Yes, it’s true, and all thanks to two Republican Presidents who not only willfully ignored evidence of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb making activities, but also aided Pakistan in its acquisition of equipment and materials needed to build nukes from US companies. Furthermore, they violated American laws to do so.
Mark this down in your list of points to bring up whenever Democrats are accused of being weak on National Defense: The reason Pakistan has nuclear weapons is because Presidents Reagan and Bush lied to Congress in order to keep billions of dollars of aid flowing to Pakistan during the 80’s.
Let me repeat that point: REPUBLICANS recklessly ENDANGERED OUR NATIONAL SECURITY when they HELPED PAKISTAN BUILD NUCLEAR BOMBS.
After the break, join me in a trip back down the memory hole as I revisit a 1993 expose by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, describing how Republicans created the threat of Islamic Nuclear Terrorism we face today.
It’s easy to forget sometimes, with all the soft focus, romantic glow in which the media often portrays the Reagan era, that most of the recent national security threats to our country were created by the two Republican administrations that held power for 12 years from 1981 through 1992. Those administrations provided aid to Saddam Hussein (in the forms of arms, cash and access to sensitive materials needed to produce WMD), and helped create Al Qaida through their covert support (i.e., arms, cash and military training) of the muhajadeen (including Osama bin Laden) who opposed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But as Seymour Hersh’s 1993 article demonstrates, nothing they did to aid Saddam and Bin Laden can match the damage done to U.S. national security resulting from the deliberate and unlawful assistance they gave Pakistan in acquiring nuclear weapons.
President Reagan and his national-security aides saw the generals who ran Pakistan as loyal allies in the American proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan: driving the Russians out of Afghanistan was considered far more important than nagging Pakistan about its building of bombs. The Reagan Administration did more than forgo nagging, however; it looked the other way throughout the mid-nineteen-eighties as Pakistan assembled its nuclear arsenal with the aid of many millions of dollars’ worth of restricted, high-tech materials bought inside the United States.
Now let’s be clear about this. What the Reagan administration did was not only reckless, but it was also illegal. Allowing these purchases broke the law in and of themselves, but the Reagan administration’s failure to cutoff all military and economic aid to Pakistan in light of these purchases was also a violation of US law. In 1985, Congress had passed what is known as the the Solarz Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (so named because it was proposed by former Democratic Representative from NY, Stephen J. Solarz). That amendment required the President to “cutoff of all military and economic aid to any . . . non-nuclear nations that illegally export[ed] or attempt[ed] to export nuclear-related materials from the United States.”
Yet even when evidence of repeated violations of US export laws surfaced, Reagan officials assured Congress that they were on top of the situation. Keeping the money flowing to Pakistan and the muhajadeen was simply more important to them than any threat a Pakistani bomb posed to us at the time, or in the future. Hersh again:
There was widespread agreement inside the American intelligence community in 1987 that Pakistan had enough enriched uranium to put together perhaps six nuclear devices. But was it in a form that could actually be used in a warhead? In more precise terms, the unresolved question was this: Had Dr. Khan’s men converted enriched-uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6) into a metal? The question resulted in the design of a highly sensitive C.I.A. operation, which produced irrefutable evidence that Pakistan was capable of manufacturing weapons-grade enriched-uranium metal at a facility near Islamabad–but not at Kahuta. The metal could then be machine-tooled to fit into a warhead small enough to hang under an F-16 wing.
Despite such evidence, the Reagan and Bush Administrations certified Pakistan in 1987, 1988, and 1989 as not having a nuclear weapon, the rationale being that there was no specific evidence that Pakistan had indeed done what it was known to be capable of doing. “There is no question that we had an intelligence basis for not certifying from 1987 on,” Richard Kerr told me. The public American rationale for certification was that the continued flow of American weapons and ammunition to Pakistan would reassure its leadership that it could rely on conventional arms, and thus have no need to go nuclear. It was a very thin argument, as everyone involved knew. The C.I.A.’s role in all this, Kerr said, was merely to supply the political leaders with the best available information and for them to carry on from that point.
And yet we now now that Pakistan’s leading atomic scientist, and the director of it’s nuclear program, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, was also the leader of a clandestine network which sought to spread nuclear weapons technology to other countries, including Libya, Iran and North Korea. Thus, as a direct consequence of their illegal actions, the Reagan and Bush administrations helped spread the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology to some of our most ardent enemies. And not only did this egregious lapse by the Reagan and Bush administrations threaten our security, but it led to the greatest nuclear crisis the world has faced: the nuclear showdown between India and Pakistan that occurred in May,1990.
The two South Asian neighbors were at the brink of war in the spring of 1990 because of growing tensions over Kashmir because of Pakistani ISI support of militants fighting in Indian controlled Kashmir.
. . . Despite a civilian government being in power in Pakistan, the military continued to retain control over its nuclear programme, including the use of nuclear diplomacy. Under Zia, Pakistan had adopted a strategy of undermining Indian security through a war by proxy in Jammu and Kashmir. By 1990, the Kashmir insurgency was at its peak as perceived by Pakistan, and India-Pakistan relations had deteriorated. On 13 March 1990, Benazir Bhutto travelled to Pakistan controlled Kashmir and promised a “thousand-year war” to support the militants.
It was under these circumstances that Pakistan implicitly threatened to use nuclear weapons if India intervened militarily, across the Line of Control (LoC) and, therefore, persuaded the United States to act as an intermediary.
And that’s not my opinion regarding the severity of the India-Pakistan crisis, that was the view of a senior CIA official at the time:
Richard J. Kerr, an even-tempered, low-key career intelligence officer, who, as deputy director of the C.I.A., coordinated the intelligence reporting in May of 1990, described the confrontation in stark terms: “It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I’ve been in the U.S. government. It may be as close as we’ve come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.”
[Note:] For those of you who are interested, Kerr was the former CIA officer who the Bush administration tabbed to conduct an internal investigation of the CIA’s intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq war. Hardly a Democratic partisan hack, in other words. Kerr was also a CIA Soviet analyst at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, so he stands in a unique position to compare these two events.
Yet even after the India-Pakistan nuclear stand-off in 1990, the Bush administration kept a lid on the story and sought to debunk the few news reports that did surface in the media. Why? To cover-up their own illegal policies, a failure which almost led to the outbreak of nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent:
An obvious explanation for the high-level quiet revolves around the fact, haunting to some in the intelligence community, that the Reagan Administration had dramatically aided Pakistan in its pursuit of the bomb. President Reagan and his national-security aides saw the generals who ran Pakistan as loyal allies in the American proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan: driving the Russians out of Afghanistan was considered far more important than nagging Pakistan about its building of bombs.
I urge you to go and read the entire article when you have the time. Not only does it demonstrate how invaluable Seymour Hersh is as a resource, and how credible his reporting continues to be, but it serves as an object lesson for all of us as to the lengths Republicans will go in pursuit of their ideological agenda. Because the same people who helped carry out that agenda back then (i.e., Cheney and Rumsfeld) are in charge of carrying it out today. And they continue exhibit the same reckless disregard for our National Security interests.
What’s the old adage: Can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Maybe we should add a corollary to that one: Old dogs only know how to perform old tricks. And we, the American public (and the world at large), are the ones who need to be on our guard against those tricks, because we’re the ones who will have to pay the price for their repeated performance.