Aid and Comfort to the Worthy

"Aiding the anti-Soviet war trumped non-proliferation policy interests ... (and the administration of then-president Ronald Reagan) used loopholes in U.S. non-proliferation laws to avoid the enforcement of sanctions on Pakistan."
"The high priority given to a close U.S.-Pakistan relationship may have encouraged, as some journalists have alleged, State Department officials to warn the Pakistanis of the imminent arrest of their agents."
U.S. National Security Archives review, George Washington University and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project

American realpolitik in action rivals any that other self-serving governments choose to practise in their perceived interests. Just as the current President of the United States is engaging in a kind of diplomatic, high-level enabling with respect to the Iran-Nuclear Technology file, under the pretext that in so doing, it, along with its allies, are evading the potential for war when what they are doing is delaying the potential for a war that could eclipse all earlier world conflicts, so too did a previous administration look the other way when it had an obligation to put a halt to proliferation.

The U.S. administration, in 1987 had the opportunity to make an effort to put a halt to Pakistan's illicit ambitions to achieve nuclear weapons, but it decided to trade in that obligation for what appeared at that time to be a greater need to uphold their anti-Soviet stance during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was a twofold purpose to the perfidious strategies devised by the White House and the CIA; to train, arm and fund a mujaheddin group whose purpose was to fight a guerrilla war against the Soviet military.

And we know what that got the world; from that group of jihadists answering the call to defeat a foreign invader on land consecrated to Islam, was born the spark that led to al-Qaeda when a Saudi Arabian jihadist by the name of Osama bin Laden conceived of nurturing a battle-hardened group of fighters as "a vehicle to promote a global jihadi revolution". And they succeeded through determination, a love of conflict, and a hatred for the West, enabled by the wealthy in Saudi Arabia who supported them financially, while managing to keep them out of Saudi Arabia.

And, in the event, senior administration arms control officials in the United States were ragingly furious that they were expected not to enforce the 1985 U.S. non-proliferation law to honour their obligations, and to take steps to halt the $4-billion in annual American military and economic subsidies to the the government of then Pakistani dictator, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. The U.S. wanted Pakistan on side to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan, and to funnel funding to the mujaheddin.

This absurdity would repeat itself many years later when it was the United States with its allies under the imprimatur of the United Nations that invaded Afghanistan to rout the Taliban and their honoured guests, al-Qaeda and bin Laden, post 9/11. In effect, the U.S. was battling the very guerrilla militias it had paid previously to train and to arm. And Pakistan was giving haven to the very Taliban that were warring with NATO troops, while continuing to accept its yearly stipends in the billions from the United States, to uphold the fiction that it was aligned with NATO in the battle against terrorism.

But of course it was the founder of the Pakistan People's Party, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of later Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who was the father of nuclear Pakistan. He felt that if India could have atomic weapons, then so too should Pakistan.  When he was foreign minister of Pakistan he visited Vienna to confer with a senior technician working as a nuclear engineer, Munir Ahmad Khan; they were in agreement that Pakistan needed a nuclear deterrent to India. And history was made.

A Pakistan-born Canadian businessman, 43-year-old Arshad Pervez, was arrested by U.S. Customs when the U.S. government was informed by an official at Carpenter Steel Corp. in Reading, Pennsylvania, of Pervez's enquiries to purchase 22,000 kilograms of high-strength maraging 350 steel, an alloy for gas centrifuge enrichment technology. He was charged also for attempting to obtain beryllium to boost the intensity of nuclear explosions for Pakistan's secret nuclear weapons program.

The man was convicted in 1987 of conspiracy to file false documents for an export license, for filing false documents and for attempting to export beryllium, a criminal offence under U.S. law. Inan Ul-Haq, a retired Pakistani brigadier-general directing the smuggling operation, managed to escape the U.S. just as authorities were moving in to arrest him. A month after Pervez was convicted and sent to prison for five years, Pakistan was granted a waiver from aid cutoff.

Continued aid to Pakistan, the president declared was "in the national interest."

Continued trust in the good word of a reliable Iranian partner for peace is presumably "in the international interest."