Opinion Who is A.Q. Khan talking to?

For someone once described by the US media as “the world’s most dangerous man”,the most a major international newspaper could fret about it was call it “worrying”. For most of those who followed his dramatic career,“sad” would perhaps have been more appropriate.

Khan says he knows not what lies in store for his party. For the time being,he says he would like to focus on convincing Pakistan’s youth to reject corrupt politicians and to bring in a new leadership. That is about as clear as his plans are,but that should surprise no one given that Khan has lived his entire life by way of ambiguity. Who,then,is he talking to and what is he looking for? He is clearly convinced that he has enough of a “stature” for the crowds to rally behind him,but examining how that stature was built may provide us with clues as to what constituency he hopes to attract.

Contrary to what he would like his followers to believe,Khan,or Pakistan for that matter,did not “develop” a nuclear weapons programme. They just built a nuclear device. A year ago,a retired Pakistani general explained the difference to me. When a nation decides to go nuclear,it builds a whole technological society to support its ambitions. It revamps its education,it pushes its industrial base towards science and technology,it fires up its economy to sustain its endeavours and it strives for excellence at the cutting edge of development till the momentum reaches escape velocity and there is no turning back. Society no longer remains hostage to the whims of political adventurers but drives its state and its politics towards what it aspires for.

Is this what happened in the 1980s and 1990s when Pakistan was building its bomb? Oddly enough,that was exactly when,in aid of Pakistan’s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan,the country’s secular education structure was collapsing,replaced by religious seminaries run by a newly empowered horde of obscurantists,its formal economy was being irreversibly replaced by a black economy and its manufacturing base steadily eroded by its growing lack of competitiveness.

In the backdrop,a small group of people headed by Khan,sitting on untold amounts of unaccounted money,was busy trawling the international black market for bits and pieces that could be put together and exploded with enough radioactive fallout to qualify as a nuclear bomb. Any component found in the black market was then replicated to be peddled for money so that other components could be bought. In essence,the thought process at work inside Pakistan’s fortified nuclear facilities was not different from those manufacturing improvised explosive devices in tribal backyards owned and operated by Taliban warlords.

However,Pakistanis were constantly given to believe and easily convinced they were becoming a nuclear power,and the first in the Islamic world. It didn’t matter if poverty was growing or the economy was being bled by a voracious weapons programme. Any critical debate on the issue was stifled by a combination of dictatorships,quasi-democratic governments and state-sponsored patriotic jingoism.

It was only when the world blew the lid off Khan’s network and the state chose to turn him into a scapegoat that a few independent minds dared to start a debate on whether Pakistan as a nation was a beneficiary or a victim of its nuclear ambitions. That debate,too,was either skewed or stifled by the anti-Western wave that had swept the country in the wake of 9/11. But disowned by the state on which he had conferred its nuclear status,Khan’s own status became a matter of faith — you could either believe he was a hero or a villain.

The faithful chose to believe Khan,father of the Islamic bomb,could do nothing wrong,that he was a hero but had served his utility. Those who thought he was indeed the villain the West made him out to be,simply ignored him. Meanwhile,abandoned by the state,at 76,Khan stepped out of his house arrest into a world that had forgotten him. Soon after,Tehreek-e-Tahaffuz-e-Pakistan was born.

Surely,that is more sad than worrying.

Khan is editor of West and Central Asia Hub at BBC Global News,London