Posted on 02/11/2003 11:05:12 AM PST by swarthyguy
NORTH Korea last week restarted its plutonium reprocessing reactor facilities at Yongbyon. The decision came as Washington was making its evidentiary case at the United Nations for military action to disarm Iraq.
The timing was a curious coincidence - maybe a coordinated stunt demonstrating the mendacity of two charter members of the "axis of evil." And when Colin Powell asserted on Feb 5 that the Iraqi Embassy in Islamabad "played the role of liaison to the Al Qaeda organization" from the late 1990s until 2001, it was a reminder of how dangerous Pakistan became as a hub for enabling Al Qaeda's global terrorism until the tragic events of September 2001.
Looking the other way while the Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship blossomed is not all Pakistan did in the late 1990s. It assisted North Korea in building and operating a uranium enrichment facility. South Korean intelligence reports that prompted US officials to confront North Korea about the banned facility last October detailed remarkable similarities between Pyongyang's centrifuges and those used by Islamabad's secret nuclear weapons plants.
Press reports indicate that perhaps as many as nine senior Pakistani nuclear scientists and engineers have left the country without obtaining required permission for foreign travel. They remain unaccounted for, despite official denials from Islamabad that any scientists are missing.
Pakistan is not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Its export controls on banned materials are lax or nonexistent.The United States should recognize the priority of controlling the supply of materials and scientific know-how that enable terrorist states to blackmail or threaten the international community. Urgent attention is needed to enforcing tougher controls for treaty nonsubscribers that match the restrictions and guidelines of global nonproliferation regimes.
Reaching bilateral and regional supplier-control agreements with nuclear powers, including Russia and China, that impose stiff economic, political and military penalties for official and unofficial breaches is of paramount importance in this effort.
In the North Korean case, controlling Pakistani and Chinese supplies to Kim Jong Il's nuclear program would enable President George W. Bush to level a more effective threat of quarantine against Pyongyang's most worrying danger: the sale of Coca-Cola-size cans filled with plutonium to terrorists. An effective quarantine might then set the stage for a "more-for-more" stratagem that induces North Korea to dismantle its nuclear infrastructure in exchange for economic aid and political reconciliation with its neighbors.
Quick-fix diplomacy or tactical negotiating ploys no longer work in reducing the threat from rogue regimes. The twin menaces of North Korea's nuclear terrorism and Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, when combined with Iran's rapidly developing nuclear program, have to be addressed as a whole. Beijing is an important place to start.
Until now, China's apparently relaxed attitude toward North Korea's nuclear shenanigans has probably been based on the knowledge that without the specialized nuclear trigger switches that the bomb makers need for perfecting detonation, Pyongyang has no functional or deployable arsenal to threaten its neighbors with. But Chinese passivity and complicity are a recipe for disaster.
North Korean-aided nuclear terrorism could well turn on Beijing if Islamist terrorists come to the conclusion that China is not doing enough to militarily aid their Pakistani brethren.
That is why Islamabad holds the most important key. It has an opportunity to correct an era of misguided decisions, still officially denied, that helped give Pyongyang the power to carry out nuclear blackmail. Pakistan should share its intelligence on North Korea's nuclear program, telling the United States how much uranium can be enriched at its plants and to what extent (i.e., bomb density).
If Pakistan fails to assist, US and other foreign aid could be suspended, and rogue elements of Pakistan's nuclear weapons establishment could be selectively targeted for sanctions or preemptive containment at a time when Osama bin Laden's breed of Islamists control increasingly more power in Islamabad.
Pakistan should pledge in writing not to act as a conduit for the transfer or barter of key enrichment technologies. By agreeing not to transfer Chinese-made ring magnets that revitalize reactor centrifuges, or specialized bomb casings that house radioactive cores, Islamabad could quietly help put Pyongyang out of the nuclear blackmail business.
Finally, Pakistan owes transparent and verifiable guarantees to US authorities that no Pakistani nuclear scientists or engineers are helping other countries or Al Qaeda cells to build nuclear devices.
Cooperation from Islamabad should include sharing with the United States, on a classified basis, of a list of all scientists, their qualifications, passport details, photographs and logs of foreign travel.
Mansoor Ijaz is chairman of Crescent Investment Management, a New York private equity investment firm focusing on national security technologies. Lieutenant General James A. Abrahamson, retired from the US Air Force, was director of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative from 1984 to 1989. - Courtesy International Herald Tribune
Sounds like things are coming to a head re: Pakistan, far away from the glare of media lights that are focused on Araby.
I assume that means "all expenses paid vacation in sunny Guantanamo".
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