Pakistan’s Nuclear Program Budget was $10 Million per Year, Increasing to $20 Million per Year When at Full Capacity

Pakistan’s nuclear program has always been a target for Western propaganda and false accusations. I would like to make it clear that it was an Indian nuclear explosion in May 1974 that prompted our nuclear program, motivating me to return toPakistanto help create a credible nuclear deterrent and save my country from Indian nuclear blackmail.

After 15 years in Europe with invaluable experience in enrichment technology, I came toPakistanin December 1975 and was given the task of producing nuclear weapons by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

On Dec. 10, 1984, I informed Gen. Ziaul Haq that we could explode a device at a week’s notice, whenever he so desired.

We achieved credible nuclear capacity by the second half of the ’80s, and the delivery system was perfected in the early ’90s. For a country that couldn’t produce bicycle chains to have become a nuclear and missile power within a short span—and in the teeth of Western opposition—was quite a feat.

The question of how many weapons are required for credible deterrence againstIndiais purely academic.Indiais engaged in a massive program to cope with the nonexistent threat posed byChinaand in order to become a superpower.Indiadoesn’t need more than five weapons to hurt us badly, and we wouldn’t need more than 10 to return the favor. That is why there has been no war between us for the past 40 years.

I have little knowledge of the present status of our program, as I leftKahuta,Pakistan’s main nuclear facility, 10 years ago. As the pioneer of the program, my guess is that our efforts have been to perfect the design, reduce the size of the weapons to fit on the warheads of our missile systems, and ensure a fail-safe system for their storage. A country needs sufficient weapons to be stored at different places in order to have a second-strike capability. But there is a limit to these requirements.

Don’t overlook the fact that no nuclear-capable country has been subjected to aggression or occupied, or had its borders redrawn. HadIraqandLibyabeen nuclear powers, they wouldn’t have been destroyed in the way we have seen recently. If we had had nuclear capability before 1971, we would not have lost half of our country—present-dayBangladesh—after disgraceful defeat.

There is a total misconception about the money spent on our nuclear program. When we started, our budget was just $10 million per year, increasing to $20 million per year when at full capacity, including all salaries, transport, medical care, housing, utilities, and purchases of technical equipment and materials. This is but half the cost of a modern fighter aircraft. The propaganda about spending exorbitant sums on the nuclear program circulated by ignorant, often foreign-paid, Pakistanis has no substance.

India and Pakistan understand the old principle that ensured peace in the Cold War: mutually assured destruction. The two can’t afford a nuclear war, and despite our saber rattling, there is no chance of a nuclear war that would send us both back to the stone age. What pains me is that we gave Pakistan nuclear capability for its self-esteem and deterrence against adversaries. With our sovereignty thus secure, I urged various governments to concentrate on development to raise the people’s standard of living. Unfortunately, successive incompetent and ignorant rulers never bothered to work on the greater national interest. We are far worse off now than we were 20, or even 40, years ago when we were subjected to embargoes.

Our nuclear-weapons program has given us an impregnable defense, and we are forced to maintain this deterrence until our differences withIndiaare resolved. That would lead to a new era of peace for both countries. I hope I live to seePakistanandIndialiving harmoniously in the same way as the once bitter enemiesGermanyand France live today.

Israeli-American Worm Destroy Half of Iran’s Nuclear Centrifuges

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

Over the past two years, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.

“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”

Though American and Israeli officials refuse to talk publicly about what goes on at Dimona, the operations there, as well as related efforts in the United States, are among the newest and strongest clues suggesting that the virus was designed as an American-Israeli project to sabotage the Iranian program.

In recent days, the retiring chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, and Secretary of State Clinton separately announced that they believed Iran’s efforts had been set back by several years. Mrs. Clinton cited American-led sanctions, which have hurt Iran’s ability to buy components and do business around the world.

Mossad has been accused by Iran of being behind the deaths of several Iranian scientists, told the Israeli Knesset in recent days that Iran had run into technological difficulties that could delay a bomb until 2015. That represented a sharp reversal from Israel’s long-held argument that Iran was on the cusp of success.

The biggest single factor in putting time on the nuclear clock appears to be Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever deployed.

In interviews over the past three months in the United States and Europe, experts who have picked apart the computer worm describe it as far more complex — and ingenious — than anything they had imagined when it began circulating around the world, unexplained, in mid-2009.

Many mysteries remain, chief among them, exactly who constructed a computer worm that appears to have several authors on several continents. But the digital trail is littered with intriguing bits of evidence.

In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States’ premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world — and that American intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities.

Siemens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyberattacks.

Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy Department, responsible for America’s nuclear arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.

The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.

The attacks were not fully successful: Some parts of Iran’s operations ground to a halt, while others survived. Nor is it clear the attacks are over: Some experts who have examined the code believe it contains the seeds for yet more versions and assaults.

“It’s like a playbook,” said Ralph Langner, an independent computer security expert in Hamburg, Germany, who was among the first to decode Stuxnet. “Anyone who looks at it carefully can build something like it.” Mr. Langner is among the experts who expressed fear that the attack had legitimized a new form of industrial warfare, one to which the United States is also highly vulnerable. Officially, neither American nor Israeli officials will even utter the name of the malicious computer program, much less describe any role in designing it.

But Israeli officials grin widely when asked about its effects. Mr. Obama’s chief strategist for combating weapons of mass destruction, sidestepped a Stuxnet question at a recent conference about Iran, but added with a smile: “I’m glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated.”

In recent days, American officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity have said in interviews that they believe Iran’s setbacks have been underreported. That may explain why Mrs. Clinton provided her public assessment while traveling in the Middle East.

By the accounts of a number of computer scientists, nuclear enrichment experts and former officials, the covert race to create Stuxnet was a joint project between the Americans and the Israelis, with some help, knowing or unknowing, from the Germans and the British.

The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center.

President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack, its officials told the White House that such a strike would set back Iran’s programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned down.

Now, Mr. Dagan’s statement suggests that Israel believes it has gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does the Obama administration.

For years, Washington’s approach to Tehran’s program has been one of attempting “to put time on the clock.

Finding Weaknesses

Years before the worm hit Iran, Washington had become deeply worried about the vulnerability of the millions of computers that run everything in the United States from bank transactions to the power grid.

