Bush busts the A.Q. Khan network

Bush's mention of the A.Q. Khan network during the debate caught my attention. From the Washington Post version:

My administration started what's called the Proliferation Security Initiative. Over 60 nations involved with disrupting the trans-shipment of information and/or weapons of mass destruction materials. 

And we've been effective. We busted the A.Q. Khan network. This was a proliferator out of Pakistan that was selling secrets to places like North Korea and Libya. 

That would be Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, or the "Islamic bomb."  Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh devotes a chapter of his Chain of Command (2004) to Pakistan, "A Most Dangerous Friend."  Some of Hersh's reporting on the subject from the New Yorker include:

The Cold Test: What the Administration knew about Pakistan and the North Korean nuclear program  New Yorker 01/20/03

The Deal: Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan’s nuclear black marketers? New Yorker 03/01/04

In the January 2003 article, Hersh describes Pakistan's role in spreading nukes to North Korea.  An important fact about this is that Pakistan was a key ally then in helping the American promote jihad - against the Soviets in Afghanistan.  And part of what that meant in practice was going easy on Pakistan's proliferations activities in the 1980s:

An American intelligence official I spoke with called Pakistan's behavior the "worst nightmare" of the international arms-control community: a Third World country becoming an instrument of proliferation. "The West's primary control of nuclear proliferation was based on technology denial and diplomacy," the official said. "Our fear was, first, that a Third World country would develop nuclear weapons indigenously; and, second, that it would then provide the technology to other countries. This is profound. It changes the world." Pakistan's nuclear program flourished inthe nineteen-eighties, at a time when its military and intelligence forces were working closely with the United States to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The official said, "The transfer of enrichment technology by Pakistan is a direct outgrowth of the failure of the United States to deal with the Pakistani program when we could have done so. We've lost control." [my emphasis]

We thought we were buying big trouble for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan on the cheap by supporting the jihadists in Afghanistan and helping the Saudis develop a worldwide network to finance them.  We're still paying, because that Frankenstein's monster long ago slipped out of its creators' control.

Hersh wrote in that article:

Over the years, there have been sporadic reports of North Korea's contacts with Pakistan, most of them concerning missile sales. Much less has been known about nuclear ties. In the past decade, American intelligence tracked at least thirteen visits to North Korea made by A. Q. Khan, who was then the director of a Pakistani weapons-research laboratory, and who is known as the father of the Pakistani nuclear bomb. This October [2002], after news of the uranium program came out, the Times ran a story suggesting that Pakistan was a possible supplier of centrifuges to North Korea. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's leader, attacked the account as "absolutely baseless," and added, "There is no such thing as collaboration with North Korea in the nuclear area." The White House appeared to take the Musharraf statement at face value. In November, Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters he had been assured by Musharraf that Pakistan was not currently engaging in any nuclear transactions with North Korea. "I have made clear to him that any . . . contact between Pakistan and North Korea we believe would be improper, inappropriate, and would have consequences," Powell said. "President Musharraf understands the seriousness of the issue." After that, Pakistan quickly faded from press coverage of the North Korea story.  [my emphasis]

The 2004 article linked above describes what Bush on Thursday called the bust of the AQ Khan network.  Here's what the "bust" earlier this year looked like:

On February 4th, Dr. Abdul QadeerKhan, who is revered in Pakistan as the father of the country’s nuclear bomb, appeared on a state-run television network in Islamabad and confessed that he had been solely responsible for operating an international black market in nuclear-weapons materials. His confession was accepted by a stony-faced Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s President, who is a former Army general, and who dressed for the occasion in commando fatigues. The next day, on television again, Musharraf, who claimed to be shocked by Khan’s misdeeds, nonetheless pardoned him, citing his service to Pakistan (he called Khan “my hero”). Musharraf told the Times that he had received a specific accounting of Khan’s activities in Iran, North Korea, and Malaysia from the United States only last October. “If they knew earlier, they should have told us,” he said. “Maybe a lot of things would not have happened.”

It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital. In interviews last month in Islamabad, a planned city built four decades ago, politicians, diplomats, and nuclear experts dismissed the Khan confession and the Musharraf pardon with expressions of scorn and disbelief. For two decades, journalists and American and European intelligence agencies have linked Khan and the Pakistani intelligence service, the I.S.I. (Inter-Service Intelligence), to nuclear-technology transfers, and it was hard to credit the idea that the government Khan served had been oblivious. “It is state propaganda,” Samina Ahmed, the director of the Islamabad office of the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization that studies conflict resolution, told me. “The deal is that Khan doesn’t tell what he knows. Everybody is lying. The tragedy of this whole affair is that it doesn’t serve anybody’s needs.” Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who is a member of the Pakistani senate, said with a laugh, “America needed an offering to the gods—blood on the floor. Musharraf told A.Q., ‘Bend over for a spanking.’”

The Bush administration, in a characteristic image-is-everything ploy, needed Pakistani cooperation in the "war on terrorism" and, in particular, with the war in Afghanistan.  So they agreed to this charade, where everyone pretended that Khan was just a rogue operator, when of course the thing was a government operation.  Pakistan has been the world's worst nuclear proliferator in recent times.  But the Bush administration couldn't confront them as such, because of the diplomatic needs of its own approach to the "war on terror."

According to past and present military and intelligence officials, however, Washington’s support for the pardon of Khan was predicated on what Musharraf has agreed to do next: look the other way as the U.S. hunts for Osama bin Laden in a tribal area of northwest Pakistan dominated by the forbidding Hindu Kush mountain range, where he is believed to be operating.

