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AQ Khan, pilfering and the honour of Pathans

Syed Badrui. Ahsan
***Ground 'realities
One final word on Abdul Qadeer Khan. He makes much of the fact that he is a Pathan that no one dare play around with the honour of a Pathan. He is absolutely right that Pathans have an acute sense of self-esteem inasmuch as they have respect for people of moral strength and stature. But he is wrong to place himself in the same league as other Pathans, for Pathans do not pilfer. And they do not go around conspiring to make the world more vulnerable to dangers than it already is.***
ABDUL Qadecr Khan did not provide Iran and Libya with nuclear technology out of any financial greed. That is the result of a Pakistan government investigation into the activities of the man who has been in internment for the last four years.
Maybe Khan was not interested in money, but it has been made abundantly clear that he gave Tehran and Tripoli the nuclear know-how owing to ideological reasons. It was a simple case of one Muslim doing other Muslims a favour, of a disreputablesort
And there comes the big question of just how much of a risk Khan and others in the Pakistani civil-military establishment put a whole world into through those dealings with states that cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. If you recall the irritant that was Gaddafi's Libya till recent times, with all that shooting down of a passenger aircraft over Lockerbie in 1988, with its grant of refuge and assistance to men who shot down Bangladesh's pre-eminent leaders in 1975, indeed with all manner of notoriety, it becomes pretty obvious what Abdul Qadeer Khan was aiming at.
The sad part of the AQ Khan story is that efforts are now underway, following the eclipse of General Musharraf, to rehabilitate the man whose chief contribution to the history of the world lies in the way he surreptitiously pilfered nuclear technology from Europe and applied it to the making of what would eventually be Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. That bomb came in 1998; and Khan was hailed by Pakistanis as a hero, the man who was (he father of the Pakistani bomb.
Some went a ludicrous step further, to suggest that he was the father of the Islamic bomb. It was as if Islam had nothing better to do than produce killing machines. And yet it was this man who was feted for years on end by successive Pakistani regimes as the individual who had charted a new course for Pakistan.
He first drew national attention when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto asked him over to a cup of tea. And, remember, it was Bhutto who made people guffaw with his loud pronouncements in the mid-1960s about Pakistan willing to eat grass and yet determined to produce an atomic bomb. It was quite natural, therefore, for Bhutto to listen to what AQ Khan had to say on his plans for a
nuclearised Pakistan. That meeting was to lead to others, with other men and women in power in Pakistan.
And through all those meetings, which Abdul Qadeer Khan arranged or influenced into taking place, a clear pattern emerged of what he and his cohorts were after. Khan consistently undermined the chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, Munir Ahmed Khan, and took advantage of his growing celebrity status to undermine and undercut anyone who crossed his path. Of course, he was not alone. To a very large extent, it was his proximity to the powers that be which elevated him swiftly to a position he quite clearly did not deserve.
The agents he sent out to the West, including the United States, to scour for centrifuge parts under cover of industrial or business requirements, came under intelligence scrutiny. Some were arrested and then mysteriously released. Ironically, despite their full awareness of Pakistan’s developing, stealthy nuclear program, successive US administrations looked the other way.
Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter knew what AQ Khan and his friends were engaged in. They
kept their silence. It was outrage that went up by a good number of notches in the eight years of the Reagan administration.
Obsessed with defeating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and, therefore, keen to have Pakistan as an ally, it ignored repeated findings by congressmen and senators pointing to escalating phases of the Pakistani nuclear program and, instead, routinely came up with certification that Islamabad possessed no nuclear bomb and was not likely to produce one.
Investigators like Richard Barlow, driven by zeal to expose AQ Khan's surreptitious activities and the Pakistani government’s quiet but insistent encouragement of his plans, were run out of town. A concerted campaign to portray Barlow as mentally unstable, as a man whose marriage was on the rocks because of his supposed extra-marital affairs, was undertaken by elements unwilling to have anything come in the way of Washington’s links with Islamabad over the conflict in Afghanistan.
Perhaps one of the more bizarre aspects of Abdul Qadeer Khan's smuggling of nuclear technology into Pakistan, and its subsequent development in
Kahuta (the sprawling establishment, named after him, was known as Khan Research Laboratories), was the fact that the Pakistani military soon came to be identified with the project.
General Ziaul I laq dropped by at Kahuta, and was clearly impressed with the secrecy in which the bomb-making industry was working. His successor Ghulam Ishaq Khan demonstrated, at every turn, the government's support for AQ Khan's project. And AQ Khan was a national hero, even to politicians who were carefully kept isolated from the nuclear program.
In her first stint as prime minister, Benazir Bhutto discovered to her horror and embarrassment that while Abdul Qadeer Khan remained reluctant to answer her summons to a meeting with her at the prime minister's office, he was absolutely ready and willing to meet President Ishaq Khan and army chief Aslam Beg at the presidential palace to discuss the progress of the nuclear program. Bhutto was conveniently shut out of the conference, though she did turn up unannounced at one such meeting on her own.
Abdul Qadeer Khan may yet be a heroic figure to many Pakistanis, especially those who have for years seen in Pakistan's nuclear program a symbol of Islamic firepower. The bigger truth is that he is as guilty as some others, such as those who have worked in the shadows for years to develop the Israeli nuclear industry, of doing precisely those things which have endangered the security of the
world. Worse, he has hugely increased the risks of rogue or failing states coming by nuclear weapons and then passing on the lessons of their experience to questionable regimes.
AQ Khan and his men, with the connivance and assistance of individuals such as Aslam Beg and Hamid Gul, went peddling their technical know-how before Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And this was at a time when Kuwait had already come under Baghdad's occupation in August 1990, prompting the West and its allies into forging a coalition against the Iraqi invaders.
At around the same time, Pakistan was offering similar nuclear technology to the clerics in charge of Iran. And then, of course, there was Libya, a state which in the times of George W. Bush chose to come clean with its nuclear plans and indeed dismantle them in order to gain re-entry into the councils of the civilised world.
One final word on Abdul Qadeer Khan. He makes much of the fact that he is a Pathan, that no one dare play around with the honour of a Pathan. He is absolutely right that Pathans have an acute sense of self-esteem inasmuch as they have respect for people of moral strength and stature. But he is wrong to place himself in the same league as other Pathans, for Pathans do not pilfer. And they do not go around conspiring to make the world more vulnerable to dangers than it already is.
Syed Badrui Ahsan s Editor, Current Affairs. The DaiyStar