Fearing Pakistan

Pakistan, which has received in excess of $16-billion in aid from the United States alone in the last nine years, portrays itself as a reliable stalwart in the war against fundamentalist Islamism. All the while the country's administration has accepted American largess it has covertly continued its support of terrorism through funding, encouraging and arming, along with offering sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban. And by extension to al-Qaeda.

Even while for years it has been an open secret that al-Qaeda and the Taliban have been sheltered by Pakistan, and that the country's secret service has direct links to both terrorist groups. The Pakistani National Army has over the years aided and assisted the Afghan Taliban in its violently aggressive and deadly raids and subsequent withdrawals from Afghanistan into Pakistan. While the administration blandly assured American authorities that it represents Pakistan's interests to work with the U.S. and NATO, and to shun terror.

American authorities have always had a window of intelligence on these activities, have addressed the situation by pressing for a change of attitude and intention from the Pakistan government, the while continuing to hand over funding. Pakistan's co-operation has always been seen to be vital to American needs in subduing the Taliban and in capturing members of al-Qaeda, even while Pakistan saw its interests differently and acted upon that difference.

It has only been in the last several years when the Waziristan area and Northwest Tribal Areas have bred their very own Pakistani Taliban that Islamabad has begun to realize it must do something to save itself. That something turned the national armed forces toward combating the Pakistan Taliban, yet continuing to actively engage and support the Afghan Taliban. The U.S. funds Pakistan which provides the means to the Afghan Taliban to battle NATO soldiers.

A larger concern emerged when the Pakistani Taliban were successful in taking over territories previously administered by tribal North-West Province chiefs and warlords, many of whom were assassinated by the Taliban when they resisted their fiercely Islamist jihadist agenda. Giving them access to the functional administration of large tracts of the geography, and bringing them close to the areas that housed Pakistan's nuclear installations, including nuclear weapons depots.

This country, Pakistan, that has demonstrated its violent antipathy toward a powerful, populous neighbour which also is in possession of nuclear weapons, cannot adequately care for the most basic human needs of its population, yet it continues to attack India and contest it for possession of Kashmir, and it continues to commit itself fiercely to the destabilization of Afghanistan, while appealing to the U.S. for increased funding.

The country is so politically unstable, so quick to become incensed at the very notion of any loss of sovereignty that it will not agree to permitting the United States to remove and safeguard a dangerous stockpile of highly enriched uranium, stored for years beside an ageing research reactor. When the Soviet Union imploded and stockpiles in Russia and Ukraine and elsewhere mouldered and presented as a danger of theft and being sold by scientists to the highest bidder, the countries allowed the U.S. to assist in safely securing the uranium and associated materials.

Even while Pakistan has suffered one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in its memory through massive flooding and the suffering of millions of displaced Pakistanis, employing its army to aid the refugees left with nothing and vulnerable to starvation and disease, the country was engaged in working to produce smaller, tactical nuclear weapons with the capacity to be used on a battlefield against Indian troops. This is a country in possession of deadly nuclear weapons, and which will obviously not hesitate to use them.

This is a country whose conscienceless nuclear scientists had no difficulty with the morality of spreading nuclear technology to other unstable countries of the world like Libya, Iran and North Korea. Currently the U.S. completed an analysis of the situation vis a vis India and Pakistan, and it should come as no surprise that India, provoked continually beyond endurance is itself now prepared to launch a mission termed Cold Start which would effectively "roll the nuclear dice".

"Indian leaders no doubt realize that, although Cold Start is designed to punish Pakistan in a limited manner without triggering a nuclear response, they cannot be sure whether Pakistani leaders will in fact refrain from such a response", wrote an American diplomat, revealed in a recently released document. India could be prevailed upon to refrain from using nuclear weapons, and to use them in the same way that the U.S. and Soviet Russia did, as a deterrent threat; MAD - but obviously the same cannot be said for unstable Pakistan.

From Pakistan comes fanatical jihadists to the attack of Western targets the world over. From Pakistan came the know-how to an insanely warring state like North Korea, and a delusionally lunatic theocracy like Iran on nuclear technology. From Pakistan comes the potential of a nuclear war between itself and its arch enemy, India, initiated by Pakistan. From Pakistan comes the threat of a possible leak or hand-over of weapons-grade materials and technology to al-Qaeda-like associates.

But we have the assurance of a senior Pakistani government official well versed in his country's nuclear weapons program that these concerns are without substance; the world need not have such concerns for "They [the weapons] are secured. That's it. No matter whatever point of view anybody else has."