February 18, 2004

Pakistani leader rejects nuclear inspections, promises missile test

Pakistan would never allow foreign inspectors to monitor its nuclear facilities and has no intention of freezing its nuclear or missile programmes, President Pervez Musharraf said.

This is very, very, very bad news.
May I scream?

What is Pervez up to???
And why have talks with India about settling the Kashmir dispute when you intend to pump up the volume on your saber rattling???
Musharraf is practically daring President Bush to open up a fresh can of whoop ass!
Now is therefore the perfect time to blog about Bernard Henri-Lévy's excellent piece on the Pakistani nuke problem in yesterday's WSJ.
Make sure you read the whole thing, but here's some of the relevant parts about Musharraf:
Abdul Qadeer Khan:
We've not yet seen all the fallout from Pakistan's nuclear proliferation.

We will find that, since Pakistan is steered by the iron hand of its secret service and its army, it is inconceivable that Khan operated alone without orders or cover....
[...]... To put it simply and disconcertingly: Pakistan's nuclear weapons need to be secured. They cannot--will not--be secured by Pakistan alone.
[...]
But we must not shift our gaze from the president [Musharraf] himself, whose knowledge of Khan's dark machinations no one in Islamabad doubts, and who, at the very moment of his confounding, celebrated Khan once more as a "hero."
[...]

And at last, sooner or later, we will come to the real secret: that of al Qaeda; and of Khan's links to Lashkar-e-Toiba, the fundamentalist terrorist group at the heart of al Qaeda; and the fact that this "mad scientist" is first of all mad about God, a fanatical Islamist who in his heart and soul believes that the bomb of which he is the father should belong, if not to the Umma itself, at least to its avant-garde, as incarnated by al Qaeda. So let us not shrink from measuring the probability of a nightmare scenario: to wit, a Pakistani state which--in the shelter of its alliance with an America that is decidedly not counting inconsistencies--could furnish al Qaeda with the means to take the ultimate step of its jihad.

How much time will it take for all this to be said? How much longer will Islamabad's masquerade endure? Next month the American Congress will vote on the question of three billion dollars in aid to Pakistan: Will this aspect of things be taken into account? Will demands be made, at last, in exchange for this aid, for inspections of Pakistani sites, as well as the installation of a double-key system--a system that some of us here in Europe have been calling for?
How timely M. Bernard-Lévy's remarks look a mere day later.
So now you know how this situation's shaping up and what we all need to do:
Write your Congressperson and Senators NOW and demand that this $3 billion in aid NOT be granted to Pakistan if they persist in their proliferation!