Are
You With Us… Or Against Us?
By Jonathan Schell
15 November, 2007
Tom
Dispatch.com
The
journey to the martial law just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed
president, the dictator Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September
11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan's intelligence chief,
Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to
meet with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps
the earliest preview of the global Bush doctrine then in its formative
stages, telling him, "You are either one hundred percent with us
or one hundred percent against us."
The next day, the administration,
dictating to the dictator, presented seven demands that a Pakistan that
wished to be "with us" must meet. These concentrated on gaining
its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan's Taliban regime, which had
long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan
and had, of course, harbored Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training
camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement to rein in the activities
of Mr. A.Q. Khan, the "father" of Pakistan's nuclear arms,
who, with the knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely hawking
the country's nuclear-bomb technology around the Middle East and North
Asia for some years.
Musharraf decided to be "with
us"; but, as in so many countries, being with the United States
in its Global War on Terror turned out to mean not being with one's
own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999,
was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically fateful additional
step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will of a
foreign master. In many countries, people will endure a homegrown dictator
but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from without, and Musharraf
was now courting this danger.
A public opinion poll in
September ranking certain leaders according to their popularity suggests
what the results have been. Osama bin Laden, at 46% approval, was more
popular than Musharraf, at 38%, who in turn was far better liked than
President Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7%. There is every reason to believe
that, with the imposition of martial law, Musharraf's and Bush's popularity
have sunk even further. Wars, whether on terror or anything else, don't
tend to go well when the enemy is more popular than those supposedly
on one's own side.
Are You with Us?
Even before the Bush administration
decided to invade Iraq, the immediate decision to bully Musharraf into
compliance defined the shape of the policies that the President would
adopt toward a far larger peril that had seemed to wane after the Cold
War, but now was clearly on the rise: the gathering nuclear danger.
President Bush proposed what was, in fact if not in name, an imperial
solution to it. In the new dispensation, nuclear weapons were not to
be considered good or bad in themselves; that judgment was to be based
solely on whether the nation possessing them was itself judged good
or bad (with us, that is, or against us). Iraq, obviously, was judged
to be "against us" and suffered the consequences. Pakistan,
soon honored by the administration with the somehow ridiculous, newly
coined status of "major non-NATO ally," was clearly classified
as with us, and so, notwithstanding its nuclear arsenal and abysmal
record on proliferation, given the highest rating.
That doctrine constituted
a remarkable shift. Previously, the United States had joined with almost
the entire world to achieve nonproliferation solely by peaceful, diplomatic
means. The great triumph of this effort had been the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty, under which 183 nations, dozens quite capable of producing nuclear
weapons, eventually agreed to remain without them. In this dispensation,
all nuclear weapons were considered bad, and so all proliferation was
bad as well. Even existing arsenals, including those of the two superpowers
of the Cold War, were supposed to be liquidated over time. Conceptually,
at least, one united world had faced one common danger: nuclear arms.
In the new, quickly developing,
post-9/11 dispensation, however, the world was to be divided into two
camps. The first, led by the United States, consisted of good, democratic
countries, many possessing the bomb; the second consisted of bad, repressive
countries trying to get the bomb and, of course, their terrorist allies.
Nuclear peril, once understood as a problem of supreme importance in
its own right, posed by those who already possessed nuclear weapons
as well as by potential proliferators, was thus subordinated to the
polarizing "war on terror," of which it became a mere sub-category,
albeit the most important one. This peril could be found at "the
crossroads of radicalism and technology," otherwise called the
"nexus of terror and weapons of mass destruction," in the
words of the master document of the Bush Doctrine, the 2002
National Security Strategy of the United States of America.
The good camp was assigned
the job not of rolling back all nuclear weapons but simply of stopping
any members of the bad camp from getting their hands on the bomb. The
means would no longer be diplomacy, but "preventive war" (to
be waged by the United States). The global Cold War of the late twentieth
century was to be replaced by global wars against proliferation -- disarmament
wars -- in the twenty-first. These wars, breaking out wherever in the
world proliferation might threaten, would not be cold, but hot indeed,
as the invasion of Iraq soon revealed -- and as an attack on Iran, now
under consideration in Washington, may soon further show.
…Or Against
Us?
Vetting and sorting countries
into the good and the bad, the with-us and the against-us, proved, however,
a far more troublesome business than those in the Bush administration
ever imagined. Iraq famously was not as "bad" as alleged,
for it turned out to lack the key feature that supposedly warranted
attack -- weapons of mass destruction. Neither was Pakistan, muscled
into the with-us camp so quickly after 9/11, as "good" as
alleged. Indeed, these distinctions were entirely artificial, for by
any factual and rational reckoning, Pakistan was by far the more dangerous
country.
