Pakistan, far from being an ally of the West, is a "rogue nation at the epicentre of world destabilisation" and "continues to sell nuclear weapons technology" to clients known and unknown even as President Pervez Musharraf denies it, a new book has claimed.
"Pakistan continues to sell nuclear weapons technology, which means either that the sales are being carried out with Musharraf's secret blessing, or that he does not know and is no more in control of his country's nuclear programme than he is of the bands of jihadis in the tribal belt and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, which have merged with Al Qaeda and
with whom he has wrapped up deals," the book by investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark observed.
The book Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Weapons Conspiracy has noted that every American administration from Jimmy Carter to the present incumbent George W. Bush has condoned Pakistan's nuclear activity.
"Every American administration from Jimmy Carter to George Bush has condoned Pakistan's nuclear activity, rewriting and destroying evidence provided by US and Western intelligence agencies, deceiving about Pakistan's intentions and capability, and facilitating the spread of the very weapons we so fear terrorists will obtain," the authors said.
"Musharraf's Pakistan remains at the epicentre of terror, a disingenuous regime with its hands on the nuclear tiller," they observed.
The book put the current US stand-offs with Iran and North Korea into startling new perspective and made clear two things: "that Pakistan, far from being an ally, is a rogue nation at the epicentre of world destabilisation; and that the complicity of the West threatens to usher in a new nuclear winter."
The book on Pakistan's nuclear weapons warns that "It will only be a matter of time before the rising tide of Sunni extremism and the fast-flowing current of nuclear exports find common cause and realise their apocalyptic intent."
"There are plenty of ideologues, thinkers and Islamic strategists who are working towards precisely that goal, and here is a regime in Islamabad that has no hard and fast rules, no unambiguous goals or laws, and no line that cannot be bent or reshaped," the investigative journalists noted.
According to the book, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's former national security adviser, who in 1979 was the first to recommend that the US look the other way when it came to Pakistan's nuclear ambitions, warned in March 2007 that if the Bush administration did not back off from its current course in Iraq and Iran, the US faced the prospect of "twenty years in a war (with)... Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and probably Pakistan, and that will be the end of American global supremacy."
Robert Gallucci, Bush's former WMD adviser, who tracked the Islamic nations nuclear progress from its inception at Multan in 1972, goes even further: "Pakistan is top of the list. It is the number one threat to the world at this moment in time. If it at all goes off, a nuclear bomb in a US or European city, I'm sure we will find ourselves looking in Pakistan's direction."
The 586-page book observed that when President Bush delivered his annual State of the Union address in 2002, he pinpointed three nuclear hot spots as threats to the free world: Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
"What he failed to disclose was America's role in facilitating the spread of nuclear weapons to these 'axis of evil' powers and the critical part played by a key US ally: the Pakistan military government, and its front man, the nuclear scientist A Q Khan," it said.
In a masterful investigation, Levy and Scott-Clark revealed how 30 years of parochial and sometimes criminal policy enabled the scandal to evolve.
Although seen as a crucial buffer state and ally -- first against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and now in the 'war on terror' -- Pakistan instead betrayed the West, building a vast nuclear arsenal with US aid money and selling the technology to countries hostile to the West, while giving shelter to the resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda.
According to its publisher, Deception is the most complete account of Pakistan's clandestine nuclear network as it has extended from Islamabad around the world, and chronicles how Khan's operation, and his ultimate fall from grace, as part of a much larger deceit.