Computers known as controllers run all kinds of industrial machinery. By early 2008, the Department of Homeland Security had teamed up with the Idaho National Laboratory to study a widely used Siemens controller known as P.C.S.-7, for Process Control System 7. Its complex software, called Step 7, can run whole symphonies of industrial instruments, sensors and machines.

The vulnerability of the controller to cyberattack was an open secret. In July 2008, the Idaho lab and Siemens teamed up on a PowerPoint presentation on the controller’s vulnerabilities that was made to a conference in Chicago at Navy Pier, a top tourist attraction.

“Goal is for attacker to gain control,” the July paper said in describing the many kinds of maneuvers that could exploit system holes. The paper was 62 pages long, including pictures of the controllers as they were examined and tested in Idaho.

In a statement, the Idaho National Laboratory confirmed that it formed a partnership with Siemens but said it was one of many with manufacturers to identify cybervulnerabilities. It argued that the report did not detail specific flaws that attackers could exploit. But it also said it could not comment on the laboratory’s classified missions, leaving unanswered the question of whether it passed what it learned about the Siemens systems to other parts of the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

The presentation at the Chicago conference, which recently disappeared from a Siemens Web site, never discussed specific places where the machines were used.

But Washington knew. The controllers were critical to operations at Natanz, a sprawling enrichment site in the desert.

The trove of State Department cables made public byWikiLeaks describes urgent efforts in April 2009 to stop a shipment of Siemens controllers, contained in 111 boxes at the port of Dubai. They were headed for Iran, one cable said, and were meant to control “uranium enrichment cascades” — the term for groups of spinning centrifuges.

Subsequent cables showed that the United Arab Emirates blocked the transfer of the Siemens computers across the Strait of Hormuz to Bandar Abbas, a major Iranian port.

Only months later, in June, Stuxnet began to pop up around the globe. The Symantec Corporation, a maker of computer security software and services based in Silicon Valley, snared it in a global malware collection system. The worm hit primarily inside Iran, Symantec reported, but also in time appeared in India, Indonesia and other countries.

But unlike most malware, it seemed to be doing little harm. It did not slow computer networks or wreak general havoc.

A ‘Dual Warhead’

No one was more intrigued than Mr. Langner, a former psychologist who runs a small computer security company in a suburb of Hamburg. Eager to design protective software for his clients, he had his five employees focus on picking apart the code and running it on the series of Siemens controllers neatly stacked in racks, their lights blinking.

He quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers, running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a centrifuge plant. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” he said. “It was a marksman’s job.”

For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send commands to 984 machines linked together.

Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late 2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.

But as Mr. Langner kept peeling back the layers, he found more — what he calls the “dual warhead.” One part of the program is designed to lie dormant for long periods, then speed up the machines so that the spinning rotors in the centrifuges wobble and then destroy themselves. Another part, called a “man in the middle” in the computer world, sends out those false sensor signals to make the system believe everything is running smoothly. That prevents a safety system from kicking in, which would shut down the plant before it could self-destruct.

“Code analysis makes it clear that Stuxnet is not about sending a message or proving a concept,” Mr. Langner later wrote. “It is about destroying its targets with utmost determination in military style.”

This was not the work of hackers, he quickly concluded. It had to be the work of someone who knew his way around the specific quirks of the Siemens controllers and had an intimate understanding of exactly how the Iranians had designed their enrichment operations.

Testing the Worm

Perhaps the most secretive part of the Stuxnet story centers on how the theory of cyberdestruction was tested on enrichment machines to make sure the malicious software did its intended job.

The account starts in the Netherlands. In the 1970s, the Dutch designed a tall, thin machine for enriching uranium. As is well known, A. Q. Khan, a Pakistani metallurgist working for the Dutch, stole the design and in 1976 fled to Pakistan.

The resulting machine, known as the P-1, for Pakistan’s first-generation centrifuge, helped the country get the bomb. And when Dr. Khan later founded an atomic black market, he illegally sold P-1’s to Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

The P-1 is more than six feet tall. Inside, a rotor of aluminum spins uranium gas to blinding speeds, slowly concentrating the rare part of the uranium that can fuel reactors and bombs.

How and when Israel obtained this kind of first-generation centrifuge remains unclear, whether from Europe, or the Khan network, or by other means. But nuclear experts agree that Dimona came to hold row upon row of spinning centrifuges. “They’ve long been an important part of the complex,” said Avner Cohen, author of “The Worst-Kept Secret” (2010), a book about the Israeli bomb program, and a senior fellow at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He added that Israeli intelligence had asked retired senior Dimona personnel to help on the Iranian issue, and that some apparently came from the enrichment program.

“I have no specific knowledge,” Dr. Cohen said of Israel and the Stuxnet worm. “But I see a strong Israeli signature and think that the centrifuge knowledge was critical.”

Another clue involves the United States. It obtained a cache of P-1’s after Libya gave up its nuclear program in late 2003, and the machines were sent to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, another arm of the Energy Department.

By early 2004, a variety of federal and private nuclear experts assembled by the CIA were calling for the United States to build a secret plant where scientists could set up the P-1’s and study their vulnerabilities. “The notion of a test bed was really pushed,” a participant at the C.I.A. meeting recalled.

The resulting plant, nuclear experts said last week, may also have played a role in Stuxnet testing.

But the United States and its allies ran into the same problem the Iranians have grappled with: the P-1 is a balky, badly designed machine. When the Tennessee laboratory shipped some of its P-1’s to England, in hopes of working with the British on a program of general P-1 testing, they stumbled, according to nuclear experts.

Dr. Cohen said his sources told him that Israel succeeded — with great difficulty — in mastering the centrifuge technology. And the American expert in nuclear intelligence, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Israelis used machines of the P-1 style to test the effectiveness of Stuxnet.

In November, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, broke the country’s silence about the worm’s impact on its enrichment program, saying a cyberattack had caused “minor problems with some of our centrifuges.” Fortunately, he added, “our experts discovered it.”

The most detailed portrait of the damage comes from the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington. Last month, it issued a lengthy Stuxnet report that said Iran’s P-1 machines at Natanz suffered a series of failures in mid- to late 2009 that culminated in technicians taking 984 machines out of action.

The report called the failures “a major problem” and identified Stuxnet as the likely culprit.

