Your's Truly - Nixon Did It Better Hannukah Present!
r From The Grumpy Cat!===
A Very Merry Christmas to all my many Christian friends and a Year of Good Health!
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Does Obama know what he is doing in Syria?
Has he appeased Islam? You decide. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Beware Europe! (See 2 below.)
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Is Pakistan a nuclear threat? (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Message body
Obama’s Dangerous Syrian CharadeBy JONATHAN S. TOBIN
Last Friday the world was treated to another example of Secretary of State John Kerry declaring a diplomatic victory. But unlike the Iran nuclear deal, even the Obama administration’s reliable media cheering section isn’t shouting hosanna about the conclusion of an agreement to end the civil war in Syria. The unanimous vote in the United Nations Security Council might be interpreted as a sign that the international community is finally getting serious about ending the conflict. Yet this deal, which serves as the linchpin for President Obama’s formula for defeating ISIS, is widely considered to have very little if any chance of success isn’t likely to do much good. To the contrary, far from being just another one of Kerry’s naïve exercises, the consequences of the diplomatic charade at the UN are serious.
The Syrian peace deal was four and a half years in the making. But the discussion as to how this was achieved after years of stalemate tells us all we need to know about why it won’t work.
The quarter million people killed in Syria over the past year wasn’t enough to motivate Obama to act to try to stop the killing. But the arrival of some of the four million refugees in Syria at the doorsteps of the West convinced him to give Russia and Iran the terms they demanded. The deal calls for a ceasefire, the end of foreign interventions in the fighting and negotiations about a new government. But Assad will stay, and that’s the fatal flaw in the deal Kerry negotiated.
So long as there is no guarantee that the butcher Assad is going, there is no way that the various Syrian rebel factions will accept this. So long as Assad is ruling in Damascus, many Sunnis will look to ISIS for protection. There is no force in place to monitor or enforce the ceasefire, nor any real agreement on what force will defeat ISIS — which occupies much of Syria — or how that will be accomplished.
In other words, the deal is an empty gesture whose only tangible impact will be to make it even harder to envision a future where what’s left of Syria does not remain a client state of both Russia and Iran or an Islamist stronghold.
We could put this diplomatic effort down as just a nice try that was worth the effort even if the odds were against Kerry. But there is more wrong here than just a belated effort on the part of the administration to do something to stop the Syrian slaughter that will almost certainly fail.
At this point, lamenting Obama’s years of dithering and humiliation on Syria including the disastrous “red line” threat about Assad’s use of chemical weaponsthat the president retracted, is a matter for the historians to unravel. Now the issue in Syria is the creation of an Islamist caliphate that presents a threat to the entire region and the world. The only answer to that threat is for the West and Arab nations to put together a force that will defeat these terrorists on the ground. That’s something that is not in the interests of either Russia or Iran at the moment since Assad benefits from having them slaughter other Syrians opposed to his continued rule. But the administration persists in pretending that it will defeat ISIS via a peace plan that is ready to unravel even before the ink is dry and a limited use of force that will do nothing to alter the facts on the ground.
The peace deal proves that Obama continues to be a hostage to his illusions about the goodwill of the Iranians and unable to stand up to Vladimir Putin. The deal isn’t so much a proposal to actually solve the Syrian dilemma as a fig leaf for a policy of acquiescing to the permanence of the current unholy balance of forces in that country between Assad and his backers on the one hand and ISIS on the other.
As always, Obama and Kerry will claim there are no reasonable alternatives to their policy. They’re right that there are no good choices available to the U.S. in a Middle East that the president has allowed to get out of control because of his precipitate withdrawal from Iraq. The only choice the West has ever had with regard to ISIS remains the use of a massive allied force — composed of both Western troops and Arab armies — to defeat ISIS and then to force Assad out in order to provide some stability. Americans may have no appetite for that answer, but if they are worried about the rise of ISIS then sooner or later they will have to acknowledge reality. Until then, we are left with a Middle East that will increasingly be dominated by Iran, Russia, and a terrorist caliphate. A diplomatic charade that leaves that in place and postpones the creation of a genuine force against ISIS is worse than no peace deal at all.
1a)
After the San Bernardino massacre carried out by jihadists Syed Farook (right) and Tashfeen Malik (left), the perennial debate about “why do they hate us” is on with more intensity than ever since 9/11.
1a)
The United States and Islam: What Is Going On?
