Article of Nuclear Risk in Pakistan, US and Israeli Response

The New Yorker has an article suggesting that Pakistan is becoming more unstable and that Israel and the US might try to steal Pakistan'snuclear weapons.

To me, such risks make it foolhardy to not at least talk to the Taliban about turning bin Laden over to a thrid party.

http://newyorker.com/FACT/

WATCHING THE WARHEADS

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

The risks to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

Issue of 2001-11-05
Posted 2001-10-29

The Bush Administration's hunt for Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network has evolved into a regional crisis that has put Pakistan's nuclear arsenal at risk, exacerbated the instability of the government of General Pervez Musharraf, and raised the possibility of a nuclear conflict between Pakistan and India. These unintended consequences of the President's decision to mount air and ground attacks on the Taliban government in Afghanistan have created a serious rift between our government's intelligence and diplomatic experts on South Asia and the decision-makers of the Bush Administration.

Musharraf's standing has become more precarious as the intense American air war produces greater numbers of civilian casualties, street demonstrations in Islamabad, Quetta, Peshawar, and elsewhere, and discontent within his own military. The Administration's top officials are known to view the threat to Musharraf as potentially dangerous but manageable. "I was worried initially," a senior military planner told me. "But Musharraf has done a good job. He's put the hard-liners in a box and locked it." The officer was referring to Musharraf's decision three weeks ago to force the resignation or reassignment of a group of Army and intelligence officers he considered untrustworthy. (Musharraf himself came to power in a coup against Pakistan's elected government, in 1999, with the help of those officers.) Similarly, a former high-level State Department official, who maintains close contact with events in Pakistan, said he understands that Musharraf has assured the Bush Administration that "only the most reliable military people remain in control of the arsenal, and if there's any real worry he'd disarm them. He does not want the crazies to precipitate a real war."

Nonetheless, in recent weeks an élite Pentagon undercover unit—trained to slip into foreign countries and find suspected nuclear weapons, and disarm them if necessary—has explored plans for an operation inside Pakistan. In 1998, Pakistan successfully tested a nuclear device, heralded as the Islamic world's first atomic bomb. According to United States government estimates, Pakistan now has at least twenty-four warheads, which can be delivered by intermediate-range missiles and a fleet of F-16 aircraft.

Some of the government's most experienced South Asia experts have doubts about Musharraf's ability to maintain control over the military and its nuclear arsenal in the event of a coup; there are also fears that a dissident group of fundamentalist officers might try to seize a warhead. The Army and the influential Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., have long-standing religious and personal ties to many of the leaders of the Taliban, dating back to Afghanistan's war against the Soviet Union in the nineteen-eighties, when Pakistan was the main conduit for American support.

One U.S. intelligence officer expressed particular alarm late last week over the questioning in Pakistan of two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists, who were reported by authorities to have connections to the Taliban. Both men, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid, had spent their careers at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, working on weapons-related projects. The intelligence officer, who is a specialist in nuclear proliferation in South Asia, depicted this latest revelation as "the tip of a very serious iceberg," and told me that it shows that pro-Taliban feelings extend beyond the Pakistani Army into the country's supposedly highly disciplined nuclear-weapons laboratories. Pakistan's nuclear researchers are known for their nationalism and their fierce patriotism. If two of the most senior scientists are found to have been involved in unsanctioned dealings with the Taliban, it would suggest that the lure of fundamentalism has, in some cases, overcome state loyalty. "They're retired, but they have friends on the inside," the intelligence officer said.

Musharraf and many of his newly appointed senior aides are muhajir—immigrants who fled to Pakistan from India after Partition, in 1947—but they are in charge of an Army that traditionally has been dominated by officers from the Punjab region. Even now, an estimated ninety per cent of the officers are Punjabi. "These things matter a lot," a retired Pakistani diplomat told me. "The Punjabi officers would be thinking that there's an earthquake or a revolution taking place. Is it because of the ethnic background of Musharraf? Don't write off the unhappiness within the Army."