Stuxnet is not the only blow to Iran. Sanctions have hurt its effort to build more advanced (and less temperamental) centrifuges. And last January, and again in November, two scientists who were believed to be central to the nuclear program were killed in Tehran.

The man widely believed to be responsible for much of Iran’s program, Mohsen Fakrizadeh, a college professor, has been hidden away by the Iranians, who know he is high on the target list.

Publicly, Israeli officials make no explicit ties between Stuxnet and Iran’s problems. But in recent weeks, they have given revised and surprisingly upbeat assessments of Tehran’s nuclear status.

“A number of technological challenges and difficulties” have beset Iran’s program, Moshe Yaalon, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, told Israeli public radio late last month.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Was Benazir Working for the Americans?

 

By Dr Sachithanandam Sathananthan,

The author  earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He serves as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Jawaharlal Nehru University School of International Studies.

Sep 12, 2008
There is great euphoria among Pakistani liberals over the presumed ‘return to democracy’. They are yet to discover Late Neo-colonialism. The manoeuvres against Musharraf bear uncanny resemblances to organised ‘people’s power’ the CIA unleashed during ‘colour revolutions’ and upheavals against Hugo Chavez.

The widely expected victory for PPP leader Zardari in the presidential election brought to ahigh pointthe tortuous process of regime change inPakistan. Anyone who has followed the ‘colour revolutions’ that installed pro-American rulers in Georgia (Rose Revolution, 2003),Ukraine(Orange Revolution, 2004) and Kyrgyzstan(Tulip Revolution, 2005) could surely not have missed the tell tale signs.

The earliest foreboding surfaced in the backroom manoeuvres by United States (US) and British intelligence services to engineer panic about the security ofPakistan’s nuclear assets. It was a repeat of the duplicitous hysteria they generated over non-existent weapons of mass destruction thatIraqallegedly possessed. A carefully worded article, co-authored by former State Department officials Richard L. Armitage and Kara L. Bue, signalled the shift in US policy. After formally acknowledging then President Musharraf’s many achievements, the authors continued: ‘much remains to be accomplished, particularly in terms of democratization.Pakistan must…eliminate the home-grown jihadists…And…it must prove itself a reliable partner on technology transfer and nuclear non-proliferation.’ And the denouement: ‘We believe General Musharraf…deserves our attention and support, no matter how frustrated we become at the pace of political change and the failure to eliminate Taliban fighters on the Afghan border.’

Translation: Musharraf has to go.

Almost simultaneously a 2006 country survey in The Economist, titled ‘Too much for one man to do’, began on a jingoistic overkill: ‘Think about Pakistan, and you might get terrified. Few countries have so much potential to cause trouble, regionally and worldwide’. The following year a Carnegie Endowment report faulted western governments that ‘contribute to regional instability by allowing Pakistan to trade democratisation for its cooperation on terrorism’. Senior US State Department officials repeatedly accused Musharraf of ‘not doing enough’ to combat Islamists within Pakistan and prevent their infiltration across the Durand Line into southern Afghanistan.

Sensing the way wind was blowing, then Benazir Bhutto redoubled efforts to convinceWashington and London that, if she were to become Prime Minister, she would gladly do their bidding. She underscored her enthusiasm to serve and ensured her party was fully responsive toAmerica’s Late Neo-colonialism. She summoned senior party members toDubai on 9 June 2007 for a ‘briefing’ by a team from the US Democratic Party’s National Democratic Institute (NDI), ostensibly on the subject of elections inPakistan. The ruling Republican Party’s International Republican Institute (IRI) had conducted the previous four ‘briefings’ in June and September 2006 and March and April 2007. Benazir leaned towards the Democratic Party in the last one no doubt as a hedge against the party’s possible victory at the forthcoming US Presidential Election.

Even a cursory knowledge of US Imperialism’s standard operating procedure is sufficient to surmise at least some among the IRI and NDI officers were covert intelligence operatives; and that their ‘briefings’ went beyond ‘tutelage of natives’. Rather they have been grooming the PPP asAmerica’s satrap.

Benazir’s predilection to collaborate with the West has its roots in the Bhutto family’s micro political culture. Her grandfather, Shah Nawaz Bhutto was a minor comprador official in the British colonial regime. The British rewarded his ‘loyal’ services with the title Khan Bahadur and later appointed him President of a District Board and still later elevated him to knighthood.

Her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s populist programmes did not dilute that legacy, which left a lasting impression on Benazir; she firmly believed the path to political power in Pakistan meanders through the Embassy of the United States, the current neo-colonialist.

She promised to offer the International Atomic Energy Agency access to Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan to ’satisfy the international community’, an euphemism for the major powers; and to allow the US-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan to operate inside north-western Pakistan. By the time Benazir visited the Senate in September 2007, she had convinced the Bush Administration of her unswerving loyalty; for ’she received a standing ovation from a select gathering of US lawmakers, diplomats, academics and media representatives. This contrasted sharply with her previous visits to theUScapital when she received little attention.’ To deepen ‘Washington’s renewed interest in her, Benazir cautioned that supporting Musharraf was ‘a strategic miscalculation’ and pleaded ‘the US should support the forces of democracy’, which, of course, refers to her PPP.

So, President George W Bush enabled Benazir’s return from exile by arm-twisting Musharraf to promulgate the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO). The NRO of 5 October granted amnesty to politicians active inPakistanbetween 1988 and 1999 and effectively wiped the slate clean of corruption charges for Benazir and her husband Asif Zardari. Three weeks later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made it appear the Bush Administration wished to bring together ‘moderate’ forces, implying a scenario in which Musharraf and Benazir would join forces as President and Prime Minister respectively; and Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte corroborated Rice: ‘Our message’, he intoned, ‘is that we want to work with the government and people of Pakistan’.

However, Musharraf saw through the US Administration’s transparent ploy to lull him into believing it would not remove him and install Benazir in his place. So, he swiftly invited Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), back from exile inSaudi Arabiato counter Benazir. But he could not consolidate his position, especially because he mishandled the judiciary, and was compelled to resign on 18 August 2008.

