Pakistan: A Hard Country (35 page)

After the Mumbai attacks, the Pakistani state was forced by US and Indian pressure to take over the supervision of Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s formal educational and welfare organization – but many of the same people work there as in LeT, and the group is also thought to have an extensive informal network which the state has left alone.

Because of this, and much more importantly of the popularity of its fight against India among the great majority of the population, Lashkar-e-Taiba has struck deep roots in Punjabi society. This is despite the fact that its Ahl-e-Hadith theology is alien to most Punjabis. This theology draws Lashkar-e-Taiba closer to Saudi Arabia and indeed to Al Qaeda, with whose leaders it was once closely linked.

From my talks with Pakistani military and intel igence officers it is clear to me that, having done so much to build up Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani security forces are now very afraid of the creature they helped create, of its possible sympathizers within their own ranks, and of the dreadful consequences if it were to join with the Taleban and the sectarians in revolt against Pakistan.

Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s extensive international network in the Pakistani diaspora also leads Pakistani officers to fear that if they attempt seriously to suppress the group it wil launch successful terrorist attacks in the West, with disastrous results for Pakistan’s international position. This is something that up to mid-2010 the Pakistani intel igence services have done much to help prevent. While the Pakistani Taleban and their al ies have begun to sponsor such attacks (like the abortive one on Times Square in New York in May 2010), groups stil al ied to the Pakistani state have not.

However, Lashkar-e-Taiba members certainly have contacts with Al Qaeda, and helped Al Qaeda operatives escape from Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taleban, and gave them shelter within Pakistan.

As Stephen Tankel writes:

Ideological y, for al of its strategic restraint fol owing 9/11

Lashkar is, after al , a jihadi organization with a long history of waging pan-Islamic irredentist campaigns. Indian-control ed Kashmir may be the group’s primary ideological and strategic target, but it has never been the apotheosis of Lashkar’s jihad.29

Men trained by LeT and stil associated with members of the group have been implicated in terrorist plots in Europe, North America and Australia, though the group’s leadership does not seem to have been involved. They have also taken part in actions within Pakistan which their leaders have deplored. The world of Sunni Islamist extremism as a whole functions not as a hierarchical organization, or even as interlocking organizations, but rather as a net with nodes.

Al the groups and individuals within this net hate the US, Israel, India and indeed Russia alike, though they have different targets at different times. Despite LeT’s strategic decision to concentrate on India, there is no ideological barrier to its members taking part in actions against the West. The jihadi world could even be cal ed a kind of cloud of interplanetary gas in which individuals join some clump for one operation and then part again to form new ad hoc groups for other attacks. This also makes it extremely hard for the ISI to keep tabs on the individuals concerned, even when it wants to.

By far the biggest terrorist attack carried out by LeT itself was that in Mumbai in November 2008. The great majority of the Pakistani experts and retired officers whom I know do not think that the Pakistani high command, either of the ISI or the army, was involved in ordering Lashkar-e-Taiba’s terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008. They point out in particular that, while deliberately targeting Westerners greatly boosted LeT’s prestige among international militants, it would have been an unprecedented, reckless and pointless strategy for the Pakistani high command, ensuring a furious reaction from the international community.

Equal y, there is an overwhelming consensus that this operation could not have been planned without ISI officers having been involved at some stage, and without the ISI knowing that some sort of operation was being planned. Whether the operation then continued as it were on autopilot, was helped only by retired officers, or whether the junior officers concerned deliberately decided to pursue it without tel ing their superiors, is impossible to say at this stage. The American LeT

volunteer David Headley, who was involved in the preparations for the Mumbai attacks, has testified under interrogation that ISI officers were involved in the planning, but could not say whether they were acting independently or under orders from above.

Certainly the ISI and the military as a whole made strenuous attempts – in the face of incontrovertible evidence – to deny that LeT

had carried out the attacks. While the Pakistani authorities could do a great deal more to restrict and detain LeT activists and leaders, it is extremely difficult to put them on public trial – for the obvious reason that they would then reveal everything about the ISI’s previous backing for their organization.

THE PAKISTANI NUCLEAR DETERRENT

The question of military links to Islamist terrorists raises particular fears in the West because of Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons. The horrendous consequences if such a weapon did fal into terrorist hands makes this a natural fear, but one which has led to a considerable degree of exaggeration and even hysteria in the Western media as far as Pakistan is concerned.

Given Pakistan’s lack of economic development, the Pakistani nuclear deterrent is the most remarkable achievement of the Pakistani state. It may also in certain circumstances lead to that state’s downfal .

This is obviously because of the risk of a nuclear exchange with India and the destruction of both countries; and perhaps even more importantly because of the fears that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have raised in the US. These fears are in part based on mistaken information and analysis, but they are nonetheless real.

For a long time, the US turned a partial y blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme. The reasons for this were that every Pakistani administration since the early 1960s – military and civilian alike – was involved in this programme, and several of those administrations were, at different times and for different reasons, key US al ies. Moreover, until the 1990s at least, India, and not Pakistan, was general y seen in Washington as the culpable party in driving a South Asian nuclear race – partly because during the Cold War India was seen as a Soviet al y, but also because India did indeed lead the race and carry out the first nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998.

From 1989 and the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, it is untrue to say that the US was indifferent to Pakistan’s nuclear programme.

