Avoiding Armageddon

by Bruce Riedel

  Some experts have argued that the travel advisories and media attention pushed the Indian business community to tell Vajpayee to avoid conflict and ease tensions. Major Indian corporate leaders could see that the war scare was bad for business and discouraged investment. One expert has argued that the American and British travel advisories “effectively dramatized the economic disruption that would be caused by war. Business leaders worked to bring an understanding to government leaders of the wide potential for economic damage inherent in precipitous cross-border attacks.”33 As it was, the Indian mobilization cost New Delhi at least $2 billion.34 It finally stood down in October. Powell and Armitage both later told me that they thought that war was a very real danger and that if it began, it would go to the brink of nuclear war, if not over. Their cool-headed actions (backed by Bush and Rice in the White House) probably helped save the lives of countless innocents. Vajpayee, of course, had made the really hard decisions and chosen the path of restraint. For a second time, the Indian prime minister had proven himself a great leader.

  But India was humiliated by the crisis. None of the wanted twenty terrorists were turned over, the crackdown on LeT and JeM was a farce, and the mobilization had failed to intimidate Pakistan and Musharraf. The Pakistani army felt that its nuclear weapons had worked to deter India, and they had. President Bush had built closer ties to Vajpayee in the crisis and with Blackwill’s help now began looking for a way to cement a closer relationship. Again, nuclear issues would be the driving force behind the effort.

  THE NUCLEAR DEAL

  Like his father, Bush devotes very little attention to India in his memoir, Decision Points—less than a paragraph out of 481 pages. That is puzzling because he fashioned a very significant deal with India that all but ended decades of American-Indian wrangling over nuclear issues, granted India special status as a nuclear weapons state outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and opened the door for stronger ties between the two democracies.

  The U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement was a landmark in American-Indian relations. The nuclear issue would no longer be a source of constant friction between Washington and New Delhi; there would be no more Gates-Rodrigues shouting matches. The first framework for the deal was announced in a joint statement on July 18, 2005, during Prime Minister Singh’s visit to Washington. The essence of the deal was to put some Indian nuclear reactors under an international safeguard and inspection regime while others would remain available for military use and production of fissile material. In return, India would be able to purchase nuclear reactors and technology from the United States and other countries. India would be given a de facto waiver for testing nuclear weapons and for not signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it regards as unfair and unbalanced. Since the Bush team did not support the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, India was not asked to sign and ratify it either. Congress would later warn that renewed tests could scupper the deal, but India has at least formally kept its options open.

  Singh negotiated the deal with Bush, but the real decisionmaker in New Delhi was Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv’s widow. Sonia is without question the power behind the throne. She has led the Congress Party as its president since 1998, and she engineered its surprise electoral victory in 2004 and its even more stunning victory in 2008. She now is the longest-serving president of the party in its 125-year history. She is also the chair of the ruling coalition. India’s economy has grown on her watch, allowing hundreds of millions to escape grinding poverty; modest economic reforms have been introduced; and a civilian nuclear power agreement was concluded with the United States. Relations with rival Pakistan have modestly improved despite the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, the worst terrorist incident in the world since 9/11. Sonia probably deserves most of the credit for restraining India from a military response to the Mumbai attack and giving diplomacy a chance.

  She was born Edvige Antonia Albina Maino in the province of Veneto in Italy on December 9, 1946, and grew up in a modest village in the Piedmont near Torino. Her father was a Mussolini supporter who had fought with the Italian army on the Eastern Front with the Nazis in World War II. She remains a Catholic but celebrates Hindu festivals and traditions. In 1965 she met her future husband in Cambridge, England, where he was enrolled at university and she was studying English and waiting tables in a Greek restaurant to make ends meet. By all accounts, theirs was a true romance. Rajiv became prime minister in 1984 after his mother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards; Rajiv himself was assassinated in 1991 by a female Tamil terrorist.35

  The murders of her mother-in-law and husband affected Sonia tremendously. She was very close to Indira, and some suggest that she now tries to look like her role model. Security precautions taken for her have been intensive since Rajiv’s death. I remember changing cars twice when visiting her bungalow in New Delhi in 1998; although the vehicles were part of her own security detachment, apparently even they were not judged to be secure enough from possible terrorist tampering. At first reluctant to take power, Sonia finally agreed. Now power seems to come naturally to this remarkable woman.

  In March 2006, Bush made a trip to the subcontinent, spending four days in India and then one night in Pakistan. On the way to New Delhi he stopped briefly in Kabul to promise America’s long-term support for Afghan democracy, making Bush the first American president to visit Afghanistan since Eisenhower. It was more than four years after the war that he had started had begun. He was hailed in India for accepting India’s nuclear status. In Pakistan there was intense disappointment that India had gotten a nuclear deal but that none was in the works for Pakistan, even though India had started the nuclear arms race in South Asia. For Pakistanis, it was yet another American betrayal.