In a nutshell, the reason for ‘Washington’s renewed interest’ in Benazir is Musharraf’s firm opposition to US Late Neo-colonialism, to its manoeuvres to occupy, pacify and ravagePakistan. In the 19th century British colonialism waged the ‘war on piracy’ on the high seas ostensibly to bring ‘the light of Christian civilization’. But the British were the most successful pirates, as Spanish and Portuguese historians would gladly confirm. The ‘war on piracy’ was the duplicitous justification trotted out to dominate lucrative maritime trade routes that were in the hands of Chinese, Arab and Tamil maritime empires and to invade kingdoms and/or countries essential to control trade and plunder resources. During most of the 20th century heroic anti-colonial movements and anti-imperialist wars rolled back much of colonial rule, which in some instances however morphed into neo-colonialism. Indonesia after Sukarno, Iran after Mosaddeq and Chile after Allende are well known examples.

The ‘war on terror’ and ‘promoting democracy’ are the 21st century equivalents of the 19th century British gobbledygook. American Late Neo-colonialism purveys them as moral justification and uses as political cover for intervening and, where necessary, invading resource-rich and strategic countries to overthrow nationalist leaders, install puppet regimes and savage the countries’ wealth. And of course theUSis by far the most powerful terrorist force.

It succeeded inIraq(for now); but the CIA-organised regime change could not dislodgeVenezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who rejected the neo-colonialist 1989 Washington Consensus and supported alternative nationalist economic models.

Politically challenged Pakistani liberals — a motley crowd that includes members of human rights and civil liberties organisations, journalists, analysts, lawyers and assorted professionals — are utterly incapable of comprehending the geo-strategic context in which Musharraf manoeuvred to defend Pakistan’s interest. So they slandered him an ‘American puppet’, alleging he caved in to US pressure and withdrew support to the Afghan Taliban regime in the wake of 9/11 although in fact he removed one excuse for the Bush Administration to ‘bomb Pakistan into stone age’, as a senior State Department official had threatened.

Nevertheless American discomfort with Musharraf’s government was palpable by late 2003, after he dodged committing Pakistani troops to prop up the Anglo-American invasion ofIraq. When he offered to cooperate under the auspices of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), naïve Pakistani media and analysts lunged for his jugular, condemning him once again for succumbing to US demands. But in fact he nimbly sidestepped American demands: he calculated that diverse ideological stances of the 57 Muslim member-counties would not allow the OIC to jointly initiate such controversial action and therefore Pakistan’s participation cannot arise, which proved correct.

Washington of course was not amused and the Bush Administration grew increasingly hostile to Musharraf’s determination to prioritise Pakistan’s interests when steering the ship of the state through the choppy waters of the unfolding New Great Game, in which the West — led by the US — is manoeuvring to contain growing Russian and Chinese influences in Central and West Asia. His foreign policy decisions over time convinced Washington that under his leadership,Pakistan would side with enemies of US andBritainin the New Great Game. First, he refused to isolateIran; instead he vigorously pursued energy cooperation to build the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline in the face of stiff American opposition. Second,Washington was alarmed by Musharraf’s preference for deepening Pakistan-China bilateral relations and forging nuclear cooperation; and more so when he offeredBeijingnaval facilities at the Gwadar port on Balochistan’s Arabian Sea coast overlooking the entrance to theStrait of Hormuz, a strategic chokepoint through which passes approximately 30 per cent of world’s energy supplies.

Perhaps the last straw was his success in gaining Observer Status for Pakistan in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Russia and China are spearheading the SCO, which includes four other countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan; Iran and India are also Observers. The SCO is widely perceived as a rising eastern counterweight to western security and economic groupings and Islamabad drifting towards the SCO was simply unacceptable in Washington.

To rub salt into its wounds, Musharraf refused permission to interrogate Dr. AQ Khan and firmly rejectedWashington’s demands that NATO troops be allowed into the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his associates.

By early 2006 it was clearWashingtonwas looking for nothing less than a pliable leader inIslamabad, a firm political foothold inPakistanand a Pakistani foreign policy that complemented US strategic aims in Central Asia.

What perhaps angered Washington the most were actions Musharraf took to wind down the ‘war on terror’ within Pakistan.

Immediately after taking power, he outlawed three Islamic extremist groups and, after 9/11, intensified military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan.

Washington would have gone along with Musharraf had he focussed on military operations to curb Islamists. Military action alone cannot defeat guerrillas; but it can kill many of them and in turn induce new recruits — well known points reiterated by William R Polk in Violent Politics (2007) – so that the so-called ‘war on terror’ would not end any time soon.

That could supplement US Administrations’ assiduous manufacture of the ‘Islamic threat’ through the 1990s to launch an endless ‘war on terror’ — the New Cold War — to rescue America’s permanent war economy. For after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US economy (and by extension west European economies) faced perhaps its biggest crisis: the ‘Communist threat’ ceased to be credible; it could not be exploited to terrify the American people into acquiescing to rising military expenditure that keeps wheels of the permanent war economy rolling and to expanding the repressive security apparatuses.

So the Bush Administration deftly replaced the ‘Communist threat’ with the ‘Islamic threat’, no doubt following Machiavelli’s famous advice in The Prince, that a wise ruler invents enemies and then slays them in order to control his own subjects. The apparently counterproductive bombings, arrests, torture, kidnappings and disappearances (sanitised as Extraordinary Rendition) carried out by US forces while the CIA covertly funded, armed and supported Islamists are intended not to eliminate the ‘Islamic threat’ but to contain it within manageable limits and to spawn the next generation of ‘terrorists’.

Sometimes, plans go awry; ‘culling’ may not contain the resistance, as seen in Afghanistan from time to time. Nevertheless, the strategy is to ‘feed terrorism’ and simultaneously ‘cull terrorists’ so that the perpetual New Cold War oils America’s moribund permanent war economy.

Musharraf, however, did not play ball. He complemented military force to defeat Islamists with political initiatives.

He signed a peace treaty with tribal elders in North Waziristan (within FATA) to marginalise the Islamists. To combat the Islamists’ religious ideology, he promoted ‘enlightened moderation’, a veiled reference to secularism and tolerance. Musharraf’s vision of a secular Pakistan has its roots in exposure to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s legacy when he attended school in Ankara during his father’s diplomatic posting to Turkey. In fact, after taking power in Pakistan he often held up Ataturk as his role model. He planned to ‘wean away’ the people from the ‘extremists’ through education is how he described his approach to this writer. Towards this end, he introduced educational reforms and re-wrote school history text books; enacted laws protecting women’s rights and diluted Islamic laws against women; and he liberalised the media. To deny Islamists their traditional rallying cry — Kashmir — he opened path breaking negotiations with India to remove that arrow from the Islamists’ quiver.

