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NTI: Global Security Newswire - India, U.S. Should Plan for Potential Pakistani Crises: Report
An expert report issued this weekend urges India and the United States to secretly plan joint responses to multiple potential crises in Pakistan, such as threats to the Pakistani armed forces' oversight of the nation's atomic arsenal falling or the government descending into chaos, Dawn reported (see GSN, Sept. 12).
The United States should take every action within its power to help Islamabad guard its nuclear weapons, while India should pursue dialogue with the Pakistani armed forces, according to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Institute India.
"We developed "¦ possible contingencies regarding developments in Pakistan," former U.S. Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, who co-headed of the panel that authored the report, told Foreign Policy magazine. "The report says the U.S. strategy (of) using military and civilian assistance to try to persuade the Pakistan military to cease its support for terrorist groups that kill Indians and kill Americans in Afghanistan has failed."
Washington should "heavily condition, from now forward, military aid to Pakistan on the basis of Pakistan moving against these terrorist groups that target Americans and Indians," the document states.
Pakistan's armed forces have consistently provided assurance that the nation's nuclear stockpile is adequately protected, but questions over such claims must be addressed, the report's authors said.
"If the society at large becomes more chaotic, more violent, if Islamic extremists have more influence inside the country, then one has to worry whether at some point in which the Pakistan nuclear complex has been penetrated by terrorists or Islamic extremists of other persuasion," Blackwill said. "The United States and India should be talking in a contingency way about what one country or the other might try to do in those circumstances. And what the two of them could try to do to prevent that from happening" (Anwar Iqbal, Dawn, Sept. 19).
Pakistan has the "world's fastest-growing nuclear stockpile" and could have as many as 200 warheads within the next 10 years, according to a July analysis published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (see GSN, July 1). Islamabad today is estimated to have 90 to 110 atomic arms (Kristensen/Norris, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2011).
Meanwhile, former top Pakistani scientist and proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan described his past operations in greater detail in newly obtained documents, Fox News reported on Friday.
The papers indicate that top Pakistani officials were involved in, and profited from, the proliferation network, an allegation long rejected by Islamabad.
"Gen. Jehangir Karamat took $3 million through me from the N. Koreans and asked me to give them some drawing and machines" connected to enriching uranium, one document states. Karamat one-time Pakistani army chief of staff and a former ambassador to the United States, called Khan's claim a "preposterous, false and a malicious fabrication"
Khan also stated that he carried out the delivery of "a set of drawings and some components to the Iranians" on the order of then-Gen. Imtiaz Ali, "probably with the blessing" of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto
An expert report issued this weekend urges India and the United States to secretly plan joint responses to multiple potential crises in Pakistan, such as threats to the Pakistani armed forces' oversight of the nation's atomic arsenal falling or the government descending into chaos, Dawn reported (see GSN, Sept. 12).
The United States should take every action within its power to help Islamabad guard its nuclear weapons, while India should pursue dialogue with the Pakistani armed forces, according to the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Institute India.
"We developed "¦ possible contingencies regarding developments in Pakistan," former U.S. Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, who co-headed of the panel that authored the report, told Foreign Policy magazine. "The report says the U.S. strategy (of) using military and civilian assistance to try to persuade the Pakistan military to cease its support for terrorist groups that kill Indians and kill Americans in Afghanistan has failed."
Washington should "heavily condition, from now forward, military aid to Pakistan on the basis of Pakistan moving against these terrorist groups that target Americans and Indians," the document states.
Pakistan's armed forces have consistently provided assurance that the nation's nuclear stockpile is adequately protected, but questions over such claims must be addressed, the report's authors said.
"If the society at large becomes more chaotic, more violent, if Islamic extremists have more influence inside the country, then one has to worry whether at some point in which the Pakistan nuclear complex has been penetrated by terrorists or Islamic extremists of other persuasion," Blackwill said. "The United States and India should be talking in a contingency way about what one country or the other might try to do in those circumstances. And what the two of them could try to do to prevent that from happening" (Anwar Iqbal, Dawn, Sept. 19).
Pakistan has the "world's fastest-growing nuclear stockpile" and could have as many as 200 warheads within the next 10 years, according to a July analysis published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (see GSN, July 1). Islamabad today is estimated to have 90 to 110 atomic arms (Kristensen/Norris, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2011).
Meanwhile, former top Pakistani scientist and proliferator Abdul Qadeer Khan described his past operations in greater detail in newly obtained documents, Fox News reported on Friday.
The papers indicate that top Pakistani officials were involved in, and profited from, the proliferation network, an allegation long rejected by Islamabad.
"Gen. Jehangir Karamat took $3 million through me from the N. Koreans and asked me to give them some drawing and machines" connected to enriching uranium, one document states. Karamat one-time Pakistani army chief of staff and a former ambassador to the United States, called Khan's claim a "preposterous, false and a malicious fabrication"
Khan also stated that he carried out the delivery of "a set of drawings and some components to the Iranians" on the order of then-Gen. Imtiaz Ali, "probably with the blessing" of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto
