Largely drowned out by more spectacular proliferation news from Iran and North Korea, Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has acknowledged in Congressional testimony last month that it was known to him that Pakistan was expanding its nuclear arsenal (estimated at approximately 60 warheads in 2007) even as it was embroiled in heavy fighting with an ever-growing insurgency of radical Islamists some 60 miles from the capital, Islamabad. According to The New York Times, when asked by Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) whether he had any evidence that Pakistan was increasing the number of weapons at its disposal, Mullen gave a one-word answer: “Yes.” He did not elaborate.
Successive U.S. administrations have been plagued by acute worries about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arms. The revelation, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, that rogue nuclear scientists from Pakistan had met with Osama bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, led many to embrace worst-case scenarios. Over the following years, the U.S. invested as much as $100 million in programs designed to keep the weapons safe. While the Pakistanis, jealously guarding their sovereignty, have never exposed how that money was actually used – both out of a sense of national pride and out of fear that the U.S. might try to seize or neutralize their arsenal in case they think a breakdown is imminent – their constant assurances and furious reactions to any indication of insufficient safety arrangements seem to have gone some way towards assuring U.S. policy-makers. But the most recent achievements of the Taliban insurgents, apparently reversed by the Pakistani army in the offensive it launched last month, and the simultaneous confirmation by America’s most senior military officer of the intensification of Pakistan’s nuclear efforts have once again heightened fears that some of these weapons or critical knowledge about them might eventually fall into the wrong hands. While the Pakistani army’s self-declared victory in the Swat valley and the sheer multitude of foreign policy challenges facing the U.S. at this time seem to have displaced Pakistan from the top of the agenda for the moment, these fears are hardly unwarranted.
Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists a few days after Mullen made his statement, Lawrence Korb, who had just returned from a trip to Pakistan, said that the media had overblown the dangers the insurgency poses to the country and its nuclear arsenal:
[T]he day we arrived, the U.S. media gave the impression that Pakistan was in dire straits. Some were going so far as to compare the current condition of Pakistan to that of contemporary Somalia, a failed state already in or about to be engulfed in chaos. Similarly, some high-level officials in the Obama administration contend Pakistan resembles Iran in 1979, a Muslim country about to be taken over by a group of radical Islamists. Others see Islamabad as Saigon in 1975, a capital city about to fall to an advancing enemy. Finally, some analysts compare today’s Pakistan to that of Afghanistan in the 1990s, when the Taliban stepped into a chaotic situation and restored order. After my trip, though, I believe that all of these comparisons are inaccurate and overstated. Pakistan isn’t about to descend into chaos, nor will it be taken over by the Taliban any time soon.
He goes on to write that the majority of Pakistanis does not support the insurgency and that the army is strong enough to keep the Taliban away from the country’s geographical and political center. “I am convinced,” he says, “that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons won’t be allowed to fall into the hands of the insurgents.” According to Mr Korb, America’s military and civilian leadership share this view, because “the weapons now are firmly under the control of the Pakistani Army; the army sees them as its main counterweight to India’s large conventional forces and nuclear capabilities, which it views as the real existential threat to Pakistan. That’s exactly why it’s currently increasing its nuclear arsenal.”
Mr Obama might trust the Pakistani military to protect its weapons, but I do not find these remarks very reassuring. In fact, I think it is profoundly disturbing that Pakistan’s army still thinks of India “as the real existential threat to Pakistan,” while their country is slowly but steadily rotting away from the inside. For one, this means that at least some of the nuclear weapons will continue to be stored where they are potentially most susceptible to seizure by non-state actors, far from the border with India and thus quite close to the Afghan border, because they might be overrun in case of a massive Indian offensive, which is next to unthinkable at this time.
Secondly, its fear of an Indian attack means that the army will probably continue to devote insufficient resources to its reluctant counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts. (There are a number of other factors which also contribute to this.) Most of Pakistan’s high quality forces are stationed along the border with India and are likely to stay there. It is hard to say how well the 16,000 troops deployed in the recent offensive have fared against the Taliban, but one need not be a COIN expert to know that the aim must have been quite limited – to drive the Taliban back a few miles and silence Washington’s calls for more vigorous action – because otherwise, the scope of the operation would be grossly insufficient. Given the small proportion of forces implicated in the offensive (the Pakistani army numbers 550,000, paramilitary forces not included) and their poor performance in combat to this point (it is not clear whether this is due to a lack of will or a lack of capability) any progress that has been made over the past weeks is likely to be transitory. What is more, tens of thousands of soldiers have been deployed in the areas where the insurgency is most active for years and they have done little to contain it. Thus, even if the nuclear arsenal is safe in the short run, the Taliban will probably continue to strengthen in the long run, unless the army changes its approach quite radically.
The Pakistanis have most certainly taken multiple measures to protect their warheads from seizure. For example, the weapons are widely thought to be disassembled, with different parts stored in different locations. For all we know, they cannot be activated without proper authentication from at least two authorized individuals. It is not known, however, if these measures are adequate under the given circumstances. And even if adequate precautions are taken, blatant security breaches can never be ruled out – remember the 2007 USAF nuclear weapons incident, when 6 nuclear warheads were mistakenly attached to an unguarded B-52 and remained unaccounted for for a period of 36 hours. Given that the Taliban and al-Qaeda will probably spare no effort to get hold of a nuclear weapon, a scenario in which one or more warheads are seized by extremists or passed on to them by rogue elements within Pakistan’s defense establishment is hardly implausible, even if these forces should never manage to take over Pakistan.
Combine a thriving insurgency of religious extremists with a marked increase in the number of nuclear weapons, indirectly paid for by U.S. aid (which frees up vast amounts of resources) and potentially available for seizure, add in rampant corruption on all levels of Pakistan’s political and defense establishment, and you have a recipe for insomnia in Washington. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is not always an enemy that constitutes the gravest threat to a great power’s security interests. While much more has been said and written about the dangers emanating from the nuclear program of Iran, a long-standing enemy of the United States, it might actually be the nuclear program of Pakistan, which has been considered a friend for the better part of a decade, that constitutes the more serious threat to American interests in the region and beyond. It is there that the Bush administration’s assertion, in the now discredited 2002 National Security Strategy, that “[t]he gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology” might prove true, after all.
) of Iranians who voted for Mousavi (or one of the other candidates) that he stole the election creates a legitimacy problem of some magnitude for the president.