Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

1 Frontline Pakistan
the hostile relations between newly nuclearized India and Pakistan.
There has also been concern of the Pakistani nuclear device falling
into the hands of Islamic extremists and passed on to other countries.
The worry was not without basis.
For almost three decades, the US and western intelligence had been
investigating Dr Khan’s suspected ties with the international nuclear
black-market network, since he began assembling components for
Pakistan’s bomb. The first indication that Dr Khan’s network traded in
bomb designs and nuclear technology emerged in 1995, after United
Nations inspectors in Iraq discovered some documents describing an
offer made to Baghdad before the 1990–1991 Gulf War. According to
an internal Iraqi memorandum, dated 10 June 1990, an unidentified
middleman claiming to represent Dr Khan had offered Saddam Hussein
help to ‘establish a project to enrich uranium and manufacture a
nuclear weapon’. 20 There were also some reports that Dr Khan himself
had made several clandestine trips to Iraq.
In 1998, Pakistani government investigated the middleman’s letter
at the request of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and
declared the offer a fraud. The nuclear agency listed the memo as a
key unresolved issue in a 1999 UN report on Iraq’s arms programmes.
Meanwhile, American authorities had gathered some evidence on
Pakistan’s nuclear cooperation with North Korea. In the summer of
2001, American spy satellites spotted missile parts being loaded into
a Pakistani cargo plane near the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.
The parts were delivered in return for Pakistan’s nuclear technology. 21
The report led to some US sanctions against KRL, but Washington was
still hesitant to impose sanctions against Pakistan for nuclear transfer
because of insufficient evidence.
Musharraf had a strong dislike for Dr Khan. ‘He is bad news,’ he
often said privately of Khan. The increasing American pressure
offered a good opportunity to sideline the scientist. In March 2001,
he removed Dr Khan as head of KRL and appointed him presidential
adviser on science, with the rank of federal minister, a post he held
until January 2004. Dr Khan was stunned when he heard the news
on national television. At first he refused to accept the move, but had
little choice. The action did not satisfy the American administration.
The US officials suspected that the exchanges with North Korea had
continued even after Dr Khan’s removal. In July 2002, US spy satellites
again spotted Pakistani military cargo planes picking up missile parts
in North Korea. Meanwhile, in June 2001, the US Deputy Secretary of