Here are two good thoughtful articles about Pakistan and its role in the NWO. The first is about the role Pakistani elites have historically played vis-a-vis the global elite. The second is about how Pakistan's nuclear program was abetted by the NWO.

That the Pakistani elite play an exceedingly important role for the NWO is well known. Indeed, the ISI chief had wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta for the 9/11 false flag operation. This same gentleman, who amazingly was in a meeting with Bush administration officials on the morning of 9/11, is now living happily in Islamabad, unmolested by the so-called war-on-terror. The ISI, along with the CIA, MI6 and the Mossad, is an important instrument through which the NWO operates.

The question may be asked: How is it that the Pakistani elite have been so eager to prostitute themselves to the NWO? To answer that question, we will have to go back several hundred years in history. Pakistan is a manifestation of Indian Muslim nationalism. At one point of time, Muslims ruled over most of the Indian subcontinent. Although the Mughal empire was largely destroyed by the Marathas and the Sikhs in the 18th century, Muslims still ruled about a quarter of the subcontinent at the time the British came on the scene.

The Pakistani elite still, at some level in their consciousness, hanker after the long lost glory of the Muslim empires, and dream of reconquest over the Indian subcontinent. But their supremacist dreams are quite incompatible with the present day realities of South Asia. This produced in the Pakistani elite a great frustration. The destruction of India became their greatest priority, and to that end they were willing to go to any lengths. The mindset is best exemplified by the statement of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto [late father of Benazir, who was hanged by Zia-ul-Haq]: "We will get the Bomb even if we have to reduce ourselves to eating grass to do so". Thus it is that the Pakistani elite has always been a faithful ally of the NWO, right since their independence. The later Pakistani alliance with China was also driven by the same motivations. From the point of view of both the NWO and China, India has been an uncooperative irritant, and Pakistan has been a useful way of keeping India in check.

To this day, the Pakistani establishment continues to sponsor and protect groups involved in terrorism against India. While India certainly has many faults of its own, it is probably fair to say that Indian hostilty to Pakistan is primarily reactive in nature. While there has sometimes been trouble between Hindus and Muslims inside India, India has very warm relations with almost all Muslim countries except Pakistan.

So what does the future look like? As long as the Pakistani elites nurture their visceral antipathy towards India, things will not change easily. There has indeed been a very gradual decrease in hostility between India and Pakistan. There is a little progress on the Kashmir issue, but Kashmir must be recognized as a symptom and not the cause of the troubles between India and Pakistan. Pakistani sponsorship of the Taliban must also be seen as a part of its struggle against India - the Pakistani desire is to have a client regime in Afghanistan which will be an ally against India. Pakistan's brutal repression against ethnic minorities in Baluchistan, Sindh, and the Northern territories must also be seen in this context. Pakistan's turmoil is, at its core, a struggle of ideas, a struggle of world-views. We certainly hope that Pakistanis will realize that fundamentally, there is no cause for hostility with India, if both sides can learn to "do unto their neighbour as they would have their neighbour do unto them". Things may not get better until we have a new generation, less encumbered by the baggage of history.
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The first article:

Pakistan’s Mercenary Elites

By: Shahid Alam
*M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Challenging the New Orientalism (2007).

http://www.amin.org/look/amin/en.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=7&NrArti...