When Musharraf skilfully combined military operations against Islamists with a political front promoting secularism to ideologically disarm them, the US administration saw red. By secularising Pakistani society over time Musharraf would de-fang the ‘Islamic threat’ within Pakistan and extricate the country out of the contrived orbit of ‘war on terror’.

That would greatly diminish Washington’s leverage to intervene in the country to distance Islamabad from Beijing and exploit energy resources abundantly found in Balochistan and, in the long run, perhaps derail US administration’s well laid plans to bring Afghanistan to heel and to dominate Central Asia and its oil-rich Caspian Sea basin.

But Musharraf was in no mood to back down. So the Bush Administration slipped regime change into gear. Taking advantage of his missteps, the anti-Musharraf media blitz, NGO and student mobilisations, lawyers agitations, protests by political parties and civil society organisations seemingly coming from all directions in fact displayed a fantastic degree of organisation, coordination and financing clearly beyond the ken of the fratricidal activists and often ad hoc institutions and never witnessed before in the country. Very likely they will not be seen again either; indeed later the activists were singularly incapable of organising any significant agitation when three women were buried alive for defying their parents’ choice of husbands. The manoeuvres against Musharraf bear uncanny resemblances to organised ‘people’s power’ the CIA unleashed during ‘colour revolutions’ and upheavals against Hugo Chavez.

The Bush Administration began reaping the rewards of unseating Musharraf within 24 hours of his resignation. Chief of Army Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani travelled to Kabul to meet NATO and Afghan commanders on 19 August. About 10 days later Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen informed a Pentagon news conference on 28 August that Kayani and his lieutenants held a ’secret meeting’ with their US counterparts on a US aircraft carrier, reminiscent of American gun boat diplomacy in Latin America and unthinkable in Pakistan under Musharraf’s watch.

Mullen touchingly chronicled how he ‘learned to trust’ Kayani and bent over backwards to emphasise that Kayani is no American puppet, that Kayani’s ‘principles and goals are to do what’s best for Pakistan.’ But a few sections of the US media, weaned on decades of Pentagon-speak from the debacle in Vietnam to the illegal invasion of Iraq, saw through the verbal obfuscation. And when a reporter pointedly queried Mullen whether Kayani’s ‘goal for Pakistan also aligned a hundred per cent with the US goal’, the Admiral waffled: ‘[Kayani] knows his country a whole lot better than we do. And again, I just think that’s where he is, that’s where he’ll stay.’ Translation: US administration has got Kayani on tight leash.

And to maintain there is no substantial change from Musharraf’s policies, Kayani’s spokesman Maj-Gen Athar Abbas and Mullen alleged the meetings had been arranged several weeks earlier, when Musharraf was President, to facetiously imply he had approved the contacts.

The import of ‘coordination’ between American, NATO, Afghan and Pakistan militaries will become clearer over the next weeks and months. For now the suspicion is unavoidable that the US Administration has at long last begun frog-marching Pakistan into the US-created Afghan quagmire to further destabilise the country and justify intervention.

Musharraf had resolutely opposed precisely this eventuality. He rejected US demands that the Pakistani army assist NATO forces inAfghanistan. He underlined the country will not repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the 1980s when it got embroiled in America’s war in Afghanistan against the then Soviet Union, for which the Pakistani people continues to pay a heavy price. Rather, he insisted his army will fight onlyPakistan’s war within Pakistan’s borders.

The consequences of the PPP leadership following theUSinto the Afghan quagmire will soon be evident. Already, within 16 days of Musharraf’s resignation, US forces carried out the first ground assault in Angoor Adda area within Pakistan’s borders — which Musharraf had disallowed — with the connivance of the new leadership. Obviously there is more to come since the Bush Administration has eagerly caricatured the Pakistan-Afghanistan border as ‘The New Frontier’ in the New Cold War.

For the moment, there is great euphoria among Pakistani liberals over the presumed ‘return to democracy’. The comments by Ayesha Tanmy Haq are typical: ‘We have removed a dictator by the citizenry showing that real power lies with them.’ The hapless liberals have yet to discover Late Neo-colonialism and its devious manoeuvres for regime change; they have in fact effectively legitimised them by opposing Musharraf. They are agonisingly unaware of the labyrinthine geo-politics and economic imperatives underlying the New Cold War. They are blissfully going along with the collaborationist leaders who are bartering away the country’s future for the proverbial pieces of silver.

Dr Qadeen Khan Aspires to Become President

By Simon Henderson

After the resignation of Musharraf, who will be the next president of Pakistan? A controversial politician such as Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, or a nonpolitical figure? If the latter, it might, just might, be the detained nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan.

A couple of weeks ago, a group of lawyers in the Pakistani city of Lahore marched in support of Khan’s candidacy. His actual election, requiring a majority vote in the national assembly, would shock the world, which was aghast at revelations, four years ago, that Khan had sold nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. But it would be justice of sorts.

Khan was not a rogue agent selling centrifuges to enrich uranium – and enrich himself. He was a loyal and obedient servant of a succession of military and political regimes in Islamabad. Generals and prime ministers traded his talents, which also included making an atomic bomb and two different missiles capable of carrying it, for a range of diplomatic and political favours.

That, at least, is his story. He has been telling it to me for more than a year, correcting what he regards as the falsehoods and errors in the books published about him. Their authors never managed to contact Khan so relied on the claims of his detractors. But, circumventing his guards, I did manage to reach him and made a simple request: tell me your version. I have hundreds of thousands of his words, as well as letters, photographs and video. My biography of him is nearly complete.

Khan’s fall from grace was spectacular. Twice awarded Pakistan’s highest honour for leading the teams that created the country’s nuclear strike force, he was forced to make a televised confession about his proliferation activities – and take all the blame himself. For four years he has been confined to his Islamabad home. Yet in neighbouring rival India, A P J Abdul Kalam, seen as Khan’s counterpart and popularly known as “the missile man”, went on to serve as his nation’s president from 2002 to 2007.

