America and its trans-Atlantic allies have willingly shut their eyes to China’s nuclear proliferation and Beijing’s supply of nuclear know-how to Islamabad. This is in sharp contrast to the West’s castigation of Iran for its nuclear programme. For US, a Pakistani Bomb is good, an Iranian Bomb is bad!
The plot thickens. A purloined letter penned by Pakistani rogue scientist Dr AQ Khan is in the possession of Dutch intelligence following a raid on his niece’s house in Amsterdam; a copy with his London-based daughter, Dina, was destroyed on the instructions of her sobbing father after a harrowing session of ISI interrogation. There was, however, another copy; it belongs to the English journalist Simon Henderson, who has been on the trail of the ‘father’ of Pakistan’s Islamic bomb since the mid-1970s, when Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto ruled the roost in Islamabad as premier. The trail went cold; Henderson’s projected biography of Khan was in deep freeze until 2003, when America’s fraught relationship with Iran reached critical mass. Khan’s dealings with the Tehran regime made him the cynosure of baleful eyes, the ISI’s most of all, since Washington was keen to nobble the errant doctor Frankenstein.
The story was up and running again, ignited by a call from Henderson’s ‘Deep Throat’ telling him of Khan’s renewed interest in establishing contact through a telephonic code. Henderson’s tale in The Sunday Times Magazine (September 20) is as riveting as it is intriguing. He writes: “The first customer of its (Khan Research Laboratories) enrichment plants was China — which itself had supplied Pakistan with enough highly enriched uranium for two nuclear bombs in the summer of 1982,” and subsequently tested one of its own on Pakistan’s behalf in May 1990, as revealed in a book, titled Deception, by two other journalists working for the paper.
After 9/11, US pressure on the Pervez Musharraf Government mounted. The General was probably offered a way out by his American interlocutors: “Work with us and we will support you. Blame all the nuclear nonsense on Khan”. Done. Gen Musharraf’s peans to Khan may have echoed in every corner of Pakistan, yet our hero soon put Khan under house arrest under ISI watch. Li Chew, the senior Minister who ran China’s nuclear weapons programme, had Khan warned about the Pakistan Army: “As long as they need the bomb, they will lick your balls. As soon as you have delivered the bomb, they will kick your balls.” Khan’s demure rephrasing to his wife read: “The ******** first used us and are now playing dirty games with us.”
The West’s haste to impugn Iran for its nuclear ambitions contrasts strangely with its discreet silence on China’s complicity in the illicit traffic of nuclear proliferation, masterminded by their common ally, the Pakistan Government and its military controllers.
Years before the inconvenience of Al Qaeda and the Taliban became corrupting flesh, the Reagan Administration and its immediate successor headed by George Bush Sr provided the protective arm of the CIA around AQ Khan, when Richard Barlow at the agency’s Pakistan desk blew the whistle on his dubious activities. The recalcitrant Barlow got the boot for his refusal to recant. Questions remain about the murky Anglo-American relationship with Pakistan. What are its true contours, what its hidden depths? And how do they fit in with Beijing’s anti-India realpolitik?
The philosopher Hegel went to some pain explaining his “Cunning of Reason;” but it was base cunning surely that drove the Countess of Minto’s triumphal entry in her diary on the troubled future that awaited India following the birth of the All India Muslim League in Dhaka in 1905 after her husband, the viceroy of India, had presided over its rite of passage. Against malevolent odds, India survived partition and has prospered.
Meanwhile, in the north and east of the sub-continent was created an Army cantonment called Pakistan, where are today seeded myriad agonies that wait to blight England’s once green and pleasant land.
Islamic terrorism, incubated in the very Muslim dominion whose seed was blessed with the holy water of the Raj, stalks the United Kingdom. The bomb plot designed to destroy transatlantic airliners in mid-flight and the long gaol sentences awarded the plotters — Tanvir Hussain, Abdulla Ahmed and Assad Sarwar — by a London court, are further evidence of the looming Pakistan-bred Islamic monster.
The late Robin Cook, spoke boldly of an ethical British foreign policy, on assuming office as New Labour’s Foreign Secretary. He cut a forlorn figure on the back benches of the Commons as his master, Mr Tony Blair, announced Britain’s support for the US war to destroy Saddam’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.
And so to a panoramic view of games great and small. British media Piranhas are much given to ritual attacks on Stalin’s August 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler, describing it as the road to World War II. The British Government’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia in the Munich settlement of 1938, which forced the surrender of Czech Sudetenland to Nazi Germany and Hitler’s subsequent march into Prague are rarely mentioned. Similar indulgence marks their approaches to the dilatory tactics of the British delegation at the Moscow talks with the Soviet Union to forge a common front against the Third Reich.
The Right-wing Max Hastings in his recent study of Churchill as warlord refers to the intense hatred of Russia in the higher echelons of the British establishment where hopes burned brightly for a Russo-German conflict of mutual destruction. Stalin refused to oblige, buying time with his own accord with the Fuhrer. He repeated the performance with fascist Japan a year later (without being blamed for Pearl Harbour), thus laying for the Soviet Union the spectre of a war on two fronts. The Germans suffered irreparable loss at Stalingrad when Soviet forces from the far east joined the battle to deliver the coup de grace to Hitler’s vaunted Sixth Army.
Hastings reveals British disbelief at the possibility of French defeat, with an Army ensconced behind the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line; the same British elements dismissed any prospect of sustained Soviet resistance to the Nazi onslaught.
At the fag end of the war, Winston Churchill asked his military staff to draw up a plan for an Anglo-American assault with remnants of the Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union. Operation Unthinkable, as it was called, would have been an act of unsurpassed treachery. Conceived in Churchillian folly as a defence of the national interest, it was never implemented.
Joseph Stalin, true keeper of the seamless robe of grand strategy, had the last word. His stock in Russia is high and rising. Understandably so.