In Pakistan today we encounter a paradox crying for an explanation; it is a paradox, moreover, whose exploration can bring some clarity to the predicament of the Islamicate today.
In January 2002, when President George Bush defined his near-term agenda for waging wars, he fixed his sights on Iraq, Iran and North Korea: the ‘axis of evil,’ marked for regime change. These countries were targeted – we were told – because they were developing ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ In the case of Iraq and Iran, this was only a cover. More likely, the two countries were targeted because they opposed Israeli hegemony. Perhaps, too, the US wanted their oil.
Oddly, Pakistan was not targeted for regime change. Yes, Pakistan has no oil. But the US-Israel axis could find her culpable on several other counts, each quite damnable. Pakistan is the only Islamicate country to possess nuclear weapons; she was guilty of nuclear proliferation; she was the chief patron of the Taliban regime; she has been accused by India of supporting cross-border terrorism in Kashmir; and, on the first two counts, Israel could tag Pakistan as the most serious threat to her security.
Why was Pakistan not being targeted?
This question has gathered even greater force over the past two years; and for two reasons. After being stalled for a while by the ferocity of the Iraqi resistance, US plans for war against Iran are once again gathering steam. In the past few weeks, Israelis, Neocons, Christian Zionists and assorted hawks have again been baying for Iranian blood. Now, the US Senate too has joined the chorus. On September 26, with an overwhelming vote, it virtually handed President Bush the license to wage war against Iran.
At the same time, there is little doubt now that Pakistan is ‘hosting’ both al-Qaida and the Taliban. Now rejuvenated, both organizations are operating from ‘liberated’ territories in Pakistan’s Waziristan. More ominously, last July, Pakistani allies of the Taliban dared to challenge the authority of the state in Pakistan’s capital. And since their rout there, they have continued to mount deadly attacks on the Pakistan army.
Yet, even today there is no talk of adding Pakistan to the ‘axis of evil.’ Why is there no clamor in the United States or Israel to invade Waziristan, to attack Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, to punish her for nuclear proliferation, or to launch covert operations to seize Pakistan’s nuclear assets before they fall into the hands of Pakistani nationalists, the Taliban or al-Qaida? This is the Pakistani paradox.
This paradox has a simple explanation: simple but also indicative of the malaise that afflicts nearly all the Islamicate world. In Pakistan, the US effected regime change without a change of regime. There was no need for an invasion, no need to fire a shot, no need for covert operations. At the first American touch, almost overnight, a terrible beauty was born. Instantly, the US had drafted the Pakistani military, nay the Pakistani state, to wage war against Islamic ‘extremists.’ The US had gained an army: and Pakistan’s military dictators had gained longevity.
The ease with which Pakistan’s sovereignty was terminated, the speed of this transaction, and no less the completeness of the foreign take-over, speaks volumes about Pakistan’s history, the nature of her ruling elites, the timbre of her ‘national’ institutions, and the alienation, degradation and dereliction of Pakistan’s middle classes. Within a few years of her birth, the state was privatized by landlords, generals and bureaucrats: three factions created, nurtured and guided into positions of leadership by the British.
Instead of mobilizing the people, instead of educating them in the values of citizenship, instead of enriching Islamic traditions, instead of building a national economy, instead of developing indigenous technologies, Pakistan’s ruling elites built bridges to the United States, to the US military, to foreign corporations, and to US-dominated multilateral institutions to create a technologically weak, a debt-ridden, and financially dependent economy controlled from outside through local elites.
Pakistan today is the fruit, the logical culmination of the agenda of accommodation launched in the nineteenth century by the two Ahmads of India – one founded a college to produce clerks who would be loyal to the British, another fashioned a whole new religion to instill servitude. The glorious hope of the two Ahmads was to serve the Empire. They were Muslims for the Empire. More than a hundred years later, their spiritual progeny serve a different Empire. If they are still around fifty years from now, they will be serving new Empires risen from the east.
For sixty years, Pakistan has been managed by different factions of its ruling elites – the military, bureaucracy, landlords – taking turns to plunder the people, competing against each other to serve foreign masters, at first covertly, but of late more openly, more blatantly, more treasonously. So complete now is the alienation of the domestic elites from their own society that their bidding against each other, the domestic competition to sell the institutions of the ‘state’ is now conducted in open view.