  Bush and Singh signed the civil nuclear agreement during Bush’s visit to New Delhi. The process of ratification of the agreement was complex; it required the approval of both the Indian parliament and Congress and the approval of the multinational organizations that oversee the NPT process. There was considerable opposition to the agreement in India and the United States, but by the end of 2008 the legislative processes in both countries were complete. In the United States it helped that it was a presidential election year and no candidate wanted to alienate Indian-American voters, who were enthusiastic about the agreement. Barack Obama and John McCain both voted for the deal in the Senate. So did Hillary Clinton.

  The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) also had to approve the agreements and implement the inspection regime for the civilian reactors. That process also was prolonged, but the IAEA approved the safeguards agreement on August 1, 2008, and the NSG provided a waiver on September 6, 2008, to allow India full access to civilian nuclear technology and fuel from other countries despite not being a signatory of the NPT. The deal was a considerable achievement for the Bush team, and it enhanced the president’s popularity in India enormously. Nonproliferation and arms control advocates were much less enamored of the deal, which many labeled a dangerous precedent for other countries to follow. Pakistan, as noted, was one of the critics. Pakistanis argued that India had been given special treatment by the United States, IAEA, and NSG and that Pakistan should be offered a similar agreement. Pakistan’s case, however, was weak. Unlike India, which has a stellar record of nonproliferation, Pakistan was burdened by its long history of exporting dangerous nuclear technology to other countries, including Iran, North Korea, and Libya.

  George Bush could also rightly claim a major role in shutting down the worst excesses of Pakistan’s nuclear bazaar. The man that most Pakistanis believe is the father of the Pakistani bomb, A. Q. Khan, was the central actor in Pakistan’s proliferation activities. He had given Iran its first centrifuges and had been a key player in North Korea’s nuclear development, receiving in return access to North Korea’s medium-range missile technology, which it has copied and used to produce the Ghauri missile. The CIA uncovered an A. Q. Khan plan to provid
e nuclear technology, including the design for a bomb, to Libya in 2003. CIA director Tenet confronted Musharraf with the evidence of Pakistani proliferation to Libya and Iran in a one-on-one meeting in New York on September 24, 2003, in which Tenet told Musharraf that Khan “is betraying your country and has stolen some of your nation’s most sensitive secrets.”36 It was fiction; Khan worked for Musharraf. But it was a way out for Musharraf and the army. Pretending that Khan was a lone wolf offered Musharraf a face-saving way of shutting down the bazaar and blaming it all on one bad man instead of the nation. All of the responsibility for decades of Pakistani help to North Korea and Iran in developing their nuclear programs and now for help to Libya could be placed on Khan.

  Musharraf seized the opening. Khan was put under house arrest and forced to confess on Pakistani television that he had exceeded the authority of his position. Pakistan stopped providing help to Libya, which dismantled its nuclear program. But no one was given access to Khan; neither the CIA nor the International Atomic Energy Agency was allowed to question him about his decades of doing business with North Korea and Iran (and perhaps Syria and Saudi Arabia). After Musharraf resigned in 2008, Khan reappeared and began putting out his version of the story. Khan says that he was authorized to carry out all the nuclear technology transfers by officials at the highest levels of the Pakistani state, starting with Zulfi and Zia and including Musharraf. Benazir Bhutto, he says, not only sanctioned his deal with North Korea to trade nuclear technology for missile technology, she actually help negotiate it and carried key files from Islamabad to Pyongyang.37 He was no rogue operator but a bureaucrat working for the government, trading nuclear secrets for technological help from other states.

  Khan probably was both. He did act on the orders of the army and the state, and he probably operated as a loner as well. The details may never come out because the Pakistani military does not want to expose them to outside scrutiny. For the Bush administration, the fiction of a nuclear pirate helped resolve a troubling problem that might have derailed the budding rapprochement between Bush and “Mush,” as the Pakistani dictator was increasingly nicknamed in Pakistan. But Khan’s activities also provided a perfect and legitimate excuse for why the United States could not offer a civil nuclear power deal to Pakistan.

  The Bush administration did very little to press Musharraf to allow a return to democracy after his coup. The administration complained half-heartedly when he rigged elections in 2002 that endorsed his rule, even when the elections produced the first provincial governments dominated by Islamist parties in Pakistani history. The key provinces bordering Afghanistan, Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province, both elected local governments that were very sympathetic to the Taliban, largely because the ISI helped tilt the electoral playing field in that direction to weaken the major secular political parties that backed Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. The supporters of Benazir and Nawaz pressed the United States to push Musharraf to allow their leaders to come home and compete in the political process. That would mean that Musharraf would have to promise that they would not be arrested for alleged past corruption or, in Sharif’s case, for allegedly trying to kill Musharraf by forcing his plane to land outside of Pakistan. Musharraf had no intention of letting his sworn political foes back into Pakistan, and Bush put no pressure on him to do so. Since Benazir’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML) still dominated the political process at the grassroots level and would certainly do very well in any reasonably open elections, Musharraf could not afford to let them come home.

