There is a very interesting and troublesome article in The New York Times about Pakistan using US military aid to add to its nuclear arsenal…This is not good news for India or for that matter the rest of the world as it shows the true intensions of the Pakistani government…Instead of focussing on protecting their country from internal militant extremists like the Taliban and LeT, the Pakistani establishment is still very much focussed on its obsession with Kashmir and India…
Pakistan’s nuclear program is based primarily on highly enriched uranium (HEU) that makes its fissile materials particularly vulnerable to diversion…HEU can be used in a relatively simple gun-barrel-type design, which could be easily procured/stolen by terrorists who intend to assemble a crude nuclear weapon…Therefore, security of their nuclear facilities is of utmost importance…Also, if Pakistan doesn’t destroy the Taliban, LeT and other militant extremists within its borders, there is a threat of its nuclear arsenal ending up in the hands of non-state actors…
The [Obama] administration’s effort is complicated by the fact that Pakistan is producing an unknown amount of new bomb-grade uranium and, once a series of new reactors is completed, bomb-grade plutonium for a new generation of weapons. President Obamahas called for passage of a treaty that would stop all nations from producing more fissile material — the hardest part of making a nuclear weapon — but so far has said nothing in public about Pakistan’s activities [and will continue to say nothing].
India has always known that the Pakistanis are untrustworthy no matter what they say…My only hope is that the Americans have realized it too…But the sad part is that even if they have realized the fact that they have been taken for a ride, they will continue providing military aid to Pakistan because they need the Pakistanis to fight their war in Afghanistan…
P.S. Pakistan could also be stockpiling nuclear weapons in order to sell them to ‘rogue’ countries like Saudi Arabia…After all, it is the worst proliferator of nuclear arms and technology in the world and it needs money…What better way than take US money to make more money for themselves? Also, I think the Pakistani military will not go after the Taliban full on as it needs it to milk the US…
P.P.S.I found the last paragraph of this comment very interesting:
“Unless Pakistan’s leaders commit, in deeds and words, their country’s armed forces and security personnel to eliminating the threat from militant extremists, and unless they make it clear that they are doing so, for the sake of their own future, then no amount of assistance will be effective,” Mr. Levin said.
Yes, Mr. Levin, you are indeed right. But, to eliminate all the militant extremists would require nothing less than a genocide, or at least the guantanamoesque internment of hundreds of thousands of sympathisizers and followers for generations to come. Do you have the stomach for that, good Sir?
The Islamic fundamentalist movement is growing rapidly in that region, not shrinking, and the main reason is because of the perceived inequity and injustice of the system in which the so-called extremists live.
Pakistan has too many poor, hungry, jobless, and very misguided men, young and old, who are offered nothing from their secular government and everything from their religious zealots. Simply put, they’re winning the PR campaign, in both deeds and words, as you so perspicaciously put it, Mr. Levin.
And we will never, never, never win them over with guns and bombs and death and destruction. We’re merely pouring fuel into flames which are only going to get higher and higher… and more and more widespread.
This is serious business, Mr. Levin, and Washington needs serious, honest, and WISE solutions – not status quo geo-political maneuverings that are leading us in only one direction: nuclear holocaust.
Stop fighting them, stop killing them. You can’t and won’t kill them all, but the more you kill, the more sympathisizers you create within their “mainstream” society, and one of these sympathisizers just may someday be one of the tens of thousands of Pakistanis involved in their nuclear arms production.
Actually, it really is only a matter of time before the enemy gets his hands on the bomb. Throughout the course of history no weapon, no matter how big or small or how well-guarded, has been prevented from proliferating around the globe – humans love to kill each other far too much for that.
But nuclear warfare is a different kind of killing all together, isn’t it now? It is the great equalizer, in the Cold War it was the even the perfect peacemaker, and today it is the slothfully surfacing nightmare, the slippery serpent that strikes when least expected. And millions and millions and millions will die, perhaps of their people, and perhaps of ours as well…
Unless, of course, we do the right thing. Come to the realization that western-style freedom and democracy will never take root in Islamic societies due to their religious doctrine… and then leave: militarily, politically, even economically. Just walk away… and dry them up so that they can’t spend billions and billions of American dollars on the bomb, which they will surely pursue, no matter how much handshaking and grinning you politicians do.
Perhaps it’s time we change our perception of the geo-political realities in the world and respond accordingly.
— Col. Michael Stone, Jalalabad, Afghanistan