In order to stifle resistance, this dependent state methodically creates a weak, alienated, demoralized, and corrupt society. By failing to provide education, skills, and jobs, the state forces people to look outward, to turn to foreign shores for education, for jobs, and cultural inspiration. For every person who leaves for foreign shores, there are ten who are forced to stay at home, and whose education, careers, and very lives are organized around the chance of leaving the country. Pakistani society increasingly consists of would-be migrants waiting for their chance to dash out of the country’s airports, ports and border-crossings.
It is the middle classes now who ape the elites, who in turn have been aping their foreign masters for more than a century. As English increasingly becomes the passport to success, they are forsaking their native languages. In the colonial era, the elites sent their children to the grammar schools, the missionary schools, and then they were packed off to Cambridge and Oxford. On succeeding their white masters, these ‘whitened’ natives brandished their command of English as the visible symbol of their new elevation to power. It marked them off from the ‘natives’ over whom they now ruled. A new caste had emerged, the native ‘whites’ segregated from their ‘backward’ cousins by their alien language, their affluence, their Western loyalties and dress, their moral turpitude, and their Western vacations and honeymoons.
The most damaging product of this alienation has been a deepening intellectual sterility. Despite the proliferation of degrees, every new generation of Pakistanis is intellectually more sterile than its predecessor. Each new generation has eagerly surrendered the traditional virtues of its predecessor without acquiring the virtues of its masters, their scholarship, their energy, and the humanity which they practice among their own kind. The aping and mimicking of the diseases of foreign masters is far easier than the cultivation of the virtues that distinguish them, that are the sources of their power over their dark subjects.
Yet, resistance revives in some troubled hearts. At some point, this wholesale degradation of a society, this prostitution of national institutions, this miscegenation of foreign and native elites, produces revulsion in a few sensitive hearts. It gives birth to anger, art, struggle, new theories, and hopes for regenerating society.
But this regeneration is arduous. The mongrel elites have raised many barriers, they have strung barbed-wire fences with watch-towers across the country’s landscape. They have trained a mercenary military and perfidious police, led by officers schooled in the arts of repressing dissent. However, it is not these overt forces of repression alone that weaken and deflect the resistance.
The resistance can stand up to repression if it resonates with the people, if it can engage, stir, and mobilize them behind the cause of justice. But the alienation in society is so deep, the demoralization and apathy so complete that the few sensitive souls who choose to resist are left to twist in the wind, unsupported, unshielded, to be singled out and decapitated by the mercenary military and police.
Yet, Pakistan is not without hope. In one corner of Pakistan, that hope comes from the sons and daughters of the mountains, yet uncontaminated by ‘civilization,’ firm in their faith, clear in their conviction, proud of their heritage, and ready to fight for their dignity. Though unschooled, they are clear-eyed as the eagle of the mountains. Their poverty steels their determination. They stood up against the Soviet marauders: and defeated them. Today, they are standing up again to reclaim their dignity and their lands from foreigners and native mercenaries.
In Pakistan now, as in much of the Islamic world, the alienation of the institutions of the state has reached its climax. In Iraq, the United States could not have restored colonialism without planting her boots on the ground. In Iran too, they dare not dream of capturing the state without boots on the ground. In Pakistan, however, the task of regime change has been truly a cake walk: it was achieved with Pakistani boots on the ground.
A US weekly, Newsweek, has written that the Pentagon “wants [Musharraf] to turn much of Pakistan’s military into a counterinsurgency force, trained and equipped to combat Al-Qaeda and its extremist supporters along the Afghan border.” There, you have it – dear Pakistanis – in clear, bold print. What is this if not a plan for plunging your country into civil war, into a carnage far worse than what the Algerians have gone through?
How is it that the Pentagon dares to make such outlandish demands on the Pakistani army? The answer is simple. They do it because they know for a certainty that Pakistan’s elites are eager to deliver; they know that Pakistan’s mercenary-generals compete for American patronage; and Pakistan’s scavenger-politicians crawl to Washington begging not to be left out of the deals to sell the Pakistani state. Worse, until recently, Pakistanis have watched from the sidelines, or turned away, and let it happen.
For the first time now, a tiny segment of Pakistan’s middle classes, the lawyers – though still outfitted in the ridiculous black attire given them by their erstwhile English masters – have stuck out their necks against the mercenary-generals, against the mercenary military, against the commodification of their state. It is an auspicious turning point for Pakistan.
It is a sign that the Iqbalian spirit stirs a few Pakistanis. And observe what it has already accomplished. A few hundred Iqbalians have put the mercenary-generals on notice. The mercenary-generals postured, they scowled, they threatened, in desperation they turned to their masters for advice, they called up the scavenger-politicians to provide civilian cover. In short, for a brief moment, there was panic in the top ranks of the mercenary military.