Hersh writes in Chain of Command, updating his reporting in the 2004 article linked above:

The American [military] task force did come to Pakistan in the spring of 2004, as I wrote, but very secretly - and only after Musharraf staged a puzzling offensive of his own in the Hundu [sic] Kush.  In mid-March, the Pakistani government announced that hundreds of its troops were engaged in a bitter battle against Al Qaeda forces and other terrorists.  ...

Over the next two weeks, the Pakistani army fought a series of battles against what were said to be hundreds of militants, with heavy casualties on both sides.  In the end, no senior Al Qaeda were captured and, despite much speculation in the international press, it wasn't clear who was fighting who, or why.  As the New York Times put it, "What exactly had happened in the isolated corner of Pakistan where the battle had raged was a riddle" and that "the pivotal question centered on Pakistan's army: Just how hard was it really trying to capture and kill terrorists?"  One possibility, of course, was that the always-carefu Musharraf was putting up a smokescreen to mask the American Special Forces that were to come.  Those commandos, members of Admiral McRaven's Task Force 121, remained on the hunt inside the Pakistani border for bin Laden throughout the spring and summer of 2004, while Musharraf was able to survive political pressure from the Army and the intelligence service [opposing the American presence].  As the months passed, however, and the American presidential elections grew closer, the crucial question remained: wher was Osama bin Laden?

So, what the United States really got for its agreement to go easy on Pakistan for its proliferation activities is pretty questionable.  Laura Rozen asked in a 09/04/04 look at Dismantling A.Q. Khan's Nuclear Bazaar:

Conventional wisdom has it that Libya's decision to abandon its WMD program and reveal its suppliers led US, UK and IAEA investigators to move to shut down the AQ Khan nuclear network. But I wonder if it didn't go the other way round -- a break in the Khan network gave UK and US officials the evidence on Libya. Whatever the case, why the Bush administration has permitted Pakistan to completely obstruct US and IAEA investigation of Khan's full role is simply inexplicable. Especially considering Khan's assistance not only to Libya, but to the nuclear programs of ticking time bombs, North Korea and Iran.

Daily Kos carried a post about the Bush administration's claims on its brilliant "bust" of Khan's network on 08/14/04:

First, Pakistan gatekeeping information. I've been worried about this since the Asst. Sec. State testified before Congress and admitted that we have never spoken to AQ Khan directly. Consider the implications of this. BushCo has crowed about how much information they've gotten from AQ Khan, the "father of the Pakistan nuclear program." But most of that information was information that we already knew--that Pakistan was trading technologies with North Korea, that Pakistan was dealing nuclear materials to Iran; or it was information that was no longer pressing--we found out AQ Khan dealt to Libya after Libya gave up their nuclear ambitions. But we didn't find out anything that would really have changed the state of Mideast relations.

This is a huge problem because all of our information is coming through Pakistan's intelligence services, the ISI. And the ISI is riddled with people who are more sympathetic to Al Qaeda than they are to the US. So the fact that we're not getting information directly raises the real possibility that we're not learning the most important stuff about AQ Khan's little nuclear convenience store. For example, there was a rumor some time ago that Pakistan had delivered a bomb to Saudi Arabia. I'd love to ask AQ Khan that question directly (as I'm sure our intelligence services would), but no dice. So it's possible that a regime that is even more volatile than Pakistan's also has some nuclear capability--and we don't know for sure.

This article from the Pakistani Daily Times (via Daily Kos 08/03/04) reports on Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca's testimony (the Daily Times article was apparently from 08/03 or 08/02; the date at the Web site comes up as the current date):

Congressman Ackerman asked if the US government or the IAEA had been given “direct access of Dr A.Q. Khan or any of his associates and if not how could it be proved that the information being filtered through the Pakistan government was authentic. Ms Rocca answered, “I can only answer in very abbreviated form in this forum. As you know, it’s an extremely sensitive matter. To my knowledge, we have not had access to A.Q. Khan. And I do not know whether the IAEA has done so, but I do not believe they have.” She said congressional leadership and certain members had been briefed on this issue. She added that some of the information being provided by Pakistan was “being borne out by some of the investigations that we’re seeing elsewhere in the world as well.” She said the US was working “very, very closely” with Pakistan on the A.Q. Khan investigation. Asked about the democratisation of Pakistan, she replied, “Well, I think we’re on track there. The President (Bush) has said that President Musharraf has said he will take off his uniform in the fall. We have a working parliament. There are steps that have been taken, and we’re continuing to work with them on that.” She said she could not say what would happen at the end of the year.

Congressman Gary Ackerman has been outspoken in criticizing the administration's reactions to the AQ Khan revelations about the extent of Pakitan's nuclear proliferation.  In this press release of 06/24/04, he said:

Ackerman said that since President Bush proposed more aid, “the media has been filled with reports of A.Q. Khan’s nuclear network, where it turns out, 2/3 of the axis of evil got their nuclear technology andthat Khan’s agents tried to sell it the other 1/3.” He added that there have been recent reports of uneven cooperation from Pakistan with regard to terrorism generally and al Qaeda particularly and noted that these “reports reach to the very heart of the Administration’s justification for supporting Pakistan.

"I don't think anyone can credibly say that the referendum on General Musharraf's rule, or the parliamentary elections held last year, were either free or fair" Ackerman noted.  "Real democratization in Pakistan just doesn't seem to be high on General Musharraf's list.  We must do more than pretend that it's high on our list."

"The Administration has said repeatedly that weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that they may be acquired by terrorists, is the single biggest threat facing the United States" Ackerman concluded.  "In Pakistan you have the epicenter of both of those threats."