Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
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1 <strong>Frontline</strong> <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong><br />
to visit the highly guarded secret facility. 25 <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i officials insist<br />
that they received the first indication about nuclear technology being<br />
transferred in 2000, when the ISI conducted a raid on an air force<br />
aircraft that was allegedly carrying nuclear material to North Korea.<br />
Dr Khan was reprimanded, but no action was taken against him at<br />
that point. 26 This is quite intriguing. How could he use an air force<br />
plane without the knowledge and consent of the military leadership?<br />
<strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> later developed its own medium- and long-distance missile<br />
system based on North Korean technology, which is now the mainstay<br />
of the country’s nuclear weapons delivery system.<br />
A few years earlier, before international attention began focusing<br />
on the dangers of proliferation, some <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i scientists had handed<br />
out brochures at trade shows in Germany and elsewhere ‘that implied<br />
that they were willing to sell sensitive centrifuge know-how or items<br />
of equipment’. <strong>The</strong> <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i leaders, who had denied for years that<br />
the scientists at the country’s secret nuclear facility were peddling<br />
advanced nuclear technology, had ignored the most conspicuous<br />
piece of evidence. <strong>The</strong> brochure was quietly circulated to aspiring<br />
nuclear states, and a network of middlemen bore the official seal<br />
‘Government of <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>’ and a photograph of Dr Khan. It offered<br />
for sale components that were spin-offs from <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>’s three-decade<br />
project to build nuclear stockpiles of enriched uranium. 27<br />
It was in October 2003 that international investigators stumbled<br />
upon the most substantive evidence about his role in spreading<br />
nuclear technology. <strong>The</strong> information, pieced together from limited<br />
inspections and the documents turned over to the IAEA, showed that a<br />
centrifuge of <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i design was used at the Iranian nuclear facility. 28<br />
Although Iranian documents submitted to the IAEA made no reference<br />
to <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> itself, the suspicion about the origin of the centrifuge<br />
inevitably fell on <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>’s main nuclear facility, KRL, which had<br />
mastered the requisite technology and where <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>’s atom bomb<br />
was developed. For more than 18 years, <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>’s role had been well<br />
hidden from American intelligence agencies.<br />
Musharraf was stunned when, during a meeting on the sidelines<br />
of the Organization of <strong>Islam</strong>ic Countries (OIC) summit conference in<br />
Kuala Lumpur in September 2003, Iran’s President Khatami cautioned<br />
him about an IAEA investigation into a possible <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> link with<br />
the Iranian nuclear programme. 29 For many years, <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> had<br />
rejected allegations of the involvement of its top scientists in nuclear<br />
proliferation. At about the same time, the US Deputy Secretary of