For a brief moment only. The mercenary generals will not surrender so soon, or so easily. Indeed, it does not matter if one batch of mercenary-generals departs the scene: many more wait in the wings to take their place. If Pakistanis wish to avert civil war – and a bloody civil war it will be – then they must steel their hearts, they must gather courage, they must plan, they must organize, they must mobilize to take back their country, their state, and their military: to take it back definitively and with a clear understanding of how to make this nationalist appropriation irrevocable.
The lawyers alone cannot do it for them; when they become too troublesome, the mercenary state will start disappearing the lawyers. Nevertheless, change will come to Pakistan: for those who can read the signs, the writing is on the wall. Pakistan’s mercenary elites have hitched their wagon to the US ‘global war on terror.’ The United States will direct this war, and it will be a dirty war. As in Iraq, American experts in counterinsurgency will not hesitate to turn Pakistan into a Guatemala or worse.
Will Pakistanis dare to exert to make a stand for the change they want? If they choose to stay unconcerned, unthinking, disengaged, impassive, change will be imposed on them by the mercenary state. They will find themselves being dragged through a dirty war: many will loose their lives. Disappearances, executions, arbitrary arrests, in short, state terror will become common: the order of the day.
If Pakistanis dare to change themselves, they can choose the change they want: to make the state work for them not against them, to reclaim history, to become the historical force that produces change. However, this change demands a price, a price in will, values and sacrifice. Pakistanis must search their hearts to revive the fire they have smothered for too long: the will to struggle, to resist, to live in dignity, connected to their history, drawing on their best traditions to forge a future that they will control. If they fail now, the game is lost. It may be lost forever.
Pakistanis can learn from Latin America, whose oppressed peoples – in particular, their indigenous people – after five centuries of oppression are raising their heads everywhere. Together, they are throwing off the shackles of the predatory state, the mercenary state that collaborated with a succession of Empires to destroy their lives, their hopes, their struggles. Today, they are reclaiming the state in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Nicaragua, and they are getting ever closer to victory across the entire continent.
The United States today is powerless to roll back these revolutions. It is powerless because the struggles of oppressed peoples are interconnected, interwoven. When the dispossessed resist in Palestine, when Iraqis battle behemoths in their country, when underdogs make a stand in Lebanon, when Afghan peasants run circles around armies of occupation: in short, when the wretched of the earth tie down the Empire in West Asia, they raise hopes of liberation in every quarter of the world, even amongst the oppressed classes in the very centers of power.
The struggles of the past six years in West Asia have quickened the pace of history: they have opened a window for the liberation of the oppressed peoples everywhere. Just when the Empire was hatching its Project for the New American Century, history decided otherwise. It will be a new century alright, but there is scarce a doubt six years later that it will not be an American century, a reality that Americans should have the courage to accept graciously. Instead, it will be multipolar century, with many centers of power, scattered across all the continents of the world. Once again, power is being decentralized, and we can hope that this new round of decentralization will produce more enduring results than the last one. The men and women leading the new decentralization are a new breed: they have not been chosen by their erstwhile masters.
It is for Pakistanis now to seize this historical moment, to join the forward march of history. The historic changes underway in Latin America, and the new forms of resistance being forged in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Palestine are delivering new hope, new ideas, and new inspiration to oppressed peoples everywhere. Global empires are too costly to be sustained anymore: that is the singular message that Iraqis and Afghans are delivering to the world.
Will Pakistanis dare to join this universal struggle, harness its power, and seize the scales of justice? Will they follow the lead of the brave lawyers so that the streets of every city, every town, every village in Pakistan reverberate with their cries for honor and justice? Or will they choose to lengthen their vegetative séance, embrace ignominious death, and become the litter in the graveyard of history, their epitaph written by the foreign masters they have served for so long and so well?
These questions are historical: they are also urgent. The choices before Pakistanis are clear: it is life or death. If they fail to act now, they will concede the stage to the Taliban and the mercenary elites. May the Pakistanis ponder deeply for an answer: may they choose to walk in the paths of justice: and may their difficult journey be victorious.

