Left Flank

By way of responding to Blake Hounshell's comment earlier this week about Albright's and Shire's argument, that "Slowly, but Surely, Pyongyang Is Moving", I have to second DPRK Studies' Richardson's skepticism about DPRK's motivations and the extent of its HEU program. However, there are broader issues that go beyond DPRK, and the arid Clintonian-Neo-Con debates of the early 2000's.

Firstly, there is no hard evidence for ascertaining Pyongyang's HEU program.

The roots of cooperation are deep. North Korea and Pakistan have been engaged in conventional arms trade for over thirty years. In the 1980s, as North Korea began successfully exporting ballistic missiles and technology, Pakistan began producing highly enriched uranium (HEU) at the Khan Research Laboratory. Benazir Bhutto's 1993 visit to Pyongyang seems to have kicked off serious missile cooperation, but it is harder to pinpoint the genesis of Pakistan's nuclear cooperation with North Korea. By the time Pakistan probably needed to pay North Korea for its purchases of medium-range No Dong missiles in the mid-1990s (upon which its Ghauri missiles are based), Pakistan's cash reserves were low. Pakistan could offer North Korea a route to nuclear weapons using HEU that could circumvent the plutonium-focused 1994 Agreed Framework and be difficult to detect.

Here again, the absence of proof leads not to verifiable fact, but a flash of temperament: is one a giddy optimist, or one who keeps his knickers firmly upright? I have to say, I would join the latter group.

Yet, secondly, as that same 2004 Global Security essay concludes, and Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins would concur, the Bush administration is not soft on Pyongyang, it's criminally negligent on nonproliferation. From the 2004 Global Security paper again:

Combating terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, however, are both important objectives for the United States and Congress may consider, in its oversight role, how we can successfully balance both. Pakistan is clearly a key ally in the global war on terror, but the considerable uncertainty about the Pakistani government's involvement in Khan's activities, particularly with respect to North Korea, raises questions about its past, but also future, cooperation in combating the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

On one hand, according to Frantz and Collins, the CIA could have halted AQ Khan in his tracks as early as the 1970's, but chose to gather intelligence, rather than share information with the Dutch intelligence services or law enforcement. Both before and after 9/11, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf resented his divided obligations, to protect Khan and, perhaps, the ISI and his own military colleagues from further questioning about his nuclear network's activities, and to the United States for military aid conditional upon backing the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan. President Clinton shelved prosecuting Khan, for Pakistan's participation in a commando raid on al-Qaeda in 1998. In July, 2001, the Bush administration had another opportunity to stop Khan. Finally, in December, 2001, George Tenet visited Islamabad personally, but not to ascertain Khan's activities, rather to secure the arrest of two Pakistani generals alleged to have negotiated with al-Qaeda for nuclear materials. Tenet studiously avoided mention of Khan so as not to embarrass Musharraf. American presidents from Eisenhower to Carter to Bush have routinely subordinated the strategic question of halting proliferation to the exigencies of the day.

Thirdly, there's the Libya gambit:

There is a superficially plausible model - Libya. Disarm, don't worry about a U.S. attack, and enjoy normalized relations, etc. But that doesn't take into account the cult of personality surrounding the Kims, and thus the need to maintain isolation.

Libya's capitulation is the result of decades of comprehensive sanctions and the intelligence on the AQ Khan nuclear network the CIA decided it could reliably turn over. However, such a wealth of intelligence on the DPRK doesn't seem to exist, and sanctions against Pyongyang have proven unsuccessful.

Finally, there's the "Beijing Miracle", the view that PRC will apply the requisite diplomatic, and if not successful, economic and military, pressure on Pyongyang to see the Six-Party process through to finish. That feeble hope died, if it ever really did have legs, when Beijing advised calm over Pyongyong's missed deadline. Beijing is simply more competent than Washington's elected politicians at crafting and sticking to a foreign policy agenda.

And, that's where the problem lies. It's the incremental errors in successive administrations' foreign policies, from Atoms for Peace, to the Brzezinski response to the Soviet-Afghan War, and finally to the Clinton and Bush administration's support for Pakistan at any cost. It's the marginalization of the International Atomic Energy Agency because of half-baked fears of international organizations (and simple tight-fistedness). It's the incestuous need to support certain states, due to previous errors in policy, but instead calling it "friendship". It might even be the simple-minded belief that nukes don't kill, only bad guys in authoritarian states do. It's the result of a well-meaning, yet hypocritical hegemon losing track of its global responsibilities due to interest-group lobbying, error, and bad intelligence, instead of committing itself to limited, well-articulated, universal goals, like non-proliferation, globalization, and sharing resources equitably.

DPRK has played the seam between all these mistakes. The only way to beat Pyongyang is to undo the major damage decades of minor errors have wrought.