Left Flank

I finally watched Charlie Wilson's War. Aside from a brilliant Aaron Sorkin script, and numerous other female distractions—notably Emily Blunt—the serious historical error about arming Ahmad Shah Massoud (YouTube embedding disabled by request) is terminal.

I've corroborated this claim in both Peter Bergen's Holy War, Inc. and Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

Why Tom Hanks allowed this whopper is almost as troubling as the Pakistani connection to Hekmatyar.

Both conservatives and progressives are criticizing the Bush administration for its continued support of Pakistan's embattled president, Pervez Musharraf, and the same could be directed at Republican presidential candidate, John McCain.

Cato Institute advises the Bush administration to stop the personal touch.

Politically, the United States will have to branch out to civilian leaders other than Musharraf in order to maintain some semblance of political stability. Militarily, to prevent the army's gradual erosion, the United States must continue giving aid to Islamabad with strict oversight and the assurance that such funding is being used against insurgents and not against long-time rival India.

The Center for American Progress is slightly less diplomatic.

The Bush administration continues to demonstrate a shocking tone deafness and incompetence when it comes to U.S. policy toward Pakistan. Just recently, the White House press secretary stated that it was too early to tell whether elections had weakened Musharraf's power. In even more disturbing remarks, she continued: "I think what President Musharraf has shown is an ability to provide for the country a chance to be confident in their government."

Furthermore, sources in Islamabad tell us that the administration is asking the PPP to explore forming a coalition government with PML-Q rather than to reach out to former prime minister Sharif's PML-N. In short, the Bush administration may be trying to keep Musharraf in the game and sideline Sharif. The Bush administration has been nervous about Sharif because of his historical closeness to the religious parties in Pakistan, yet sidelining the PML-N could be potentially destabilizing for Pakistan as it controls the heartland of Pakistan through control of the Provincial Assembly in Punjab.

The Bush administration needs to let Pakistan's political parties do their own parliamentary horse-trading without U.S. pressure, but we worry that the administration has refused to learn the lessons of its failed policies in Pakistan. Its efforts to negotiate a deal between President Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto prior to her assassination served to delegitimize her for many Pakistanis, making her a greater target for anti-American extremists in Pakistan.

The administration's consistent over-reliance on President Musharraf emboldened an authoritarian figure who has weakened the nation's independent judiciary and media, making the United States appear to be a force against democracy and the Pakistani people. What's more, U.S. policy has done little to counter the strengthening militant groups in Pakistan. If anything, the administration's ham-handed policies have only inflamed a fragile political and security environment in the country.

Meanwhile, Juan Cole warns that a McCain administration will do no better with Pakistan (as well as defending Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama).

And, let's just consider the shaky dictator Pervez Musharraf, who just suffered a sharp rebuke from the Pakistani electorate, as I wrote about today in Salon.com. McCain appears never to have met a rightwing dictator he didn't like. McCain defends the dictator. Here is what McCain said about Musharraf late last December:

"Prior to Musharraf, Pakistan was a failed state," McCain said. "They had corrupt governments and they would rotate back and forth and there was corruption, and Musharraf basically restored order. So you're going to hear a lot of criticism about Musharraf that he hasn't done everything we wanted him to do, but he did agree to step down as head of the military and he did get the elections."

There's much more in this blog, so make it a priority!

I'm undecided about buying former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's posthumously published plea for Islamic and civilizational «Reconciliation». Mostly, I can't forgive her for abetting A.Q. Khan to build his uranium bomb (and, recall her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, got Khan started), but The Economist is about as even-handed as I care to read about Ms. Bhutto and keep considering a purchase.

Much of this book's argument has been rehearsed before. Bhutto defends Islam's liberal, tolerant traditions. The first person to embrace the religion, she points out, was a woman, Bibi Khadijah, later to become the Prophet's wife. And she debunks as “convenient and simplistic” the notion that Islam and democracy are somehow incompatible. Yet her own political overview of Muslim countries tends also to be rather simplistic.

She tackles head-on the thesis of Samuel Huntington's essay and book, “The Clash of Civilisations”, declaring herself a “reconciliationist”, not a “clasher”. She even proposes her blueprint for reconciliation: a kind of Islamic Marshall plan, using the petrodollars of the Gulf and the riches of the West, Japan and China to assist “the Islamic world to leap into modernity”.

The observation that economic backwardness fuels anti-Western feeling and fanaticism, however, is hardly new. Familiar, too, is her analysis of the culpability of the West in propping up dictators where they seem strategically useful, undermining its claims to be promoting democracy. The victims of this hypocrisy include, of course, her own country, which, like a recent cover of this newspaper, she calls “the most dangerous place in the world”. Her effort to make it safer led her last year to negotiate with Pervez Musharraf, the president she had long reviled as an unprincipled military dictator. She recounts the pragmatic haggling that enabled her return, at the expense, her critics would argue, of the unity of the civilian democratic opposition.

Here as elsewhere in this book and in Bhutto's autobiography, “Daughter of the East”, there is a tension between the fervour of her expressed ideals and the reality of her political life. Her refusal to acknowledge any mistakes during her deeply disappointing stints as prime minister may be inevitable in a campaigning politician. But it made it hard to share her enthusiasm for what she might achieve at the third attempt.