*M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Challenging the New Orientalism (2007). He may be contacted at alqalam02760@yahoo.com. Visit his website at: http://aslama.org. © M. Shahid Alam.
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The second article:

How the West summoned up a nuclear nightmare in Pakistan

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2368174.ece

Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark reveal how misguided deals with Pakistan have created a terrifying threat of nuclear terrorism

General Pervez Musharraf was surprised. Visiting New York for a session of the UN, the last thing the Pakistani president expected was to be confronted with evidence of his country’s secret sales of nuclear bomb technology and equipment to members of the “axis of evil”.

Yet here on the polished wooden table of Musharraf’s hotel suite, George Tenet, director of the CIA, was laying out a sheaf of incriminating evidence.

There were intricate drawings of Pakistan’s P-1 uranium-enrich-ing centrifuge, with part numbers, dates and signatures. And there were details of the activities of Abdul Qadeer “A Q” Khan, the so-called Father of the Pakistani Bomb: his travels around the world, bank statements, even paperwork showing what his organisation had offered for sale and to which countries.

A senior Musharraf aide described it disingenuously as “the most embarrassing moment in the president’s life” – not because of the evidence but because he had felt Pakistan was on a long leash as it was integral to the Americans’ war on terror.

It was only three months since President George W Bush had cancelled a $1 billion debt and instigated a new $3 billion military and economic assistance package for Pakistan.

“Now the leash was being wound in, but Musharraf got over his surprise. He moved on and thought, so be it. He was a survivor. Pakistan was a survivor. We would adapt to a new reality,” a source said.

But he was not going to confess all: “Musharraf would play dumb until he ascertained what the US knew and whom we could blame.”

The general feigned ignorance. But everyone in the room during this “confrontation” four years ago knew that they were involved in a charade.

American officials knew that Musharraf had known about the nuclear trade all along. And Washington had itself not only turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear bomb project for decades but had covered it up for imperative geopolitical reasons, even when Islamabad began trading its secret technology.

By 2003 there was mounting evidence – still kept from Capitol Hill and the UK parliament – that Pakistan’s clients now encompassed North Korea, Iran and Libya and probably other countries and individuals too.

Britain had privately been pressing America to tell Musharraf it had to stop. In October 2003 MI6 uncovered Pakistani nuclear material on a boat heading for Libya. But the consensus in Washington was that saving Pakistan’s vulnerable (and valuable) president mattered more than prosecuting the guilty.

A senior British Foreign Office source explained: “He would come up with his own framework for survival and we would help him get through it, as long as the dirty deals were wound up. It was a compromise struck in the world of realpolitik.”

The details were agreed between Musharraf and Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, at a meeting in Islamabad. A drama was conceived that drew from Musharraf a promise to shut down Pakistan’s nuclear black market in return for winning continued US support for his unelected regime.

It was agreed that A Q Khan and his aides would be arrested and blamed for “privately” engaging in proliferation. The country’s military elite – who had sponsored Khan’s work and encouraged sales of technology to reduce their reliance on American aid – were left in the clear.

Khan was made to admit his “unauthorised activities” on television. Bush subscribed to the deceit, announcing: “Khan has confessed his crimes and his top associates are out of business . . . President Musharraf has promised to share all the information he learns about the Khan network, and has assured us that his country will never again be a source of proliferation.”

The truth was that Musharraf had been reducing Khan’s role in the nuclear enterprise and had pushed him into official retirement. The nuclear programme and trading were – and are – completely under the military government’s control. And proliferation did not stop.

