Everyone seems to be hailing Pakistan as the existential threat to world peace. They say that the large Muslim population, low literacy rate and the threat of Taliban make it even more likely to be the cause of the doom than any other nation on earth. The primary cause of this scare is Pakistan's nuclear status. The worst-case scenario - The Taliban gains control of nuclear weapons and launches the missiles on US or Afghanistan or India - is presented. But in reality, that is not going to happen. We can rest assured that the missiles will not fall into the wrong hands. Why, you ask. Well, read on...

Its simply because the world will never let anyone press the "Red Button" in Pakistan. Notice that although Taliban is just a hundred kilometres from Islamabad, hardly anyone is talking seriously about the safety of its nuclear arsenal. That does not mean no one is taking it seriously. Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, said last week that he was "reasonably comfortable that the nuclear weapons are secure". Somehow Pakistan has managed to convince not only the United States and the European countries, but also its arch-enemy India, that its nuclear arsenal is safe. Campaigning during the 2009 election season, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, "We have been assured that their nuclear assets are in safe hands and I do not want to disbelieve that assurance". India is a country which will be the first target of any nuclear missile let out from Pakistani ground. If India can be so confident, I think something must have been done right.

The debate about securing Pakistan's nuclear weapons started way back in the last century, after Pakistan conducted its first nuclear tests in 1998. Since then, a lot of water has flown under the bridge, and Pakistan has established several layers of control over its nuclear weaponry. Even back then, Pakistan was believed to maintain a strong control over its nuclear weapons. Pakistan has generally been effective at maintaining the secrecy and the containment of its fissile material, except for the 2001 A.Q.Khan incident. The incident, where A.Q.Khan distributed sensitive information to rogue countries, highlighted the need for international cooperation in securing Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.

In one such paper on the subject, for the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in October 2001, David Albright made the case that aid to Pakistan must be conditional on it safeguarding its nuclear weapons and proposed several measures in case things go wrong, one of which included the US or China seizing control of the nuclear facilities in case a regime hostile to the United States assumes power by a coup.

History shows that the presence of Musharraf at the helm for all the years since 2001 helped in averting that possibility. In the past 8 years, Musharraf instituted a National Command Authority (NCA) for the command-and-control of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. The missiles were distributed over the whole of Pakistan (see adjoining figure. Source: WMDInsights). Permissive Action Links (PALs) which prevent unauthorized access to the "Red Button" were fixed onto the missiles. Alongwith that, the warheads, the rest of the missile and the delivery vehicles were also kept segregated to prevent terrorists from getting a complete missile on a platter. Some reports suggest that the Pakistani system of safeguarding the missiles is as good as any in the world, even the United States.

On paper, Pakistan has also instituted several measures to prevent leakage of fissile material or information to terrorists. It has signed several accords and has instituted several checks to ensure reliability of personnel manning the nuclear complexes. But the extent to which these checks are actually reliable is questionable, given the history of corruption in Pakistani governmental machinery and the growing rise of Islamic radicalism in the country.

TIME reported recently that Washington was more concerned about radicalised Pakistani youths gaining access to the nuclear material than about Al-Qaeda taking control of those. Such radicalized youth are finding their way into the Pakistani Army, which is considered by regional experts as the most stable and the least corrupt institution in Pakistan, and other security establishments. The demography of the Pakistani Army has changed over the years, with more Pashtun, Sindhi and Baluchi youths getting inducted to fight the war at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Experts fear that this may lead to factionalism in the army, thus endangering the nuclear weapons. At the same time, according to one Bush administration official, the efforts to systemically penetrate the army to gain control of the nuclear weapons have reached a high after Musharraf's resignation. The weak government of Asif Ali Zardari in Islamabad remains to be tested in this regard.

The United States had supposedly drawn up plans to take control of the nuclear installations. According to this report in The Guardian and here, Pentagon had prepared contingency plans to whisk away any weapons at imminent risk to safe places in conjunction with Pakistani military and the intelligence. But due to Musharraf at the helm till now, that contingency plan has not been needed. With Musharraf gone and the Taliban gaining power, coupled with a weak civilian government and the rising corruption in the Pakistani system, observers are worried that the government may lose control over parts of its territory, giving the terrorists access to nuclear weapons.

