. (12-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail:seventyone2@gmai.com )
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
BLAST OUTSIDE INDIAN EMBASSY IN KABUL: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS
B.RAMAN
( An article prepared exclusively for 'India Abroad", the weekly published from the US, and its sister online publication Rediff.com. Not to be used by others before July 14,2008)
Forty-one persons, four of them Indian nationals, were killed in a suicide car bomb explosion outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul on July 7,2008, as the staff of the Embassy were arriving to start the day's work.
2. The Indian nationals killed were Brigadier R.D.Mehta, the Defence Attache, V.Venkateswara Rao, an officer of the Indian Foreign Service working as Counsellor, Ajai Pathania, a security guard of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), and Roop Singh, also a security guard of the ITBP. The two security guards of the ITBP were manning the security barrier outside the entrance gate of the Embassy. Brig. Mehta and Rao were coming to the Embassy in a chauffeur-driven car. The Brigadier was sitting in the front seat by the side of the chauffeur and Rao in the rear seat just behind the chauffeur, who was possibly an Afghan national, since his name did not figure among Indian fatalities.
3.The remaining 37 fatalities consisted of six Afghan police officers posted outside the Embassy, a large number of Afghan visa seekers plus some bystanders on the road. Though the blast took place just outside the gate, it was reported to have badly damaged the building of the Indian Embassy and caused some damage to an adjoining building, in which the Indonesian Embassy was located. There were no fatalities among the staff of the Indian Embassy inside the building. Among the over 100 injured persons were two Indonesian diplomats and five Afghan police officers posted outside the Indonesian Embassy.
4.Initial reports suggested that the suicide car bomber came from the opposite direction and rammed his explosive-laden car into two Embassy cars as they were waiting for the gate to open. This gave rise to the possibility that his primary targets were the two Indian officers. Subsequent reports indicated, however, that the suicide bomber was driving behind the car carrying the Indian officers. As the ITBP guards were trying to verify the identity of the car following the Embassy car, the terrorist activated the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED). From this, it is suspected that his aim was to enter the Embassy premises by taking advantage of the opening of the gate for the Embassy car and then activate the IED, but when the suspicions of the ITBP guards were roused, he activated the IED outside the Embassy itself. If he had succeeded in entering the premises and then activating the IED, the Indian fatalities and the damage to the building might have been more.
5.The Kabul blast outside the Indian Embassy brings to mind a similar suicide car bomb blast near the US Consulate in Karachi on the eve of the arrival in Islamabad from New Delhi of President George Bush in the first week of March,2006. The blast killed a US diplomat, his Pakistani driver and a Pakistani security officer. Briefing the media after the incident, Niaz Siddiqi, an officer of the Karachi Police , was quoted as saying by the "News" of March 3,2006: "Due to strict security arrangements, the suicide bomber could not reach his target [the U.S. Consulate] and blew the car up on the way, when a motorcade of U.S. diplomats was passing through". Pakistani investigators blamed the blast on a little known organisation called the Jundullah (Soldiers of Allah) reported to have been trained in North Waziristan.
6. Terrorists have been using suicide vehicular bombs ( two-wheelers, cars, trucks and boats) since 1983, when a suicide vehicular bomb was first used against the US Marines in Beirut. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been using this modus operandi (MO) since 1987. This MO is being used by Al Qaeda with devastating effect in Iraq since the US-led troops occupied the country in 2003. It has also been used by Al Qaeda in Algeria. A suicide car bomb causes many more fatalities and much more damage than an IED carried by a suicide bomber on his person.
7. There have been many car bomb explosions in India and Pakistan carried out by jihadi terrorists in the past, but these were activated through a remote control device or a mechanical timer and not by a suicide bomber driving the vehicle. As an example, one could cite the Mumbai blasts of March,1993. However, there have been no suicide car bomb explosions in India so far.
8. The increasing use of the MO involving suicide car bombs came into vogue in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region after 9/11. There were no acts of suicide terrorism in Afghanistan before September 9,2001. The assassination of Ahmed Shah Masood, the legendary Tajik leader, by two Arab terrorists on September 9,2001, was the first act of suicide terrorism reported from Afghan territory. Since the Afghan Taliban, headed by Mulla Mohammad Omar, staged a come-back in Afghanistan from sanctuaries in Pakistan in 2004, it has been increasingly using suicide terrorism. The virus of suicide terrorism, which was initially introduced into Pakistan in the 1990s by the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), spread dramatically after the raid by the Pakistan Army commandos into the Lal Masjid of Islamabad in July last year.
9. In both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the suicide bombers carried the IEDs on their person, but since 2006 there has been an increasing number of instances of vehicle-borne suicide terrorism in both countries.Training in the use of this MO is reported to have been imparted to the volunteers of the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan and the various pro-Taliban and pro-Al Qaeda organisations of Pakistan in the training camps of Al Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Group (IJG), another Uzbek organisation, in North Waziristan in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan.
10.There has been a sharp increase in acts of terrorism in Afghanistan since the new Government headed by Yousef Raza Gilani assumedoffice in Islamabad in the last week of March,2008. NATO officers in Afghanistan have spoken of a 40 per cent increase in the infiltration ofjihadi terrorists from the tribal belt of Pakistan into Afghanistan since the new Pakistani Government suspended military operations againstthe Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and entered into peace negotiations with them. Even as acts of terrorism----including suicide terrorism---have increased in Afghan territory, there has been a sharp decrease in acts of suicide terrorism in Pakistani territory. This indicates that thenew Government has made a deal with the Taliban allowing it to operate freely in Afghanistan in return for its stepping down its operationsin Pakistani territory.
11.In a despatch on July 7,2008, Luis Martinez of the ABC News of the US said: "As the number of U.S. fatalities has dropped in Iraq, those in Afghanistan have been steadily rising. In June, U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan nearly equaled those in Iraq and were the highest since the start of the war in 2001. It's a reflection of a resurgent Taliban that has refocused the attention of Pentagon planners, but drawn little attention in a presidential campaign in which politicians have been more focused on Iraq. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen told reporters last week that he has been "deeply troubled" by the rising violence in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have "without question, grown more effective and more aggressive in recent weeks, and as the casualty figures clearly demonstrate." The 28 American deaths in Afghanistan in June were one short of the 29 in Iraq, where the U.S. has more than four times as many troops. There are currently 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and 145,000 in Iraq. But the casualty rates of NATO allies are also rising. For the second month in a row, the total number of coalition combat deaths exceeded those in Iraq -- 46 in Afghanistan, compared with 31 in Iraq."
12.The ABC report added: "Military officials cite several reasons for the increase in violence, namely the Taliban's "safe haven" in the western tribal areas of Pakistan, where they can launch operations across the border into Afghanistan. Also, unable to defeat U.S. and NATO troops in conventional fighting, the various groups that make up the Taliban insurgency have resorted to tactics like those seen in Iraq, primarily the use of roadside bombs. A third factor cited by American commanders is that with more American troops on the ground than ever there is more combat as they move into areas controlled by insurgents. The commander of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, was more precise last week when he said that the number of violent incidents in his sector had jumped by 40 per cent in the first five months of this year over last year. This is in a region praised as a success story of American counterinsurgency efforts. Schloesser and other military officials describe the "safe haven" in Pakistan as a major factor for the increase in violence in eastern Afghanistan as insurgents are able to easily slip back and forth along the border into Afghanistan. The safe haven was created by ceasefire agreements negotiated by the Pakistani government with tribal leaders."
13.In an article contributed to the "Washington Post" on July 7,2008, Greg Bruno of the Council on Foreign Relations, said: ' A June 2008 report on Afghan security by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, finds that despite $10 billion in U.S. aid, only two of 105 Afghan National Army (ANA) units are judged "fully capable" . None of the 433 units of Afghanistan's National Police (ANP) are capable of conducting independent patrols, and only twelve -- 3 per cent -- are capable of leading operations with coalition support, the GAO says. Weakness of Afghan security services was exposed in a July 7 blast that leveled the Indian mission in Kabul , killing dozens. "
14. There are only three terrorist organisations in Afghanistan, which are capable of a vehicle-borne suicide terrorist strike like the one of July 7----the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan, the Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Heckmatyar and Al Qaeda. Of these, only the Neo Taliban has repeatedly demonstrated a capability for suicide terrorist strikes in Kabul----even in supposedly well-protected areas. It has repeatedly struck at soft as well as hard targets. Al Qaeda, based in the FATA, has a similar capability, but it prefers to train the Neo Taliban and guide it in its operations instead of itself operating. One reason for this is that it has a dwindling cadre of fresh Arab recruits and does not want to lose them in acts of suicide terrorism. It has kept them reserved for training volunteers from all over the world and for more important operations outside Afghanistan. The two Uzbeck organisations have a larger cadre and are in a position to operate in Kabul either on their own or as members of the Neo Taliban. The capability of the Hizb-e-Islami for operations in Kabul is unknown.
15. It is, therefore, assessed that there is a strong possibility of the Neo Taliban having carried out the blast outside the Indian Embassy.One Zabihullah Mujahid, who claimed to be a spokesman of the Neo Taliban, is reported to have denied the involvement of his group.This denial means nothing. If the Neo Taliban admits its involvement, it will provide a connecting link to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which has provided sanctuaries to its leaders, including Mulla Mohammad Omar, and cadres in Pakistani territory. Since the survivors of Al Qaeda and the Taliban withdrew into the tribal belt of Pakistan after the US strikes destroyed their sanctuaries in Afghan territory after 9/11, Pakistan has been following a dual policy in its co-operation with the US in the war against terrorism. It has been co-operating in the operations against Al Qaeda to the extent necessary and unavoidable, but avoiding action against the Neo Taliban. It wants to preserve the Neo Taliban as a fighting unit to regain its pre-9/11 influence in Afghanistan if and when the US and other NATO forces leave Afghanistan and to counter the Indian presence in Afghanistan.