After a ten-year interval brought about by Pakistan’s help to the US in combating the Soviet occupation, the US administration permitted the re-imposition of the terms of the Pressler Amendment, mandating sanctions against countries which could not certify that they were in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

These sanctions were imposed on both India and Pakistan, but hurt Pakistan very much more, given its smal er size and more vulnerable economy. Indeed, the imposition of these sanctions is one of the chief Pakistani arguments concerning America’s ‘betrayal’ of Pakistan once the Soviet withdrawal diminished Pakistan’s apparent strategic importance to the US.

Fear of India has always been the driving force behind Pakistan’s nuclear programme. Rhetoric of an ‘Islamic bomb’ reflects pride in Pakistan’s role (in this if nothing else) as the leading country of the Muslim world, and has also been used when dealing with other Muslim countries over nuclear issues. According to every Pakistani soldier and official with whom I have spoken, though, it reflects neither the core motive nor the strategic intention behind Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent.

As a senior retired general told me, Look, we knew from the mid-60s that India was seeking the bomb. Given that, any Pakistani who did not want to get the bomb too would have been either a complete fool or a traitor.

We needed the bomb at al costs for exactly the same reason NATO needed the bomb in the Cold War, faced with overwhelming Russian tank forces threatening you in Europe.

So how can you criticize us?

Part of the problem in South Asia, first in trying to prevent a nuclear arms race and then in managing it, has always been that, unlike in the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union, this was never a straight two-way competition. Rather, ever since the Sino-Indian war of 1962, and the first Chinese nuclear test at Lop Nur in 1964, India has been largely motivated by rivalry with China – a rivalry that combines strategic and emotional elements. India’s desire to achieve a balance with China makes it impossible to devise an agreed balance between India and Pakistan – unless of course China were to extend a nuclear shield to Pakistan.

As early as 1965, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told a Western journalist that if India were to acquire a nuclear bomb, ‘then we should have to eat grass and get one, or buy one of our own!’ As prime minister after 1971, Bhutto was instrumental in getting Pakistan’s nuclear programme off the ground – a programme which natural y gathered momentum immensely after India carried out its ‘Smiling Buddha’

nuclear tests in 1974.

Bhutto also began the cooperation with Libya on nuclear development that continued through the 1980s and ’90s until Libya revealed and abandoned its programme as part of its effort for reconciliation with the US after 2001. Secret dealings with Libya, North Korea and Iran were greatly extended under the direction of Dr A. Q.

Khan, a metal urgist working in Hol and’s nuclear industry who returned to Pakistan in 1976 with information stolen from his then employers.

A. Q. Khan has been wel described by Shuja Nawaz as ‘part bril iant and hard-working scientist, part patriot, and partly self-serving, publicityseeking egomaniac’.30 The success of his publicity campaign has indeed been such as to make it very difficult to assess his real importance to the development of Pakistan’s bomb. Where he was clearly of critical importance was in acquiring essential technology, expertise and material from abroad, as part of barter with states dubbed ‘rogues’ by Washington. Since 9/11, these links have natural y attracted immense interest from the US. Before 9/11, Musharraf had already removed A. Q. Khan from his position as chief of the nuclear programme in March 2001. He was later placed under (a very liberal y defined) house arrest.

The extent of US pressure on Pakistan over the nuclear proliferation issue has been modified by two facts wel known to US intel igence.

The first is that A. Q. Khan is not an Islamist, but a secular Pakistani nationalist. His wife is of Dutch – South African origin. There is no evidence at al of any links between him and Al Qaeda or other terrorist organization.

The second fact is that, while A. Q. Khan certainly profited personal y from some of his deals, at no stage was he a truly ‘rogue’ element.

Rather, as my military acquaintance quoted above told me, every Pakistani president and chief of the army staff knew in broad outline what A. Q. Khan was doing. They might not necessarily have approved in detail – but then again, they took good care not to find out in detail.

‘He had been told, “get us a bomb at al costs”, and that is what he did.’

As far as US intel igence is concerned, this means that, on the one hand, they cannot real y pursue A. Q. Khan for fear of unravel ing their relationship with the entire Pakistani military and political establishment. On the other hand, the fact that this establishment was always ultimately in charge means that US fears concerning potential terrorist access to Khan’s network are less than the Western media have sometimes suggested. As a result, the private US line to Pakistan on nuclear links to ‘rogue states’, in the off-the-record words of a US official, has been ‘We know what you did and we wil let you off this time. But don’t do it again. Since 9/11, everything has changed. If you do it again, we wil have no choice but to hit you very hard.’

The most worrying aspect by far of the A. Q. Khan network concerns not the network as such, or the proliferation to Iran and North Korea (which are also not about to commit suicide), but the links to Al Qaeda before 9/11 of two Pakistani nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Chaudhry Abdul Majeed. Neither of these men was part of the A. Q. Khan network or concerned with the weapons programme as such, and it would be impossible for people like this to produce a nuclear bomb. If, however, terrorist sympathizers in the nuclear structures could get their hands on radioactive materials, what such figures could do is help terrorists to produce a so-cal ed ‘dirty bomb’.

This is the greatest fear of US diplomats, as revealed by WikiLeaks.

It is certain that if there ever seemed a serious chance that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons were going to fal into the hands of Islamist radicals, the US would launch some kind of strike to capture or disable them. Barring a split in the army and the col apse of the Pakistani state, such a danger is in fact minimal. There is no chance at al of the Pakistani military giving them to terrorists. The Pakistani army exists to defend Pakistan. That is its raison d’être. A move which would ensure Pakistan’s destruction for no strategic gain would contradict everything the military stands for. Moreover, these weapons are Pakistan’s greatest military asset. ‘We are not going to cut off our own crown jewels and give them to terrorists,’ an officer told me.