- The irony is that no major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the United States to help, respect, please and, yes, appease Islam. And, yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S.
- The politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.” Is it Islamophobia to question a religion whose Middle East leaders often preach “Death to America” and hatred for Western values?
- More prevalent than Islamophobia is Islamophilia, as leftists treat Muslims as children whose feathers should not be ruffled. The Islamophilia crowd invites Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom in atonement of largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era.
- Many Muslims resent the kind of flattery that takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized. The world needs to wake up and ask: What is going on?
With Americans still trying to absorb the shock of San Bernardino massacre, the perennial debate about “why do they hate us” is on with more intensity than ever since 9/11. The irony is that no major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the United States to help, respect, please and, yes, appease Islam. And, yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S.
Both Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson tried to appease the Islamist pirates of North Africa in the hope of persuading them to cease their raids on U.S. commercial ships and stop capturing Americans and selling them as slaves in the Mediterranean. They sent peace missions laden with gifts and cash, and flattered the pirates, successors to Kheireddin, the Red Bearded One, in almost lyrical terms. In the end, however, they had to take military action to cut the head off the snake. However, the episode was soon forgotten, except in the U.S. Marine Corps, where it became part of its folklore, and the U.S., a nation built on the principle of religious freedom, resumed its benevolent attitude towards Islam.
I remember back in the 1980s, the diplomat then in charge of the United Sates counterterrorism program, Robert Oakley, insisted that the U.S. will never be targeted by homegrown Islamist terrorists because it was “their final destination, their last best hope.”
That was the time when groups controlled by Ayatollah Khomeini kidnapped or killed Americans in the Middle East.
So what happened to make that “final destination” a stopover to paradise for martyrs?
Why do so many Muslims hate Americans to the point of wanting to massacre them in their offices as in 9/11 or at a Christmas Party at San Bernardino — despite the fact that the United States is the only major power in modern times to offer Muslims a helping hand when they needed it?
Wasn't it President Woodrow Wilson who insisted at the end of the First World War that the main European imperial powers of the day, Great Britain and France, publicly commit to respecting the right of self-determination for nations freed from the Ottoman yoke? The Americans invented the idea of “mandates” under the League of Nations to prevent the European imperialist world-grabbers from turning their Muslim conquests in the Middle East into a new colonial galaxy. Without that, there would probably have been no independent Arab states in the Levant, at least for decades.
And wasn't it President Harry Truman who in 1946 used eyeball-to-eyeball diplomacy against Soviet despot Josef Stalin to force him to take Russian occupation troops out of Iran's northwestern provinces and forget about his plan of creating a Soviet Iranistan? (At the time the Soviets hadn't yet developed a nuclear arsenal and thought twice before provoking a clash with the U.S.)
It was President Truman again who prevented the British from sharing out mandatory Palestine among their Arab clients, having already taken a big chunk of it to create an emirate for their Hashemite protégés on the east bank of the Jordan.
And it was thanks to U.S. sending the Marines in the nick of time in 1958 that both Lebanon and Jordan managed to retain their independence and avoided becoming early versions of what is Syria today.
Then we had the 1956 crisis, when Britain and France invaded Egypt to prevent the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Wasn't it President Dwight Eisenhower who went against American's oldest allies to let the Egyptians assert their national sovereignty?
From 1961 onwards, President John F. Kennedy exerted immense pressure on France and used his charm on General De Gaulle to accelerate progress towards Algeria's independence. In 1997 Redha Malik, a former Prime Minister of Algeria and key negotiator with France, told me that throughout the Evian peace talks, the Algerian team knew it had “a strong friend in Washington.”
In the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, triggered by Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul-Nasser's quixotic attempt at imposing a blockade in the Strait of Tiran, the U.S. used its clout to persuade the Israelis to stop the war after only six days. In his memoirs, the long-standing Soviet apparatchik and future Prime Minister, Yevgeni Primakov, claims that the Israelis wanted to complete their destruction of Arab air forces by wiping out Nasser's heavy weapons on the ground as well. It was under American pressure that the Israelis agreed to temper their appetite for victory and accepted a ceasefire under the auspices of the United Nations.
The Nasserist regime could live to fight another day, which came in 1973. In the October 1973 war, too, U.S. intervention helped restrain the Israelis, who had built up an invasion force under General Ariel Sharon a stone's-throw from Cairo.