The former diplomat also took issue with the Bush Administration's belief that Musharraf has resolved the loyalty issue by replacing top commanders with officers believed to be less ideological. "To remove the top two or three doesn't matter at all," he said. "The philosophy remains." The I.S.I., he added, is "a parallel government of its own. If you go through the officer list, almost all of the I.S.I. regulars would say, of the Taliban, 'They are my boys.' "

With no sign that the Taliban leadership is weakening, Musharraf, under threat, is suspected by some officials in Washington and New Delhi of seeking to placate the fundamentalists by looking the other way during renewed terrorist attacks in the last month, allegedly sponsored by the I.S.I., on Indian targets in the disputed region of Kashmir. India and Pakistan have gone to war twice over Kashmir, which is dominated by India but has a mostly Muslim population, and it is a highly emotional issue for fundamentalists in the I.S.I. and the Taliban.

With the continued American bombing of the Taliban, the strategic risks are escalating. Our government is, in effect, working against itself as the air war in Afghanistan intensifies the political pressure on Musharraf—internally from the I.S.I., and externally from the street demonstrations against him, which are led by the fundamentalists. "Nobody's going to move against Musharraf unless there's an uprising in the streets," a second Pakistani diplomat told me. "How to prevent the uprising is to stop dropping bombs on civilian targets."

Critics of the Administration's policy emphasized in interviews that they viewed the war against the Taliban as just. The problem is that the bombing has not had the quick, decisive effect that military planners had hoped for. One senior Administration official told me last week that, despite the bombings and the efforts by C.I.A. operatives in the area to persuade Taliban commanders to defect, "People in my building wonder why there hasn't been a truly significant defection." In a subsequent interview, a former C.I.A. officer provided one reason for that failure. The agency, he said, had few or no people in the field who speak fluent Pashto, the language of the Taliban, and had been forced to rely on I.S.I. officers to communicate its offers to potential defectors. Thus, he said, "the same Pakistani case officers who built up the Taliban are doing the translating for the C.I.A. It's like using the Gottis to translate a conversation with the Lucheses." Another intelligence officer depicted the language situation in Afghanistan as "madness." He added, "Our biggest mistake is allowing the I.S.I. to be our eyes and ears."

It was a lack of operational security that, apparently, led to the death, late last week, of one of the most prominent operatives in the Taliban war. According to press reports, Abdul Haq, an Afghan guerrilla leader who was a hero in the war against the Soviets, had been ambushed and executed after a two-day standoff in eastern Afghanistan. Haq was said by the Taliban to have been on a mission for the United States, and to have been carrying large amounts of money—presumably to be used to induce Taliban commanders to defect. An Afghan press report subsequently quoted a Taliban spokesman who said that fifty of Haq's supporters, possibly including "foreigners," had also been surrounded. Haq's death was a major setback to the American anti-Taliban effort and to Pakistan's hopes of forming a broad-based new government in Afghanistan. One of Haq's close friends, Kurt Lohbeck, a former stringer for CBS Television who covered the Afghan-Soviet war for years, acknowledged in a telephone interview that Haq, who prided himself on his independence, had been on a temporary assignment for the C.I.A. at the time of his death, although he "never worked with them, for them, or loved them." Lohbeck told me, "He had two or three top Taliban people who were willing to defect, and he was going in with C.I.A. support and money to get these guys." Instead, he was double-crossed by the Taliban. "I'm furious at the C.I.A.," Lohbeck said. "They didn't provide operational security."

As Osama bin Laden continued to elude the American forces, there was talk in the Pentagon and the White House last week of lowered expectations. A high-level former intelligence official talked about how the air attacks had "contained" bin Laden and the Taliban leadership, rather than about the prospect of actually capturing him. Bin Laden, one senior general told me, may not be dead, "but he's hiding in a cave at six thousand feet freezing his ass off." The former State Department official acknowledged that the air attacks thus far had not been a success and added, "What worries me is if, a month from now, bin Laden gets on Al-Jazeera and thumbs his nose at us. It'd be a huge loss of prestige for the United States."

The White House's Afghanistan dilemma, and the risks of its war, were clearly spelled out last week in a speech given by Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., a Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "The President has not been as blunt as I'm going to be," Biden told a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Pakistan may very well, and Musharraf may, in fact, collapse. It may be gone. . . . If that were the case, we would find ourselves with a whole hell of a lot more forces in the region than we have now."