16. The fact that the ISI has been playing a double game in respect of the Taliban-----pretending to co-operate, but not actually co-operating--- has been admitted even by many US analysts. 'The Times" of London wrote on July 8,2008: "A US Department of Defence funded study undertaken by the RAND Corporation and published last month also stated that elements of the ISI were aiding the Taliban.“Right now, the Taliban and other groups are getting help from individuals within Pakistan’s Government, and until that ends, the region’s long-term security is in jeopardy,” concluded the report’s author Seth Jones.He said the support included medical care for wounded fighters, logistical and financial support. He also said ISI trainers were instructing insurgents in camps at Quetta, Mansehra, Shamshattu and Parachinar and other areas of Pakistan. “NATO officials uncovered several instances in which ISI operatives provided intelligence to Taliban insurgents at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels,” the report says."
17. "The Times" added: " Privately there is acknowledgement that a level of complicity is a reality. “There is an acceptance that elements of the ISI are engaged with the insurgents,” said one source serving in the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) for Afghanistan yesterday. “The issue that remains unresolved is the degree of higher level acceptance of this, and how much they (the ISI) can actually be controlled.”British officers confirmed to The Times an incident last summer in which a Taliban corpse found on the battlefield in Helmand turned out to be carrying papers identifying the body as that of a serving ISI Colonel. When British officials challenged the Islamabad Government on the issue, they received an explanation that the man was ’on leave’ at the time of his death."
18. Was the ISI involved in the Kabul blast? The Afghan Government seems convinced it was.Talking to the media after the blast, Humayun Hamidzada, a spokesperson of President Hamid Karzai, was quoted as saying: “Everything has the hallmark of a particular intelligence agency that has conducted similar terrorist acts inside Afghanistan in the past.We believe firmly that there is a particular intelligence agency behind it.I’m not going to name it anymore, I think it’s pretty obvious.”
19. Indian investigators must still be collecting the evidence. Even if they find the smoking gun connecting the ISI with the blast, it is doubtful whether the Government of Dr.Manmohan Singh would go public with its charge against Pakistan. Since his meeting with President Pervez Musharraf at Havana in September,2006, our Prime Minister has been following a policy of not implicating the ISI in public in acts of terrorism----even if there be strong evidence---- lest such public airing affect the confidence-building process which he has undertaken in our relations with Pakistan. But we should have no illusions that the Pakistani leadership----military or political---- genuinely wishes well of India---either in Afghanistan, within India or elsewhere. There has been no change in Pakistan's mindset of wanting to keep us bleeding wherever possible and whenever possible.
20.The increasing Indian presence in Afghanistan for assisting in the economic development of Afghanistan and for strengthening thecapability of the Afghan Government in various fields has been a constant source of criticism by Pakistan, which has taken up the issuerepeatedly with the US and other NATO countries. Sections of the media and the religious parties in Pakistan have also been critical of theclose relations of the Karzai Government with India.Urdu newspapers in Pakistan had even accused India of fomenting trouble inBalochistan from covert bases in Afghan territory.
21.Instead of condemning without any reservation the Pakistani use of the Taliban against the Afghan Government of Karzai and against the Indian nationals and interests in Afghanistan, many American scholars and experts----governmental as well as non-governmental--- try to project it as deplorable, but understandable in view of the Pakistani concerns over the Indian presence. This further encourages the ISI's use of the Taliban and gives Pakistan the confidence that so far as the use of terrorists against India is concerned, it can get away with its misdeeds.
22.Testifying before the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on October 10,2007, Lisa Curtis, Senior Research Fellow in the Heritage Foundation of Washington DC, which is close to the Republican Party, said : "One reason for continued Pakistani ambivalence toward the Taliban stems from the concern that India is trying to encircle it by gaining influence in Afghanistan. In this context, the Taliban offers the best chance for countering India’s regional influence. Pakistan believes ethnic Tajiks in the Afghan Government receive support from New Delhi. India, in cooperation with Russia and Iran, supported the Afghan Northern Alliance against the Taliban in the late 1990s and almost certainly retains links to Northern Alliance elements now in the Afghan Government. Pakistan also complains that the Indian consulates in the border cities of Jalalabad and Kandahar are involved in fomenting insurgency in its Baluchistan area. Because of the regional rivalry between Pakistan and India, Islamabad has been reluctant to allow Indian trans-shipment of goods across its territory into Afghanistan. The U.S. should encourage India and Pakistan to work toward greater economic cooperation in Afghanistan as a way to defuse their tensions. Participants in unoffiial talks on improving Indo-Pakistani ties have suggested that the two countries add Afghanistan as an agenda item in their formal dialogue".
23.Lisa Curtis is a former diplomat from the State Department. After serving in Pakistan for some years, she worked as a Congressional aide and then moved over to the Heritage Foundation. She was testifying before the Committee on “Security Challenges Involving Pakistan and Policy Implications for the Department of Defense."
24. However, there are some experts who are a little more forthright in exposing the duplicity of Pakistan in Afghanistan. Claudio Franco, a senior investigator of the NEFA Foundation, a US counter-terrorism think-tank, has come out with an analysis on "the Evolution of the Taliban in Pakistan during the February-May,2008, period: The Peace Accord Era"----that is, since the elections which brought the present Government to power. He says in his study: " The Government is not negotiating the dismantling of the TTP, but the retargeting of the organisation towards Afghanistan. In other words, from Islamabad's point of view, if the tribal context cannot be stabilised once and for all, at least they want to have a say concerning when and where to strike across the border. Tribal frontier armies have often been used as a foreign policy tool and that is probably one of the reasons why they managed to keep their historical autonomy."
25. He adds: " Realistically wih India becoming closer and closer to the Afghan regime financially and politically, why should Islamabad forsake one of its best assets in the Afghan scenario without trying to turn the situation to its strategic advantage? The TTP could be a proxy army engaged in support for the Afghan Taliban when necessary, an arrangement which would entail exceptional leverage on the Taliban leadership, with a third party doing the dirty work---plausible deniability at its very best.This role "in defence" of Pakistan is certainly clear to Faqir Mohammad ( a leader of the TTP) : "We will continue our activities until we achieve the purpose for which Pakistan was created. In Afghanistan and other Islamic countries, a war is going on against the cruelty of America and its allies. Unless and until America and its allies are expelled, Mujahideen activities will continue."
26. In 1989, the ISI started its proxy war against India in Kashmir. It directly funded, trained and armed Kashmiri jihadi oranisations such as the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), the Hizbul Mujahideen etc. After coming to office in January 1993, President Bill Clinton placed Pakistan on a so-called watch list of suspected state-sponsors of international terrorism and warned Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister, that he would declare Pakistan a state-sponsor of international terrorism if its policies did not change. Thereafter, the ISI adopted a new policy which came to be known as privatisation of assistance to jihadi groups operating against India. Instead of assisting them directly, it started assisting them through selected Pakistani organisations such as the Jamaat-e-Islami,the Jamaat-ul-Ulema Islam, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Lashkar-e-Toiba etc. The money was given to them and they were asked to distribute it to the Kashmiri organisations and to take over from the ISI the responsibility for running training camps. Retired officers of the Army were placed at the disposal of these organisations for running the training camps.
27. A similar policy is now sought to be followed by the Gilani Government. Cut off direct links of the ISI with the Taliban of Afghanistan and funnel future assistance to the Neo Taliban through the TTP. All the instructions to the Neo Taliban on whom to attack and where and when to attack will be conveyed through the TTP, which will also arrange for the training of the suicide bombers in the camps in North Waziristan.
28. India has done well not to lose its cool as a result of the Kabul blast and to express its determination to stay put in Afghanistan and implement its on-going and future projects. At the same time, it would be necessary to examine the physical security of all our missions and offices in Afghanistan and undertake the necessary enhancements. The attack of July 7 should not be treated as an isolated incident, but as the beginnig of more to come.
29. Additional protective measures are the immediate priority, but they alone would not be sufficient. They have to be supplemented by meaures to make it clear to Pakistan that it will pay a heavy price for its use of the jihadi terrorist organisations against India----either in Afghan or Indian territory. (9-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
( An article prepared exclusively for 'India Abroad", the weekly published from the US, and its sister online publication Rediff.com. Not to be used by others before July 14,2008)
Forty-one persons, four of them Indian nationals, were killed in a suicide car bomb explosion outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul on July 7,2008, as the staff of the Embassy were arriving to start the day's work.
2. The Indian nationals killed were Brigadier R.D.Mehta, the Defence Attache, V.Venkateswara Rao, an officer of the Indian Foreign Service working as Counsellor, Ajai Pathania, a security guard of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), and Roop Singh, also a security guard of the ITBP. The two security guards of the ITBP were manning the security barrier outside the entrance gate of the Embassy. Brig. Mehta and Rao were coming to the Embassy in a chauffeur-driven car. The Brigadier was sitting in the front seat by the side of the chauffeur and Rao in the rear seat just behind the chauffeur, who was possibly an Afghan national, since his name did not figure among Indian fatalities.
3.The remaining 37 fatalities consisted of six Afghan police officers posted outside the Embassy, a large number of Afghan visa seekers plus some bystanders on the road. Though the blast took place just outside the gate, it was reported to have badly damaged the building of the Indian Embassy and caused some damage to an adjoining building, in which the Indonesian Embassy was located. There were no fatalities among the staff of the Indian Embassy inside the building. Among the over 100 injured persons were two Indonesian diplomats and five Afghan police officers posted outside the Indonesian Embassy.
4.Initial reports suggested that the suicide car bomber came from the opposite direction and rammed his explosive-laden car into two Embassy cars as they were waiting for the gate to open. This gave rise to the possibility that his primary targets were the two Indian officers. Subsequent reports indicated, however, that the suicide bomber was driving behind the car carrying the Indian officers. As the ITBP guards were trying to verify the identity of the car following the Embassy car, the terrorist activated the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED). From this, it is suspected that his aim was to enter the Embassy premises by taking advantage of the opening of the gate for the Embassy car and then activate the IED, but when the suspicions of the ITBP guards were roused, he activated the IED outside the Embassy itself. If he had succeeded in entering the premises and then activating the IED, the Indian fatalities and the damage to the building might have been more.
