Did Pakistan betray China?

[Imdad Ali]

China helped us with the nukes so that we could achieve parity with India. They did not help us so that we would make money of them and pursue are pan-islamic agenda. Nor was it Pakistani state policy to sell our nuclear secrets, and yet the traitors who did this are pardoned.

I would not be surprised now that China no longer wishes to sell us their weapons since we have a bad habit of illegally giving it away to the highest bidder. In fact what country could trsut with their state of the art technology now?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...692-2004Feb14?

Libyan Arms Designs Traced Back to China
Pakistanis Resold Chinese-Provided Plans
By Joby Warrick and Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 15, 2004; Page A01


Investigators have discovered that the nuclear weapons designs obtained by Libya through a Pakistani smuggling network originated in China, exposing yet another link in a chain of proliferation that stretched across the Middle East and Asia, according to government officials and arms experts.

[shawaiz]

The only country which has been really betrayed by these idiots is Pakistan. The worst is yet to come.

K.Hassan, D.Times
The worst not over: it just began

Anyone in Pakistan who thinks the worst is over after Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan’s confession on state television and President Pervez Musharraf’s press conference some days later is living in cuckooland. Pakistan’s troubles are not over: they may have just begun.

First things first. No one, but no one, is prepared to believe that what has been said on Pakistan television — which has less than a shimmering reputation for telling the truth — is no more than a donkey’s tail with the rest of the said donkey well out of sight in the barn, and a radioactive barn at that.

I am not sure if the functionaries of the government back home read American newspapers or listen to American television news shows with the same attention that the Embassy of Pakistan pays to them, which is to say, not a heck of a lot. But in case anyone is reading or listening, here or there, he should be under no illusion that anyone believes for a minute that Dr Khan was solely and singly responsible for the sale, stealth or smuggling of lethal nuclear materials and how-to-make-a-bomb primers.

But let us skip the preliminaries and come to the heart of the matter. There are two scenarios. One boils down to Pakistan having confessed that its nuclear programme has been leaking like a sieve and the security of its nuclear assets has been repeatedly compromised by its declared and much-honoured ‘father’, Dr A.Q Khan. Since no reasonable person finds it possible to accept this explanation, the only other conclusion is that the sale of Pakistan’s nuclear secrets was a highly organised affair with the full knowledge and/or connivance of those occupying the highest offices of the state.

Whether it is scenario one or scenario two, we have established to the satisfaction of the entire world that we are a country that cannot ensure the security of its nuclear weapons and related assets. It goes without saying that Pakistan has flouted the assurances it had been extending internationally about its nuclear weapons being in safe and secure hands. It is irrelevant whether Dr Khan did it for money or ideology or whether the decision to hawk nuclear secrets for money or ideology was taken by the state itself.

Today, the world is justified in believing that Pakistan cannot be trusted and nuclear weapons are not safe in its hands. In a country where Maulana Masood Azhar is said to have disappeared from house custody without the government’s knowledge, a country where even traffic lights don’t work and when they do, they are not obeyed, is not exactly a country the world can feel terribly confident about when it comes to nuclear weapons, especially after the Great Confession.

I am not in the business of making predictions but let me make one for a change. Once the United States is through with its war on terrorism, it will turn towards Pakistan and there will be no dearth of people here screaming that the country that actually has weapons of mass destruction and a country that has failed to ensure their safety, is a country that must be deprived of those dangerous toys. Our nuclear assets will either be neutralised — much to the glee of India and Israel, among others — or they will be placed under such draconian regulations that we will have been denied both their use and their flaunting. And who would have brought all that about? None other than we ourselves.

But I want to end this Postcard on a lighter note. After Chaghi, Syed Mushahid Hussain suggested at a meeting held at the Information Ministry in Islamabad that small models of Mount Chaghi should be placed at every arrivals/departure lounge at Pakistan’s international airports to be given out as free gifts to foreign tourists. Why this imaginative suggestion that would have quadrupled our sagging tourism industry overnight was not given a run, only the Senator can say.

link