Four years on, Khan is still under house arrest, and Musharraf is still in power. In a further exercise in “realpolitik”, another political deal is being stitched together to keep him in the presidency as America’s best hope of maintaining stability in this geopolitically vital but desperately unstable country.

Musharraf’s term of office comes to an end in November. Under the constitution he cannot win another term if he remains chief of army staff. Urged on by Washington, he has been discussing a power-sharing agreement with Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister.

He intends, however, to keep hold of foreign affairs, the armed forces, internal and external security portfolios, the nuclear deterrent and the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) programme, according to Pakistani sources.

America’s reason for sustaining Musharraf in power is that the alternative is even less appealing. The upper reaches of the army, and the retired military elite, are rife with Islamists – a legacy of General Zia ul-Haq, the zealot who both ramped up the nuclear programme and gave the military a religious mission when he was president from 1978-88.

The tragedy is that America’s gamble on Musharraf has not paid off. Washington’s nightmare is a nuclear Pakistan controlled by fundamentalists. Yet Musharraf presides over a country that is not only still a nuclear proliferator but the real source of the Islamist terrorism menacing the West.

Al-Qaeda has merged with Pakistan’s home-grown terrorists, spawning new camps, new graduates and new missions abroad – including the July attacks in London in 2005.

At least 17 of the worst Sunni terror groups banned by the US and the UN have been allowed to operate openly and launch recruitment drives, using flimsy cover-names, most of them operating within sight of the Pakistan military.

The Taliban reformed after Musharraf signed a secret pact with its supporters in Waziristan – the tribal region of northwest Pakistan – in 2004, and again in 2006, leading to what Nato commanders in Afghanistan complained of as a 300% increase in attacks on UK and Afghan forces.

US intelligence sources have accused elements of Pakistan’s intelligence establishment and army – including General Mo-hammad Aziz Khan, who until October 2004 was Musharraf’s chairman of the joint chiefs of staff – of coaching and sheltering the neo-Taliban.

Pakistan today stands on the failed states index at position 12, just below Haiti, in worse shape than North Korea and Burma. Yet Musharraf’s government has been rewarded with a 45,000% increase in US aid since 2001, taking assistance levels to more than $10 billion, five times more than received by any other country (including Israel).

On his only visit to Pakistan, in March 2006, Bush flew in at night, unannounced, without lights. As the US knew only too well, America’s enemies had access to US-supplied Stinger missiles that Pakistan’s former army chiefs had declined to help the CIA claw back after the Afghan war.

Bush never got near to the people of Pakistan. A heavy security blanket enveloped Islamabad, which was patrolled by thousands of riot police and para-troopers while US Black Hawks buzzed the skies which were empty of any commercial traffic.

After Bush’s visit, Eliza Manningham-Buller, then the director of MI5, made an unusual outing in public to warn that “resilient networks” of terror in Britain and elsewhere in Europe were being “directed by al-Qaeda in Pakistan”.

Pakistan’s unsecured nuclear arsenal is increasingly vulnerable as terrorists gain new footholds in Islamabad. According to a recent poll of 100 US foreign policy experts by the Centre for American Progress and the Carnegie Endowment, both in Washington, Pakistan poses today’s greatest nuclear threat to the world.

Robert Gallucci, who as a young US diplomat tracked its nuclear programme from inception in 1972 and ended his career as Bush’s adviser on WMD, describes Pakistan as “the number one threat to the world at this moment in time”.

He warns: “If it all goes off, a nuclear bomb in a US or European city, I’m sure we will find ourselves looking in Pakistan’s direction.”

Furthermore, disturbing new intelligence suggests that proliferation has not stopped. Last year, a 55-page highly classified “early warning” assessment was produced by Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, taking in the pooled knowledge of British, French and Belgian spies.

Its authors found that a range of materials and components were still being procured by Pakistan that “clearly exceeds” what Islamabad needed for its domestic nuclear programme. One of the report’s authors said: “They were buying to sell, and it could no longer be hived off as rogue scientists doing the deed.”