5.The Kabul blast outside the Indian Embassy brings to mind a similar suicide car bomb blast near the US Consulate in Karachi on the eve of the arrival in Islamabad from New Delhi of President George Bush in the first week of March,2006. The blast killed a US diplomat, his Pakistani driver and a Pakistani security officer. Briefing the media after the incident, Niaz Siddiqi, an officer of the Karachi Police , was quoted as saying by the "News" of March 3,2006: "Due to strict security arrangements, the suicide bomber could not reach his target [the U.S. Consulate] and blew the car up on the way, when a motorcade of U.S. diplomats was passing through". Pakistani investigators blamed the blast on a little known organisation called the Jundullah (Soldiers of Allah) reported to have been trained in North Waziristan.
6. Terrorists have been using suicide vehicular bombs ( two-wheelers, cars, trucks and boats) since 1983, when a suicide vehicular bomb was first used against the US Marines in Beirut. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have been using this modus operandi (MO) since 1987. This MO is being used by Al Qaeda with devastating effect in Iraq since the US-led troops occupied the country in 2003. It has also been used by Al Qaeda in Algeria. A suicide car bomb causes many more fatalities and much more damage than an IED carried by a suicide bomber on his person.
7. There have been many car bomb explosions in India and Pakistan carried out by jihadi terrorists in the past, but these were activated through a remote control device or a mechanical timer and not by a suicide bomber driving the vehicle. As an example, one could cite the Mumbai blasts of March,1993. However, there have been no suicide car bomb explosions in India so far.
8. The increasing use of the MO involving suicide car bombs came into vogue in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region after 9/11. There were no acts of suicide terrorism in Afghanistan before September 9,2001. The assassination of Ahmed Shah Masood, the legendary Tajik leader, by two Arab terrorists on September 9,2001, was the first act of suicide terrorism reported from Afghan territory. Since the Afghan Taliban, headed by Mulla Mohammad Omar, staged a come-back in Afghanistan from sanctuaries in Pakistan in 2004, it has been increasingly using suicide terrorism. The virus of suicide terrorism, which was initially introduced into Pakistan in the 1990s by the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), spread dramatically after the raid by the Pakistan Army commandos into the Lal Masjid of Islamabad in July last year.
9. In both Pakistan and Afghanistan, the suicide bombers carried the IEDs on their person, but since 2006 there has been an increasing number of instances of vehicle-borne suicide terrorism in both countries.Training in the use of this MO is reported to have been imparted to the volunteers of the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan and the various pro-Taliban and pro-Al Qaeda organisations of Pakistan in the training camps of Al Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Group (IJG), another Uzbek organisation, in North Waziristan in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan.
10.There has been a sharp increase in acts of terrorism in Afghanistan since the new Government headed by Yousef Raza Gilani assumedoffice in Islamabad in the last week of March,2008. NATO officers in Afghanistan have spoken of a 40 per cent increase in the infiltration ofjihadi terrorists from the tribal belt of Pakistan into Afghanistan since the new Pakistani Government suspended military operations againstthe Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and entered into peace negotiations with them. Even as acts of terrorism----including suicide terrorism---have increased in Afghan territory, there has been a sharp decrease in acts of suicide terrorism in Pakistani territory. This indicates that thenew Government has made a deal with the Taliban allowing it to operate freely in Afghanistan in return for its stepping down its operationsin Pakistani territory.
11.In a despatch on July 7,2008, Luis Martinez of the ABC News of the US said: "As the number of U.S. fatalities has dropped in Iraq, those in Afghanistan have been steadily rising. In June, U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan nearly equaled those in Iraq and were the highest since the start of the war in 2001. It's a reflection of a resurgent Taliban that has refocused the attention of Pentagon planners, but drawn little attention in a presidential campaign in which politicians have been more focused on Iraq. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen told reporters last week that he has been "deeply troubled" by the rising violence in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have "without question, grown more effective and more aggressive in recent weeks, and as the casualty figures clearly demonstrate." The 28 American deaths in Afghanistan in June were one short of the 29 in Iraq, where the U.S. has more than four times as many troops. There are currently 32,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and 145,000 in Iraq. But the casualty rates of NATO allies are also rising. For the second month in a row, the total number of coalition combat deaths exceeded those in Iraq -- 46 in Afghanistan, compared with 31 in Iraq."
12.The ABC report added: "Military officials cite several reasons for the increase in violence, namely the Taliban's "safe haven" in the western tribal areas of Pakistan, where they can launch operations across the border into Afghanistan. Also, unable to defeat U.S. and NATO troops in conventional fighting, the various groups that make up the Taliban insurgency have resorted to tactics like those seen in Iraq, primarily the use of roadside bombs. A third factor cited by American commanders is that with more American troops on the ground than ever there is more combat as they move into areas controlled by insurgents. The commander of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, was more precise last week when he said that the number of violent incidents in his sector had jumped by 40 per cent in the first five months of this year over last year. This is in a region praised as a success story of American counterinsurgency efforts. Schloesser and other military officials describe the "safe haven" in Pakistan as a major factor for the increase in violence in eastern Afghanistan as insurgents are able to easily slip back and forth along the border into Afghanistan. The safe haven was created by ceasefire agreements negotiated by the Pakistani government with tribal leaders."
13.In an article contributed to the "Washington Post" on July 7,2008, Greg Bruno of the Council on Foreign Relations, said: ' A June 2008 report on Afghan security by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, finds that despite $10 billion in U.S. aid, only two of 105 Afghan National Army (ANA) units are judged "fully capable" . None of the 433 units of Afghanistan's National Police (ANP) are capable of conducting independent patrols, and only twelve -- 3 per cent -- are capable of leading operations with coalition support, the GAO says. Weakness of Afghan security services was exposed in a July 7 blast that leveled the Indian mission in Kabul , killing dozens. "
14. There are only three terrorist organisations in Afghanistan, which are capable of a vehicle-borne suicide terrorist strike like the one of July 7----the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan, the Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Heckmatyar and Al Qaeda. Of these, only the Neo Taliban has repeatedly demonstrated a capability for suicide terrorist strikes in Kabul----even in supposedly well-protected areas. It has repeatedly struck at soft as well as hard targets. Al Qaeda, based in the FATA, has a similar capability, but it prefers to train the Neo Taliban and guide it in its operations instead of itself operating. One reason for this is that it has a dwindling cadre of fresh Arab recruits and does not want to lose them in acts of suicide terrorism. It has kept them reserved for training volunteers from all over the world and for more important operations outside Afghanistan. The two Uzbeck organisations have a larger cadre and are in a position to operate in Kabul either on their own or as members of the Neo Taliban. The capability of the Hizb-e-Islami for operations in Kabul is unknown.
15. It is, therefore, assessed that there is a strong possibility of the Neo Taliban having carried out the blast outside the Indian Embassy.One Zabihullah Mujahid, who claimed to be a spokesman of the Neo Taliban, is reported to have denied the involvement of his group.This denial means nothing. If the Neo Taliban admits its involvement, it will provide a connecting link to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which has provided sanctuaries to its leaders, including Mulla Mohammad Omar, and cadres in Pakistani territory. Since the survivors of Al Qaeda and the Taliban withdrew into the tribal belt of Pakistan after the US strikes destroyed their sanctuaries in Afghan territory after 9/11, Pakistan has been following a dual policy in its co-operation with the US in the war against terrorism. It has been co-operating in the operations against Al Qaeda to the extent necessary and unavoidable, but avoiding action against the Neo Taliban. It wants to preserve the Neo Taliban as a fighting unit to regain its pre-9/11 influence in Afghanistan if and when the US and other NATO forces leave Afghanistan and to counter the Indian presence in Afghanistan.
16. The fact that the ISI has been playing a double game in respect of the Taliban-----pretending to co-operate, but not actually co-operating--- has been admitted even by many US analysts. 'The Times" of London wrote on July 8,2008: "A US Department of Defence funded study undertaken by the RAND Corporation and published last month also stated that elements of the ISI were aiding the Taliban.“Right now, the Taliban and other groups are getting help from individuals within Pakistan’s Government, and until that ends, the region’s long-term security is in jeopardy,” concluded the report’s author Seth Jones.He said the support included medical care for wounded fighters, logistical and financial support. He also said ISI trainers were instructing insurgents in camps at Quetta, Mansehra, Shamshattu and Parachinar and other areas of Pakistan. “NATO officials uncovered several instances in which ISI operatives provided intelligence to Taliban insurgents at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels,” the report says."
17. "The Times" added: " Privately there is acknowledgement that a level of complicity is a reality. “There is an acceptance that elements of the ISI are engaged with the insurgents,” said one source serving in the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) for Afghanistan yesterday. “The issue that remains unresolved is the degree of higher level acceptance of this, and how much they (the ISI) can actually be controlled.”British officers confirmed to The Times an incident last summer in which a Taliban corpse found on the battlefield in Helmand turned out to be carrying papers identifying the body as that of a serving ISI Colonel. When British officials challenged the Islamabad Government on the issue, they received an explanation that the man was ’on leave’ at the time of his death."
18. Was the ISI involved in the Kabul blast? The Afghan Government seems convinced it was.Talking to the media after the blast, Humayun Hamidzada, a spokesperson of President Hamid Karzai, was quoted as saying: “Everything has the hallmark of a particular intelligence agency that has conducted similar terrorist acts inside Afghanistan in the past.We believe firmly that there is a particular intelligence agency behind it.I’m not going to name it anymore, I think it’s pretty obvious.”
19. Indian investigators must still be collecting the evidence. Even if they find the smoking gun connecting the ISI with the blast, it is doubtful whether the Government of Dr.Manmohan Singh would go public with its charge against Pakistan. Since his meeting with President Pervez Musharraf at Havana in September,2006, our Prime Minister has been following a policy of not implicating the ISI in public in acts of terrorism----even if there be strong evidence---- lest such public airing affect the confidence-building process which he has undertaken in our relations with Pakistan. But we should have no illusions that the Pakistani leadership----military or political---- genuinely wishes well of India---either in Afghanistan, within India or elsewhere. There has been no change in Pakistan's mindset of wanting to keep us bleeding wherever possible and whenever possible.