In the Camp David talks that led to peace between Egypt and Israel, intense pressure by President Jimmy Carter forced the Israelis to abandon plans to maintain “security enclaves” inside the Sinai Peninsula, thereby helping President Anwar Sadat recover all of Egypt's lost territory.
In 1982 a multinational force, led by the United States, intervened in Lebanon to stop the Israeli advance beyond the Litani River. That force also helped save the lives of Yasser Arafat and his close associates in the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when, trapped in Beirut, they risked being captured or killed by the Israelis. President Ronald Reagan even arranged for Arafat and his entourage a safe passage to Tunisia, free of charge.
During the lengthy crisis that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the U.S., having at first hesitated to intervene under President George H.W. Bush, assumed a leadership position under President Bill Clinton and helped save the lives of many Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where a Serbian ethnic cleansing master plan was in full application. Later, it was also U.S. military power that helped Kosovo's Albanian majority, overwhelmingly Muslim, achieve independence. Ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova told me in an interview that he had counted on “Europe's conscience to wake up” only to see that it was “the American cavalry” that in the end came to the rescue, while the Europeans “danced around the dying man.”
The U.S. was the only major power to have no state-owned oil company and thus never used its military clout to obtain a share of the Middle East's energy resources.
Should Muslims hate Americans because they refused to disband their military bases on Islamic lands? Again, history shows that the U.S. was the only major power prepared to pack up and leave as soon as its hosts showed it the door.
In 1969, an astonished Col. Moammar Khadafy watched as the Americans closed one of their most important military bases in the Mediterranean, Wheelus, located on Libyan territory, as soon as his newly installed military government asked Washington to leave. A couple of years earlier, it had taken months of bloody battles and tens of thousands of lives before South Yemen was able to force Britain to close its base in Aden.
In 1979, the U.S. had 27,000 military personnel in Iran, operating “listening posts” set up as part of the strategic arms limitation accords to monitor Soviet missile tests. But when the new Islamic regime led by Khomeini asked the U.S. to close the listening posts, which had been approved by the Soviets as well, the Americans did no foot-dragging. The only Americans left behind were diplomats, soon to be seized as hostages by Khomeinist militants.
We witnessed a repeat of that in the 1990s on a grander scale, when the Americans simply packed up and left when the Saudis asked them to close their bases after driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, tangentially also saving Saudi Arabia from Iraqi occupation.
That the U.S. was a friend of Muslims and of Islam was again illustrated when American power helped drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan and, later, liberate Afghans and Iraqis, a total of 50 million Muslims, from the vicious domination of Taliban and the Ba'ath Party.
In 2005, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein Sharestani was publicly wondering why the Americans were not coming to “steal our oil,” which anti-U.S. propaganda claimed had been Washington's key objective in toppling Saddam Hussein. We left there, too.
During the past six decades, the U.S. has been by far the largest donor of aid to more than 40 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations. In the 1940s and '50s, tens of millions of Muslims were saved from starvation and famine thanks to U.S. food aid. And the Point IV program, launched by President Truman, helped eradicate a number of endemic diseases, including smallpox and malaria, which killed large numbers of Muslims each year.
Many Muslims nations have been annually receiving large checks from the U.S. for decades, among them Egypt, which gets $2 billion, and Pakistan, the homeland of San Bernardino killer Syed Farook, which gets $1 billion.
After the San Bernardino massacre carried out by jihadists Syed Farook (right) and Tashfeen Malik (left), the perennial debate about “why do they hate us” is on with more intensity than ever since 9/11.
When the last Islamic Caliph was driven out of Turkey in 1924, he went into exile first to France and then to the United States, where his descendants lived in New York. In fact, the last pretender to the Islamic Caliphate, Ertugul Osman V, died in Manhattan in 2009.
An open society, the U.S. has always welcomed Islamic exiles of all kinds, including some of its own bitter enemies. The only time that the pan-Islamist Hezbollah movement, founded and led by Iran, has ever held an international conference outside Iran or Lebanon was in Austin Texas in 1986, when a number of Latin American branches of the movement were created. Hundreds of former high-ranking Khomeinist civilian and military officials and clerics have ended up in the U.S. as exiles, while many others have their children attending U.S. schools and universities.
Today, half of Islamic Republic President Hassan Rouhani's closest aides are holders of PhDs from U.S. universities, among them his Chief of Staff, Muhammad Nahavandian, a Green Card holder, and his Foreign Minister Muhammad Javad Zarif. (The other half consists of former holders of U.S. hostages in Tehran, among them Defense Minister Hussein Dehqan and Environmental director Masoumeh Ebtekar.)
