The Pakistani Nuclear Shadow Falls On Japan

J. E. Menon

North Korean nuclear brinkmanship with the US, coming as Washington prepares for a final showdown with Saddam Hussein’s regime, has brought Pakistan’s nuclear capability under sharp focus. With details of the nuclear and missile technology barter between Islamabad and Pyongyang dripping out through leaks in the US and Japanese media, the nuclearization of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan appears as a not too distant possibility.

Pakistan’s role in the derailment of strategic stability in East Asia has not been missed by those most affected, Tokyo in particular. It appears to have come as something of a shock, however, although this would not have been so if Japanese and South Korean security managers had done their homework in the 1990s. Of course, there is the alternate possibility that the Pakistani-North Korean nexus was known and that the media leaks were timed to signal a strategic purpose.

Whatever the case may be, it appears that Washington and its allies on the Asian landmass are betting heavily on the pliability of Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Their objective, through him, will be to end such co-operation, and to roll back the programs of both North Korea and Pakistan to the point where they cease to be proliferation threat to the world. There are indications that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability no longer enjoys the status it did prior to Sept. 11, 2001. Similarly, there are indications that Washington would like to keep the North Korean factor in “hold” mode until the Iraqi endgame is played out.

Yet the proliferation threat goes well beyond the stockpile of nuclear weapons. It is the transfer of expertise, technologies, materials, and manpower that could pose a longer term problem. Japan would like to buy out both proliferators through a combination of economic carrots and military threats. North Korea has shown itself to be rather more pragmatic and receptive in this regard than Pakistan, whose leaders have promised to eat grass than do without the nuclear weapon. In any case, the domestic situation in Pakistan is infinitely more complex than in North Korea. In considering the amount of pressure to apply on Gen. Musharraf to acquiesce in a roll-back and cap scheme, an unlikely prospect no matter what the incentive, the US and Japan would have to consider the following factors:

1.  The prospect for the future spread of nuclear technology from Pakistan is increasing as the political power balance shifts towards Islamist parties. President Musharraf and his spokesman Lt. Gen. Rashid Qureshi have stated that Pakistan would never proliferate such technology; Musharraf has personally given a 400% non-proliferation guarantee to US Secretary of State Colin Powell and a 500% assurance to the Japanese government (a differential that has perplexed some official Japanese observers). Yet over the past decade, Pakistan has either transferred or proposed to transfer nuclear technology and/or know-how to all three countries listed in US President George Bush's "axis of evil" - Iraq, North Korea and Iran. Some Pakistani scientists are currently under detention on suspicion of supplying information on how to build nuclear weapons to Al Qaida and the Taliban, while others are reported to have fled to Burma (another "rogue" state), or simply "disappeared" to unknown destinations.

The most extensive transfer of nuclear technology from Pakistan has been to North Korea, however. It began with the initiation of contacts in 1992. The last reported transfer was an airlift of nuclear materials to Pyongyang in July 2002. Ironically, all this was being done during a decade when Pakistan's biggest aid donor was Japan. The man regarded as the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, started the contact in 1992 and is known to have visited North Korea at least 13 times. Khan, now a presidential advisor, was also the man behind Pakistan's proliferation of nuclear know-how to Iran, beginning with a nuclear cooperation agreement signed in 1986. Subsequently, links included training for Iranian nuclear scientists in Pakistan in 1988, but such interaction eased after 1993 as Tehran and Islamabad became rivals for influence in Afghanistan.

The UN has documented that in October 1990, i.e. just two months before the US-led Operation Desert Storm to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, Dr. Khan allegedly offered Iraq through an unnamed intermediary the technology to "manufacture a nuclear weapon". Baghdad said it rejected the offer fearing an American trap, and Pakistan denied the offer as a fraud. But the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) listed it as a key unresolved issue in a 1999 report to the UN on Iraqi arms programs. In light of the potential for further radicalization in Pakistan - and especially after the experience of after Sept. 11, 2001 – it is only to be expected that the US will want to become physically involved in the safekeeping of Pakistani nuclear weapons; reports suggest it may already have some kind of guardianship role. If acknowledged, of course, any such development could have a devastating effect on Musharraf's rapidly deteriorating domestic credibility.