20.The increasing Indian presence in Afghanistan for assisting in the economic development of Afghanistan and for strengthening thecapability of the Afghan Government in various fields has been a constant source of criticism by Pakistan, which has taken up the issuerepeatedly with the US and other NATO countries. Sections of the media and the religious parties in Pakistan have also been critical of theclose relations of the Karzai Government with India.Urdu newspapers in Pakistan had even accused India of fomenting trouble inBalochistan from covert bases in Afghan territory.
21.Instead of condemning without any reservation the Pakistani use of the Taliban against the Afghan Government of Karzai and against the Indian nationals and interests in Afghanistan, many American scholars and experts----governmental as well as non-governmental--- try to project it as deplorable, but understandable in view of the Pakistani concerns over the Indian presence. This further encourages the ISI's use of the Taliban and gives Pakistan the confidence that so far as the use of terrorists against India is concerned, it can get away with its misdeeds.
22.Testifying before the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee on October 10,2007, Lisa Curtis, Senior Research Fellow in the Heritage Foundation of Washington DC, which is close to the Republican Party, said : "One reason for continued Pakistani ambivalence toward the Taliban stems from the concern that India is trying to encircle it by gaining influence in Afghanistan. In this context, the Taliban offers the best chance for countering India’s regional influence. Pakistan believes ethnic Tajiks in the Afghan Government receive support from New Delhi. India, in cooperation with Russia and Iran, supported the Afghan Northern Alliance against the Taliban in the late 1990s and almost certainly retains links to Northern Alliance elements now in the Afghan Government. Pakistan also complains that the Indian consulates in the border cities of Jalalabad and Kandahar are involved in fomenting insurgency in its Baluchistan area. Because of the regional rivalry between Pakistan and India, Islamabad has been reluctant to allow Indian trans-shipment of goods across its territory into Afghanistan. The U.S. should encourage India and Pakistan to work toward greater economic cooperation in Afghanistan as a way to defuse their tensions. Participants in unoffiial talks on improving Indo-Pakistani ties have suggested that the two countries add Afghanistan as an agenda item in their formal dialogue".
23.Lisa Curtis is a former diplomat from the State Department. After serving in Pakistan for some years, she worked as a Congressional aide and then moved over to the Heritage Foundation. She was testifying before the Committee on “Security Challenges Involving Pakistan and Policy Implications for the Department of Defense."
24. However, there are some experts who are a little more forthright in exposing the duplicity of Pakistan in Afghanistan. Claudio Franco, a senior investigator of the NEFA Foundation, a US counter-terrorism think-tank, has come out with an analysis on "the Evolution of the Taliban in Pakistan during the February-May,2008, period: The Peace Accord Era"----that is, since the elections which brought the present Government to power. He says in his study: " The Government is not negotiating the dismantling of the TTP, but the retargeting of the organisation towards Afghanistan. In other words, from Islamabad's point of view, if the tribal context cannot be stabilised once and for all, at least they want to have a say concerning when and where to strike across the border. Tribal frontier armies have often been used as a foreign policy tool and that is probably one of the reasons why they managed to keep their historical autonomy."
25. He adds: " Realistically wih India becoming closer and closer to the Afghan regime financially and politically, why should Islamabad forsake one of its best assets in the Afghan scenario without trying to turn the situation to its strategic advantage? The TTP could be a proxy army engaged in support for the Afghan Taliban when necessary, an arrangement which would entail exceptional leverage on the Taliban leadership, with a third party doing the dirty work---plausible deniability at its very best.This role "in defence" of Pakistan is certainly clear to Faqir Mohammad ( a leader of the TTP) : "We will continue our activities until we achieve the purpose for which Pakistan was created. In Afghanistan and other Islamic countries, a war is going on against the cruelty of America and its allies. Unless and until America and its allies are expelled, Mujahideen activities will continue."
26. In 1989, the ISI started its proxy war against India in Kashmir. It directly funded, trained and armed Kashmiri jihadi oranisations such as the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), the Hizbul Mujahideen etc. After coming to office in January 1993, President Bill Clinton placed Pakistan on a so-called watch list of suspected state-sponsors of international terrorism and warned Nawaz Sharif, the then Prime Minister, that he would declare Pakistan a state-sponsor of international terrorism if its policies did not change. Thereafter, the ISI adopted a new policy which came to be known as privatisation of assistance to jihadi groups operating against India. Instead of assisting them directly, it started assisting them through selected Pakistani organisations such as the Jamaat-e-Islami,the Jamaat-ul-Ulema Islam, the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the Lashkar-e-Toiba etc. The money was given to them and they were asked to distribute it to the Kashmiri organisations and to take over from the ISI the responsibility for running training camps. Retired officers of the Army were placed at the disposal of these organisations for running the training camps.
27. A similar policy is now sought to be followed by the Gilani Government. Cut off direct links of the ISI with the Taliban of Afghanistan and funnel future assistance to the Neo Taliban through the TTP. All the instructions to the Neo Taliban on whom to attack and where and when to attack will be conveyed through the TTP, which will also arrange for the training of the suicide bombers in the camps in North Waziristan.
28. India has done well not to lose its cool as a result of the Kabul blast and to express its determination to stay put in Afghanistan and implement its on-going and future projects. At the same time, it would be necessary to examine the physical security of all our missions and offices in Afghanistan and undertake the necessary enhancements. The attack of July 7 should not be treated as an isolated incident, but as the beginnig of more to come.
29. Additional protective measures are the immediate priority, but they alone would not be sufficient. They have to be supplemented by meaures to make it clear to Pakistan that it will pay a heavy price for its use of the jihadi terrorist organisations against India----either in Afghan or Indian territory. (9-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
Sunday, July 6, 2008
A.Q.KHAN GAGGED, THREATENED WITH IN CAMERA TRIAL
B.RAMAN
There has been widespread disapproval in Pakistan of the interviews given by Dr.A.Q.Khan, the detained Pakistani nuclear scientist, to the Associated Press of the US and to the Kyodo News Agency of Japan as well as to some domestic TV channels regarding the involvement of President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistan Army in the sale of centrifuges for uranium enrichment to North Korea in 2000. Even his traditional supporters such as the Muslim fundamentalist parties and the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) of Nawaz Sharif have been embarrassed by his implicating the army as an institution in the clandestine transaction.
2. The main line of criticism is that by implicating Musharraf as the Head of State and the Army as an institution in this transaction, he has implicated Pakistan as a State in this transaction and thereby provided international critics of Pakistan with one more stick with which to beat Pakistan.
3. There was considerable confusion and panic in the Government headed by Yousef Raza Gilani over the likely consequences of his disclosures. It was decided to let the Army handle the damage control without the civilian Ministers getting involved in it. The entire damage control exercise was handled by Lt.Gen. (retd) Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, the head of the Strategic Planning Division, which, inter alia, is responsible for the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. He is thought of highly in the US and carries some credibility in the US policy-making circles. It was he and Lt.Gen. Ehsanul Haq, the then Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who had played a role in pressurising A.Q. Khan to admit his role, in his individual capacity, in the sale of nuclear technology and equipment to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
4. As part of this damage control exercise, Kidwai invited a small group of Pakistani journalists enjoying the confidence of the Army for a briefing and refuted in detail the various allegations made by A.Q.Khan. According to these journalists, firstly, he denied that the confession of A.Q.Khan had been obtained under duress or through false promises. He asserted that the confession was made voluntarily and that A.Q.Khan himself had made some modifications in his handwriting in his confessional statement.He offered to show the confessional statement to independent Pakistani observers to prove that no force or false promises were used.
5. He said that though there was sufficient ground for prosecuting Khan, Musharraf decided not to do so keeping in view his national stature and contribution to Pakistan's quest for a nuclear capability. According to Kidwai, Musharraf pardoned Khan under two conditions. He would not talk to journalists on the subject and no fresh disclosures would come up in future which might warrant his prosecution. He accused Khan of violating the condition regarding not talking to journalists and indicated that the ban on his meeting journalists has been re-imposed. He also talked of a possible in-camera trial of Khan for endangering national security.
6. As regards the dealings with North Korea, he admitted that there was a State-to-State contract with North Korea under which Pakistan bought medium-range missiles from North Korea for cash. He projected this as a legitimate commercial transaction to which nobody can object. He denied that Pakistan had bought any long-range missiles from North Korea. He said that Khan did submit a proposal for the purchase of North Korean long-range missiles, but claimed that Musharraf did not approve it. It was not clear why he denied officially the purchase of any long-range missiles though it is widely known that the long-range missiles were also procured by Pakistan from North Korea since China had declined to sell them on the ground that their sale would be a violation of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). He apparently wanted to protect North Korea from any accusations of having violated the MTCR.
7. Kidwai vehemently denied that North Korea sold the missiles in return for the centrifuges. He maintained that the supply of the centrifuges by Khan to North Korea was an individual illegal transaction without the knowledge of the State, which had nothing to do with it. He was silent on Khan's statement that Musharraf had sent him to North Korea during the Kargil conflict with India in 1999 along with a senior Army officer to procure shoulder-fired missiles.
8. Khan has been taken aback by the widespread public disapproval of his interviews to the AP and Kyodo and has mounted a damage control exercise of his own. He has accused the AP of having distorted his remarks. He has denied having implicated the Army, but not denied having implicated Musharraf. He has denied endangering national security since the fact that the centrifuges in North Korea's possession were from Pakistan had been admitted by Musharraf himself. The only additional fact he has mentioned is that Musharraf was aware of the supply. He has also said that to avoid such distortions he has decided not to give interviews to foreign journalists in future.
9. As part of the six-power (US,Russia, China, South Korea, North Korea and Japan) talks under the auspices of China, North Korea had agreed to submit a full, verifiable declaration of its nuclear-capable assets. It has so far submitted to the group only a declaration of its assets relating to the plutonium route to an atom bomb. Pakistan had played no role in this and hence was not worried over it.
10. North Korea has been delaying the submission of a declaration relating to the enriched uranium route in which the Pakistani centrifuges were crucial. According to well-informed sources, there is considerable nervousness in the Pakistani Army over this lest the North Korean declaration, if and when it is made, does not totally corroborate the Pakistani stand that the supply of the centrifuges was a rogue operation of Khan without the knowledge of the State. According to these sources, Pakistan is hoping that China will ensure that North Korea will not cause any embarrassment to Pakistan in its declaration.