Quite a few of Osama bin Laden's 50 or so siblings are either holders of U.S. passports or green cards, along with thousands of other Saudis.
Unlike Russia, which has a 200-year history of war against Muslims, having annexed Islamic land at the rate of one square kilometer a day during the 19th century, the U.S. never annexed any Muslim-majority nation. And unlike China, which is still holding its Muslim minority, the Uighurs, in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) surrounded by a ring of steel, the U.S. is not trying to stop a Muslim nation's aspiration after self-determination.
In the 1990s, when Saudi Arabia normalized ties with the People's Republic of China, it shut down the offices of the Uighur exiles in Jeddah. Where did the exiles transfer to? The answer is: Washington DC, since neither Muslim nations nor Europeans would agree to host them.
Since the 1970s, the U.S. has been host to more than five million Muslims from all over the world, many of them fleeing brutal Islamist regimes in their homelands. In a conversation in 2002, Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis expressed the hope that Muslims in the United States and other Western democracies could become “beacons of enlightenment” projecting light back to their old counties. Many of us shared that hope.
Now, however, we see that the opposite is happening. Instead of exporting “light” back to the Muslim world, a growing number of Muslims in Western democracies have become importers of darkness in their new abodes.
Worse still, the politically correct crowd has turned Islam into a new taboo. They brand any criticism of Islam as racist, ethnocentrist or simply vile, all crammed together in the new category of “Islamophobia.”
Is it Islamophobia to question a religion whose Middle East leaders often preach “Death to America” and hatred for Western values?
More prevalent than Islamophobia is Islamophilia, as leftists treat Muslims as children whose feathers should not be ruffled.
The Islamophilia crowd does great disservice to both Western democracies and to Islam itself.
They invite Americans and Europeans to sacrifice part of their own freedom in atonement of largely imaginary sins against Muslims in the colonial and imperialist era. They also invite Muslims in the West to learn how to pose as victims and demand the rewards of victimhood as is the fashion in Europe and America. To the Muslim world at large, the message of Islamophilia is that Muslims need no criticism, although their faith is being transformed into a number of conflicting ideologies dedicated to violence and terror.
Never mind if Islamic theology is all but dead. To say so would be a sign of Islamophobia.
Never mind that God makes only a cameo appearance in mosque sermons almost entirely obsessed with political issues.
All that Western intellectuals or leaders need to do is stop flattering Islam, as President Obama has been doing for the past seven years, claiming that virtually anything worthwhile under the sun has its origin in Islam.
Many Muslims resent that kind of flattery, which takes them for idiots at a time that Islam and Muslims badly need to be criticized. The world needs to wake from its slumber and ask: What is going on?
This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in the New York Post.
Amir Taheri was born in Iran and educated in Tehran, London and Paris. From 1972 until the 1979 Iranian Revolution, he was executive editor-in-chief of Iran's main daily newspaper, Kayhan. He is currently a contributor to the pan-Arab daily, Asharq al-Awsat, and serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
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Illustrative photo of Islamic State militants, with an IS fighter waving the group flag in Fallujah, Iraq, west of Baghdad, June 28, 2015.
(Militant website of IS, via AP)
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Jihadist who fled Syria: IS is planning 'mega attack' in Europe
Illustrative photo of Islamic State militants, with an IS fighter waving the group flag in Fallujah, Iraq, west of Baghdad, June 28, 2015.(Militant website of IS, via AP)
An Islamic State activist from Germany who succeeded in fleeing the group says the terror organization is planning a massive Europe-wide terror attack, according to a report in the Independent on Friday.
Named by the paper as “Harry S.”, the 27-year-old said he and other jihadists from European countries were asked in Syria whether they would be willing to “bring jihad to their homeland.”
“They want something that happens everywhere at the same time,” he said. The man is now incarcerated in a German prison, having been arrested upon his return from Syria.
According to the Independent, he fled Islamic State after having stayed with the group for three months because he could not stand the organization’s brutality.
“Harry” tried to join the terror group in 2014 but was returned to Germany by Turkish authorities, after which he was ordered to check in at a police station twice a week. He nonetheless succeeded in escaping Germany using another man’s passport, and upon reaching Syria was trained for a major terror attack not unlike the one that took place in Paris on November 13.