2.  The Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), regarded as a state within the state, is connected both to Pakistan’s proliferation activities and to radical Islamist groups. Its former Director General, Mehmood Ahmed, was replaced in late 2001 by Musharraf after it was revealed that he had authorised the transfer of $100,000 to the WTC attackers by Shaikh Omar Saeed, a Briton of Pakistani origin who is also the chief suspect in the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Earlier directors general like Lt. Gen. Hameed Gul, Lt. Gen. Javed Nasir and Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani are pro-Taliban. They, along with others like former Army Chief Gen. Aslam Beg, form a "brain trust" with intimate knowledge of US military methods and tactics, due to their co-operation during the anti-Soviet jihad. They are believed to be helping Taliban and Al Qaida leaders to avoid capture.

Washington is aware that the ISI has been playing a double game since Islamabad “abandoned” the Taliban after the WTC attacks; but its seems in two minds about whether or not Musharraf is part of this double game; current ISI Director General Ehsan ul Haq is a close friend of his. The ISI has split up its operational desk for Afghanistan into two units – one for handling the Taliban/Al Qaida remnants, and another for dealing with the US military. Such moves have made the relationship between the US military and Pakistani forces on the Afghan-Pakistan border uncomfortable. Eventually, for peace to materialize in Afghanistan and for Pakistan to stabilize internally, the ISI would have to be dismantled completely. But this may not happen without considerable pressure from the US. The way in which the US publicized its secret agreement with Musharraf to pursue terrorists into Pakistani territory is an indication that a tougher approach is beginning to materialize.

3.  Pressure on Pakistan is building up as a result of the military establishment's unwillingness to cut itself off from the radical Islamist elements. In recent months, three leading Islamists - Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, chief of the Lashkar-e-Toiba; Maulana Azam Tariq, head of the fanatical Sunni sectarian group Sipah-e-Sahaba, and Maulana Mahmood Azhar, head of the Jaish-e-Mohammed - were released from prison. All are leaders of groups labelled as terrorist by the US. Although Saeed and Azhar in particular have called for violence against Americans, Islamabad says these leaders have not been charged with any crime and therefore it is unable to keep them in detention. Washington has noted that such judicial niceties have not been observed in the case of jailed politicians from the mainstream political parties, as in the case of the husband of the former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

American special forces and regular units fighting Al Qaida and Taliban remnants in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly frustrated by the way in which these elements are using sanctuaries in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province - controlled by an alliance of six Islamist groups called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) - to launch attacks on US soldiers. Minor successes in killing or wounding Americans enhances the prestige of Al Qaida and the Taliban in these areas, while US retaliatory strikes breeds further hatred against the West. In fact, the secret hot pursuit understanding with Pakistan became public only recently when the US Air Force dropped a bomb on a makeshift Pakistani madrassa in retaliation for an attack on its troops by a Pakistani soldier. This has further damaged the image of Musharraf, who is derided as "Busharraf" by his opponents.

The Chinese Angle

In the 1980s China transferred the key technologies required to give Pakistan the capability to build an "Islamic Bomb". The US has been applying pressure through the 1990s to stop the proliferation without much success. The North Korean connection was formalized in 1993 when military officers traveling with the entourage of then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto reached a deal for the exchange of Pakistani nuclear technology in return for missile technology from North Korea. In this process, the practice of “plausible deniability” was perfected by China, Pakistan and North Korea. China, when accused of proliferation, admitted at most that certain companies in its defense industrial complex had acted outside the authority of the central government. Pakistan simply denied the transfer of such technologies from China, but when Islamabad was itself caught proliferating the government has said these were done on the "personal" initiative of key nuclear scientists. With both Pakistan and North Korea having gone nuclear, these arguments are no longer convincing to the US which is keen to see such transfers discontinued. Staff of several US agencies are posted in Pakistan, while five of the country’s airbases have been taken over by the US military.

Islamabad still calls Beijing its “all weather friend” but its Islamic Bomb has cast a shadow indirectly over China as well. Most observers concur that Beijing made a major strategic mistake by proliferating nuclear and missile technologies to Pakistan, with the intention of containing India, and to North Korea with the objective of constraining Japan. In choosing these client states, Beijing strategists appear to have overlooked the possibility that they might seek to implement their independent agendas once they became nuclear capable, agendas that might threaten the country's own interest by generating instability beyond Chinese control. China now faces a nuclear India to its south-west, a potentially nuclear Japan and South Korea to its east, and a Taiwan ready to go nuclear to its south - apart from the Russian arsenal to the north, and an American capability everywhere. Arizona Sen. John McCain, an influential Republican, said on Jan. 5 that the best way to make it in China’s interests to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to change his mind on nuclear weapons would be “to remove our objections to Japan developing nuclear weapons”. Almost certainly an early sign of things to come.