Biden asked rhetorically, "How much longer does the bombing continue? Because we're going to pay an escalating price in the Muslim world. We're going to pay an escalating price in the region. And that in fact is going to make the aftermath of our 'victory' more difficult. . . . I hope to God it ends sooner rather than later." Biden also had these words for the Musharraf regime: "We have to make clear to the Pakistanis that, notwithstanding the fact that we need you very much right now . . . if you are going to continue to foment the terror that does exist in Kashmir, then you are operating against your own near-term interests, because that very viper can turn on you."

Biden came as close as any Democrat has come since September 11th to straightforward criticism of President Bush's war aims. The White House had no specific response, but Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, a Republican from Illinois, depicted Biden's public skepticism about the bombing as "completely irresponsible." In a statement, Hastert said that the "American people want us to bring these terrorists to justice. They do not want comments that may bring comfort to our enemies."

The crisis may bring into play the élite unit, operating under Pentagon control with C.I.A. assistance, whose mission it is to destroy nuclear facilities, past and present government officials told me. "They're good," one American said. "If they screw up, they die. They've had good success in proving the negative"—that is, in determining that suspected facilities were not nuclear-related.

The American team is apparently getting help from Israel's most successful special-operations unit, the storied Sayeret Matkal, also known as Unit 262, a deep-penetration unit that has been involved in assassinations, the theft of foreign signals-intelligence materials, and the theft and destruction of foreign nuclear weaponry. Sayeret Matkal's most memorable operation took place in June, 1976, when Lieutenant Colonel Jonathon Netanyahu, brother of the future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, led a team that stormed a hijacked Air France airliner that was forced down by Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe International Airport, in Uganda, after taking off from Tel Aviv with two hundred and fifty-seven passengers. Jonathon Netanyahu was killed in the raid, along with two of the hostages, but the operation is still considered one of the most successful and audacious in modern history. Members of the Israeli unit arrived in the United States a few days after September 11th, an informed source said, and as of last week were training with American special-forces units at undisclosed locations.

In recent weeks, the Administration has been reviewing and "refreshing" its contingency plans. Such operations depend on intelligence, however, and there is disagreement within the Administration about the quality of the C.I.A.'s data. The American intelligence community cannot be sure, for example, that it knows the precise whereabouts of every Pakistani warhead—or whether all the warheads that it has found are real. "They've got some dummy locations," an official told me. "You only get one chance, and then you've tried and failed. The cat is out of the bag."

Some senior officials say they remain confident that the intelligence community can do its job, despite the efforts of the Pakistani Army to mask its nuclear arsenal. "We'd be challenged to manage the problem, but there is contingency planning for that possibility," one Bush military adviser told me last week. "We can't exclude the possibility that the Pakistanis could make it harder for us to act on what we know, but that's an operational detail. We're going to have to work harder to get to it quickly. We still have some good access."

A senior military officer, after confirming that intense planning for the possible "exfiltration" of Pakistani warheads was under way, said that he had been concerned not about a military coup but about a localized insurrection by a clique of I.S.I. officers in the field who had access to a nuclear storage facility. "The Pakistanis have just as much of a vested interest as we do in making sure that that stuff is looked after, because if they"—I.S.I. dissidents—"throw one at India, they're all cooked meat." He was referring to the certainty of Indian nuclear retaliation: India's nuclear warheads are more numerous, more sophisticated, and more powerful than Pakistan's; its Army is twice as large; and its population is more than seven times as large.

The skeptics among intelligence and military officials, however, worry that there may not be enough reliable information about the location of all elements of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. The C.I.A., they note, provided effective information on the warheads in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, when it worked closely with the Pakistani military in Afghanistan. At that time, the United States was a major supplier of arms and military technology to Pakistan. The agency recruited informants inside the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and the National Security Agency found a way to intercept the back-channel communications of Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the German-educated metallurgist who had run Pakistan's nuclear laboratories since the nineteen-seventies and is known as the father of the Pakistani bomb. But those assets no longer exist.

Other officials expressed concern about what any team sent to Pakistan could really accomplish without risking significant casualties. "How are you going to conduct a covert commando operation in the middle of the country?" the former high-level State Department official said. "We don't know where this stuff is, and it would take far more than a commando operation to get at it."