The report said that KRL labs, Khan’s old facility, had continued to coordinate the Pakistani sales programme and now ran a network of front companies in Europe, the Gulf and southeast Asia which deployed all the old tricks: disguising end-user certificates by shielding the ultimate destinations from sellers, and lying on customs manifests.

The Pakistan-North Korean relationship was still very much alive, the report stated. Islamabad had hooked Pyongyang into its nuclear procurement network in western Europe, buying raw materials and machinery for production lines in North Korea that were churning out cheap centrifuge components. Pakistan was one of the key customers, selling the parts on to other clients.

Most alarming was the finding that hundreds of thousands of components amassed by Khan had vanished since he had been put out of operation. In other words, Pakistan has continued to sell nuclear weapons technology (to clients known and unknown) even as Musharraf denies it – which means either that the sales are being carried out with his secret blessing or that he is no more in control of Pakistan’s nuclear programme than he is of the bands of jihadis in his country.

Some of Pakistan’s generals are gleeful and even unguarded about the trade, seeing it as proof of their apparently untouchable status as a prime ally in the US war on terror, but also as evidence of their rapid industrialisation.

Pakistan has learnt to manufacture the restricted components and materials, electronic equipment and super-strong metals needed for a ready-made nuclear weapons facility which they were selling to anyone who could come up with the cash.

General Khalid Mahmud Arif, formerly in charge of the nuclear programme and still an influen-tial figure in military circles, said: “Once we skulked around. Now we have a new generation of men and the technology. We have labs and the industry to rival the West.”

He said Pakistan was producing super-strength maraging (low carbon) steel which is primarily used for making centrifuges with which Pakistan enriched uranium to weapons grade. It was also making high-frequency inverters which regulate power to the centrifuges.

“They used to come from the UK and now we are selling them ourselves,” he said. “Maraging steel too – once we struggled but now, finally, we are manufacturing it at the People’s Steel Mill and exporting it. It is better than you can get outside.”

For many years the US and Europe have barred the export of both items to Pakistan.

Musharraf has consistently hidden bad news from his American backers. Two particularly worrying incidents were recently disclosed by sources close to those involved.

In 2001, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, had proof that Osama Bin Laden had received in person two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists at his secret HQ in Afghanistan. Both had become Islamist radicals in retirement.

According to the son of one of them, Bin Laden told them he had succeeded in acquiring highly enriched uranium from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and he wanted their help to turn it into a bomb. Amazed, they explained that while they could help with the science of fissile materials, they were not weapons designers.

Soon afterwards, a secret army audit discovered evidence that 40 canisters of highly enriched uranium (HEU), the feedstuff for a nuclear bomb, were missing from the Kahuta enrichment labs outside Islamabad after A Q Khan retired.

Dr Muhammad Shafiq ur-Rehman, an insider who is the son of one of Khan’s former key aides, revealed: “They could only account for 80 out of a supposed 120 canisters.”

The ISI reasoned that some of the drums had probably gone to North Korea, and some to Iran and probably Libya, according to a former ISI officer.

Enough highly enriched uranium remained at large to fuel 1,000 dirty bombs or a sizable nuclear device. All it would take for a doomsday scenario is 100lb of HEU – a mass the size of a sugar bag as the material is heavier than lead – to get into the hands of terrorists with the right expertise.

Split into two loads to prevent accidental fission, it could be machined into semi-spheres, loaded into a cannon-style device, and driven in the back of a van to a western target.

Behind this desperately worrying state of affairs lies a grand deception. For three decades, consecutive US administrations, Republican and Democrat, as well as governments in Britain and other European countries, allowed Pakistan to acquire highly restricted nuclear technology. Key US agencies were then misdirected and countermanded in order to disguise how Pakistan had sold it on.

Intelligence gathering in the US was blunted while the departments of state and defence were corralled into backing the White House agenda and forced to side-step Congress and break federal laws. Officials who tried to stop the charade were purged.

