Keeping the bomb safe from extremists: DT

Excepts from Daily Times Editorial - November 3, 2006

EDITORIAL: Keeping the bomb safe from extremists
The fear of nuclear technology slipping into the hands of terrorists also relates to Pakistan, in addition to certain developments after the break-up of the Soviet Union, when nuclear devices could become dangerously available to ‘non-state actors’. It also indirectly points to the possibility of nuclear weapons and material falling into the hands of ‘extremist’ elements either through a change of government or through sheer pilferage by state functionaries owing allegiance to extremist ideologies.

Pakistan says it has set up a fail-safe system of safety for its nuclear facilities, but any known estimates of how a state may achieve complete security of nuclear materials militate against such a claim. Apart from Pakistan’s financial ability to safeguard a completely fail-safe nuclear security, there are political risks run only by Pakistan as an Islamic state that cannot be ignored. For the world, the possession of nuclear weapons by a third world Muslim nation is a new experience. The concept of jihad in today’s Islamic ideology is increasingly opposed to the state itself which is not deemed sovereign. And the question of the sovereignty of the state as understood in the non-Islamic states also remains open to dispute.

Indeed, most religious leaders inside the MMA in Pakistan don’t think that jihad is, or should be, strictly a function of the state. Those moderate Islamic scholars who insist that Islam gives the right of declaring jihad only to the state have either fallen silent or have been silenced by physical threats by the extremist clergy. But Pakistan cannot complain too much if the clergy no longer views it as the holder of monopoly of violence. It allowed the privatisation of jihad for almost 20 years and used jihadi militias for infiltration into its neighbouring states. Today, even Pakistan’s civil servants dispute that jihad is the monopoly of the state.

Pakistan’s doctrine of deterrence fell apart when Pakistan broke the fundamental rule of nuclear deterrence by mounting the Kargil Operation right after its testing of the nuclear device in 1998, and was faced with the prospect of an all-out Indian conventional attack across the Indo-Pak frontier despite the risk of nuclear war. In 1995, an unsuccessful military coup led to the discovery of a plot by religious fanatics from within the army who wanted to kill the military leadership and declare Pakistan as a Caliphate. Islamic fanatics actually believe that dying in a war with the infidel is not death at all but shahadat in which the dead person remains physically alive. This makes nonsense of nuclear deterrence. A nuclear bomb unleashed on India is supposed to kill all the Indians as infidels while the Muslims would live ‘physically’ as martyrs under this doctrine.

When Pakistan and India were eyeball to eyeball on the border after an attack on the Indian parliament by one of Pakistan’s jihadi militias in 2001, the clerical leadership regularly issued statement asking the army to destroy India with a nuclear bomb. It developed that an extremist’s understanding of nuclear weapons is completely at odds with the rest of the world. There was a time when Osama bin Laden actually threatened the world with nuclear strikes. And Pakistani nuclear scientists — most of them with flowing beards — ere discovered to have had meetings with him in Afghanistan. The true measure of the nuclear risk can be had from the belief of Pakistan’s senior nuclear enrichment scientist, Sultan Bashiruddin, who actually told the government that Pakistan could use nuclear bombs to de-silt Tarbela Dam and extract energy from djinns.

Nuclear weapons are ‘irrational’ devices that are expected to be controlled by rational mind. Nonetheless, many great thinkers of our times have questioned the desirability of acquiring these weapons if they cannot be used and threaten humanity with death even in the hands of rational leaders. But what if these irrational devices were to fall in the hands of people whose worldview is based on irrationality, on faith rather than reason? India went overtly nuclear when the philosophy of Hindutva was in control, and organisations like Bajrang Dal were interpreting the bomb in the light of the Brahmshastra (the final weapon) of Mahabharata. In Pakistan, politicians were referring to Sura Anfal of the Holy Quran as the government went ahead with its tests in 1998. Today, any opinion survey would tell us that Osama bin Laden is more popular in Pakistan than General Musharraf. And Osama bin Laden is looking for his next weapon!