11. Annexed are two more past articles of mine on this subject. (6-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and,presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
ANNEXURE I
Extracts From Article of September 29,2006, titled "MUSHARRAF'S MEIN KAMPF" http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers20/paper1969.html The article was my comment on his book "In the Line of Fire" and the observations made by him in response to questions during his tour of Europe and the US in September,2006, in promotion of the book
Quote from the article: See the kind of falsehoods he has uttered in his book and during his promotional tour in West Europe and the US. I have already drawn attention to his falsehoods about the Kargil conflict in an earlier article on the book ("Musharraf: Throwing Dust in His Own Eyes"). Let me mention some others:
The Pakistani military units posted in the Kahuta uranium enrichment plant could not detect the removal of centrifuges from the plant by A. Q. Khan, the nuclear scientist, for being sent to Iran and North Korea because their job was to protect the plant from external attacks and not the prevention of internal thefts. A. Q. Khan just put the centrifuges in his car and took them away, without his car being checked.The "Daily Times" of Lahore reported as follows on September 26, 2006, on Musharraf's interview on the CBS the previous evening: "Gen Musharraf was closely questioned as to how the centrifuges that Dr Khan is charged with having supplied to North Korea and Iran could have been taken out of Pakistan’s highly-secured and military-guarded nuclear facilities undetected by the government or the army. He replied that the military was there to safeguard the facilities from outside attack. When the interviewer suggested that in that case the internal controls were a “little weak,” Gen Musharraf disagreed, asserting that they were not weak but “very strong”. He said the centrifuges, whose designs, parts and they themselves had been sent out, could easily have been placed in a car and moved out. When the interviewer wondered if 18 tonnes of equipment could have been thus removed without anyone noticing, Gen Musharraf replied that it could not have been done at one time. “It must have been transported many times” and thereafter put on a C-130 and flown out. All the C-130s in the country are owned and flown by the Pakistan Air Force, but this question was not put to the President. Asked if the reason nobody from outside had been allowed to talk to Dr Khan was the fear that he might incriminate the army, the President replied, “That is absolutely not the case,” adding that US President Bush and CIA’s George Tenet are “very satisfied and quite comfortable with whatever we have done”.Musharraf has insinuated that there were some Indians working in the Dubai network of A. Q. Khan, who "disappeared" after the network was detected by the US and speculated that Pakistan's enrichment technology must have leaked to India through them. He has not named these so-called Indians in A. Q. Khan's Dubai network. Nor has he indicated why the detailed investigations made by the intelligence agencies of the US and other countries and by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Vienna have not brought out any "disappeared" Indians. Buhary Seyed Abu Tahir, who headed A. Q. Kan's Dubai network and who set up a plant in Malaysia for the clandestine manufacture of new centrifuges at the instance of A. Q. Khan, was a Sri Lankan Muslim of Indian origin, who subsequently married a Malaysian and settled down in Malaysia. He has not disappeared. He was arrested and interrogated by the Malaysian Police. Why has he not said anything about the so-called "disappeared" Indians? Ever since the Indo-US deal for civil nuclear co-operation was signed in July last year, Ms. Shireen Mazari, the Pakistani analyst, who wrote a book on the Kargil conflict at the instance of Musharraf, has been spreading nuclear canards about India allegedly supplying nuclear technology to Iran, Iraq and other countries. The story of the so-called "disappeared" Indians was also her canard, which Musharraf has borrowed."
ANNEXURE II
26. 10. 2006
NUCLEAR NORTH KOREA: NERVOUSNESS IN PAKISTAN http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers21/paper2004.html
According to well-informed sources in Pakistan of well-established credibility, there is nervousness in Pakistan that fresh enquiries by the US into North Korea's nuclear capability might bring out hitherto unknown (to the international community) information relating to co-operation between Pakistan and North Korea in the nuclear and missile fields. These sources say that Maj. Gen. (retd) Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan's Ambassador to the US, who is a close personal friend of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has informed Gen. Musharraf that after the North Korean nuclear test of October 9, 2006, the US intelligence has been asked to do an update of a National Intelligence Estimate of 2002 on Pakistan-North Korea nuclear co-operation and to talk to Mrs. Benazir Bhutto and Mr. Nawaz Sharif, former Pakistani Prime Ministers, about it. Details of the reported National Intelligence Estimate were given by Mr. Seymour Hersh, the well-known investigative journalist, in an article published by the New Yorker magazine on January 27, 2003. A copy of the article is annexed.
2. While Pakistan's military relationship with North Korea in the field of purchase and joint development of conventional weapons dates back to the period before the outbreak of the Indo-Pak war of 1971, the co-operation in the missile and nuclear fields dates back to the visit of Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, to Pyongyang in 1993. The visit and the resulting discussions on bilateral co-operation in the field of missile purchase and development were facilitated by China.
3. The Chinese entities, which were supplying the M-9 and M-11 missiles to Pakistan, had come under intense scrutiny by the US during the tenure (1988-92) of Mr. George Bush, the father of the present President, and the subsequent tenure of President Bill Clinton. This pressure partly contributed to the Chinese decision to put Pakistan in touch with North Korea and facilitate the acquisition of North Korean missiles and related technology by Islamabad. Mrs. Bhutto's talks in Pyongyang were successful and led to the signing of a formal agreement on this subject in 1995.
4. Pakistan's missile and nuclear relationship with North Korea since then has proceeded as follows:
· 1993-97: The co-operation was confined to missiles and missile-related technology.
· 1997-2003: The co-operation was expanded to cover the nuclear field. What was initially a missile for cash and wheat deal became a missiles and missile know-how for nuclear material and nuclear know-how barter deal. This decision to convert it into a barter deal was attributable partly to the cash crunch faced by Pakistan, the difficulties faced by Pakistan in procuring wheat from abroad for supplying to North Korea and North Korea's decision to go nuclear and the reported Chinese reluctance to help it directly since the Chinese nuclear entities were under close watch by the US intelligence. The Pakistan-North Korea nuclear co-operation took the form of transfer of know-how, visits of North Korean nuclear scientists to Pakistani nuclear establishments, the presence of North Korean nuclear scientists during the nuclear tests carried out by Pakistan at Chagai in May, 1998, and the supply of centrifuges for uranium enrichment to North Korea.
5. Till 2000, the transport of missiles and nuclear material in the two directions was mainly by sea and air. During the Clinton Administration, Mr. Richard Armitage, who was at that time doing security consultancy work, was commissioned by a Congressional Committee to prepare a paper on how to prevent the clandestine transport of nuclear-related material by sea. He presented a paper on this subject to the Committee and also gave an oral testimony. He suggested interdiction of suspected ships and proposed other ideas, which became the subsequent basis of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) under the Bush Administration. Mr. Armitage, who functioned as the Deputy Secretary of State during the first tenure of Mr. Bush, continued to take interest in the subject of interdictions as one of the options to prevent proliferation.
6. This led to a re-examination by Pakistan and North Korea----with the reported knowledge of China--- of the mode of a transport used till then and to the decision to transport the material thereafter by train via China and by road from the Xinjiang Province of China via the Karakoram Highway, initially built with Chinese assistance in the 1960s and the 1970s and now being upgraded, also with Chinese assistance.
7. The policy of General Pervez Musharraf has been to accept only those aspects of the co-operation about which the US has obtained credible evidence and deny the rest and to put all the blame on Dr. A. Q. Khan, the nuclear scientist. Till 2003, Musharraf denied the supply of centrifuges and admitted it only after it had been established by the US. He has not so far admitted any Pakistani role in assisting North Korea in the field of plutonium re-processing and the use of the overland route for the proliferation activities.
8. The nervousness in Islamabad after the North Korean nuclear test is due to, firstly, fears that fresh enquiries by the US might bring out hitherto unadmitted (by Pakistan) aspects of its co-operation with North Korea; secondly, fears that the pressure on it to hand over A. Q. Khan for interrogation by US investigators might increase; and, thirdly, that Mrs. Benazir Bhutto and Mr. Nawaz Sharif, who were considerably in the picture about this c-operation, might reveal the details to the US because of their anger over Musharraf's refusal to let them return to Pakistan and contest next year's elections to the National Assembly. If rightly approached by the US, Mrs. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif might be inclined to speak about the role of the Army---particularly Musharraf--in this co-operation, but not about their own role. According to these sources, Musharraf is particularly nervous that Mrs. Bhutto, who is more knowledgeable than Mr. Sharif, might start talking about this co-operation with the Americans. It is to pre-empt her doing so that he has reportedly been trying to make some political overtures to her.
9. The present visit to the US of Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, the head of Pakistan's Strategic Plan Division, who oversees the nuclear and missile programme on behalf of Musharraf---whether the visit it is at his instance or in response to a summons from the US-- is being utilised by him to remove any misperceptions in the US about Pakistan's role, explain its reluctance to hand over Khan and to project Pakistan as willing to co-operate with the US in any further investigation. He has been meeting Congressional aides---since most Congressmen are busy with the Congressional elections-- research scholars of think-tanks and proliferation experts. He also held an unattributable (to him) briefing for the media in the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.
10. During his interactions, Lt. Gen. Kidwai has reportedly been making the following points:
· A. Q. Khan gave the centrifuges to North Korea for the low grade enrichment of uranium for the production of electricity and not high grade enrichment for military purposes.
· A. Q. Khan has had no role in helping North Korea in respect of the plutonium reprocessing technology or weapon design.
· However, if the US wants fresh enquiries to be made, Pakistan will be willing to co-operate without handing over Khan.
11. He has also been utilising the opportunity of his interactions to stress upon the US policy-makers the need to have a second look at the US-India civilian nuclear co-operation deal in the light of the North Korean nuclear test. His argument has been: either put the deal with India in the cold storage or if the US has to go ahead with it, treat Pakistan on par with India. He has also been making the point that China has offered to supply six more nuclear power stations to Pakistan and that it will not be in the US interest for Pakistan to become dependent on China because of the US' discriminatory attitude.
