Posted on 05/15/2009 1:08:17 PM PDT by MyTwoCopperCoins
WASHINGTON: India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has told President Obama that nuclear sites in Pakistan's restive frontier province are "already partly" in the hands of Islamic extremists, an Israeli journal has said, amid considerable anxiety among US pundits here over Washington's confidence in the security of the troubled nation's nuclear arsenal.
Claims about the high-level exchange between New Delhi and Washington were made in the Debka, a journal said to have close ties with Israeli intelligence, under the headline "Singh warns Obama: Pakistan is lost." The brief story said the Indian prime minister had named Pakistani nuclear sites in the areas which were Taliban-Qaida strongholds and said the sites are already partly in the hands of "Muslim extremists." A sub-head to the story said "India gets ready for a Taliban-ruled nuclear neighbor."
There was no official word from either Washington or New Delhi about the exchanges, with India in the throes of an election and US winding down for the weekend. But US experts have been greatly perturbed in recent days about what they say is Washington's misplaced confidence in, and lackadaisical approach towards, Pakistan's nuclear assets. The disquiet comes amid reports that Pakistan is ramping up its nuclear arsenal even as the rest of the world is scaling it down.
"It is quite disturbing that the administration is allowing Pakistan to quantitatively and qualitatively step up production of fissile material without as much as a public reproach," Robert Windrem, a visiting scholar with the Center for Law and Security in New York University and an expert on South Asia nuclear issues told ToI in an interview on Thursday. "Iraq and Iran did not get a similar concessions... and Pakistan has a much worse record of proliferation and security breaches than any other country in the world."
Windrem, a former producer with NBC whose book "Critical Mass" was among the first to red flag Islamabad's proliferation record going back to the 1980s, referred to recent reports and satellite images showing Pakistan building two large new plutonium production reactors in Khushab, which experts say could lead to improvements in the quantity and quality of the country's nuclear arsenal. The reactors had nothing to do with power-production' they are weapons-specific, and are being built with resources who diversion is enabled by the billions of dollars the US is giving to Pakistan as aid, he said.
Windrem also pointed out that Khushab's former director, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood met with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and offered a nuclear weapons tutorial around an Afghanistan campfire, as attested by the former CIA Director George Tenet in his memoir "At the Center of the Storm." Yet successive US administrations had adopted an attitude of benign neglect towards Pakistan's nuclear program and its expansion at a time the country was in growing ferment and under siege within from Islamic extremists.
US officials, going up to the President himself, have repeatedly said in public that they have confidence the Pakistani nuclear arsenal will not fall into the hands of Islamic extremists, and they have Islamabad's assurances to this effect. But scholars like Windrem fear Pakistan's nuclear program may already be infected with the virus of radicalism from within, as demonstrated by the Sultan Bashiruddin incident.
boom goes london and boom paree....more room for you and more room for me...
Randy Newman
damn, there goes my bike trip over the karakorum pass.
Debka said so....
Praise Allah.
Powder keg ready to blow ..... ROP alert
While Debka is about as reliable as the National Enquirer, it is true that Obama’s Pakistan policy is entirely inept and dangerous.
Many people are going to die because of Obama.
I’ve always had a feeling the Indian-Pakistani situation would be where there is actually an exchange of nuclear weapons. If it comes about, I just hope the Indians decided to kill two birds at the same time by hitting Iran, too.
So? What’s it gonna be? Blow up India?
Blow up Israel?
Teach the US.A a lesson?
Decisions decisions decisions.
AAAAHHHHH Pakistan.
We will all go together when we go,
All suffused with an incandescent glow.
Hey, Debka is no worse than our MSM!
and an hour after they use them to kill 100 million Indians, the other 900 million are coming straight over the hill to kick their ass....
Only Israel has the balls to eliminate the opposition....and why would a Muslim attack a brother?
Pakistan, like N. Korea is trying to extort money out of us, with the threat that their weapons will fall in Taliban hands. Our appreaser in chief is willing to give them more money to develop more weapons.
Our plan to handle their nucs needs to include destroying their production capacity, but it is unlikely the Zero would make that move.
“why would a Muslim attack a brother ?”
Iraq VS Iran, Shiite VS Sunni ....
Sadistic cults know no bounds.
The israelis and the Indians should smite them simultaneously, settling all business with the nuclear jihadis..
When there are no infidels to kill, they fall on each other. It is their nature..
London and Paree are safe against Muslim attack—why should they destroy Europe when it is already theirs? The US too, is relatively safe from attack—after all we have a Muslim in the WH.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.