liferation activities became public.58 In a choreographed deal with Musharraf,
Khan confessed his role and was immediately pardoned. By silencing Khan and
shutting down his activities, Musharraf managed to deflect American pressure
for a more comprehensive investigation or interrogation by U.S. officials and
to keep a firm lid on public opinion.
Until then, Khan enjoyed unquestioned backing from Pakistan’s leaders, in
part because his program successfully imported illicit materials for the state’s
uranium enrichment, warhead, and missile programs. It is less clear precisely
what Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders knew about all of his many export
activities. General Jehangir Karamat, who had been Pakistan’s army chief in the
1990s when Khan’s proliferation ring was riding high, shared the official army
line on the very day that Musharraf pardoned Khan in February 2004. Over tea
in Karamat’s well-appointed sitting room, he explained that by the mid-1990s
Khan had become a larger-than-life figure. Not only did Khan enjoy nearly
unquestioned authority over a range of state assets, but he had also armed
himself with a team of propagandists who would make short work of anyone
who got in his way. Karamat, who was prematurely bounced from office by
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1998, indicated that a fight with A. Q. Khan
was not one he thought he could win.
56 Although Khan proudly takes credit for Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, other Pakistani researchers and laboratories, especially Munir Ahmed Khan and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, were at least as responsible. See William Langewiesche, “The Wrath of Khan,” Atlantic (November 2005), http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2005/11/the-wrath-of-khan/
4333/.
57 Khan also attempted deals with South Africa and Iraq. One highly speculative article suggests that Khan’s nuclear technology may have even ended up in Indian hands. See Joshua Pollack,
“The Secret Treachery of A.Q. Khan,” Playboy (January/February 2012).
58 David Rohde and Talat Hussain, “Delicate Dance for Musharraf In Nuclear Case,” New York Times, February 8, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/world/delicate-dance-for-musharraf-in-nuclear-case.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm.
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Why Do They Hate Us?
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When A. Q. Khan was freed from house arrest in 2009, he alleged that
Karamat, among others, had known – and profited – from his deals. Kara-
mat dismissed these allegations out of hand, but the debate over who knew
what and when is far from resolved. Most outside observers suggest that at
the very least Pakistan’s military was grotesquely negligent in its failure to
oversee Khan’s activities, and there is evidence to suggest that its complicity,
and even the complicity of Pakistan’s civilian leaders, went much further than
that.59
There are many theories about why Khan shared nuclear secrets with other
countries. Some focus on personal motivations, like ego or wealth. Khan clearly
bought into his own greatness, and judging from his boastful tone in recent
newspaper columns, he still does. It is also true that Khan’s transactions made
him rich. By the time of his house arrest, he owned all sorts of real estate, made
generous contributions to charities, and lived well beyond the means of any
normal government employee. Other theories tend to emphasize ideological
and strategic commitments. Khan is said to have built an “Islamic bomb” and
to have supported anti-Western Pakistani military strategies.60
On the other hand, it is clear what motivated Khan to steal classified infor-
mation from the Europeans in the early 1970s. Khan was an ardent national-
ist. Like many Pakistanis, he believed that the 1971 war exposed the nation’s
profound vulnerability to Indian conquest. Looking back, Khan calls it the
“darkest day in Pakistan’s history” and remembers, “It was a very, very sad
day. I cried a lot that night. I didn’t eat for many days. . . . The mental scar
remained forever, and the pain of that wound could never subside.” In his
words, after India’s own “peaceful nuclear explosion” in May 1974 “the world
was shaken. Pakistan was all the more shaken because we had not even recov-
ered from the tragedy of 1971.”61 These two events convinced Khan that
only a nuclear bomb could guarantee Pakistan against new predations by its
neighbor.
Khan took the initiative and contacted the Bhutto government multiple times
in 1974. Overcoming initial skepticism, Khan managed to convince Bhutto’s
advisers that his access and expertise would be invaluable. Khan had no qualms
about exploiting the trust and confidence of his fellow employees in the Nether-
lands, breaking security rules, or violating provisions of international law as he
worked feverishly to transfer nuclear know-how to his homeland. In those
early days, there was no financial reward either; Khan took a pay cut to
return home to Pakistan. Yet he believed he was serving a higher purpose,
59 For more on official Pakistani complicity, including the involvement of Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto in transfers to North Korea, see Matthew Kroenig, Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 135–9.