ANNEXURE TO THE ABOVE ARTICLE
THE COLD TEST
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
What the Administration knew about Pakistan and the North Korean nuclear program.
Last June, four months before the current crisis over North Korea became public, the Central Intelligence Agency delivered a comprehensive analysis of North Korea's nuclear ambitions to President Bush and his top advisers. The document, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, was classified as Top Secret S.C.I. (for "sensitive compartmented information"), and its distribution within the government was tightly restricted. The C.I.A. report made the case that North Korea had been violating international law—and agreements with South Korea and the United States—by secretly obtaining the means to produce weapons-grade uranium.
The document's most politically sensitive information, however, was about Pakistan. Since 1997, the C.I.A. said, Pakistan had been sharing sophisticated technology, warhead-design information, and weapons-testing data with the Pyongyang regime. Pakistan, one of the Bush Administration's important allies in the war against terrorism, was helping North Korea build the bomb.
In 1985, North Korea signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which led to the opening of most of its nuclear sites to international inspection. By the early nineteen-nineties, it became evident to American intelligence agencies and international inspectors that the North Koreans were reprocessing more spent fuel than they had declared, and might have separated enough plutonium, a reactor by-product, to fabricate one or two nuclear weapons. The resulting diplomatic crisis was resolved when North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, entered into an agreement with the Clinton Administration to stop the nuclear-weapons program in return for economic aid and the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors that, under safeguards, would generate electricity.
Within three years, however, North Korea had begun using a second method to acquire fissile material. This time, instead of using spent fuel, scientists were trying to produce weapons-grade uranium from natural uranium—with Pakistani technology. One American intelligence official, referring to the C.I.A. report, told me, "It points a clear finger at the Pakistanis. The technical stuff is crystal clear—not hedged and not ambivalent." Referring to North Korea's plutonium project in the early nineteen-nineties, he said, "Before, they were sneaking." Now "it's off the wall. We know they can do a lot more and a lot more quickly."
North Korea is economically isolated; one of its main sources of export income is arms sales, and its most sought-after products are missiles. And one of its customers has been Pakistan, which has a nuclear arsenal of its own but needs the missiles to more effectively deliver the warheads to the interior of its rival, India. In 1997, according to the C.I.A. report, Pakistan began paying for missile systems from North Korea in part by sharing its nuclear-weapons secrets. According to the report, Pakistan sent prototypes of high-speed centrifuge machines to North Korea. And sometime in 2001 North Korean scientists began to enrich uranium in significant quantities. Pakistan also provided data on how to build and test a uranium-triggered nuclear weapon, the C.I.A. report said.
It had taken Pakistan a decade of experimentation, and a substantial financial investment, before it was able to produce reliable centrifuges; with Pakistan's help, the North Koreans had "chopped many years off" the development process, the intelligence official noted. It is not known how many centrifuges are now being operated in North Korea or where the facilities are. (They are assumed to be in underground caves.) The Pakistani centrifuges, the official said, are slim cylinders, roughly six feet in height, that could be shipped "by the hundreds" in cargo planes. But, he added, "all Pakistan would have to do is give the North Koreans the blueprints. They are very sophisticated in their engineering." And with a few thousand centrifuges, he said, "North Korea could have enough fissile material to manufacture two or three warheads a year, with something left over to sell."
A former senior Pakistani official told me that his government's contacts with North Korea increased dramatically in 1997; the Pakistani economy had foundered, and there was "no more money" to pay for North Korean missile support, so the Pakistani government began paying for missiles by providing "some of the know-how and the specifics." Pakistan helped North Korea conduct a series of "cold tests," simulated nuclear explosions, using natural uranium, which are necessary to determine whether a nuclear device will detonate properly. Pakistan also gave the North Korean intelligence service advice on "how to fly under the radar," as the former official put it—that is, how to hide nuclear research from American satellites and U.S. and South Korean intelligence agents.
Whether North Korea had actually begun to build warheads was not known at the time of the 1994 crisis and is still not known today, according to the C.I.A. report. The report, those who have read it say, included separate and contradictory estimates from the C.I.A., the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Department of Energy regarding the number of warheads that North Korea might have been capable of making, and provided no consensus on whether or not the Pyongyang regime is actually producing them.
Over the years, there have been sporadic reports of North Korea's contacts with Pakistan, most of them concerning missile sales. Much less has been known about nuclear ties. In the past decade, American intelligence tracked at least thirteen visits to North Korea made by A. Q. Khan, who was then the director of a Pakistani weapons-research laboratory, and who is known as the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb. This October, after news of the uranium program came out, the Times ran a story suggesting that Pakistan was a possible supplier of centrifuges to North Korea. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's leader, attacked the account as "absolutely baseless," and added, "There is no such thing as collaboration with North Korea in the nuclear area." The White House appeared to take the Musharraf statement at face value. In November, Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters he had been assured by Musharraf that Pakistan was not currently engaging in any nuclear transactions with North Korea. "I have made clear to him that any . . . contact between Pakistan and North Korea we believe would be improper, inappropriate, and would have consequences," Powell said. "President Musharraf understands the seriousness of the issue." After that, Pakistan quickly faded from press coverage of the North Korea story.
The Bush Administration may have few good options with regard to Pakistan, given the country's role in the war on terror. Within two weeks of September 11th, Bush lifted the sanctions that had been imposed on Pakistan because of its nuclear-weapons activities. In the view of American disarmament experts, the sanctions had in any case failed to deal with one troubling issue: the close ties between some scientists working for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and radical Islamic groups. "There is an awful lot of Al Qaeda sympathy within Pakistan's nuclear program," an intelligence official told me. One American nonproliferation expert said, "Right now, the most dangerous country in the world is Pakistan. If we're incinerated next week, it'll be because of H.E.U."—highly enriched uranium—"that was given to Al Qaeda by Pakistan."
Pakistan's relative poverty could pose additional risks. In early January, a Web-based Pakistani-exile newspaper opposed to the Musharraf government reported that, in the past six years, nine nuclear scientists had emigrated from Pakistan—apparently in search of better pay—and could not be located.
An American intelligence official I spoke with called Pakistan's behavior the "worst nightmare" of the international arms-control community: a Third World country becoming an instrument of proliferation. "The West's primary control of nuclear proliferation was based on technology denial and diplomacy," the official said. "Our fear was, first, that a Third World country would develop nuclear weapons indigenously; and, second, that it would then provide the technology to other countries. This is profound. It changes the world."
Pakistan's nuclear program flourished in the nineteen-eighties, at a time when its military and intelligence forces were working closely with the United States to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The official said, "The transfer of enrichment technology by Pakistan is a direct outgrowth of the failure of the United States to deal with the Pakistani program when we could have done so. We've lost control."
The C.I.A. report remained unpublicized throughout the summer and early fall, as the Administration concentrated on laying the groundwork for a war with Iraq. Many officials in the Administration's own arms-control offices were unaware of the report. "It was held very tightly," an official told me. "Compartmentalization is used to protect sensitive sources who can get killed if their information is made known, but it's also used for controlling sensitive information for political reasons."
One American nonproliferation expert said that, given the findings in the June report, he was dismayed that the Administration had not made the information available. "It's important to convey to the American people that the North Korean situation presented us with an enormous military and political crisis," he said. "This goes to the heart of North Asian security, to the future of Japan and South Korea, and to the future of the broader issue of nonproliferation."
A Japanese diplomat who has been closely involved in Korean affairs defended the Bush Administration's delay in publicly dealing with the crisis. Referring to the report, he said, "If the intelligence assessment was correct, you have to think of the implications. Disclosure of information is not always instant. You need some time to assess the content." He added, "To have a dialogue, you really have to find the right time and the right conditions. So far, President Bush has done the right thing, from our perspective." (The White House and the C.I.A. did not respond to requests for comment.)
There has been widespread disapproval in Pakistan of the interviews given by Dr.A.Q.Khan, the detained Pakistani nuclear scientist, to the Associated Press of the US and to the Kyodo News Agency of Japan as well as to some domestic TV channels regarding the involvement of President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistan Army in the sale of centrifuges for uranium enrichment to North Korea in 2000. Even his traditional supporters such as the Muslim fundamentalist parties and the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) of Nawaz Sharif have been embarrassed by his implicating the army as an institution in the clandestine transaction.
2. The main line of criticism is that by implicating Musharraf as the Head of State and the Army as an institution in this transaction, he has implicated Pakistan as a State in this transaction and thereby provided international critics of Pakistan with one more stick with which to beat Pakistan.
3. There was considerable confusion and panic in the Government headed by Yousef Raza Gilani over the likely consequences of his disclosures. It was decided to let the Army handle the damage control without the civilian Ministers getting involved in it. The entire damage control exercise was handled by Lt.Gen. (retd) Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, the head of the Strategic Planning Division, which, inter alia, is responsible for the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. He is thought of highly in the US and carries some credibility in the US policy-making circles. It was he and Lt.Gen. Ehsanul Haq, the then Director-General of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who had played a role in pressurising A.Q. Khan to admit his role, in his individual capacity, in the sale of nuclear technology and equipment to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
4. As part of this damage control exercise, Kidwai invited a small group of Pakistani journalists enjoying the confidence of the Army for a briefing and refuted in detail the various allegations made by A.Q.Khan. According to these journalists, firstly, he denied that the confession of A.Q.Khan had been obtained under duress or through false promises. He asserted that the confession was made voluntarily and that A.Q.Khan himself had made some modifications in his handwriting in his confessional statement.He offered to show the confessional statement to independent Pakistani observers to prove that no force or false promises were used.
5. He said that though there was sufficient ground for prosecuting Khan, Musharraf decided not to do so keeping in view his national stature and contribution to Pakistan's quest for a nuclear capability. According to Kidwai, Musharraf pardoned Khan under two conditions. He would not talk to journalists on the subject and no fresh disclosures would come up in future which might warrant his prosecution. He accused Khan of violating the condition regarding not talking to journalists and indicated that the ban on his meeting journalists has been re-imposed. He also talked of a possible in-camera trial of Khan for endangering national security.
