U.S. Handles Pakistan Pardon With Kid Gloves
WASHINGTON — The United States will neither sanction Pakistan for pardoning the top scientist who passed nuclear bomb technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, nor demand an independent investigation of the Pakistani military's suspected role in aiding the transfers, U.S. officials said.
That's because the Bush administration wants Pakistan's cooperation in pursuing at least two larger strategic interests: tracking down and halting the shadowy international procurement ring that has been peddling nuclear bomb technology, and rooting out Al Qaeda and Taliban networks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"Our goal is not to denounce people, our goal is not to jail people, our goal is to get results
"It's just another case where you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar," the official added. "And there's a lot of flies to be caught in Pakistan."
But some analysts say the administration's decision to handle Musharraf with kid gloves may have unintended and possibly dangerous consequences.
Several said the implicit U.S. stance was that the U.S.-declared war on terrorism trumped the goal of nonproliferation and that such a position would send the wrong message to other nuclear aspirants. Some also argued that acquiescing to Musharraf's decision to pardon the scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, poses a moral hazard for an administration that toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein because of alleged offenses involving weapons of mass destruction that were arguably less severe than Khan's.
But Pakistan experts agreed Washington feared that pushing Musharraf too hard in public to crack down on Khan, the revered creator of the "Islamic bomb," could weaken the Pakistani general's fragile hold on power. The Bush administration's nightmare is that Musharraf will fall and a nuclear-armed extremist Islamic government will follow.
"There's a strong belief here in Washington that Musharraf is the only thing that stands between us and chaos," said Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan specialist at the Brookings Institution. Nevertheless, Cohen said, "Pakistan could be our biggest foreign policy problem, because it's an Iraq with nuclear weapons. The government may not be as brutal, but it is as dangerous."
Musharraf announced Thursday that he would pardon Khan, and he insisted that the scientist and associates in Pakistan's nuclear laboratories had acted alone. "The reality is that the government is not involved and that the military is not involved," Musharraf said.
