Pakistan’s Nuclear Facilities Targeted

By S.P.SETH

There are some disturbing reports that the Taliban and al-Qaeda attacked Pakistan’s nuclear weapons bases in the past two years. A recently published British House of Commons foreign affairs select committee report has suggested that al-Qaeda, which has shifted its strategic focus to Pakistan, might seek to gain access to Islamabad’s nuclear weapons.

At about the same time, some academics have actually identified the sites that were attacked. In his paper published by the US West Point Military Academy, Professor Shaun Gregory, Director of Pakistan Security Research Unit at Bradford University, has detailed three attacks. And he fears that there might be more in the future.

Dr Anupam Srivasava, Director at the Centre for International Trade and Security at Georgia University, believes that there have been more than three attacks on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. In one such attack on Wah, one of Pakistan’s main nuclear assembly plants, 63 people were killed, though the target at the time was referred to as a conventional weapons factory.

If these reports are true (and they come from multiple sources), Pakistan is truly becoming the focal point of Taliban and al-Qaeda activity.

Hillary Clinton, US secretary of State, also recently highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons in Pakistan falling into the hands of these elements.

Such danger arises because the Pakistani state is increasingly being corroded from within. President Asif Ali Zardari recently said, “We are not a failed state yet but we may become one in ten years if we don’t receive international support to combat the Taliban threat.”

His contention is that, “…we have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs or revive economy. What are we supposed to do?”

It is an extraordinary public statement from Pakistan’s president, even though its context was to demand more funds from the United States and other rich countries.

The point, though, is that Pakistan received about $12 billion from the United States under former president Bush. But there is no accounting of where all that money has gone.

The reports suggest that 80 per cent of $12 billion went to the army. And the army (Pakistan’s military establishment which has ruled the country directly or indirectly for all these years) spent much of it buying weapons for use against India. Again, there is no accounting.

In other words, even with funds coming from the United States and elsewhere as under the Bush administration, there is no action plan about how the money will be spent. Ther are no plans to revamp the country’s economy, create jobs, provide education and create health clinics for the people.

Even faced with the most dire existential crisis, Pakistan’s establishment still sees India as its major security threat.

In a recent article, “Pakistan on the Brink”, in the New York Review of Books, Pakistan’s veteran journalist, Ahmed Rashid, has succinctly summed up Pakistan’s national security goals, as defined by the army.

According to him, “Currently it has two strategic interests. First, it seeks to ensure that a balance of terror and power is maintained with respect to India, and the jihadis are seen as part of this strategy.

Second, the army supports the Afghan Taliaban as a hedge against US withdrawal from Afghanistan and also against Indian influence in Kabul...”

With its strategic priorities focused on India: “Containing the domestic jihadi threat has been a tactical rather than a strategic matter for the army.”

Not surprisingly then, “ there have been bouts of fighting with the militants and also peace deals with them; and these have been interspersed with politics of jailing them and freeing them---all part of a complex and duplicitous game.”

No wonder Pakistan is facing an existential crisis. And no wonder that alarms are being raised about the danger of its nuclear weapons falling into the Taliban and al-Qaeda hands!