Very interesting article about Pakistan/Osama/WMD in New Yorker

[sam h]

In this week's New Yorker there is a Seymour Hersh piece that starts with this puzzle: Why is it that A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, could go on Pakistani TV a month ago, confess to running the world's biggest black market exchange in nuclear weapons production material (one many informed people believe supplied Iran with the equipment for their nascent weapons program), and get pardoned by Pervez Musharraf without so much as a peep from the Bush administration?

The answer Hersh gives is that the administration cut a deal with Musharaff. Khan gets pardoned, we don't make a stink about the fact that he and his ISI buddies (Pakistani intelligence officers) have been engaged in activities that from a WMD proliferation standpoint are in a completely different league than anything Iraq was ever guilty of, and Musharaff allows us to bus in a few thousands soldiers to the Hindu Kush to hunt Bin Laden this spring with (supposedly, har har) help from Pakistani intelligence.

Musharaff, essentially an illegitimate leader to begin with, is in a very precarious position. He is not that popular, and a lot of that stems from his close ties with America and a general fear that we will intervene militarily in Pakistan (at least this is what a Pakistani friend of mine claimed today). Hersh opines, and my friend agrees, that allowing a large US military push in the mountains is a huge risk. It is a very scary situation, because if there is a palace coup, it will likely be perpetuated by an Islamic faction in the military or defense community there. And who knows what kind of contingency plan the Bush administration has for that eventuality.

It should be obvious to anybody that our administration is playing a very dangerous game and lying to the American people about how that game is being conducted. In some ways, that's par for the course of international relations. But I for one have some pretty deep reservations about their strategy. The influence of Islamic factions in Pakistan has skyrocketed since the bombing in Afghanistan began, and if there is a regime change there and a quasi-fundamentalist group comes to power, only the most deluded coud fail to conclude that the Bush administration's foreign policy, en toto, has been a disaster. That the push for Osama (who Pakistani intelligence or their contacts could probably find for us within a couple weeks if they really wanted according to some people) may be coming at the cost of A) letting the world's worst nuclear proliferation network off the hook and B) rolling the dice with the future of a nuclear country of 150M people, is bad enough. That the timing seems part of an electoral calculus is even worse.

How much of a threat could Osama really be to us right now, boxed in a small desolate region of the Hindu Kush? As much of a threat as AQ Khan brokering the sales of nuclear equipment to Iran, other states, and possibly non-state actors? As much of a threat as a hostile Islamic Pakistan?