The deceit began under President Jimmy Carter; but it burgeoned under Ronald Reagan, who used Pakistan as a springboard for American aid to the antiSoviet jihad in Afghanistan.

US officials converged on Islamabad carrying cash and the message that America would ignore the growing nuclear programme – while Reagan publicly insisted that nonproliferation remained a primary policy.

A flavour of the duplicity comes from Robert Gallucci, who was director of the bureau of near eastern and south Asian

affairs at the State Department in 1982 at a time when the Reagan administration was desperately struggling to suppress evidence that Khan was designing a bomb.

After British intelligence caught the Khan network shopping in the UK for reflective shields made from beryllium, which could boost the power of a nuclear device, Reagan sent General Vernon Walters, a former CIA deputy director, to see President Zia in Islamabad.

Gallucci, who accompanied him, remembers: “Our evidence was incontrovertible. ‘This is what your experts have been up to’, we said, as politely as we could, giving Zia a get-out.

“However, the president rejected our briefing, saying our information had come from the Indians.”

Gallucci was not privy to a secret agenda. Walters confided to a senior State Department colleague on his return that, far from demanding a rollback in nuclear trading, he had been asked to warn the Pakistanis to do it more discreetly.

“He came in looking miserable,” the colleague recalled. “He said, ‘I was told [by the White House] to tell Zia to get that nuclear problem off our radar’.

“I was shocked. It was the antithesis of what we were supposed to be doing. Instead of giving it to them with both barrels, Walters had told the Pakistanis they had better hide their bomb programme, lest it humiliate Reagan.”

But Zia did not heed the warning and, as the months passed, the intelligence mounted. It was augmented by a US data-collect-ing operation made possible by a high-tech surveillance device secreted in the arid area surrounding the heavily guarded Kahuta hills outside Islamabad, where the nuclear installation had been built.

The device, a resin “boulder”, was capable of transmitting intelligence through an array of recording and air-sampling technology hidden inside.

A freak accident exposed the operation. Somebody fell on the “rock”, exposing the whirring and blinking components.

While knowing what was going on, Washington pursued a deception that bloomed into a complex conspiracy. Evidence was destroyed, criminal files were diverted, and Congress was repeatedly lied to.

The obfuscation concealed from the world Pakistan’s “cold-testing” of a nuclear bomb in laboratory conditions in 1983 and the intelligence that it had “hot-tested” – exploded – one in 1984 with the help of China.

By the time Reagan’s presidency came to an end in 1989, Pakistan possessed a deployable and tested nuclear device. Much of the programme had been funded using hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid diverted by the Pakistan military.

The bomb could be mated to a missile or dropped from Ameri-can-supplied F-16 fighter jets, also given by Reagan in the mid1980s, and the nuclear weapons programme had become a shop window for the world’s most unstable powers.

The US deceit lapsed in the 1990s when President George Bush Sr cut Pakistan adrift after the fall of the Soviet Union; but this increased Islamabad’s need to develop and sell nuclear technology in place of aid.

Under Bill Clinton an ever more detailed picture was pieced together of Pakistan’s dangerous liaisons: Iran in 1987, Iraq in 1990, North Korea in 1993, and by 1997 Libya, too. In 1998 both India and Pakistan held publicly announced nuclear tests.

By the time George W Bush became president in 2001, there was a mountain of precise intelligence portraying Pakistan as the epicentre of global instability: a host of and patron for Islamist terrorism, ruled by a military clique that was raising capital and political influence by selling WMD.

Yet even when American spy satellites photographed missile components being loaded into a Pakistani C-130 outside Pyong-yang, the North Korean capital – and intelligence analysts concluded that the cargo was a direct exchange for Pakistani nuclear technology – Washington did not react.

It was in this dangerous condition that Pakistan was clutched back into the American bosom after the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. And the deception continued.

© Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark 2007

Extracted from Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, to be published by Atlantic Books on September 13 at £25. Copies can be ordered for £22.50 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

Submitted by kula.kundalini on Tue, 2007-10-09 17:39

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