Living in a dangerous neighbourhood

The book ends on a chilling note, by quoting Robert Gallucci, former adviser to President George W. Bush on weapons of mass destruction (WMD): “Pakistan is the number one threat to the world at this moment in time. 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.”

This may sound alarmist, especially in view of Bush administration’s earlier baseless claims about Saddam Hussein’s “bomb-in-the-basement”, a pretext it used for invading Iraq in 2003. However, the frightening scenario that Levy and Scott-Clark have sketched is different for several important reasons. Firstly, there is voluminous evidence of a flourishing nuclear black market in Pakistan that was being run by A.Q. Khan, the disgraced “father of the Islamic Bomb”.

General Pervez Musharraf placed him under house arrest in 2004 following global outcry over revelations about the latter’s clandestine activities. Intriguingly, for a crime as grave as this, Khan received a presidential pardon, raising suspicion that he was acting with the consent of Pakistan’s rulers. Even Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of IAEA, described Khan as “the tip of the iceberg” who “was not working alone”.

Secondly, the book narrates that two leading Pakistani nuclear scientists — Dr Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the ex-chief of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission, and Chaudry Abdul Majeed — were in contact with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, advising him how to make or acquire nuclear arms. Liaising with them, and also with al-Qaeda’s leadership, was General Hamid Gul, the former ISI chief and a well-known initiator of cross-border terrorism in India.

Thirdly, with Pakistan in turmoil, not just the US, but India, too, is worried about the spectre of nuclear terrorism. Last week, army chief General Deepak Kapoor said, “Nuclear bombs falling in the hands of jihadis is definitely a worry for all stable countries and democracies . . . they can be used for anything, even to start an international conflict.”

The book is an explosive account of the jihadi-military nexus in Pakistan. The two share a common ideology that underpinned both Islamabad’s covert pursuit of nuclear weapons and its policy of supporting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The authors show how Musharraf himself belonged, at least partly, to this nexus, until the Bush administration forced him to do a U-turn after 9/11.

His former ISI chief, General Mahmood Ahmed, the book says, knew about the transfer of $1,00,000 from a Pakistani militant to Mahammed Atta, who flew the first plane into New York’s World Trade Centre.

No less convincingly, the book reveals how successive US governments have knowingly turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s illegal import and export of nuclear weapons technology. Washington justified this first on the ground that Pakistan was an indispensable US ally in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Since 9/11, it is doing the same on the plea that Pakistan under Musharraf is a frontline state in the US-led war on Al Qaeda and Islamist militants, the very elements that have penetrated the Pakistani army that Musharraf heads. All this shows how Musharraf, obsessed only with personal power, has been fooling America, and the latter, with its muddled and self-serving thinking on terrorism, has allowed itself to be fooled by him.

These fears are echoed by the American scholar, Jonathan Schell (author of a new book, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, on a similar theme), in a recent article: “If the Bush Doctrine laid claim to the values of democracy, its man Musharraf now has the distinction, rare even among dictators, of mounting a second military coup to maintain the results of his first one. In a crowning irony, his present crackdown is on democracy activists, not the Taliban, armed Islamic extremists, or Al Qaeda supporters who have established positions in the Swat valley only 150 miles from Islamabad. Most important, the collapsed doctrine has stoked the nuclear fires it was meant to quench. The dangers of nuclear terrorism, of proliferation, and even of nuclear war — with India, which is dismayed by developments in Pakistan as well as the weak Bush administration response to them — are all on the rise.”

It’s high time we in India realised that America’s strategy of fighting terrorism by befriending Musharraf, or some other military dictator, is doomed to fail, probably with disastrous consequences. A new strategy is needed, a global coalition that compromises with neither jihadism nor imperialism, but is firmly wedded to democracy, freedom and pluralism everywhere.