Indeed, the Pakistan of Pervez
Musharraf has, by now, become a one-country inventory of all the major
forms of the nuclear danger.
*Iraq did not have nuclear
weapons; Pakistan did. In 1998, it had conducted a series of five nuclear
tests in response to five tests by India, with whom it had fought three
conventional wars since its independence in 1947. The danger of interstate
nuclear war between the two nations is perhaps higher than anywhere
else in the world.
*Both Iraq and Pakistan were
dictatorships (though the Iraqi government was incomparably more brutal).
*Iraq did not harbor terrorists;
Pakistan did, and does so even more today.
*Iraq, lacking the bomb,
could not of course be a nuclear proliferator. Pakistan was, with a
vengeance. The arch-proliferator A.Q. Khan, a metallurgist, first purloined
nuclear technology from Europe, where he was employed at the uranium
enrichment company EURENCO. He then used the fruits of his theft to
successfully establish an enrichment program for Pakistan's bomb. After
that, the thief turned salesman. Drawing on a globe-spanning network
of producers and middlemen -- in Turkey, Dubai, and Malaysia, among
other countries -- he peddled his nuclear wares to Iran, Iraq (which
apparently turned down his offer of help), North Korea, Libya, and perhaps
others. Seen from without, he had established a clandestine multinational
corporation dedicated to nuclear proliferation for a profit.
Seen from within Pakistan,
he had managed to create a sort of independent nuclear city-state --
a state within a state -- in effect privatizing Pakistan's nuclear technology.
The extent of the government's connivance in this enterprise is still
unknown, but few observers believe Khan's far-flung operations would
have been possible without at least the knowledge of officials at the
highest levels of that government. Yet all this activity emanating from
the "major non-NATO ally" of the Bush administration was overlooked
until late 2003, when American and German intelligence intercepted a
shipload of nuclear materials bound for Libya, and forced Musharraf
to place Khan, a national hero owing to his work on the Pakistani bomb,
under house arrest. (Even today, the Pakistani government refuses to
make Khan available for interviews with representatives of the International
Atomic Energy Agency.)
*Iraqi apparatchiks could
not, of course, peddle to terrorists, al-Qaedan or otherwise, technology
they did not have, as Bush suggested they would do in seeking to justify
his war. The Pakistani apparatchiks, on the other hand, could -- and
they did. Shortly before September 11, 2001, two leading scientists
from Pakistan's nuclear program, Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the
former Director General of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and
Chaudry Abdul Majeed, paid a visit to Osama bin Laden around a campfire
in Afghanistan to advise him on how to make or acquire nuclear arms.
They, too, are under house arrest.
If, however, the beleaguered
Pakistani state, already a balkanized enterprise (as the A.Q. Khan story
shows) is overthrown, or if the country starts to fall apart, the danger
of insider defections from the nuclear establishment will certainly
rise. The problem is not so much that the
locks on the doors of nuclear installations -- Pakistan's
approximately 50
bombs are reportedly spread at sites around the country
-- will be broken or picked as that those with the keys to the locks
will simply switch allegiances and put the materials they guard to new
uses. The "nexus" of terrorism and the bomb, the catastrophe
the Bush Doctrine was specifically framed to head off, might then be
achieved -- and in a country that was "for us."
What has failed in Pakistan,
as in smashed Iraq, is not just a regional American policy, but the
pillars and crossbeams of the entire global Bush doctrine, as announced
in late 2001. In both countries, the bullying has failed; popular passions
within each have gained the upper hand; and Washington has lost much
of its influence. In its application to Pakistan, the doctrine was framed
to stop terrorism, but in that country's northern provinces, terrorists
have, in fact, entrenched themselves to a degree unimaginable even when
the Taliban protected Al-Qaeda's camps before September 11th.
If the Bush Doctrine laid
claim to the values of democracy, its man Musharraf now has the distinction,
rare even among dictators, of mounting a second military coup to maintain
the results of his first one. In a crowning irony, his present crackdown
is on democracy activists, not the Taliban, armed Islamic extremists,
or al-Qaeda supporters who have established
positions in the Swat valley only 150 miles from Islamabad.
Most important, the collapsed
doctrine has stoked the nuclear fires it was meant to quench. The dangers
of nuclear terrorism, of proliferation, and even of nuclear war (with
India, which is dismayed by developments in Pakistan as well as the
weak Bush administration response to them) are all on the rise. The
imperial solution to these perils has failed. Something new is needed,
not just for Pakistan or Iraq, but for the world. Perhaps now someone
should try to invent a solution based on imperialism's opposite, democracy,
which is to say respect for other countries and the wills of the people
who live in them.
Jonathan Schell is
the author of The Fate of the Earth, among other books, and the just-published
The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. He
is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a visiting
lecturer at Yale University.
Copyright 2007 Jonathan Schell
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