“Harry” said he was trained to become part of a special unit intended to carry out urban combat missions before detonating suicide vests. But he fled before being dispatched to carry out an attack and was arrested at Germany’s Bremen airport in July.
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“The Pakistani nuclear program is rapidly growing… along with an unusual problem: Pakistan is not a rogue state that might go nuclear, but rather a nuclear state that might go rogue. Such a situation presents an almost endless stream of nightmare scenarios for U.S. policymakers,” wrote Kevin Hulbert, a former CIA Station Chief, in an opinion column on “The Cipher Brief” website in early October.
“While Pakistan is not the most dangerous country in the world, it is probably the most dangerous country for the world, and as such, a serious case for close and continued U.S. engagement with Pakistan can be made. As a country ripe with the triple threat of terrorism, a failing economy and the fastest growing nuclear arsenal, Pakistan has the potential to create more nightmare scenarios for U.S. policymakers than any other country.”
Pakistan is a nuclear state possessing the largest arsenal in the Muslim world: about 120 warheads and the capacity to manufacture 20 warheads per year, according to The Washington Post. Other experts claim that the aforesaid number of warheads is overrated, and that in fact the number is a double-figure one, but much smaller. Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in 1998 (“Chagai-I”) before joining the NPT. That is the reason why it is not currently a part of the Treaty.
Pakistan’s nuclear history began in 1965, with a reactor supplied by the USA in the context of the “Atoms for Peace” program. That PARR-I reactor was activated in 1974. Alongside the official program, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (who subsequently became President of Pakistan), initiated a military nuclear program in 1972. The reason was the defeat of Eastern Pakistan (currently Bangladesh) in the war against India a year previously. In 1974, Pakistan tested a first device – but not yet a bomb. In 1975, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan entered the picture. Khan had been educated in Germany, and he brought along his knowledge of gas centrifuges that he had acquired at a plant of the Urenco Company in Holland. He also brought along uranium enriching technologies stolen from Europe.
Khan assumed responsibility for the establishment of the Kahuta uranium enrichment facility in 1976. Under his leadership, Pakistan developed a global network of smuggling operations, through which it obtained the necessary materials and technologies. By 1986, Pakistan had already produced a sufficient amount of nuclear material for a bomb. A year later, it acquired the knowledge required in order to perform a nuclear explosion.
As stated, Pakistan conducted its first nuclear test in May 1998. In the course of that test, six explosions were initiated. The Los Alamos laboratories in the USA claimed that one of the explosions involved low-grade plutonium. Opinions regarding that claim are divided to this day.
In the early 1990s, estimates claimed that Pakistan possessed 3,000 active centrifuges. In those days, Pakistan aspired to develop plutonium production capabilities. They found a sympathetic shoulder to lean on in China, which helped the Pakistanis build a 40 megawatt reactor at the Joharabad facility. According to US sources, that reactor can produce between 8 and 10 kilograms of plutonium per year – enough for one or two bombs per year. The plutonium separation process takes place in the Chasma reactor at the Rawalpindi sites. According to the fas.org website, this reactor can also produce tritium out of lithium-6 (for the purpose of producing a hydrogen bomb). Both facilities are not supervised by IAEA.
Another major facility in Pakistan’s nuclear program is Khushab, which serves as a production plant for plutonium for nuclear weapons. As stated, the first reactor was established in the 1990s by China. Among other things, China also helped the Pakistanis design their warheads and contributed various elements to the uranium enrichment plants, along with radioactive materials. Over the years, Pakistan also acquired dual-use elements in Russia and Western Europe.
The Khushab facility is located about 200 km south of Islamabad. Originally, the facility consisted of a single reactor. Over the years, Pakistan expanded it with three more reactors in 2002, 2006 and 2011. According to a report on the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) website, the fourth reactor became active in January 2015. Each one of those reactors is capable of producing 10 kg of plutonium per year, namely – a bomb production rate of 14 to 27 bombs per year, according to various estimates. If Pakistan maintains its current production rate, in one decade it will possess the world’s third largest arsenal of nuclear warheads, after the USA and Russia.
Almost Attacked by Israel, Threatened by the Mossad
One of the better known stories around Pakistan involves Khan’s smuggling network. After being indicted for running a worldwide smuggling network for nuclear technology elements, he was placed under house arrest in 2004 and subsequently released in 2009. Khan was apprehended in 2004 after having been accused that over the course of the two previous decades he had shared nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea. Some sources maintain that Khan also helped Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The arrest was made after the CIA had been monitoring Khan’s network for a long time.