But again, these are all worst-case scenarios. With current Pakistani safeguards, continuous European and US insistence on securing the nuclear material and the benefit of having a still-responsive Pakistani Army may keep the terrorists from getting a hold of the nuclear weapons - atleast for now.

References and further readings:
1) Does Pakistan's Taliban surge raise a nuclear threat? Time, USA
2) Securing Pakistan's nuclear weapons complex ISIS, USA
3) Nuclear security in Pakistan after Musharraf WMDInsights, USA
4) Building confidence in Pakistan's nuclear security Armscontrol.org

This from The Atlantic, a very intelligent journal targeted to, as they call it, "thought leaders".



Creatively funny

Recent events in Pakistan have shaken up the international community. The Obama administration, which had been promoting its idea of building up Pakistan by throwing $15 billion at it over the next few years, was rudely awakened by the Pakistan government's deal with Taliban allowing them virtual control over the Swat valley. The blows kept on coming, with suicide attacks in different parts of Pakistan, some of them blatantly on the security forces of the country. The culmination of all of these was the news that the Taliban had started occupying and claiming regions of the Buner district, only a hundred kilometres from Islamabad.

Now, international reaction has been limited to asking Pakistan to rein in Taliban and take all the necessary military action against it. Till now, Pakistan has just been making peace deals and effectively ceding territory to Taliban, without undertaking any military confrontation. Analysts believe that the Pakistani Army is unwilling to do so because they dont know how to fight this guerilla warfare. In all their period of existence, they have been trained to fight a conventional war against India. Fighting a counter-insurgency is not their cup of tea.

Another possible reason could be the army doesnt want to fight its own people. The Pakistani Army gets about 30% of its soldiers from the Pashtun tribal areas. Almost all of its Frontier Guards come from these areas. These soldiers may be unwilling to pick arms against their own people. Third possible reason is that the Army doesnt see this as a war IT needs to fight. The army has become wary due to almost a decade of fighting a war that it never wanted to fight in the first place. This, to them, was and is an "American war". This, coupled with the high anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and the whole of the Muslim world, makes it enormously difficult for the Army to lauch a full fledged operation against the Taliban.

So there are reports that the Taliban may be retreating from the Buner district. This happened after another rounds of dialog between General Ashfaque Kiyani and Sufi Muhammad, the cleric from the Swat Valley. No war, no force used here, just talks. I really do not think this peace is real or is going to last for long.

Buner is part of the Malakand province, which is a very hilly region. The region has a terrain very similar to the Swat valley, and is ideal for fighting a guerilla war, which the Taliban has become an expert in. Now, Taliban vociferously claims that it wants to make the whole of Pakistan a Sharia state, but thats not realistically possible. The might of the Pakistani army is no match for Taliban, more so in the flat plains of Punjab. Hence, it can never cross over beyond Buner, lest the Pakistani army might launch a full fledged attack as a final act of desperation. The logical thing for Taliban to do is fortify its own territory, a territory it is familiar with, where it is comfortable fighting. And the entire territory of the Malakand region perfectly fits those criteria.

It is highly unlikely that Taliban will actually leave Buner. And even if it did, it needs to be realised that Buner is just one of the district in the region. Several other districts bordering the Swat district have reported Taliban presence. It is going to extremely difficult, almost impossible, to get rid of the Taliban in these districts in the near future. While signing the Swat peace deal, the Pakistani government virtually handed over the region to Taliban on a platter. The only solution now is to strengthen the frontiers of whatever remains and ensure the violence doesnt spread to the south, to cities like Peshawar.

It also makes sense in this case to rethink the aid given by the US Government to Pakistan. A majority of this aid was supposed to go the strengthen the infrastructure of the border regions, more specifically the FATA and the NWFP. Since the NWFP is controlled by Taliban and since Pakistani government has no control over the region, it is senseless to waste all that taxpayer money on that region.

Taliban is like a cancer, or a virus, if you will. A cancer is much more manageable when it is contained and benign. The moment it becomes metastatic, it becomes nearly impossible to control. Taliban has now not only spread in the NWFP, but it also has presence in major Pakistani cities and the ability to conduct bomb blasts there. It is slowly morphing into a metastatic cancer. It is very necessary here to contain Taliban as quickly as possible by establishing a Line-of-Control between NWFP and the rest of Pakistan, and here is where the argument of Partition of Pakistan again comes in.

