Coming to terms with Pakistan’s nukes

Pakistan has finally won an “unequivocal endorsement” as a secure nuclear state, said Arif Nizami in the Islamabad News. At the nuclear security summit in Washington last week, not one country cited Pakistan’s nuclear weapons as an issue of concern. Indeed, President Obama “vociferously defended the safety of Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal,” saying: “I feel confident about Pakistan’s security around its nuclear-weapons program.” With those words, Obama effectively legitimized Pakistan as a nuclear state, even though we still have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani was justifiably delighted by the boost to Pakistan’s credibility. “Pakistan is considered no longer part of the problem,” Gilani said, “but part of the solution for stability in the region.”

Sorry, but Gilani’s jubilation sounds like a load of “spin,” said Asif Ezdi, also in the News. Sure, Washington is fairly confident that Pakistan has adequate physical security measures around our nuclear facilities—after all, the U.S. gave us the technical assistance to secure the sites. But the Americans still worry that our military and intelligence services could be “infiltrated by al Qaida sympathizers” and that nukes could fall into terrorist hands that way. The U.S. military has “therefore prepared plans to seize and destroy Pakistan’s nuclear assets in certain eventualities.” If the U.S. ever decides it needs to act on those plans, “it will not be stopped by any promises of good behavior that Obama might have made to Gilani.”

American doubts about Pakistan’s nuclear stability are costing us dearly, said the Lahore Daily Times in an editorial. We’re in the midst of an “energy crisis,” and we desperately need to develop nuclear power plants to generate electricity. But we can’t do that without international help, something along the lines of the civil nuclear cooperation deal the U.S. granted India in 2005. And that’s not going to happen, thanks to the Americans’ “blatant double standards.” India is now allowed to buy nuclear fuel on the open market even though it is the country that “set off the subcontinental arms race” by testing a bomb in the 1970s. Pakistan, meanwhile, is still seen as “not a safe bet” for nuclear materials “because of lingering suspicions about our proliferation record in the past.”

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Face it: “We screwed up,” said Cyril Almeida in the Karachi Dawn. Given that Dr. A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, confessed several years ago to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, you can forgive the Americans for being a bit skeptical about Pakistani nuclear security. Yet there could still be “a way out of the nuclear-pariah morass.” At the summit, Gilani proposed that Pakistan offer its services in refining nuclear fuel for other countries, under U.N. safeguards. Providing such services would put Pakistan “in a category of law abiders rather than nuclear scofflaws.” The way things are now, “keeping Pakistan on the defensive on all things nuclear means the army is on the defensive and in über-suspicious mode”—hardly conducive to peace and stability. “The army may be more reasonable if the world learns to treat its nuclear program more reasonably.”