6. As regards the dealings with North Korea, he admitted that there was a State-to-State contract with North Korea under which Pakistan bought medium-range missiles from North Korea for cash. He projected this as a legitimate commercial transaction to which nobody can object. He denied that Pakistan had bought any long-range missiles from North Korea. He said that Khan did submit a proposal for the purchase of North Korean long-range missiles, but claimed that Musharraf did not approve it. It was not clear why he denied officially the purchase of any long-range missiles though it is widely known that the long-range missiles were also procured by Pakistan from North Korea since China had declined to sell them on the ground that their sale would be a violation of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). He apparently wanted to protect North Korea from any accusations of having violated the MTCR.
7. Kidwai vehemently denied that North Korea sold the missiles in return for the centrifuges. He maintained that the supply of the centrifuges by Khan to North Korea was an individual illegal transaction without the knowledge of the State, which had nothing to do with it. He was silent on Khan's statement that Musharraf had sent him to North Korea during the Kargil conflict with India in 1999 along with a senior Army officer to procure shoulder-fired missiles.
8. Khan has been taken aback by the widespread public disapproval of his interviews to the AP and Kyodo and has mounted a damage control exercise of his own. He has accused the AP of having distorted his remarks. He has denied having implicated the Army, but not denied having implicated Musharraf. He has denied endangering national security since the fact that the centrifuges in North Korea's possession were from Pakistan had been admitted by Musharraf himself. The only additional fact he has mentioned is that Musharraf was aware of the supply. He has also said that to avoid such distortions he has decided not to give interviews to foreign journalists in future.
9. As part of the six-power (US,Russia, China, South Korea, North Korea and Japan) talks under the auspices of China, North Korea had agreed to submit a full, verifiable declaration of its nuclear-capable assets. It has so far submitted to the group only a declaration of its assets relating to the plutonium route to an atom bomb. Pakistan had played no role in this and hence was not worried over it.
10. North Korea has been delaying the submission of a declaration relating to the enriched uranium route in which the Pakistani centrifuges were crucial. According to well-informed sources, there is considerable nervousness in the Pakistani Army over this lest the North Korean declaration, if and when it is made, does not totally corroborate the Pakistani stand that the supply of the centrifuges was a rogue operation of Khan without the knowledge of the State. According to these sources, Pakistan is hoping that China will ensure that North Korea will not cause any embarrassment to Pakistan in its declaration.
11. Annexed are two more past articles of mine on this subject. (6-7-08)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and,presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. He is also associated with the Chennai Centre For China Studies. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )
ANNEXURE I
Extracts From Article of September 29,2006, titled "MUSHARRAF'S MEIN KAMPF" http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers20/paper1969.html The article was my comment on his book "In the Line of Fire" and the observations made by him in response to questions during his tour of Europe and the US in September,2006, in promotion of the book
Quote from the article: See the kind of falsehoods he has uttered in his book and during his promotional tour in West Europe and the US. I have already drawn attention to his falsehoods about the Kargil conflict in an earlier article on the book ("Musharraf: Throwing Dust in His Own Eyes"). Let me mention some others:
The Pakistani military units posted in the Kahuta uranium enrichment plant could not detect the removal of centrifuges from the plant by A. Q. Khan, the nuclear scientist, for being sent to Iran and North Korea because their job was to protect the plant from external attacks and not the prevention of internal thefts. A. Q. Khan just put the centrifuges in his car and took them away, without his car being checked.The "Daily Times" of Lahore reported as follows on September 26, 2006, on Musharraf's interview on the CBS the previous evening: "Gen Musharraf was closely questioned as to how the centrifuges that Dr Khan is charged with having supplied to North Korea and Iran could have been taken out of Pakistan’s highly-secured and military-guarded nuclear facilities undetected by the government or the army. He replied that the military was there to safeguard the facilities from outside attack. When the interviewer suggested that in that case the internal controls were a “little weak,” Gen Musharraf disagreed, asserting that they were not weak but “very strong”. He said the centrifuges, whose designs, parts and they themselves had been sent out, could easily have been placed in a car and moved out. When the interviewer wondered if 18 tonnes of equipment could have been thus removed without anyone noticing, Gen Musharraf replied that it could not have been done at one time. “It must have been transported many times” and thereafter put on a C-130 and flown out. All the C-130s in the country are owned and flown by the Pakistan Air Force, but this question was not put to the President. Asked if the reason nobody from outside had been allowed to talk to Dr Khan was the fear that he might incriminate the army, the President replied, “That is absolutely not the case,” adding that US President Bush and CIA’s George Tenet are “very satisfied and quite comfortable with whatever we have done”.Musharraf has insinuated that there were some Indians working in the Dubai network of A. Q. Khan, who "disappeared" after the network was detected by the US and speculated that Pakistan's enrichment technology must have leaked to India through them. He has not named these so-called Indians in A. Q. Khan's Dubai network. Nor has he indicated why the detailed investigations made by the intelligence agencies of the US and other countries and by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of Vienna have not brought out any "disappeared" Indians. Buhary Seyed Abu Tahir, who headed A. Q. Kan's Dubai network and who set up a plant in Malaysia for the clandestine manufacture of new centrifuges at the instance of A. Q. Khan, was a Sri Lankan Muslim of Indian origin, who subsequently married a Malaysian and settled down in Malaysia. He has not disappeared. He was arrested and interrogated by the Malaysian Police. Why has he not said anything about the so-called "disappeared" Indians? Ever since the Indo-US deal for civil nuclear co-operation was signed in July last year, Ms. Shireen Mazari, the Pakistani analyst, who wrote a book on the Kargil conflict at the instance of Musharraf, has been spreading nuclear canards about India allegedly supplying nuclear technology to Iran, Iraq and other countries. The story of the so-called "disappeared" Indians was also her canard, which Musharraf has borrowed."
ANNEXURE II
26. 10. 2006
NUCLEAR NORTH KOREA: NERVOUSNESS IN PAKISTAN http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers21/paper2004.html
According to well-informed sources in Pakistan of well-established credibility, there is nervousness in Pakistan that fresh enquiries by the US into North Korea's nuclear capability might bring out hitherto unknown (to the international community) information relating to co-operation between Pakistan and North Korea in the nuclear and missile fields. These sources say that Maj. Gen. (retd) Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan's Ambassador to the US, who is a close personal friend of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has informed Gen. Musharraf that after the North Korean nuclear test of October 9, 2006, the US intelligence has been asked to do an update of a National Intelligence Estimate of 2002 on Pakistan-North Korea nuclear co-operation and to talk to Mrs. Benazir Bhutto and Mr. Nawaz Sharif, former Pakistani Prime Ministers, about it. Details of the reported National Intelligence Estimate were given by Mr. Seymour Hersh, the well-known investigative journalist, in an article published by the New Yorker magazine on January 27, 2003. A copy of the article is annexed.
2. While Pakistan's military relationship with North Korea in the field of purchase and joint development of conventional weapons dates back to the period before the outbreak of the Indo-Pak war of 1971, the co-operation in the missile and nuclear fields dates back to the visit of Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, the then Prime Minister, to Pyongyang in 1993. The visit and the resulting discussions on bilateral co-operation in the field of missile purchase and development were facilitated by China.
3. The Chinese entities, which were supplying the M-9 and M-11 missiles to Pakistan, had come under intense scrutiny by the US during the tenure (1988-92) of Mr. George Bush, the father of the present President, and the subsequent tenure of President Bill Clinton. This pressure partly contributed to the Chinese decision to put Pakistan in touch with North Korea and facilitate the acquisition of North Korean missiles and related technology by Islamabad. Mrs. Bhutto's talks in Pyongyang were successful and led to the signing of a formal agreement on this subject in 1995.
4. Pakistan's missile and nuclear relationship with North Korea since then has proceeded as follows:
· 1993-97: The co-operation was confined to missiles and missile-related technology.
· 1997-2003: The co-operation was expanded to cover the nuclear field. What was initially a missile for cash and wheat deal became a missiles and missile know-how for nuclear material and nuclear know-how barter deal. This decision to convert it into a barter deal was attributable partly to the cash crunch faced by Pakistan, the difficulties faced by Pakistan in procuring wheat from abroad for supplying to North Korea and North Korea's decision to go nuclear and the reported Chinese reluctance to help it directly since the Chinese nuclear entities were under close watch by the US intelligence. The Pakistan-North Korea nuclear co-operation took the form of transfer of know-how, visits of North Korean nuclear scientists to Pakistani nuclear establishments, the presence of North Korean nuclear scientists during the nuclear tests carried out by Pakistan at Chagai in May, 1998, and the supply of centrifuges for uranium enrichment to North Korea.
5. Till 2000, the transport of missiles and nuclear material in the two directions was mainly by sea and air. During the Clinton Administration, Mr. Richard Armitage, who was at that time doing security consultancy work, was commissioned by a Congressional Committee to prepare a paper on how to prevent the clandestine transport of nuclear-related material by sea. He presented a paper on this subject to the Committee and also gave an oral testimony. He suggested interdiction of suspected ships and proposed other ideas, which became the subsequent basis of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) under the Bush Administration. Mr. Armitage, who functioned as the Deputy Secretary of State during the first tenure of Mr. Bush, continued to take interest in the subject of interdictions as one of the options to prevent proliferation.
6. This led to a re-examination by Pakistan and North Korea----with the reported knowledge of China--- of the mode of a transport used till then and to the decision to transport the material thereafter by train via China and by road from the Xinjiang Province of China via the Karakoram Highway, initially built with Chinese assistance in the 1960s and the 1970s and now being upgraded, also with Chinese assistance.
7. The policy of General Pervez Musharraf has been to accept only those aspects of the co-operation about which the US has obtained credible evidence and deny the rest and to put all the blame on Dr. A. Q. Khan, the nuclear scientist. Till 2003, Musharraf denied the supply of centrifuges and admitted it only after it had been established by the US. He has not so far admitted any Pakistani role in assisting North Korea in the field of plutonium re-processing and the use of the overland route for the proliferation activities.
