The president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, is in a self-congratulatory mood these days, savouring the praise heaped upon him by US President George Bush, Secretary of State, Collin Powell, and the under-secretary of state for arms control, John Bolton. After surviving two recent assassination attempts and overseeing a high-level summit meeting with India, the great survivor of Pakistani politics acts as if the worst is behind him. By way of celebration, he announced new long-range missile tests for March 2004, and a two-stage Shaheen II missile system has already been tested at the time of going to press.
The primary reason for General Musharraf´s current satisfaction is the way his treatment of Pakistan´s hugely popular nuclear hero, Abdul Qadeer Khan — forcing him to apologise on public television for his illicit nuclear trafficking, yet also pardoning him for the offence — allowed him to please Washington without causing a massive uproar. Many in the Pakistani press had warned that any attempt to punish Qadeer, advertised for near two decades as the architect of Pakistan´s and the Islamic world´s nuclear bomb, would provoke rampaging mobs to demand an end to Musharraf´s pro-US rule. As it turned out, Washington was thrilled with the general´s rebuke of the wayward scientist, while a disillusioned and disempowered Pakistani public grumbled but did not take to the streets.
But neither Musharraf´s satisfaction nor America´s approbation is likely to last long. For while Qadeer took sole responsibility for the trafficking in his televised confession, the sheer scale of Pakistan´s secret exports raises at least two difficult questions that go far beyond him and a handful of his colleagues. First, Iranian and Libyan revelations since December 2003 have confirmed that this was the most extensive nuclear smuggling episode in history. Not only did it involve the illicit export of centrifuge designs and parts used to enrich uranium into fuel for nuclear reactors, or as fissile material for weapons (an export reluctantly admitted by the Pakistani government itself); but it also included complete centrifuges, together with a shipment to Libya of 1.5 tons of uranium hexafluoride gas. Could Qadeer and his cohorts have moved such large pieces of equipment, and travelled extensively outside Pakistan, without the knowledge of the military? The ultra-high level of security in Pakistan´s nuclear installations makes this unbelievable and points to deeper level of complicity.
Second, documents handed over by Libya to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — now being evaluated by US experts — reveal that the country had received old Chinese designs for a workable nuclear bomb that had been passed to Pakistan in the late 1970s. Here lies a puzzle, and the possibility of some embarrassment for the Pakistani establishment because, although Qadeer is widely advertised as the "father of the Pakistani bomb", knowledgeable people are aware that he had nothing to do with the design and manufacture of the bomb.