A government expert on Pakistan's nuclear capabilities depicted the issue in strategic terms: "The United States has to look at a new doctrine. Our nuclear strategy has to incorporate the fact that we might have a nuclear-armed fundamentalist government in Pakistan. Even if we know where the weapons are now, it doesn't mean we'll know where they are if the fundamentalists take over. And after Pakistan it could be Iran and Iraq. These are countries that support state terrorism." Intelligence officials told me they believe that, in case of an imminent threat, the Indian military's special commando unit is preparing to make its own move on the Pakistani arsenal.



Referring to the air and ground war against bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the former high-ranking government official, who has direct knowledge of the situation, said, "The Bush Administration is so focussed on the target and the objective that it's lost its peripheral vision. If Musharraf is toppled in a coup, or fears he'll be toppled, or, as a price for not being toppled, gives the I.S.I. permission to ratchet it up in Kashmir, that's very dangerous." (Neither the White House nor the State Department responded to a request for comment. A C.I.A. official who was asked to comment described the questions I raised as "policy issues," and added, "We don't do policy. I have nothing for you.")

A Pakistani diplomat I talked to last week acknowledged that the "situation is explosive." Much of the current dilemma, he told me, stemmed from the Reagan Administration's decision to finance many of today's I.S.I. and Taliban leaders in their successful war against the Soviet Union. "At one time, it was a three-way game," the former diplomat said. "The C.I.A., the I.S.I., and the mujahideen were creating these Frankensteins"—the Taliban—"and now the C.I.A. has pulled out, but you can't totally destroy the Frankensteins."

Another American intelligence official pointed out that Vajpayee, like Musharraf, was in a delicate position. "Vajpayee is under pressure to take out the camps in Pakistan and in the staging areas," the official said. The Prime Minister and his External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh, were "holding back the dam, but now that Fernandes is back Singh has lost influence," the official told me. "All the major figures in India said, 'We're not going to go across,' but that's if nothing else breaks out."

The former State Department official said that Musharraf, eager to find a way to justify the war to the Pakistani public, has sought in talks with U.S. officials to provide Pakistan's support in exchange for an American commitment to endorse the Pakistani position in Kashmir. The senior intelligence analyst confirmed that Indians had been alarmed by the muted private response of the Bush Administration to the October 1st bombing incident in Kashmir. "I've seen tough messages to the Pakistanis—'Keep these guys under control,' " he noted, but that message was not sent this time. He went on, "The I.S.I. is being allowed by Musharraf to develop policies of its own—to run Afghan policy and Kashmir policy. And that's where the danger is, if we continue to push the Indians. What would happen if there's another attack like October 1st?" Referring to the senior managers of the Bush Administration, the intelligence analyst said, "Americans have underestimated Indian anger— underestimated the degree of antiPakistan feeling that has developed inside India."

Not everyone in the intelligence community believes that Musharraf could stop the cross-border activity even if he wanted to. "I doubt he is encouraging these attacks in Kashmir," a former official said. "But it's very hard for him to control it. He's not going to alienate the I.S.I.—he's going to need them if and when it comes to stopping a demonstration. He has less control than Arafat has over the terrorists in the West Bank."

"Nitrogen and glycerine are being shaken up here," the former high-ranking government official said. "The Pakistanis are the small, scared ones. And they might use nuclear weapons as an equalizer. The danger is that the fifty-year dynamic between India and Pakistan is the backdrop for a scenario in which someone could hit a button."

In a CNN television interview with Larry King last week, Musharraf dismissed the American concerns about the integrity of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, depicting them as the thoughts of those in the West "who don't really understand the reality of Pakistan. . . . We have an excellent command-and-control system which we have evolved, and there is no question of their falling into the hands of any fundamentalists." However, in an interview last year with Jeffrey Goldberg, Musharraf described the arsenal's command-and-control mechanism as consisting of "a geographic separation between the warhead and the missile. . . . In order to arm the missile, the warhead would have to be moved by truck over a certain distance. I don't see any chance of this restraint being broken." He would not say how far apart the warhead and its launching missile were, or who controlled the system on a minute-to-minute basis.