The political demise of Musharraf still leaves several obstacles to Khan’s rehabilitation, never mind his election as head of state. There are many people who do not want the real story to emerge. Musharraf himself said in June that the true story “is a confidential issue . . . a very serious matter, as Pakistan may suffer”.

Within Pakistan, Khan’s successes – and impatience with bureaucratic obstacles and rivals – caused much envy and anger. For three decades a sub-plot of the country’s nuclear programme was the antagonism between the Khan Research Laboratories and the country’s official nuclear authority, the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.

Pakistani leaders encouraged rivalry between the teams trying to make highly enriched uranium and the other nuclear explosive, plutonium. Khan’s team won. His team was also the recipient of a gift from China of a design for an atomic bomb and enough highly enriched uranium for two devices, after Beijing decided to back Khan to jump-start Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. I remember being told about China’s nuclear generosity by an outraged British official in the 1980s. I later asked what Beijing had received in return. It was an enrichment plant.

The plant is at Hanzhong in central China. C-130 Hercules transports of the Pakistan air force made more than 100 flights to China carrying centrifuge equipment. Beijing needed the plant, not for bombs but to fuel its nuclear power plants. Centrifuge technology is good for both levels of enrichment, hence the current concern that Iran’s nascent plant at Natanz has a military purpose. China could not make the Pakistan-supplied centrifuges work properly, so replaced them with Russian centrifuges. What happened to the Pakistani centrifuges? A good question. They were not returned to Pakistan. Could they have ended up in Iran?

Pakistani nuclear cooperation with Iran began after a visit from Ali Khamenei, then Iran’s president and now supreme leader, in 1986. The collaboration was ordered by President Zia ul-Haq, then Pakistan’s military dictator who, five years earlier, had publicly declared that Pakistan would “acquire [nuclear technology] . . . even if we have to beg, borrow or steal [it]“.

Many outsiders first heard of Khan after Colonel Gadaffi’s sudden announcement in 2003 that Libya was giving up its weapons of mass destruction programmes. Foreign businessmen who had supplied Khan had been commissioned by the Libyans to build an enrichment plant. The whole deal had been instigated by Bhutto, assassinated in December 2007, but, confronted by the US, Musharraf blamed Khan, prompting the nuclear scientist’s arrest and incarceration. The explanation suited Washington which, post 9/11, needed Pakistan’s help to fight Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and stop the use of sanctuaries in the border region.

Apart from Iran and Libya, the other main sin laid at Khan’s door is North Korea. Having built an atomic bomb for Pakistan by 1984, Khan had no means of being able to deliver it. One version was adapted for use by Pakistan’s American-supplied F-16 fighter bombers; another was put on the Ghaznavi missile, the first Pakistan-produced version of China’s M-11 rocket. It was not until Khan won authorisation to buy manufacturing rights for North Korea’s No-dong missile that Pakistan had a missile capable of reaching nearly all of neighbouring India, which had first tested a bomb in 1974.

The North Korean missile, known in Pakistan as the Ghauri (and, in Iran, as the Shehab-3), was manufactured at the Kahuta enrichment facility outside Islamabad. While at Kahuta, North Korean scientists helped fit the nuclear warhead to the Ghauri and also learnt about centrifuges.

In his biography, Musharraf said Khan had shipped examples of centrifuges to North Korea. Correct, but with the connivance and at the instruction of the Pakistan military. North Korea now probably has a functioning enrichment plant but has not admitted its existence to US diplomats negotiating the country’s de-nuclearisa-tion. It is already sitting on a stockpile of highly enriched uranium courtesy of Stalin, the Soviet leader.

Musharraf’s depiction of Khan as a rogue agent, and the international acceptance of this tale, had led to moments of farce. To the bemusement of foreign officials, one of the officials sent to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, had been involved in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission’s own clandestine purchasing network.

The notion that Khan might be a credible candidate to be Pakistan’s next president will cause apoplexy for many in Washington DC. But President Bush’s officials realise that, denied access to Khan, they had to rely on the version of what he did supplied to them by Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.

A postscript: Khan’s activities give a new explanation for the crash of President Zia’s C-130 plane in 1988, in which Arnold Raphel, the US ambassador, and General Herbert Wassom, head of the military mission, also died. Wing Commander Mash’hood Hassan, the plane’s pilot, had also been flying Khan’s centrifuge equipment to China. On one such trip he confided in a colleague of Khan that he hated Zia, holding him responsible for the murder of a local religious leader: “The day Zia flies with me, that will be his last flight.” The aircraft plummeted to the ground soon after taking off, killing all on board.

US Seeks Control Over Pak Nukes: Dr Qadeer Khan Wakes Up

By Dr. ABDUL QADEER KHAN
Founder of Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons Defense Systems

August 24/ 2008 – It has been a long time since I expressed my feelings to my nation. I had a great mission in front of me at the time of my return from Europe. The mission was to make Pakistan move ahead, independent and exceptionally capable in its defence.

During those busy days, I could hardly spare any time to convey my
feelings to the Pakistani masses, but even then my work spoke louder than words. I mean I believed that my day and night hard work for the country somehow made me feel constantly in touch with my people. Besides this, I frequently used to voice my emotions and thoughts for development and prosperity of the country and practically worked on them myself. My ideas also reached you through my presence at various events and seminars until that sad day when the country for which I worked so diligently came under the rule of Musharraf.

This dictator mistreated the whole nation for the delight of his
foreign allies and even I could not escape his victimization. He deceived me in the first place and later put me into detention. He not only [unlawfully] confined me but also mentally tortured me and my family, and his sole aim was to make me feel guilty and eventually die with the guilt. Bugging devices were used to interfere in my private family life just to please his foreign heads.

Even the Chief Justice of the country was dragged by his hair to hide this dictator’s crimes. One thing I want to share with you is that even in these times of hardships I did not loose my connection with God and I kept praying for the stability and development of my country. It always soothed me that the love of thousands of Pakistanis for me would never end no matter what this evil ruler of the time might do against me. This feeling kept my relation with my countrymen alive. I passed my days fighting illness while I was thrown into [unlawful] confinement but still my mind could not be detained.

On August 18/ 2008 we have gotten rid of a dictator and the whole
nation is celebrating this day of liberation. At this important juncture I would like to share my few feelings with all of you. I
believe that we all have to make some important decisions at this
stage. The end to dictatorship is no doubt a healthy sign but more
importantly we need to get rid of the policies of that dictator who
brought the country to the verge of destruction.