60 For more on these debates, see Matthew Kroenig, Exporting the Bomb, pp. 134–47.
61 Translated from Urdu interview with ARY television, http://notesfromsaudiarabia.blogspot
.com/2010/08/dr-abdul-qadeer-khan-narrates-history.html.
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90
No Exit from Pakistan
and more important, that the rules he was breaking to protect his country were
inherently discriminatory. In a letter to the editor of a German magazine in
1979, he revealed his disdain:
I want to question the bloody holier-than-thou attitudes of the Americans and the
British. Are these bastards God-appointed guardians of the world to stockpile hun-
dreds of thousands of nuclear warheads and have they God-given authority to carry
out explosions every month? If we start a modest programme, we are the satans, the
devils.62
There can be no doubting that Khan saw himself as a Pakistani patriot. In
subsequent decades, his language would become increasingly peppered with
religious overtones and references from the Qur’an. His secret dealings would
make him wealthy and powerful. But his initial drive to bring home the bomb
and the popularity that his project won him in Pakistan were based on his ability
to channel a nationalistic resentment that had become increasingly common in
the 1960s and 1970s.
The diplomatic consequence of Pakistan’s nuclear program was that it drove
a deep wedge between Washington and Islamabad. The Ford administration
was the first to recognize what Bhutto and his nuclear scientists, including Khan,
were up to
. Kissinger, then Ford’s secretary of state, attempted to convince
Pakistan that Washington could provide military assistance to meet Islam-
abad’s needs without having to go down the costly nuclear path. The U.S.
Congress had also drafted legislation intended to deter Pakistan’s program by
threatening what remained of U.S. civilian aid. None of this had any effect on
Bhutto or other top Pakistani officials, who were hell-bent on developing the
bomb.63
Jimmy Carter’s national security team, deeply committed to the nuclear non-
proliferation agenda, was desperate to keep Pakistan’s program in check. By
then General Zia had ousted Bhutto, but Pakistan’s new dictator was no more
inclined to walk away from the nuclear program. Nuclear differences sparked
a short-lived rupture in the relationship; Washington suspended civilian aid to
Pakistan. In 1979, the U.S. embassy in Islamabad was nearly overrun by radical
student protesters while the Zia regime stood idly by. The grounds were torched
and two Americans were killed; more than 100 others took shelter inside the
embassy’s communications vault and barely escaped the violence.64 The U.S.-
Pakistan relationship had reached an all-time low. If not for the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan in 1980 and the Reagan administration’s rekindled cooper-
ation with Islamabad to arm the Afghan insurgency, disagreements over the
nuclear issue would have sent the U.S.-Pakistan relationship completely over the
cliff.
62 Khan’s letter is cited in Langewiesche, “The Wrath of Khan.”
63 See Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000, pp. 221–4.
64 On the embassy attack, see Coll, Ghost Wars, pp. 22–37.
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Why Do They Hate Us?
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Pressler, Abandonment, and National Honor
Pakistan’s nuclear program came back to haunt the relationship again in the
late 1980s. When Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan, the George H. W.
Bush administration found it impossible to overlook Pakistan’s nuclear trans-
gressions. In 1985, the U.S. Congress passed legislation requiring a yearly White
House certification that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device. Senator John
Glenn introduced the original legislation, but because Senator Larry Pressler
amended it, the mechanism came to be known in Pakistan as the Pressler
Amendment.65 By 1990, the U.S. intelligence community found conclusive evi-
dence that Pakistan had crossed the nuclear line.
When they hit, U.S. sanctions were painful. Over half a billion dollars in
annual military and civilian assistance was eventually frozen. Twenty-eight
F-16s on order for delivery to Pakistan were instead put in storage in Arizona.
It was not until 1998 that the Clinton administration agreed to a plan that
allowed Pakistan to recoup its financial losses in the deal. Pakistani officials
acted stung, as if they had thought Washington would never actually follow
through on its threats.
From the perspective of U.S. diplomats, however, no one in Islamabad
should have been the least surprised. Ambassador Robert Oakley had pointedly
warned Pakistan’s president, prime minister, and army chief. Washington had
simply followed through on the threats it had leveled for years.
