[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

[risk]

Levy bump. I don't always agree with him, but he makes another admirable spokesman for France. He was on Charlie Rose quite a while back and his positive comments for Americans softened up my attitudes quite a bit.

[livius]

I was hoping you were going to post this one!

Pakistan-not-our-friend bump.

[angkor]

It's not as if Kahn miraculously came under the microscope just a month or two ago. In fact he's been well-known to international intelligence agencies for well over a decade. And Pakistan's two-decade history of fanaticism, money laundering, heroin dealing, arms smuggling, and terrorist harboring goes on and on.

BTW, Kahn's expertise is theft, not engineering. Kahn himself does and did not have the technical skills to actually lead the nuclear engineering efforts.

The following quotes are from Rachel Ehrenfeld's Evil Money, HarperCollins, 1992):

"In 1983 a Dutch court convicted Dr. Abdul Qader Khan, head of Pakistan's nuclear program, on charges of stealing the blueprints for a uranium enrichment factory. . . . Kahn's lawyer was paid by BCCI.

"In 1984, three Pakistani nationals were indicted in Houston for attempting to buy and ship to Pakistan, high-speed switches designed to trigger nuclear weapons. The trio offered to pay in gold supplied by BCCI.

"In 1987 two Americans, Rita and Arnold Mandel, together with Hong Kong businessman Leung Yu Hung, were indicted by the U.S. Attorney in Sacramento, California, on charges of illegal importations of $1 billion worth of oscilloscopes and computer equipment for Pakistan's nuclear program. . . . BCCI facilitated [some of the shipments]"

"In 1987 in Philadelphia, Ashad Pervez, a Pakistani-born Canadian, was indicted for conspiring to export restricted specialty steel and metal used to enhance nuclear explosions. ... He . . . paid high prices with money delivered to the Toronto BCCI branch from BCCI London"

[stilts]

I am waiting for the Dems to sieze on the Musharaff connection and juxtapose that with the lack of WMD we have found in Iraq as a way of trying to undermine the effort made in the War on Terror. This discrepancy (No WMD found in the country we went to war with and admitted nuclear proliferation from the country we give aid to.) looks like a "soft white underbelly" in today's envronment of sound-bites and media spinning.

[dennisw]

TRUTH!!!!!

[af_vet_1981]

To put it simply and disconcertingly: Pakistan's nuclear weapons need to be secured. They cannot -- will not -- be secured by Pakistan alone.

The French observer is correct.

[Mitchell]

Another Pakistan ping.

[Cold Heart]

Btt

[Boot Hill]

Bernard Levy writes:   "But we must not shift our gaze from [Musharraaf] himself, whose knowledge of Khan's dark machinations no one in Islamabad doubts..."

In reading Levy's editorial, one is reminded of the old adage that, "when you're up to your a$$ in alligators, sometimes it is difficult to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp".

Of course Musharraf was aware of what Kahn was doing, just as every other leader of the army and the Pakistani government has known for the past 15 years. But punishing the guilty here is far less important than stopping those transfers of nuclear technology and moving on to complete our far more critical objectives in Pakistan.

And if, in accomplishing those goals, we find it convenient, for the time being, to indulge Musharraf and his fiction that he was not involved in the Kahn affair, then so be it. Rather than turning our gaze to Musharraf, as Levy entreats, we should rivet our attention on real objectives in Pakistan that further our goals in the War on Terror.

1. Keep Pakistan's existing nuclear weapons stockpile out of the hands of Islamist radicals, al Qa'ida, etc.
2. Capture Osama bin Ladin, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Mohammed Omar.
3. Clean out the rat's nest of terrorist groups that inhabit Pakistan.
4. Close off the support for these terrorists including the financial support (foreign and domestic), weapons supplies and the madrasis.
5. Track down the details of the Saudi nuclear weapons program that was located inside of Pakistan.

Anything else, including the question of Musharraf part in the Kahn affair, is just a sideshow, set up by those who do not wish us well, to distract us.

--Boot Hill

[Monty22]

The 'fallout' will probably be a bright flash in LA, Chicago, NYC, and others at the same time. The burn victims will be slithering away from the blast, and there will be no medical attention or hospital beds for them.

It'll be the end, and it will *hopefully* be a full scale retaliation against the islamic world in retaliation.

Sadly, we'll probably do nothing but scrape up the pieces like we did on 9/11. And we'll absorb the millions injured and suck it up, cause that's what we do now.