(03.01.2003)
THE
ISLAMIC BOMB
Abdul Qadeer Khan
We've not yet seen all the fallout from Pakistan's nuclear
proliferation.
BY BERNARD-HENRI LEVY
Tuesday, February 17, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST
PARIS--We
observed the Abdul Qadeer Khan affair, the incredible story of this
Pakistani nuclear scientist who delivered over 15 years--freely and with
impunity--his most sensitive secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
Then we learned that President Musharraf in person, after an interview
from which little or nothing has been divulged, ended up granting Khan
his "pardon." Case closed? End of story? That's what the American
administration, falling oddly in step with the official Pakistani
doctrine, would have us believe. But knowing something of the case--and
being the first French observer, to my knowledge, to have tried to alert
public opinion to the extreme gravity of the situation--I believe that
we are only at the very beginning this story.
Far from ending on Sept. 11, 2001--the day, we are told, on which
"the world changed"--this terrifying nuclear traffic continued until
well after: A last trip to Pyongyang, his thirteenth, was made in June
2002 by the good doctor Khan; not to mention the ship inspected last
August in the Mediterranean, transporting elements of a future nuclear
plant to Libya. The eyes of the world, emulating the eyes of America,
were fixed on Baghdad, while the tentacles of nuclear proliferation were
being extended from Karachi.
We will
soon learn that far from being the overexcited, but in the end isolated,
"Dr. Strangelove" that most of the press has described, Khan was at the
center of an immense network, an incredibly dense web. There were Dubai
front companies, meetings in Casablanca and Istanbul with Iranian
colleagues, complicities in Germany and Holland, Malaysian and
Philippine agents, and detours through Sri Lanka, with Chinese and
London connections--a world of crime and dirty war that the West, mired
in a big game that is beginning to get ahead of it, has so blithely
allowed to develop.
We will
find that, since Pakistan is steered by the iron hand of its secret
service and its army, it is inconceivable that Khan operated alone
without orders or cover. We will understand more precisely that we
cannot repeat without contradiction that, on the one hand, the Pakistani
nuclear arsenal is under control, and that not a warhead can budge
without the authorities' knowledge, and, on the other, that Khan was
acting alone, working on his own account, with no official connivance.
To put it simply and disconcertingly: Pakistan's nuclear weapons need to
be secured. They cannot--will not--be secured by Pakistan alone.
We will
come back to Gen. Musharraf--and Pakistan being what it is, we will come
back also to other generals and ex-generals, such as Mirza Aslam Beg and
Jehangir Karamat, both former army chiefs of staff. But we must not
shift our gaze from the president himself, whose knowledge of Khan's
dark machinations no one in Islamabad doubts, and who, at the very
moment of his confounding, celebrated Khan once more as a "hero." What
does Khan know of what Gen. Musharraf knows? And what does Khan's
daughter, Dina, who announced in London that she has suitcases of
compromising files, know?
And at
last, sooner or later, we will come to the real secret: that of al
Qaeda; and of Khan's links to Lashkar-e-Toiba, the fundamentalist
terrorist group at the heart of al Qaeda; and the fact that this "mad
scientist" is first of all mad about God, a fanatical Islamist who in
his heart and soul believes that the bomb of which he is the father
should belong, if not to the Umma itself, at least to its avant-garde,
as incarnated by al Qaeda. So let us not shrink from measuring the
probability of a nightmare scenario: to wit, a Pakistani state which--in
the shelter of its alliance with an America that is decidedly not
counting inconsistencies--could furnish al Qaeda with the means to take
the ultimate step of its jihad.
How much time will it take for all this to be said? How much longer
will Islamabad's masquerade endure? Next month the American Congress
will vote on the question of three billion dollars in aid to Pakistan:
Will this aspect of things be taken into account? Will demands be made,
at last, in exchange for this aid, for inspections of Pakistani sites,
as well as the installation of a double-key system--a system that some
of us here in Europe have been calling for?
These are
just a few elements I offer--as part of a debate that has scarcely
begun.
Mr. L憝y
is the author, most recently, of "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" (Melville
House, 2003).
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