The Khan affair introduced the world to the black market of the nuclear world. Khan’s network had centrifuge parts manufactured in Malaysia and purchased various elements in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. In the case of North Korea, missile technology was transferred to Pakistan and centrifuges were transferred to North Korea. In the case of Iran, Khan had planned to sell Iran 50,000 centrifuges in 1987. Eventually, this plan never materialized and Iran purchased from Khan a certain amount of old centrifuges for a lot of money.
In 1979, the Indian intelligence agency intercepted an American document according to which Pakistan intended to conduct a nuclear test very soon. The intelligence agencies of Israel that were monitoring the Pakistanis knew that they were working on a nuclear bomb, but the information betrayed the fast progress made by that country. In view of the new information, Israel planned an attack against the nuclear facility in Kahuta, used by Dr. Khan. The attack was cancelled owing to US pressure, according to the book “Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons” by Adrian Levy & Catherine Scott-Clark. The Reagan administration feared that the attack would undermine American interests in Afghanistan, which Pakistan supported vis-à-vis the Russians. According to various reports, Israel even went as far as building a complete model of the Pakistani nuclear facility in the Negev, for the purpose of training the strike mission pilots. According to the book, the attack was to be staged in March 1984 from the Jamnagar Indian Air Force base in Gujarat. Another source claiming that Israel had planned an attack against the Pakistani nuclear facility is the fas.org website.
Other allegations pertaining to the connection between Pakistan and Israel include a claim according to which in the 1980s, following the attack against the Iraqi nuclear reactor, Pakistan wanted to assure Israel that it was not threatened by Pakistan, in order to prevent a future Israeli attack. For this purpose, the Pakistani President, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, asked the USA to assure Israel that Pakistan would not attack it. According to the same allegation, that is the reason why Israeli officials never mentioned Pakistan as a nuclear threat in their rhetoric. Additionally, it was alleged that Pakistan and Israel established a cooperative alliance between their respective intelligence agencies, ISI and the Mossad.
Another allegation maintains that Israel trained the bodyguards of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. In one case, in 2003, a frequency jammer supplied by Israel even saved the President’s life. Other allegations maintain that this intelligence cooperation revolved around Iran, namely – information collected by ISI was transferred to the Mossad.
Other reports alleged that Pakistan purchased arms from Israel. A British report from 2013 claimed that Israel sold Pakistan Radars, electronic warfare equipment, pilot helmets, fighter aircraft spare parts and engines, optical target acquisition systems, parts for trainer aircraft and other items. Another report, dated 2012, alleged that Turkey sent trucks to Israel to be converted to aircraft refueling trucks for Pakistan.
The same book, Deception, also reports that in the early 1980s, the Mossad threatened a member of Khan’s network, a British national named Peter Griffin. Griffin reported that a Mossad operative sat next to him at a pub and said: “We do not like what you are doing, stop it.” In another case, the Mossad sent a bomb to the home of a German national named Heinz Mebus who had established a fluoride and uranium conversion plant in Pakistan for Khan. The bomb killed Mebus’ dog, but the message was received.
In those years, the 1980s, the Mossad, under the cover of such fronts as “The South Asia Demilitarization Group” or “The Committee for the Safeguarding of the Islamic Revolution” attempted to assassinate members of Khan’s network. The Mossad also threatened such European companies as Alcom Engineering of Italy or CORA Engineering of Switzerland, who were involved in business with Khan – all according to the same book.
Along with the development of fission or fusion-based warheads, Pakistan also developed launching platforms, including short-range launchers such as the Nasr (60 km), nuclear artillery, and long-range launchers such as the Shaheen-III (2,750 km). Additionally, they developed the Babur missile that could be launched from submarines or surface vessels, and the Raad cruise missile. Missile technology was developed at the Kahuta facility. In 1999, Saudi prince Bin Abdul Aziz visited that facility, probably for the purpose of purchasing Ghauri missiles. According to various sources, Saudi Arabia is one of the primary financing sources for the Pakistani nuclear program.
A Threat More Serious than the Iranian Threat
According to a report dated 2011, about 9,000 people in Pakistan are involved in the nuclear project, of whom about 2,000 possess “critical” knowledge about the project. As stated, Pakistan holds an arsenal of between tens and hundreds of nuclear warheads and diversified launching platforms from the ground, from the sea and from the air.