8. The nervousness in Islamabad after the North Korean nuclear test is due to, firstly, fears that fresh enquiries by the US might bring out hitherto unadmitted (by Pakistan) aspects of its co-operation with North Korea; secondly, fears that the pressure on it to hand over A. Q. Khan for interrogation by US investigators might increase; and, thirdly, that Mrs. Benazir Bhutto and Mr. Nawaz Sharif, who were considerably in the picture about this c-operation, might reveal the details to the US because of their anger over Musharraf's refusal to let them return to Pakistan and contest next year's elections to the National Assembly. If rightly approached by the US, Mrs. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif might be inclined to speak about the role of the Army---particularly Musharraf--in this co-operation, but not about their own role. According to these sources, Musharraf is particularly nervous that Mrs. Bhutto, who is more knowledgeable than Mr. Sharif, might start talking about this co-operation with the Americans. It is to pre-empt her doing so that he has reportedly been trying to make some political overtures to her.
9. The present visit to the US of Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, the head of Pakistan's Strategic Plan Division, who oversees the nuclear and missile programme on behalf of Musharraf---whether the visit it is at his instance or in response to a summons from the US-- is being utilised by him to remove any misperceptions in the US about Pakistan's role, explain its reluctance to hand over Khan and to project Pakistan as willing to co-operate with the US in any further investigation. He has been meeting Congressional aides---since most Congressmen are busy with the Congressional elections-- research scholars of think-tanks and proliferation experts. He also held an unattributable (to him) briefing for the media in the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.
10. During his interactions, Lt. Gen. Kidwai has reportedly been making the following points:
· A. Q. Khan gave the centrifuges to North Korea for the low grade enrichment of uranium for the production of electricity and not high grade enrichment for military purposes.
· A. Q. Khan has had no role in helping North Korea in respect of the plutonium reprocessing technology or weapon design.
· However, if the US wants fresh enquiries to be made, Pakistan will be willing to co-operate without handing over Khan.
11. He has also been utilising the opportunity of his interactions to stress upon the US policy-makers the need to have a second look at the US-India civilian nuclear co-operation deal in the light of the North Korean nuclear test. His argument has been: either put the deal with India in the cold storage or if the US has to go ahead with it, treat Pakistan on par with India. He has also been making the point that China has offered to supply six more nuclear power stations to Pakistan and that it will not be in the US interest for Pakistan to become dependent on China because of the US' discriminatory attitude.
ANNEXURE TO THE ABOVE ARTICLE
THE COLD TEST
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
What the Administration knew about Pakistan and the North Korean nuclear program.
Last June, four months before the current crisis over North Korea became public, the Central Intelligence Agency delivered a comprehensive analysis of North Korea's nuclear ambitions to President Bush and his top advisers. The document, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, was classified as Top Secret S.C.I. (for "sensitive compartmented information"), and its distribution within the government was tightly restricted. The C.I.A. report made the case that North Korea had been violating international law—and agreements with South Korea and the United States—by secretly obtaining the means to produce weapons-grade uranium.
The document's most politically sensitive information, however, was about Pakistan. Since 1997, the C.I.A. said, Pakistan had been sharing sophisticated technology, warhead-design information, and weapons-testing data with the Pyongyang regime. Pakistan, one of the Bush Administration's important allies in the war against terrorism, was helping North Korea build the bomb.
In 1985, North Korea signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which led to the opening of most of its nuclear sites to international inspection. By the early nineteen-nineties, it became evident to American intelligence agencies and international inspectors that the North Koreans were reprocessing more spent fuel than they had declared, and might have separated enough plutonium, a reactor by-product, to fabricate one or two nuclear weapons. The resulting diplomatic crisis was resolved when North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, entered into an agreement with the Clinton Administration to stop the nuclear-weapons program in return for economic aid and the construction of two light-water nuclear reactors that, under safeguards, would generate electricity.
Within three years, however, North Korea had begun using a second method to acquire fissile material. This time, instead of using spent fuel, scientists were trying to produce weapons-grade uranium from natural uranium—with Pakistani technology. One American intelligence official, referring to the C.I.A. report, told me, "It points a clear finger at the Pakistanis. The technical stuff is crystal clear—not hedged and not ambivalent." Referring to North Korea's plutonium project in the early nineteen-nineties, he said, "Before, they were sneaking." Now "it's off the wall. We know they can do a lot more and a lot more quickly."
North Korea is economically isolated; one of its main sources of export income is arms sales, and its most sought-after products are missiles. And one of its customers has been Pakistan, which has a nuclear arsenal of its own but needs the missiles to more effectively deliver the warheads to the interior of its rival, India. In 1997, according to the C.I.A. report, Pakistan began paying for missile systems from North Korea in part by sharing its nuclear-weapons secrets. According to the report, Pakistan sent prototypes of high-speed centrifuge machines to North Korea. And sometime in 2001 North Korean scientists began to enrich uranium in significant quantities. Pakistan also provided data on how to build and test a uranium-triggered nuclear weapon, the C.I.A. report said.
It had taken Pakistan a decade of experimentation, and a substantial financial investment, before it was able to produce reliable centrifuges; with Pakistan's help, the North Koreans had "chopped many years off" the development process, the intelligence official noted. It is not known how many centrifuges are now being operated in North Korea or where the facilities are. (They are assumed to be in underground caves.) The Pakistani centrifuges, the official said, are slim cylinders, roughly six feet in height, that could be shipped "by the hundreds" in cargo planes. But, he added, "all Pakistan would have to do is give the North Koreans the blueprints. They are very sophisticated in their engineering." And with a few thousand centrifuges, he said, "North Korea could have enough fissile material to manufacture two or three warheads a year, with something left over to sell."
A former senior Pakistani official told me that his government's contacts with North Korea increased dramatically in 1997; the Pakistani economy had foundered, and there was "no more money" to pay for North Korean missile support, so the Pakistani government began paying for missiles by providing "some of the know-how and the specifics." Pakistan helped North Korea conduct a series of "cold tests," simulated nuclear explosions, using natural uranium, which are necessary to determine whether a nuclear device will detonate properly. Pakistan also gave the North Korean intelligence service advice on "how to fly under the radar," as the former official put it—that is, how to hide nuclear research from American satellites and U.S. and South Korean intelligence agents.
Whether North Korea had actually begun to build warheads was not known at the time of the 1994 crisis and is still not known today, according to the C.I.A. report. The report, those who have read it say, included separate and contradictory estimates from the C.I.A., the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Department of Energy regarding the number of warheads that North Korea might have been capable of making, and provided no consensus on whether or not the Pyongyang regime is actually producing them.
Over the years, there have been sporadic reports of North Korea's contacts with Pakistan, most of them concerning missile sales. Much less has been known about nuclear ties. In the past decade, American intelligence tracked at least thirteen visits to North Korea made by A. Q. Khan, who was then the director of a Pakistani weapons-research laboratory, and who is known as the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb. This October, after news of the uranium program came out, the Times ran a story suggesting that Pakistan was a possible supplier of centrifuges to North Korea. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's leader, attacked the account as "absolutely baseless," and added, "There is no such thing as collaboration with North Korea in the nuclear area." The White House appeared to take the Musharraf statement at face value. In November, Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters he had been assured by Musharraf that Pakistan was not currently engaging in any nuclear transactions with North Korea. "I have made clear to him that any . . . contact between Pakistan and North Korea we believe would be improper, inappropriate, and would have consequences," Powell said. "President Musharraf understands the seriousness of the issue." After that, Pakistan quickly faded from press coverage of the North Korea story.
The Bush Administration may have few good options with regard to Pakistan, given the country's role in the war on terror. Within two weeks of September 11th, Bush lifted the sanctions that had been imposed on Pakistan because of its nuclear-weapons activities. In the view of American disarmament experts, the sanctions had in any case failed to deal with one troubling issue: the close ties between some scientists working for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and radical Islamic groups. "There is an awful lot of Al Qaeda sympathy within Pakistan's nuclear program," an intelligence official told me. One American nonproliferation expert said, "Right now, the most dangerous country in the world is Pakistan. If we're incinerated next week, it'll be because of H.E.U."—highly enriched uranium—"that was given to Al Qaeda by Pakistan."
Pakistan's relative poverty could pose additional risks. In early January, a Web-based Pakistani-exile newspaper opposed to the Musharraf government reported that, in the past six years, nine nuclear scientists had emigrated from Pakistan—apparently in search of better pay—and could not be located.
An American intelligence official I spoke with called Pakistan's behavior the "worst nightmare" of the international arms-control community: a Third World country becoming an instrument of proliferation. "The West's primary control of nuclear proliferation was based on technology denial and diplomacy," the official said. "Our fear was, first, that a Third World country would develop nuclear weapons indigenously; and, second, that it would then provide the technology to other countries. This is profound. It changes the world."
Pakistan's nuclear program flourished in the nineteen-eighties, at a time when its military and intelligence forces were working closely with the United States to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The official said, "The transfer of enrichment technology by Pakistan is a direct outgrowth of the failure of the United States to deal with the Pakistani program when we could have done so. We've lost control."
The C.I.A. report remained unpublicized throughout the summer and early fall, as the Administration concentrated on laying the groundwork for a war with Iraq. Many officials in the Administration's own arms-control offices were unaware of the report. "It was held very tightly," an official told me. "Compartmentalization is used to protect sensitive sources who can get killed if their information is made known, but it's also used for controlling sensitive information for political reasons."
One American nonproliferation expert said that, given the findings in the June report, he was dismayed that the Administration had not made the information available. "It's important to convey to the American people that the North Korean situation presented us with an enormous military and political crisis," he said. "This goes to the heart of North Asian security, to the future of Japan and South Korea, and to the future of the broader issue of nonproliferation."
A Japanese diplomat who has been closely involved in Korean affairs defended the Bush Administration's delay in publicly dealing with the crisis. Referring to the report, he said, "If the intelligence assessment was correct, you have to think of the implications. Disclosure of information is not always instant. You need some time to assess the content." He added, "To have a dialogue, you really have to find the right time and the right conditions. So far, President Bush has done the right thing, from our perspective." (The White House and the C.I.A. did not respond to requests for comment.)
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