No matter; like A. Q. Khan, most Pakistanis and their leaders chose not
to face up to their own responsibility. Instead, they tended to see America’s
nuclear policy as blatantly hypocritical. They rejected the idea that Washing-
ton’s 1990 aid cutoff was a predictable consequence of Pakistan’s own decision
to violate clear U.S. conditions. Neither India nor Israel had suffered a similar
fate, they observed. They were skeptical of claims that Washington’s intelli-
gence only picked up clear evidence of Pakistan having a nuclear bomb after
the Soviets had been defeated in Afghanistan. After all, somehow the Reagan
and Carter administrations had been willing to put off sanctions when they
needed Pakistan to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan. If those exceptions were
possible, why hadn’t Bush done the same? The typical conclusion was that
Washington was a “fickle friend” who had used Pakistan then discarded it
“like a piece of used Kleenex.”66
By 9/11, the Pressler episode had assumed almost legendary proportions
for Pakistanis, who considered it to be America’s ultimate abandonment. Not
only did America leave the region in turmoil, the narrative went, but it was
punishing Pakistan for arming itself with nuclear weapons just as its foe, India,
was doing the same.
65 Vilified in Pakistan, the Pressler amendment was in fact an attempt to water down the nuclear restrictions imposed by Senator Glenn.
66 Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947–2000, p. 310.
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92
No Exit from Pakistan
Both the Bush and Obama administrations tried, without success, to
overcome Pakistan’s powerful abandonment narrative. Unfortunately, it has
become a central part of the nationalist worldview. As the previous chapter
describes, extreme nationalism has a prominent place in the Pakistani military,
amplified by vocal advocates like Shireen Mazari who have a disproportion-
ate influence on the public policy debate. This school of thought had gotten
so strong that Pakistan’s media even gave it a name: the “Ghairat [honor]
Brigade.”67
Having been freed from the muzzle imposed during the Musharraf years,
today, A. Q. Khan routinely writes about the need to defend Pakistan’s ghairat
from American predations. In one 2011 essay, he catalogues the litany of U.S.
betrayals in 1965, 1971, and 1989 and observes that “now after 50 years
we are still slaves to the US.”68 Again and again, his language is that of the
archetypal nationalist, obsessed with honor and shame, pride and cowardice.
In 2011, a free-spirited Pakistani pop band satirically named itself the Bey-
gairat Brigade (a brigade without honor) and released a single “Aalu Anday”
(“Potatoes and Eggs”). In the band’s video, the three young musicians are
dressed as rebellious schoolboys who start by complaining about the lunches
packed by their mothers – potato and egg curry – but quickly turn their ire
to more controversial subjects. With thinly veiled references to a wide cast of
Pakistani xenophobes, religious extremists, and conspiracy theorists, the lyrics
lampoon many of the notions associated with defending Pakistan’s national
pride.69
Released straight to YouTube to avoid any sort of censorship, the song was
a sensation with urban Pakistani youth. Its success says good things about
the potential for a different Pakistani future. For the time being, however, the
nationalistic strand of anti-Americanism, symbolized by the likes of
A. Q. Khan
and Shireen Mazari, holds the high ground.
the anti-americanism of pakistan’s jihadists
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan became more strate-
gically important to the United States than ever before. Without Pakistan as
a conduit for the weapons and money that flowed to Afghan insurgents, the
anti-Soviet resistance there would have been crushed.
One of the most stunning features of the partnership between Washington
and Islamabad during the Afghan war was the extent to which Pakistan insisted
67 Salman Masood, “Satirical Song, a YouTube Hit, Challenges Extremism in Pakistan,” New York Times, November 6, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/world/asia/beygairat-brigades-youtube-hit-song-challenges-extremism-in-pakistan.html.
68 Dr. A. Q. Khan, “God Save the Country from Bad Governance,” The News, August 15, 2011, http://www.thenews.com.pk/TodaysPrintDetail.aspx?ID=62911&Cat=9&dt=8/15/2011.
69 Masood, “Satirical Song, a YouTube Hit, Challenges Extremism in Pakistan,” New York Times, November 6, 2011.
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Why Do They Hate Us?
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that U.S. funds and supplies had to be managed by Pakistan’s military and Inter-
Services Intelligence directorate, with meager American oversight or control.
In the early years of the program, it was managed in Pakistan by a CIA station
of only a half-dozen officers.70 American trainers and other technical experts
would come to Pakistan, but only for short stints.71 Due to the small footprint
of the covert program, Islamabad and Washington could plausibly deny the
existence of their joint venture. Such an arrangement made it far less likely
that the Soviets would expand their war into Pakistan, a contingency that both
Islamabad and Washington feared from the start.
Years later, the arrangement came out of the shadows. Washington had
expanded its annual funding to over $600 million and armed Afghan forces
with the shoulder-launched Stinger missile that was deadly accurate against
Russian attack helicopters. By then, however, the tide had turned against the
Daniel S Markey Page 20
