The New Yorker-Seymour Hersh "The Deal"

[LiviaOlivia]

THE DEAL
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan’s nuclear black marketers?
Posted 2004-03-01
The New Yorker
http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040308fa_fact

<snip>

It was a make-believe performance in a make-believe capital. In interviews last month in Islamabad, a planned city built four decades ago, politicians, diplomats, and nuclear experts dismissed the Khan confession and the Musharraf pardon with expressions of scorn and disbelief. For two decades, journalists and American and European intelligence agencies have linked Khan and the Pakistani intelligence service, the I.S.I. (Inter-Service Intelligence), to nuclear-technology transfers, and it was hard to credit the idea that the government Khan served had been oblivious. “It is state propaganda,” Samina Ahmed, the director of the Islamabad office of the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization that studies conflict resolution, told me. “The deal is that Khan doesn’t tell what he knows. Everybody is lying. The tragedy of this whole affair is that it doesn’t serve anybody’s needs.” Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who is a member of the Pakistani senate, said with a laugh, “America needed an offering to the gods—blood on the floor. Musharraf told A.Q., ‘Bend over for a spanking.’”

<snip>

Musharraf, who seized power in a coup d’état in 1999, has been a major ally of the Bush Administration in the war on terrorism. According to past and present military and intelligence officials, however, Washington’s support for the pardon of Khan was predicated on what Musharraf has agreed to do next: look the other way as the U.S. hunts for Osama bin Laden in a tribal area of northwest Pakistan dominated by the forbidding Hindu Kush mountain range, where he is believed to be operating. American commanders have been eager for permission to conduct major sweeps in the Hindu Kush for some time, and Musharraf has repeatedly refused them. Now, with Musharraf’s agreement, the Administration has authorized a major spring offensive that will involve the movement of thousands of American troops.

Musharraf has proffered other help as well. A former senior intelligence official said to me, “Musharraf told us, ‘We’ve got guys inside. The people who provide fresh fruits and vegetables and herd the goats’” for bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers. “It’s a quid pro quo: we’re going to get our troops inside Pakistan in return for not forcing Musharraf to deal with Khan.”

<snip>

Two former C.I.A. operatives with firsthand knowledge of the PakistanAfghanistan border areas said that the American assault, if it did take place, would confront enormous logistical problems. “It’s impenetrable,” said Robert Baer, who visited the Hindu Kush area in the early nineties, before he was assigned to lead the C.I.A.’s anti-Saddam operations in northern Iraq. “There are no roads, and you can’t get armor up there. This is where Alexander the Great lost an entire division. The Russians didn’t even bother to go up there. Everybody’s got a gun. That area is worse than Iraq.” Milton Bearden, who ran the C.I.A.’s operations in Afghanistan during the war with the Soviet Union, recounted, “I’ve been all through there. The Pashtun population in that belt has lived there longer than almost any other ethnic group has lived anywhere on earth.” He said, “Our intelligence has got to be better than it’s been. Anytime we go into something driven entirely by electoral politics, it doesn’t work out.”

<snip>

[varun]

1. Democrats should challenge *'s support..

...of a dictator responsible for the worst nuclear proliferation in history...instead of propping him up.

[megatherium]

3. but the fear is what happens if Musharraf falls

and Islamists completely hostile to the US gain control of the nuclear arsenal. Pakistan and India appear to be serious about peace just now; it would be terrible if a regime change in Pakistan sparked a resumption of that conflict.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. So therefore Julius & Ethel Rosenberg would be alive today if they were

living in a country that has nuclear weapons and that was assisting our country fight "terrorism". It's that simple?

Ironically an Islamic country via its scientist passes on nuclear weaponry info to a communist country. Same outcome.

Passing on nuclear secrets got a lot more forgiveable.

[Vitruvius]

4. Err -- Julius Rosenberg passed over the secret of the PROXIMITY FUSE,

not the atomic bomb. And the Russians rushed it into production and killed a lot of Nazis with it.

Many people in the know think Rosenberg was semi-tolerated as a spy because helping the Russians build the proximity fuse indirectly helped save American lives in WWII. And that when Hoover couldn't find the actual atomic spies, Rosenberg had to do as a substitute human sacrifice.

Ethel Rosenberg was a simple housewife and there is no evidence that she had anything to do with her husband's spying. The gov't nailed her to put pressure on her husband: "talk or we'll execute your wife too."

P.S: Rosenberg knew plenty about electronics but nothing about physics; he wasn't even qualified to be an atomic spy.

[bobbieinok]

6. links?

...

[kaitykaity]

5. Hersh is manna from heaven (to borrow a phrase).

He gets it right, and he gets it right first, before anybody else has even hit their alarm clocks.

Awesome.

[teryang]

7. Apologia for Pakistan's proliferation

Unsubstantiated accusations against Iran.