Religion, cricket and nuclear weapons -though perhaps not always in that order - are emotionally charged subjects in Pakistan.
Does Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker know this? Of course. But he's a journalist on the hunt for a scoop, so he can't really be faulted for stringing together juicy titbits into a 7,000-word piece that made front-page headlines for days. There are few in the profession, here and afar, who could resist that kind of temptation.
But now that the furore over Hersh's piece is dying down, its contents and, perhaps more importantly, the subtext need to be examined rationally.
First, the article's central claim: the possibility of American personnel having some direct role, however limited, in the protection of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal in the event of a crisis. Hersh has admitted, or clarified, that he didn't actually write of an agreement between the US and Pakistan, just that the US is "�negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military'.
Let's work with the remote possibility that this may be true. Whoever from the Pakistani side is conducting or has authorised those negotiations needs to be fired or tried, arguably both. There is no room for such people in our nuclear establishment, period. Here's why. In an interview published in Dawn on Wednesday, Hersh has claimed that the Americans' intentions in negotiating the new arrangement is India-centric: because the Indians are unwilling to move troops away from their side of the Pak-India border because of our nuclear weapons, which in turn has made Pakistan unwilling to shift troops to its western border to fight the militants, which in turn has frustrated the Americans, the Americans allegedly hit upon the idea of reassuring the Indians about the security of our nuclear arsenal.
Even if you can suspend belief long enough to get that far in this strategic cuckoo land, Hersh's claim should be enough to shut down the negotiations at once. You don't have to be some crazed nationalist to figure out the implications: India would be playing a role in Pakistan's nuclear defence strategy and the US would be abetting it. That's not just asking the fox to guard the hen house; it's taking a hen, stuffing it in the mouth of the fox, clamping its jaws shut and then asking the fox not to chew.
Retreating to reality, though, there are other explanations for what is the crux of the Hersh story. Perhaps the Americans have made overtures to the Pakistan Army, pointing out additional things they could do to help secure our arsenal.
We know from David Sanger's November 2007 report in The New York Times that the US had spent almost $100m since 9/11 on a classified nuclear security programme for Pakistan. That included training for Pakistani personnel in the US and "�a raft of equipment "” from helicopters to night-vision goggles to nuclear detection equipment'.
At the time, Sanger also reported: "�A second phase of the programme, which would provide more equipment, helicopters and safety devices, is already being discussed in the [Bush] administration, but its dimensions have not been determined.'
So maybe in the discussions on the dimensions of that second phase, the Americans floated the idea of US rapid-reaction security teams and their Pakistani interlocutors appeared to listen politely while mentally tuning out. When one side has an open cheque book and a treasure trove of sophisticated, unrivalled equipment, it behoves the other side to sometimes hear out some of the more cockeyed ideas even.
There is, of course, a third possibility: that Hersh was deliberately fed a lie by his unnamed sources. Here's where the subtext becomes important: Pakistan's nuclear programme and weapons freak out the Americans.
In some respects, Pakistan lucked out that between the imposition of the Symington amendment sanctions in the late '70s and the Pressler amendment sanctions in 1990, the US looked the other way while we built the bomb because it needed our help to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. We probably would have got the bomb anyway, but the economic and political cost would have been much higher.
But there lives on in the US a fierce non-proliferation lobby that is implacably opposed to other states possessing them. Here in Pakistan the Muslim card is often pulled out, but the Americans didn't even like de Gaulle's drive to make France a nuclear-weapons power.
The anti-proliferation hawks in the US foreign policy and nuclear security establishment, though, are no idiots; they can and do adjust to the reality of other states possessing nuclear weapons. But they know how to keep the pressure on states that make them uncomfortable as well as, and this is important, the perceived doves in the US itself.
From afar, it is easy to think of the American state as a monolith, where everyone is always on the same page and agrees on everything. But the American turf wars are legendary "” as indeed they are elsewhere. State department versus defence department, intelligence community versus the military, civilians versus the uniformed lot, the power games are played out in a very different paradigm to the one in Pakistan, but they are nevertheless real and significant.
There is a real possibility that some of Hersh's sources were trying to use the vast media amplifier to send a message to two very different audiences through one set of "�revelations': one, the Pakistan Army; and two, the Obama administration and other camps in the US security establishment.
To the Pakistan Army the message could be read as: you guys think you're so clever kicking up a fuss over the Kerry-Lugar aid? What you can do, we can do one better. Go see what Congress wants to talk about now.
To the Obama administration and the US security establishment, the message would be: the Pakistanis may be fighting some militants, but they haven't done anything about the underlying conditions, in Pakistani society and especially the army, that feed radicalism.
These are nukes we are talking about. Coexisting with conditions that are already keeping us up at night. The country has barely survived 62 years; the half-life of uranium-235 is 700 million years. Do the math.
Whatever the American machinations, though, there is at least one bitter truth that Hersh did expose: the crass, wanton stupidity of some of the highest officials that we have had the misfortune of handling our most sensitive national affairs.
This from the Hersh article: "�Musharraf also confirmed that Pakistan had constructed a huge tunnel system for the transport and storage of nuclear weaponry. "�The tunnels are so deep that a nuclear attack will not touch them,' Musharraf told me, with obvious pride.
The tunnels would make it impossible for the American intelligence community "” "�Big Uncle', as a Pakistani nuclear-weapons expert called it "” to monitor the movements of nuclear components by satellite.'
Can you ever, in your wildest dreams, imagine Clinton or Bush or Blair or Chirac or Jiang Zemin talking glibly about such stuff with a journalist? Makes you think, resignedly, that perhaps we deserve some of the opprobrium and derision and suspicion that keeps coming our way.
cyril.a@gmail.com
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