After Syria, Pakistan?

Concerns about Islamabad’s nuclear assets

Just as the US Senate agreed on September 3, 2013, on a joint Republican and Democrat resolution that would give President Barack Hussain Obama the authority to carry out a military strike against Syria, a Washington Post report on the US intelligence community’s “Black Budget” expressed what it called “new levels of distrust of Pakistan” regarding the security of its nuclear programme.

What one finds most chilling about these renewed concerns, particularly in the background of the US now preparing to go to war against the Assad regime in Syria for the purported use of chemical weapons against its civilian population, is the mention about concerns that had not been previously expressed: those over Pakistan’s biological and chemical sites. According to the report, the concerns in US intelligence community about Pakistan and its nuclear programme are so high that the section in the “Black Budget” on containing the spread of illicit weapons divides the world into two explicit categories – “Pakistan and everybody else”.

It will be no wonder than if the US, at some point in the near future, were to trace the trail of chemical weapons in Syria to Pakistan. The Washington Post report does mention one incident at a Turkish port where American interdiction operations targeting other countries stumbled into connections with Pakistan.

What does the report entail for Pakistan? Are contingency plans being laid out to take out Pakistan’s nuclear assets? Will Pakistan be the next target after Syria? These questions are now looming large among the officials and academic experts in Pakistan.

There have been countless table top exercises and definite plans by the United States to take out targets and officials associated with Pakistan’s nuclear programme. In fact there have even been reports that the US has already trained a crack elite unit to seal off and snatch Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and installations in case of militants, possibly inside Pakistan’s armed forces, taking over a nuclear device or materials. There have already been several reported attacks over the past years since 2007 by militants on Pakistani military bases that are thought to may have contained nuclear weapons, and that may have prompted the US to establish such a force.

The signs and the mood in Washington certainly do not augur well for Pakistan, even if one was to assume that the US needs Pakistan in the face of the coming withdrawal of the US forces from Afghanistan in 2014. Although the intensity of the drone attacks along Pakistan border with Afghanistan seems to be subsiding, they have not been completely halted giving rise to suspicions among many security experts in Pakistan that America is already trying to shift the focus of the war in Afghanistan to Pakistan. It will therefore require a genuine reason to do so completely. With the example of the American operation in Abbottabad, the possibility of an operation against its nuclear assets cannot be ruled out altogether, assurances of a robust command and control system notwithstanding.

What could be more tempting than so-called intelligence reports that pro-Islamic militants are reported to be leaving Pakistan to fight in Syria are smuggling toxic materials traced to laboratories in Pakistan?

The release of the report by Washington Post is clearly timed with the coming military action against Syria, and may have been released to send a message to Pakistan, particularly its military that has been accused by US officials of playing double games. US officials have on many occasions openly accused the security establishment in Pakistan of painting itself as a reliable US ally against militants, while at the same time helping some of them in a clandestine manner when it suits their interests. Clearly, there is much to be said about the levels of trust between Pakistan and the United States. It is simply not present on either side even though both profess that they need each other in the face of the coming withdrawal of foreign military forces from Afghanistan in 2014.

It is in this context of mistrust that all Pakistani assurances of having eradicated the procurement networks run by A Q Khan or having established a robust command and control of its nuclear assets will simply be brushed aside in case one was to truly believe the Washington Post report.

To be sure the conditions inside Pakistan – the unstable political environment, the fragility of its economy, the growing social unrest, the fact that Pakistan happens to be one of the eight countries in the world that posses nuclear weapons, some 200 of them in fact, combined with the presence of militants outfits that plague the Pakistani society, help to undermine and impact such assurances.

A dark scenario indeed. The larger question is whether policymakers in Pakistan would realise the gravity of the report in the Washington Post and the impending consequences of the Black Budget, or choose as always to be dismissive?

The writer is Director (America/Programmes), Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad. The views expressed here are of the author and do not represent those of the institute, or the government.