We need to build our place as an independent sovereign country in the world and for this we would have to take steps that ensure the growth of democracy and end to dictatorship. The democratic parties on the other hand should get ready to address the issues of the masses. The people should strive to get enlightened and fight for their legal rights. The media can play a pivotal role in this regard by giving voice to people’s sentiments.

Many forces have been conspiring for the disintegration of our country and all of us need to join hands in order to defeat them. The conspirators are creating misunderstandings against which the masses should be enlightened.

My dear countrymen, the rule of a dictator has come to an end and I
appeal you all to adhere to the fact that all of us our Pakistanis no
matter we our Punjabis, Sindhis, Balochis, Pathans or migrants [mohajirs]. This country is not a property of any dictator or
personal interests seeking ruler. All Pakistani should work together
to change the system that gave way to dictatorship.

It is to be remembered that every individual, whether Punjabi or
Sindhi, is suffering the same adverse situation but the enemies of
our integrity want us to get parted. We need to defeat these forces
and I would like to quote my own example. I was detained in 2002 and suffered severe mental torture but my love for the country
remained as it was and I kept praying for its stability.

I know the people have faced a lot of cruelty but you should stop and cut the hand of the tyrant who made it all happen to us. You should boldly face the enemy with complete unity. Had Pervez Musharraf read the word of God as well as the past history and taken guidance from it, he might have corrected his actions and doings.

But we all know that God takes away the reasoning power of those He wants to be doomed. The same fact was quoted by a Greek philosopher, centuries ago:

“God maketh those go mad (snatches away their reasoning), He wants destroyed and destructed.”

The God first gave way to Pervez Musharraf, then took away his ability to think and made him miserable in front of 170 million people. He was destined to this fate since he could have become a
hero, had he resigned right after February 18/ 2008 elections. He got punished befittingly for his wrong doings as the person who used to act like a Pharaoh, swinging forth his clenched fist, could not even come out on streets, fearing of being ripped apart by the angry masses. No doubt my God is great and just in his doings.

In the end, I would like to say that uncountable Pakistanis were
facing uncertainty, thinking how God could give way to a tyrant,
murderer and hypocrite that forced them to loose hope, but I always made them remember the word of God. To conclude I pray that may Allah preserve the integrity of Pakistan, help us solve the issues confronting our nation and bestow prosperity on us (Amen).

In Defense of Dr A Qadeer Khan

By HENDRINA KHAN
Wife of Pakistani Nuclear Scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan based in
Islamabad, Pakistan.

Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan did everything he could to achieve his goal and to create a nuclear bomb for Pakistan. He worked 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week. He traveled and was out of the country for a total of about five months a year. It didn’t come easily and that makes it so sad to see the way he is being treated today, with a character assassination campaign being conducted against him.

He has already been living in Islamabad under house arrest for four-
and-a-half years now, without having been accused of or prosecuted for anything. At least I have been able to leave the house for the last
few months without a security guard. At no point has he been allowed
in any way to defend himself against all the government-sponsored
distortions of the truth and the outright lies contained in General
(R) Pervez Musharraf’s memoir.

In the “Line of Fire,” the General wrote: “On the basis of the thorough probe that we conducted in 2003-2004, I can say with confidence that neither the Pakistan Army nor any of the past governments of Pakistan was ever involved or had any knowledge of Abdul Qadir’s proliferation activities. The show was completely and entirely Abdul Qadir’s.”

That statement is quickly refutable if you look at the security measures that were in place at at my husband’s offices and places of work at the firm KRL in Rawalpindi, the nuclear facility in Kahuta and the satellite offices at Sihala and Golra. Despite General Musharraf’s claim, the factual position is that, right from day one, the security and logistics of the project were in the hands of the Pakistan Army. There were hundreds of personnel serving under a brigadier; about half of these were in active service while the other half were retired military personnel. When I say hundreds, I mean a figure closer to 1,000 than 500.

In concrete terms, the Pakistan Air Force and Army personnel there
served under a departmental general director. They were the ones who
packed all the consignments and took them to the airplane for dispatch. Army personnel – along with the secret service Inter-
Services Intelligence (ISI) and later the Strategic Planning Division
(SPD), which controlled all nuclear activities, both military and
civilian – supervised the loading and dispatch of the goods to foreign
countries. They were also led by a General.

Similarly, all incoming consignments were received by KRL personnel in
the presence of the ISI (and later the ISI and SPD), loaded onto the
firm’s own trucks and taken to their final destinations. There are
official records of all of this. Under these circumstances, how would
it have been possible for anyone to virtually run his own security?
Consequently, if the Pakistan Army personnel knew exactly what was
coming in and what was going out, how could Dr. Khan have acted alone?

General Musharraf, on the other hand was three things at one time: He
was the Army Chief, Chief Executive and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff. Does it then seem likely that he knew nothing?

On February 5/ 2004, the president of the then-ruling Pakistan Muslim
League (PML-Q) party and later interim PM, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, told the newspaper Dawn in an interview: “Dr. AQ Khan had saved the country from a major crisis by taking full responsibility for the nuclear proliferation issue. Dr. Khan has taken full responsibility himself in the national interests.” It was the same Shujaat who was the intermediary between the government and my husband. He knew the country was under great pressure from outside – from the Americans. He was very concerned about the country and was looking for a way out of the dilemma. For political reasons he was of the opinion that my husband should take sole blame. My husband, being a great patriot, went along with the idea.

On the same day as Shujaat’s interview, General Musharraf announced at
a press conference at the Army House in Rawalpindi that he had
“accepted the Cabinet suggestion and pardoned Dr. Khan. He also said:
“He is a free man, but he is not allowed to go abroad.”

We never even dreamed that Shujaat or the government would try to harm my husband or that the promises made would not be carried out. The promised freedom – for travel inside Pakistan, for example – never
materialized. With the exception of a visit to the Academy of
Sciences, the unconstitutional house arrest has never been lifted.
Today my husband is treated as a traitor and he is constantly
harassed.

Literally overnight he was cut off from communication with the outside
world and any intellectual stimulation. This active man became a
virtual couch potato. Our mobile phones are monitored, our whole house is fitted with listening devices. Anywhere we sit or walk, guards are conspicuous everywhere. Every aspect of our lives is determined by
these guards.