But, yes, she was brave.

I'm sure this will never be good enough for the Pakistan's People's Party or Ms. Bhutto's family—and dámn it, if the lone gunman is still out there for conspiracy theorists to search for—but it was just a distraction from the larger issues.

Western diplomats warned that the findings in Scotland Yard's report will not help president Pervez Musharraf's government tackle the political fallout from Ms Bhutto's killing, as Pakistan heads towards parliamentary elections which are now due on February 18th. Earlier, the elections were due on January 8th but were delayed after nationwide riots occurred following Ms Bhutto's killing.

«The PPP will keep on arguing that this was a conspiracy hatched possibly with support of people in Pakistan's ruling structure» said one western diplomat. «They will keep on rejecting Scotland Yard's outcome».

The Pakistani government this week announced the arrest of two suspects in Ms Bhutto's killing. A third was arrested last month, when Pakistani officials accused Baitullah Mehsud, the pro-Taliban Islamic militant, of backing Ms Bhutto's assassins. But the official position has been thrown into fresh controversy after officials on Wednesday confirmed a ceasefire between Mr Mehsud and Pakistani government troops in the region bordering Afghanistan.

Now, excuse me while I stick a finger down my throat to purge my reaction to the "creeping convenient canonization of Benazir Bhutto." Individual Count strikes just the right chord.

Normally I wouldn't ordinarily give Imran Khan a second look, but, along with his support for Pakistan's judiciary, I found this insight striking.

Khan argued a different perspective from that of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who is wrapping up a tour through Europe. In an interview with the Monitor, Khan said he came to challenge conventional wisdom in the US. His argument: An election in Pakistan could do more harm than good. Restoring an independent judiciary, rather than holding elections, should be the first goal. The US "should back the democratic process, by insisting on the reinstatement of the judges, rather than back any individual in an election," Khan said.

But, why bother about that, when it seems the Bush administration is sold on some sort of acceptable way to boot out Musharraf?

So there!

Its security program was tightened in light of a scandal in 2003 involving the father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who sold nuclear weapons designs and components to Iran, North Korea and Libya in the 1980s and 1990s for personal gain.

Many experts believe senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials were complicit in Khan's ring. His voice touched with anger, Kidwai on Saturday vehemently defended his military brethren.

"Don't you think that after all these years, at least one name would have surfaced if that was true?" he asked.

Pakistan's Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai knows how to spin!

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.

I put this story about Dubai wanting to go nuclear (and then, retracting it) into deep freeze until I was reading Frantz and Collins on A.Q. Khan today about Dubai's role in the Pakistani pipeline.

Dubai is one of the seven principalities that form the United Arab Emirates: a sleepy port until a construction boom started in the 1960s, by the 1980s Dubai was a bustling free-trade zone without tariffs or taxes and little in the way of government regulation. Foreign businessmen had been drawn by the freewheeling, explosive economy. Among them was Mohammed Farooq, a stocky Indian who had set up a small import-export business in the Jebel Ali Free Zone. Like Lerch, Farooq was a veteran of the nuclear black market—he had met the engineer in South Africa years before, and they had also crossed paths over the years in their dealings with Khan. Lerch now contacted Farooq and found a willing local partner. Lerch also recruited another alumnus of the Pakistani network, Heinz Mebus. Mebus had worked at Siemens and spoke better English than Lerch, prompting later speculation that he had been the one to write the four-point proposal for Iran on some of his old stationery.

At some point, Lerch or Mebus ran the Iranian deal past Khan, who had access to the centrifuges and components that were a key part of the transaction. As a fellow Muslim who was well-known for his role in building the Islamic bomb. Khan's involvement also served to quell any worries the Iranians still had about a sting operation. Although the Pakistani scientist was willing to participate, he did not want to travel to Dubai for the meeting. Instead, he agreed to provide two centrifuges and some components. At the time, Kahuta was developing a more advanced centrifuge, known as the P-2, so all Khan had to do was dip into his stockpile of P-1s waiting to be melted down and ship them to Dubai. He still operated with complete immunity, without any real oversight, so the goods could be sent out of the country merely on his signature.

Later Khan would rationalize his participation in the transfer of nuclear technology to Iran in a variety of ways. Chiefly, he would argue that providing an atomic weapon to another Muslim country was a way to shift some of the West's scrutiny away from Pakistan. In private, he told friends that he had been encouraged to assist Iran by Pakistani military leaders who were interested in expanding ties with Tehran against the West and Israel. At the time of the first deal, President Zia did not trust the Americans despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid, any more than he trusted the Soviets occupying the country next door. The secure future that Zia envisioned for Pakistan rested on a new alliance stretching west to unite the west to unite the region's non-Arab Muslims in Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. This was, in Zia's mind, a formation capable of resisting outsiders and posing a formidable counterweight to India. He had ordered his plan put down in writing and called it the Strategic Regional Consensus.

Perhaps this is just sin by association or coincidence, but Khan went on to own a company (and a private apartment) in Dubai. Dubai became instrumental for Khan's efforts to help not only Iran, but also Iraq and Libya, get the bomb. Do we add Dubai to this list (if not directly, but like the younger apprentice following the master)?