Reply #25: Pakistan's Nuclear Hero Defended

[seemslikeadream]

Dawn, the English-language daily that often gives voice to the Pakistani establishment, reports that opposition political leaders in the country say the sacking of Khan will cause "irreparable damage to the country's integrity."

The press in India, Pakistan's South Asian nuclear rival, turns a critical eye on the U.S. role over three decades. The Times of India goes back to the early 1980s, when Pakistan, like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, was a quietly favored U.S. ally.

As correspondent Syed Saleem Shahzad notes in the Asia Times, the U.S. Congress cleared the way for Pakistan's nuclear program. In 1981 the Congress, under pressure from Ronald Reagan's White House, voted to formally exempt Pakistan from U.S. laws prohibiting aid to any non-nuclear country engaged in illegal procurement of equipment for a nuclear weapons program. The Pakistani government also won a six-year aid package from the United States worth $3.2 billion. Free from the threat of sanctions, Pakistan conducted a cold test at a small-scale nuclear reprocessing plant in 1982. From there, the so-called Islam bomb began to grow.

Pakistan proceeded to spend some $10 billion developing a nuclear arsenal, say the editors of the Times of India. The money came from Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and the depositors of the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), which became notorious in the early 1990s for myriad criminal activities. The bank, say the editors of the Times of India, was founded by a Pakistani and operated freely in the Persian Gulf oil enclave of Dubai. It is inconceivable, they argue, that Western intelligence agencies didn't know all about this black market.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A8262-2004Feb3¬Found=true