Further readings:
1) Fareed Zakaria: Spiraling chaos possible in Pakistan CNN, USA
2) The alarming rise of Pakistani Taliban Rediff, India
3) How to clear this mess The News, Pakistan

Update:
See the ongoing discussion on this article at Reddit

Glenn Beck, like his big daddy Limbaugh, recently wished that Obama should fail. Here are his own words:

So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing – remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it science. Let’s put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don’t we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed with it!

And it was from America. Progressive movement in America. Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person. …. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails. But I just want his policies to fail; I want America to wake up.

Then he had this to say (with a lot of histrionics and drama which involved pouring kerosene on his guest)


Finally, he suggests that the Republican states should think about seceding from the United States!



But wait!! This from DailyKos

Travel back in time a mere 18 months and listen to Glenn Beck’s outrage at Democrats who weren’t supportive of President Bush:



Transcript:

And here’s another part of this poll. Most people say they have said a prayer for the troops, 87%. Oh, well, that’s big. 87% say they have said a prayer for the troops. Another 77% say they have prayed that the war would end in Iraq. A much smaller majority, 54% of Americans, say they have prayed for the President. I don’t — I don’t understand this. Republicans, 74%, say they are twice as likely as Democrats at 37% to have included the President in their prayers. First of all, we should all be down on our knees in praying for the troops. We should all be down praying for an end to this war. We should all be down on our knees every day praying for the President and praying for members of congress. My family prays for the President and members of congress, our leaders in all parties, our leaders all around the world. My family prays for President Tom. How do you not pray for everyone? How do you not pray for your enemies? How do you not understand that we all need guidance from God? What has happened to our country?

What a loser!

Analysts throughout the western world have repeatedly asserted that the first step in winning the war in Afghanistan is to have a stable Pakistan. To achieve this goal, an unbelievable amount of money is being thrown at Pakistan. A recent Pakistan Donors' Conference, comprising of more than 20 countries and convened by Japan and the World Bank in Tokyo, committed $5 billion in aid to Pakistan. Similarly, the United States is considering a bill that would provide Pakistan with $1.5 billion in direct aid every year for the next five years. Consider the fact that Pakistan, since 2001, has received over $10 billion in direct aid and military reimbursements from the United States, a significant proportion of which has been used by Pakistan for building up its defenses and posts against India.

And has this money been useful even, for Pakistan? A 2008 study by AmericanProgress.org gave the following results
These figures show that since 2001, the flow of funds to Pakistan has not made it any stronger, but only weaker, soon to fall into a state of anarchy. Only 1% of the total funds allocated for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have been used for development. This is exactly the area which has now been taken over by Taliban, and where girls schools have been torched and the Sharia law implemented. Even across mainland Pakistan, the literacy and employment rates are abyssmal further encouraging the young Pakistanis to take up the route of terrorism.

Some might argue that all of what is happening today is the result of utterly failed policies of the Bush administration, which is true. But is throwing more money at Pakistan the only solution? To be fair enough, the Obama administration IS INDEED attaching a lot of strings to the money being provided to Pakistan (Read the provisions of the PEACE Act here). But once the money does reach Pakistan, whom are you going to hold accountable? Pakistan has already expressed its severe reservations and unhappiness over the strings attached to the federal aid (Read this article in Daily Times).

Even with all the money spent, it is very unlikely that at the end of Obama's first term, or even the second, Pakistan would emerge stronger than it is now, especially given the nature of the geopolitics in the region. The all-pervasive corruption in the system would disallow the money to reach the projects they were intended for. There is a very strong anti-American sentiment in the Muslim population of Pakistan, which is unlikely to quell due to the money being thrown in. This sentiment would further be fuelled by whoever is in the Opposition, assuming Pakistan remains a democracy. Without assuming an anti-American stance the Opposition would never be able to get to power. Coupled with all of this comes the India-centric polity of Pakistan, and the India-phobia of its military and intelligence establishment. It is highly unlikely given these circumstances that money and greater oversight over the distribution of the money would alone help the region get out of this mess.