When my husband needs to go to the dentist, appointments are arranged at night. The clinic staff are made to wait until it is dark. Doctors are the only people he is allowed to see outside the house.

In order to cope with the tremendous stress he was under, my husband
was on anti-depressants for more than three years. My husband’s health has been getting steadily worse. Radical prostate surgery in 2006 was followed only a few months later by deep vein thrombosis. This has
also been very difficult for me.

The authorities claim that my husband’s life is in danger. That is why
they say he is not under “detention” but rather “protective custody,”
but it is definitely illegal detention. That some foreign powers would
like to question my husband is beyond doubt, since they feel that the
information supplied to them by the Pakistani government has been
edited and they only passed on what they wanted to be known. Whether
they would actually go so far as to abduct him as the authorities here claim is an open question. When he was still working actively as a scientist, nobody did anything for my husband’s safety. At the time his life was in real danger.

If the truth were to come out, it would cause the Pakistan Army great
embarrassment because it would prove they were not as innocent as they claim to be and that the blame does not rest solely on one person as they have tried to make the whole world believe. For the concerned
government, it is of course too late today to admit or to confess
everything. The consequences for the country would be too drastic,
especially from the Americans who have been supporting Musharraf
through thick and thin.

The fact that many of the claims made by General Musharraf in his
memoirs are false can be verified in documentation available in the
KRL office. Of course the government would never give permission for
those to be scrutinized. Most of the documents that prove my
statements were removed when the Pakistan Army ransacked our house in April 2006. But a few documents are still in our possession.

The worst thing for my husband is that he was stabbed in the back by
his own people. I often ask myself what crimes it was supposed to be
that my husband actually committed. His duty was to execute the
instructions he was given by the Pakistani government. Pakistan was
not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and no
Pakistani laws were broken.

My husband traveled to North Korea twice, the second visit was made at
the specific request of General Musharraf. Pakistan and North Korea
had enjoyed close cooperation since the days of then-Prime Minister
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s first visit to the country in 1976. My husband
never traveled to Iran, he never visited Libya and he was not involved
in any deals there in any way, as is alleged.

Musharraf and his supporters claim my husband did it all for money.
They allege we are supposed to have millions of dollars stashed away
in bank accounts in Pakistan and abroad. To this day they have not
come up with a single sheet of evidence to support their claims. Not
even our tax returns have been questioned.

We know who truly profited from the business with Libya and North
Korea, and the Pakistan Government and Army also know. At this point,
we are not willing to divulge any names. That would be taking too much
of a risk.

Of course, ideally, no country should have the nuclear bomb. However,
until such a time as there is a fair deal between the “haves” and the
“have nots,” and as long as the “haves” go on building up larger
arsenals of weapons and continue further research, the “have nots”
will not feel safe. They know full well that, when push comes to
shove, they will only have themselves to depend on no matter how many treaties they may have with other countries. Politics is a dirty
game.

So why is the world so afraid of the Pakistani bomb? And why is it
even called the “Islamic Bomb”? Was the American one a “Christian
Bomb”? The Israeli a “Jewish Bomb”? Was the Chinese a “Buddhist” or
“Atheist” bomb? Was the Indian one a “Hindu Bomb”? Right from the time it first became known that Pakistan had a nuclear program, the whole Western world, with America and Britain at the forefront, were up in arms and did all they could to prevent our success. All sorts of media
hype immediately started – from false accusations of stolen documents
to fictitious spy stories of James Bond proportions.

In any case, the Pakistani security forces will do everything in their
might to prevent the truth from ever coming out. Most of all, I fear
they will keep my husband under these conditions until the day he
dies. Will all of those patriotic Pakistani people, who suffered in
one way or another for the sake of the Pakistan nuclear defense
project and gave their best, will be remembered with a stigma attached
to their name? – [Publication Date: Monday, 11 August 2008 – www.InformPress.com

Dr AQ Khan Blames Musharraf

June 26/ 2008  Musharraf is working on the U.S. agenda of dismembering Pakistan by 2015, according to renowned but corrupt to the core Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Dr Khan says that Musharraf is doing whatever the U.S. wants. He said the U.S. plans to break up Pakistan by 2015.

Bitterly criticising the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he
said it is not an international organisation but belongs to the
Americans and Jews, and he is not bound to appear before the IAEA.

 According to the report circulated by the South Asian News Agency, Dr. Khan said that Libya is lying as Tripoli did not get anything from Islamabad. He said they purchased nuclear hardware from the person from whom Pakistan had purchased nuclear hardware. He said he admitted it not because of any fear but in the interest of the country. He said at that time he was told that if he did not accept the allegations, the country might be bombed.

Dr Khan, who is respected as a national hero in Pakistan, said that
 now it is time to show the real picture to the nation because the other side is spreading false stories one after another.

He said that his report would not remain under wraps like the Hamood ur Rehman Commission report because he has told each and everything to his family and the nation would soon know the truth.

About the threat to his life, Dr Khan said he is a true Muslim and
believes that life and death are in the hands of Almighty Allah;
therefore, he is not afraid of death.

About procurement of conventional weapons by Pakistan despite having nuclear weapons, he said they have no value as compared to the nuclear weapons and are being bought just to receive commissions. In this regard, he referred to the construction of flyovers in Karachi and said that in the areas inhabited by the poor, there are big potholes all around. When big projects are executed, he added, these are meant to receive commissions.

Commenting on the personality of Benazir Bhutto, Dr. Khan said she was a wise woman and had she been alive, the situation would have been different now. He feared that she might have been eliminated because she had announced to investigate the affairs of the nuclear programme.

About Nawaz Sharif, Dr Khan said he is a brave man and remains committed to whatever he says. Regarding Asif Zardari, he said that he does not know much about him.

He profusely praised Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and said he is a great person. About his oath under the PCO (Provisional Constitution Order), Dr. Khan recalled that some companions of the Holy Prophet [Muhammad] (peace be upon
him) were non-believers before embracing Islam but they cannot be
remembered as non-believers.
 
Dr. Khan said Benazir Bhutto was assassinated by those very elements that were responsible for forcing him to confess
smuggling of nuclear plans. He disclosed that Israel had once been
 warned of the destruction of Tel Aviv if it ever tried to attack Pakistan.