Newton's Third: For every action...
Saturday, May 30, 1998 -- HONG KONG -- Pakistan's foreign minister put it quite clearly: "It isn't a question of if, just a question of when." This time intelligence agencies were on the ball and accurately predicted when Pakistan would detonate its test nuclear devices. There was no surprise, just the outrage and condemnation. Something that surprises me somewhat is the repeated Pentagon speculation that Thursday's nuclear tests were not really successful. If the purpose was to dare Islamabad into further tests and raise the ante, it worked. The US can now soften its attitude to India, a more important partner in the region.
Another peculiar position being taken by the US is Washington's repeated warnings that India and Pakistan should not take their programs a step forward and actually use what they have learned to produce nuclear weapons. What do the experts in the White House and the Pentagon think the good folks in Delhi and Islamabad have been doing all this time? If you ask me, it is a diplomatic way of saying: If you play the game and lie to us, we'll drop the sanctions and get back to business as usual in short order. Its been done before to pull the wool over the eyes of Congress - or perhaps we should say crochet - the lies were so transparent its pathetic.
India and Pakistan have been considered 'threshold' nuclear states for some time. They didn't get there on their own. Influence peddling, shifting foreign policies and basic greed meant that Delhi and Islamabad always had someone they could turn to for assistance in their nuclear programs. No one country is completely to blame, so responsibility for creating two new nuclear powers is shared. This makes the acrimonious mud slinging a little hypocritical. The United States, European countries, Russia and China all played important roles in helping India and Pakistan become nuclear capable.
Pakistan started to get serious about producing a nuclear bomb way back in 1972 - two years before India detonated its first device. The program received an unexpected boost when Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Pakistan became a front-line Cold War state, a bulwark against the advancing commie hordes. The United States was determined that Afghanistan would become Russia's 'Vietnam' and that meant keeping Islamabad sweet. Washington turned a blind eye to Pakistan's advancing nuclear program. But what is worse, Washington, among others of course, helped it along.
During the 1980s Islamabad was the happy recipient of billions of dollars in US aid, including advanced computers that could be used for bomb design. They also received millions of dollars in other high-tech aid such as telemetry systems for missiles. But it was a badly kept secret, and the issue was discussed on the Hill. Amendments were passed that demanded assurances from the White House that Pakistan had not developed a nuclear device - an event that would have meant an immediate cut-off in aid. Despite incontrovertible evidence those assurances were given by the White House. Remember, there was still the war in Afghanistan to be won.
By 1990, however, the world was adjusting to its so-called 'new order'. Alarmed at the prospect of an Islamic bomb, Washington cautioned Islamabad that it was on the verge of becoming a pariah state if it continued with its program. My, how things can change. The sanctions went into effect in October of that year. A bit like closing the gate after the horse has bolted, eh? Unfair too, Washington knew about India's program (and Israel's) but Pakistan was singled out to serve as an example of what would happen to Third World countries if they dared threaten the status quo and cross the nuclear threshold. I'm sure it was nothing personal.
But don't think for a moment that Pakistan was the only country that enjoyed the largesse of the United States and had some of its scientists 'trained' at Los Alamos. No, Sir. While there were several countries helping India in the early years of its nuclear program, the US gave subsidised loans and research grants for more than a thousand Indian scientists to study at nuclear facilities in the United States. Washington also helped in the building of a reprocessing plant where Indian scientists could learn how to extract plutonium.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the waning of Moscow's influence in India, Washington obligingly stepped in. It would be unfair to accuse the US of being the only guilty party, it most certainly isn't. But I find it unacceptable that Washington was a sometimes active, sometimes passive, but always knowledgeable participant in both of these nuclear programs and is now trying to claim the high moral ground by leading the world in imposing sanctions.
Watching the drama unfold on my television, I heard a CNN correspondent claim that he'd been told by White House insiders that the latest developments demonstrate Washington's lack of influence in the region. I suspect those insiders are being a little disingenuous.
A nuclear armed South Asia is something we will have to learn to accept. In common with most of the unfortunate situations we face in this New World Order in which we live, the situation was 'created' and didn't just happen. Sanctions will not stuff the genie back in the bottle, if anything, they will make the situation even more dangerous. So let's be honest about it, eh?
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