  So, in the eyes of a growing number of Pakistanis, Bush was all for democracy except in the second-largest Muslim country in the world, their homeland. There, Bush wanted to keep a military dictator in office indefinitely. Bush’s ambassador in Islamabad, Ryan Crocker, told the press that “there is no dictatorship in Pakistan” and that the country was fast heading toward “true democracy” under Musharraf.38 The hypocrisy drove more Pakistanis to hate America and some to support the jihad.

  When Musharraf’s regime began to unravel in 2007, Bush stood by his man. According to well-informed insiders, some in the White House, including Vice President Cheney, argued behind the scenes that Musharraf was like the Shah of Iran, a strong man who was needed to prevent an Islamic revolution. Bush should not throw Musharraf under the bus, as they alleged Jimmy Carter had done with the shah. Instead of calls for the rule of law and an independent judiciary, the administration urged patience and compromise. It did criticize Musharraf, but only reluctantly, when he imposed martial law in November 2007. Finally, it began to support the idea of trying to soften the face of military rule in Pakistan by arranging a shotgun wedding of Musharraf and Benazir. In this marriage of mutual foes, Bhutto would return to Pakistan to serve as prime minister and run domestic affairs while Musharraf would remain president and control national security affairs. Encouraged by the White House, Musharraf met secretly with Benazir in Dubai to see whether they could reach a deal, and the two began to think that they might be able to do so. Benazir saw a chance to return home, have the corruption charges against her and her husband dropped, and compete for power. Musharraf was very reluctant but was also increasingly desperate to hold on to power.

  It was a foolish idea. The two could not really share power, and domestic and external issues could not be so easily separated. Musharraf was especially opposed to giving up his uniform because being chief of army staff was the real source of his power, and Bhutto knew that she would not really run the country if he remained chief of army staff. I said so at the time. I told The New York Times in October 2007 that “this backroom deal is going to explode in our face,” arguing that “Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Musharraf detest each other, and the concept that they can somehow work collaboratively is a real stretch.”39 Nawaz Sharif opposed the deal for an obvious reason: it left him on the outside. He demanded fair treatment: if Bhutto could come home, he should be able to do the same. Because Sharif was certain to push for Musharraf’s impeachment for the 1999 coup if he returned, the Bush team did not like that idea at all. So the deal to broker a little democracy was actually a barrier to real democratic reform.

  Bhutto returned to Karachi on October 18, 2007, and was almost killed in an assassination attempt that evening while she was traveling among hundreds of thousands of adoring PPP followers to her home. She was murdered two months later, on December 27, 2007, while attending a political rally in Rawalpindi in the same square where Liaquat Ali Khan was murdered in 1951. The elections that followed in 2008 were relatively free and fair and brought her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, to power. At his request, the United Nations was asked to do an inquiry into the “facts and circumstances of the assassination” of Benazir Bhutto. The result is a fascinating document and analysis of Pakistan’s political system and the links between the army and the jihadists.

  The UN concludes that the assassination was probably planned by al Qaeda and its Pakistani Taliban allies, who recruited a fifteen-year-old suicide bomber to kill Bhutto. An al Qaeda spokesman claimed credit for the murder, saying, “We have terminated the most precious American asset” in Pakistan.40 The UN investigators point a finger in particular at the notorious al Qaeda operative Ilyas Kashmiri, discussed earlier, as a possible mastermind.41 The report notes that Bhutto represented everything that the jihad hated: she was a woman in politics, educated in the West, who advocated a harsh crackdown on the jihadist movement in Pakistan. The report notes that many saw her as a Shia as well because her mother and husband were Shia.42

  A more damaging conclusion of the UN inquiry, however, is that the Musharraf government did far too little to protect Benazir despite her repeated requests and then deliberately and effectively took action to make a thorough investigation of the crime impossible. With adequate protection, the report says, “Ms. Bhutto’s assassination could have been prevented.” Instead, the Musharraf government denied her the normal security arrangements made for any VIP in Pakistan, even af
ter the first attack in Karachi. The cover-up was even worse. The crime scene was immediately washed down by fire hoses to remove forensic evidence, no proper autopsy was conducted, and “high-ranking Pakistani government authorities obstructed access to military and intelligence sources” to impede the inquiry.43 The UN report concludes that the ISI played a key role in the cover-up and intimidated the Pakistani police from doing their job. It may even have been quietly encouraging the assassins through former officials who had well-known contacts with the extremists. Before her death, Benazir had alleged that former ISI officials, including former director general Hamid Gul, were plotting her demise with al Qaeda.44

  Musharraf lost office within a year. President Bush had tried to arrange a political deal to save the Musharraf regime but saw that deal blow up in its face. After eight years of dealing with Musharraf, the United States did not have Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, had not slowed the growth of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, and had lost the faith of the Pakistani people by supporting a dictator for too long. Musharraf went into exile in London. In 2011 he was charged by Pakistan’s judiciary with conspiracy to murder Benazir Bhutto and an arrest warrant was issued for him. Treason charges have also been filed against him in Pakistan. At least for now, he cannot go home again.