The only solution to this problem lies in the partition of Pakistan into three provinces - NWFP (which has already become an autonomous region under the Taliban), Balochistan (whose people have been waging a seccesionist battle against Pakistan for decades now) and Punjab. More on that in the next post...

More readings:
1) Sen Carl Levine questions Pakistan Aid Plan
2) Pakistan: Militants make aid work risky
3) Pakistan warns Kerry against aid conditions
4) Coming to grips with an expanding extremist threat in Pakistan

On April 20th, 2009 India launched a spy satellite-RISAT- aimed at boosting the surveillance capabilities of the army, especially at the borders. The purchase of the Israeli-made satellite was put on a fast-track after the November 26 Mumbai attacks, which claimed more than 180 lives and left the security establishment completely bewildered. The incident saw the long-impending replacement of India's Home Minister and the subsequent re-organisation of India's security apparatus. The procurement of this Israeli satellite was a shot in the arm for India's intelligence services which, in recent years, has come to rely heavily on TECHINT methods.

The launch of RISAT will provide a much-needed boost to the security of India. The country has witnessed hundreds of terrorism-related incidents in the past few years. Terrorist organisations like the ULFA, NSCN, the Naxalite movement have spawned and are actively working in several parts of India. The all-weather surveillance capabilities of RISAT would help in getting crucial information about such groups too, apart from keeping a watch on the India-Pakistan border. The launch has placed India in a group of select nations -US, Canada, Germany and Japan - with spy satellite capabilities.

Reports show that despite the Indian elections looming large, the pace of activity at the Home Ministry and the Defense Ministry have not slowed down. India also plans to buy the Phalcone Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) from the Israelis (image alongside), with whom defense ties have been becoming stronger since the BJP-led NDA government came to power in 2001. In just the last year, after the Nov 26 attacks, India has signed a deal to buy short-range surface to air missiles and aerostat radars for its Navy. India is also in talks with United States , Israel and Russia for raising an effective Anti-Ballistic Missile shield, the threat of which from Pakistan is a looming possibility. This apart from the almost $10 billion it wants to spend procuring 126 combat aircrafts for its ageing Air Force fleet.

Analysts point out that the focus of India's defense establishment has shifted rapidly from China to Pakistan, after the Nov 26 Mumbai attacks. Long pending defense purchases like the ones above are being expedited, and coordination between India's multitude of security agencies is being made a top priority. The policy focus on Pakistan has become even more pronounced since Taliban assumed control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, and subsequent rise in violence across Pakistani mainland. Indian administrators realise that the situation may well spiral out of control leading to the fall of Pakistan as early as the end of 2009, if nothing is done to curb that. This policy change comes well ahead of the elections - dubbed by BBC as "the greatest exercise of the democratic will anywhere and at any time in human history" - and in good time. With four more phases of electioneering and voting to go, it remains to be decided whether the people of India will give this administration a chance to extend this policy for the next four years.

More readings:
India's new arms have Pakistan in focus
India launches Israeli-made satellite for eyes in the sky

I moved to WordPress for some time and came back again to Blogger. This is a new beginning for me. I have written on several topics till date, and those interested are invited to take a look at the archives. From now on, however, I intend to write more substantial stuff...opinions and views on specific issues. I intend to write about the following topics, henceforth:
1) Politics and International Affairs
I am a news-junkie. I feel passionately about several events, and find myself establishing links between events that seem disconnected. Through this blog, I intend to propagate some of my ideas, opinions and views on international affairs.

2) Science and Technology
That is what I am training in. The scientific approach of enquiry is an amazing way to get to the truth. And the successes of this approach are being seen almost everyday. The Internet, the sequence of the human genome, spaceflights, medicines etc. are products of this exact approach. I have some darn good views on science and where it should be heading. Hope the readers are turned on by those too.

3) Educational Issues
I am deeply committed to education, especially in developing countries like India. Such countries have huge populations but lack of access to education and proper facilities stymies the growth of these nations. I intend to publish some of my views and ideas on those issues on this blog.

So this is the general outline of how my blog will look from now on. This is sort of a vision statement. I hope you readers find this blog interesting and worthwhile to read.