"That's not a command-and-control system," one American intelligence expert subsequently told me. "You always keep the weapons separate." Musharraf's description, he added, "is like the argument the Pakistanis used to use in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineteen-nineties that they did not have a bomb because they hadn't put the components together." The intelligence expert also suggested that the Musharraf account was not credible. "What happens in a crisis? Are you going to have to drive warheads to the delivery vehicles? And leave you vulnerable to an enemy strike? A real command-and-control system allows you to have them ready to go, but always under the control of the leadership."

One longtime C.I.A. operative who served under cover in South Asia argued that Musharraf is simply telling Washington what it wants to hear. "Why should he tell us the truth?" the operative said. "He's fighting for his life. We sit there dumbly listening to him, and it's wrong."

Pakistani military officials have approached Pentagon officials several times in the past decade in an unsuccessful attempt to get support for an upgrading of Pakistan's nuclear command-and-control mechanisms. Senior military and proliferation officials in the Clinton Administration told me, however, that they had determined that such assistance was barred by the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, ratified in 1968, which prohibits declared nuclear states from providing any support or guidance to any emerging nuclear power. One former Pentagon official caustically depicted the Clinton Administration's Pakistani command-and-control debate as being similar to the debate over condoms in high schools and needle exchanges: "If you give out condoms, are you condoning teen-age sex? If you give out needles, are you condoning drugs? By helping with command-and-control, are you condoning nuclear weapons?"

 

Treeman, for most people these issues aren't as simple at they are for you.

For you it is just: Destabilize an Arab country of 130.000,000 with nukes. No biggie. send in the special forces with their neato new weapons and bingo no nukes, no threats, no terrorism. Just a few more people to deprogram. Good old American can do attitude. Everybody have a nice day. What's the sweat? What me worry.

 

Treeman, you misunderstand. I am tremendously worried that bin Laden/Al Qaeda will get nukes, by destabilizing Pakistan. I've repeated it over and over. From the first week of this cirisis many have voiced fear of the terrorists getting control of those nukes. That's why we should be careful with macho bluster and perhaps swallow self pride and see if the taliban want to turn over bin Laden to another country.

In fact it is so important that it would be better to not even punish bin Laden than run a substantial risk of him gettin nukes. Nukes make the WTC look like child's play.

You seem to be arguing that it isn't a big deal if extremists destabilize Pakistan because of your naive faith in the US military and special forces ability to extract the nukes or deal with whatever happens with no real consequences.

 

Madmax, you seem to be of the camp that fears that we might get bin Laden too soon, obviating the need for an immediate widening of the war to other countries.

If we get bin Laden and a few of the other most important al-qaeda guys, gradually arrest other terrorists around the world as we don from time to time and beef up our foreign intelligence and maintain our airport and other internal security that is as about as safe as we are going to get till we change our foreign polices regarding Iraq, oil and Israel that make us so hated. Sorry, but they don't hate us just because we are good and love freedom.

As you advocate we can continue to kill a lot more people in mumerous muslim countries, with greaty "collateral damage" for a generation or so and create a lot of additional very personal hatred towards us. It won't make us any safer.

Once you broaden your information sources you will start to realize things such as: 1) the Taliban is not esentially the same things as Al Qaeda. 2) the Taliban has fanatics as well as a great deal of moderate bureaucarats. (Maybe this will help. In Russia most members of the Communist Party were not believers, they simply wanted a living and did not want to rock the boat).

Once your undertanding of the facts chagnes you will start seeing other posssiblities.
..

 

An example of an article to counter the idea that it doesn't matter why our enemy does what he does. It also give NC Stateffan another person he can accuse of being a traitor.

Why our efforts to expand the war can hurt is capturing bi Laden.

http://salon.com/news/feature/2001/11/03/war/index.html

 

Treeman, we know that you have long advocated invading Iraq and other countries who aid terrorsts.

According to your statements Pakistan is not our ally and is actively aiding the Taliban and keeping them alive.. You also put most of your hope to prevent those nukes from falling in the wrong hands to US and Israeli military operations in Pakistan.

Again the narrowness of your military only approach to foreign policy leads to crazy scenarios in which the military scenario is the only option.