Pakistan in the News

When the war in Iraq was under discussion, but before it started, a friend of mine said: if you’re worried about a country which has WMDs and which supports Al Qaeda, looking at Iraq doesn’t make any sense at all. Look at Pakistan. They’ve already got the bomb. They helped create the Taliban in Afghanistan. They may be sheltering bin Laden–even at that time the common speculation was that bin Laden had crossed the border to Pakistan (of course, the term “border” is a complete misnomer for the unmarked unpatrolled line on the map which separates Afghanistan and Pakistan’s so-called “tribal areas”).

The only thing Pakistan had going for it at the time was that its local dictator, Musharraf, swore eternal allegiance to the U.S. Since then, nothing has changed. They still have the bomb (and we now know they were selling the technology to other countries). They still support the Taliban (at least, the well-funded and well-armed security service does). The general consensus is that bin Laden is happily living somewhere in the tribal areas (of course this could turn out to be wrong, but I know of no reason to think that it is).

Now Musharraf is showing his dictatorial colors even more clearly, not that they were at all hidden before. How long will we continue to support him? What will we do when he inevitably falls? We’ve got most of our military tied up in Iraq. If a radical Islamist government takes over in Pakistan, they could be a much bigger threat to the U.S. than Iraq could ever have been. Besides all the other reasons that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, it was a terrible worst case analysis.

That said, there is no reason to think that there will be a radical Islamist government in Pakistan. There is a solid bloc of Pakistanis who would be strongly opposed to it. But ensuring some kind of control over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons should have the highest priority for the U.S. The current Pakistani government does not want radical Islamists to get ahold of them. We should take advantage of that to work toward better control.

Let’s not forget that South Africa actually destroyed their nuclear weapons when it became clear that their government was going to change. So there is a precedent for that, although unfortunately not one that Pakistan is likely to follow.