Due to holidays and other obligations, some time has passed since my first piece on Georgia/Russia and the Ossetian War. I can assure you, however, that the following editorial will more than compensate for the dearth of recent posts.
Yesterday, August 26, the International Herald Tribune headlined the article "Moles, cash and CIA undo a nuclear ring" by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, which elaborated on the whereabouts of a family of Swiss engineers - father Friedrich Tinner and his two sons Urs and Marco - and their involvement in a nuclear technology (mostly machine components for the construction of uranium enrichment centrifuges) smuggling network set up by the infamous Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan for the benefit of 'rogue states' and Pakistan's military establishment.
Most importantly, however, the article exposed the links between the Tinner family and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Due to the excellent investigative journalism of a small group of New York Times reporters, we now know that the CIA recruited the Tinners as moles in Khan's smuggling network, in order to gather intelligence on the nuclear progress of states such as Libya and Iran - according to several interviewed US officials, this intelligence proved instrumental in assessing the threat posed by these regimes. On several occasions, the Agency officers transferred cash to the Tinner family in return for nuclear intelligence.
Even though the Tinners are held in detention in Switzerland and the Swiss government declared in May that all the incriminating evidence had been destroyed to prevent it from falling into the wrong (read 'terrorist') hands, the story of this clandestine cash-for-intel deal is far from over. The agency's involvement in the untangling of Khan's black market was presented as a clear success, or in the words of Broad and Sanger, as an "intelligence coup".
But in my opinion, this conclusion is hypocritical; it tries to justify the Agency's own inability - or unwillingness, if you will - to dismantle the network in the past, by presenting the links with the Tinner family as a cleverly devised, purpose-based mole operation. No doubt the Bush Administration non-proliferation experts want you to believe they were on to the bad guys all the time and only moved in for the kill when the full extent of the network had become apparent.
Of course it is a good thing that the CIA managed to infiltrate Khan's smuggling ring; as explained in his biography by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, "The Nuclear Jihadist", Khan was remarkably indifferent towards the sale of nuclear technology to states with malicious regimes, regardless of ideology, alliance or strategic value. If the network had been able to continue running for another ten years without hindrance, the US list of 'rogue states' would surely managed to assemble a nuclear device; worst case, the nuclear know-how could have been transferred to terrorist organizations - some of which have been or are still being supported by Pakistan's might intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - with close links to individuals in Islamabad's military and nuclear establishment.
On another note, a very good account of Khan's activities, the intricacies of the Pakistani military and state and Western policies towards Pakistan's nuclear development is given in "Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy" by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, from which much of the information in this editorial is drawn.
In this sense, some credit must be given to the CIA officers responsible for the operation, but this is not the case when judging the conduct of their superiors, i.e. the officials directing the CIA's nuclear intelligence gathering and the Defense, State and White House officials responsible for formulating the U.S. Administration's non-proliferation policy. There are two reasons for this, both of which I will discuss hereafter:
1. Bush Administration policy makers - and many of their predecessors - willfully ignored the threat posed by Pakistan's nuclear arms bazaar, and only acted to dismantle it when its existence jeopardized the U.S. relationship with Pakistan as an ally in the War on Terror.
Ever since Pakistan managed to assemble a nuclear device - an event which most people agree occurredin the year 1984, under the rule of the notorious Zia ul-Haq - the Western intelligence community has gathered intel documenting the international sales of nuclear technology (e.g. blueprints, bomb designs, missile parts, machine components and uranium yellowcake, which is needed to produce the nuclear fuel for an atomic bomb).
For example, when it became apparent to the Mossad in the early 1980s that Pakistan was going to reach the final stage of uranium enrichment in its quest for a nuclear bomb, Israel offered to execute an airstrike on the Kahuta enrichment and research facility, using Indian Air Force bases to refuel its fighter jets - all to prevent an Islamic state from acquiring 'The Bomb'.
Likewise, the CIA, British MI6, Indian RAW and International Atomic Energy Agency since 1984 gathered intelligence implicating Khan, his associates and Pakistani government and military officials in the selling of nuclear technology to Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea and even to fundamentalist Jihadis in the Islamic World. The Tinner case, although valuable in assessing the nuclear programmes of Iran and Libya, was by no means a breakthrough in confirming Pakistan's involvement in these sales; after all, this had been an accepted thruth in the Western intelligence community for years.
This is another point of controversy; if the CIA infiltrated Khan's network, was it really to take out the supplier or simply to identify the clients it served? Most likely, the latter is the case, as all the non-proliferation talk coming from the US in recent years has focused on Iran - and before 2003, on Libya to a lesser degree.
From a realist point of view, it is explainable and perhaps even acceptable that Musharraf's support of the U.S. effort against Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan supersedes nuclear non-proliferation or democracy promotion. As Thomas Carothers wrote recently, the Mush & Bush alliance was "the ultimate realist bargain".
But if we take realism as a guiding principle in determining the nature of the US relationship with Pakistan, consider the following: does the importance of Pakistan's military and intelligence support against terrorists outweigh the potential danger of nuclear terrorism, which is all the more likely to directly target the United States?
Clearly, stopping the activities of Khan's nuclear bazaar should rank above the support for an autocratic and militaristic regime with close ties to the same terrorists it claims to be fighting.
2. The CIA operation cannot be dubbed a complete success until the network has been fully undone; declaring it to be inactive is a premature conclusion as many of Khan's nuclear acquaintances and business associates have not been charged or apprehended.
Even though A.Q. Khan was formally indicted by President Musharraf in February 2004, his televised public confession - in which he, to the amazement of most Pakistan experts and non-proliferation specialists, declared to have acted on his own and without the knowledge of the Pakistani government - did not put an end to the activities of his smuggling ring. Not all of Khan's associates, who include dozens of suppliers, middlemen and clients in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia, have been apprehended or even charged.
The flawed U.S. policy of first dealing with Pakistan's clients (invading Iraq, pressuring Iran and galvanizing North Korea into testing a nuclear device) before exerting pressure on Islamabad itself to rein in its nuclear salesmen has given ample warning to members of the network that their activities had been uncovered long before Khan's fall from grace, 9/11 or the advent of the Bush Administration.
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Only time will show the true ramifications of Khan's activities. However disturbing these may be, it is also very worrysome that the U.S. government tends to ignore incriminating intelligence when its policy makers shield ulterior motives in supporting what is effectively a rogue regime covertly proliferating nuclear technology. That this approach is hypocritical given the attention devoted to containing the allegedly 'rogue states' of Iran, Iraq and North Korea is not even the worst error of the Bush administration; it is that the United States is actually placing the Western world's security at risk when it is claiming to be fighting against - potentially nuclear - terrorism.
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