Although Pakistan maintains that their nuclear weapons are properly protected, various experts estimate that in effect, it is a ticking time bomb. The reason for it is the high risk-to-odds ratio regarding the possibility that Pakistan will become a rogue state dominated by fanatic religious elements from al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Additionally, there are concerns that nuclear weapons may find their way into the hands of those organizations who might actually use them. Another concern stems from Pakistan’s history in the context of technology leaks.
In 2001, those concerns reached a peak. The USA and Israel feared that President Musharraf was losing control over Pakistan and planning began for an operation intended to steal some of the nuclear warheads considered to be under risk from Pakistan. It was feared that former employees of the Pakistani intelligence agency ISI might steal 24 such warheads if the President lost control. For this purpose, the special operations units of both countries prepared for a joint operation. According to reports in the Telegraph of Britain, teams of the Israeli unit Sayeret Matkal were sent to the USA in order to train with US units in preparation for the operation that never materialized.
With regard to the ideological aspect, too, Pakistan continues to be a threat to the world. It never adopted the “No First Use” (NFU) doctrine, it is not a part of the NPT or the NSG and some of its facilities are under no supervision. According to various reports, Pakistan also provides a nuclear umbrella to the Gulf States, in particular to Saudi Arabia that bankrolled parts of Pakistan’s nuclear program. Some reports alleged that Saudi Arabia wanted to purchase nuclear strike systems from Pakistan. Pakistan’s shaky economic situation does not bode well regarding the stability of the present regime.
Along with the dangers on the part of the regime, China, which built the nuclear reactors for Pakistan, apparently sold Pakistan outdated technology that is highly probable to produce safety problems. China also intends to build two more electrical power nuclear reactors in the Karachi area in the near future.
Concerns have undoubtedly intensified pursuant to the agreement between Iran and the superpowers. The Middle East has embarked on a nuclear arms race as no country wants to remain devoid of nuclear deterrence opposite Iran. This has made the Pakistani knowledge highly valuable, and in a poor country like Pakistan, with so many people involved in the nuclear industry, this situation is a ‘loophole beckoning to the thief’.
With One Eye Open
Owing to the growing concerns on the part of the USA regarding the Pakistani nuclear program, the White House channeled into Pakistan US$ 30 billion between 2002 and 2015, in an attempt to gain access to the nuclear facilities for supervision purposes. Recently, reports have started floating about a deal being concocted between the two countries. In the context of that deal, Pakistan will be recognized as a nuclear state and will be allowed to maintain a civilian nuclear program in exchange for close supervision over its nuclear and missile program.
Another development is related to the development of a second strike capability by Pakistan. According to a report on the Defense News website, Pakistan will acquire eight Yuan-class SSK submarines from China. Four of those submarines will be built in China and the others will be built at the Karachi Shipyard & Engineering Works in Pakistan. Experts assume that those submarines will be able to launch the Babur missiles fitted with nuclear warheads to a range of about 700 kilometers.
Why is that important? Because such a capability could lead Pakistan to change its strategy to the Credible Minimum Deterrence strategy, which was also adopted by India, Pakistan’s primary rival. In the context of this strategy, the state commits to “No First Use” of nuclear weapons and reduces its production of bombs, as opposed to the Mutually Assured Destruction strategy which Pakistan has maintained to this day. This is also the reason why Pakistan maintains one of the world’s largest nuclear weapon arsenals.
Does the Pakistani nuclear arsenal constitute a threat to Israel? Well, it seems that at the present time, Islamabad does not constitute a direct threat. As long as the stability of the regime is maintained, Pakistan is a global problem handled primarily by the USA. At the same time, Israel should have a plan for the time when a radical religious leader may ascend to power in Pakistan.
With regard to the broader perspective, Israel should be concerned primarily about the leaking of knowledge, technology and products from Pakistan. As Khan’s network provided the momentum for the nuclear infrastructures of Iran, North Korea and possibly other countries as well, Pakistan is currently an objective for terrorist organizations and countries wishing to acquire nuclear capabilities. Admittedly, the regime declares that they are doing their best to protect their nuclear assets, but Jerusalem will be well advised to remain vigilant vis-à-vis the world’s largest Muslim nuclear state.
Tal Inbar, Head of the Space & UAV Research Center at the Fisher Institute for Air & Space Strategic Studies, contributed to the preparation of this article.
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