China & Pakistan: Nuke Suppliers to the World
China is the generator of the nuclear problems that stare us in the face today - but its role has been generally ignored. The Guardian journalist Martin Jacques (author of the recently published When China Rules the World) said at a speech at the London School of Economics that China's rise is "absolutely peaceful". I challenged him later on; to his credit, he agreed that Beijing's role in proliferation was quite destructive. Muammar al Gaddfi, awash with oil money, initially sent an emissary to China to purchase a weapon. He was shown the door. But Beijing was more receptive to Pakistan, seeing it as a counter to its own rival, India. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was given assurances of Chinese support for Pakistan’s nuclear program during his visits to Beijing between 1972 and 1976. Bhutto described the Sino-Pak understanding as “my greatest achievement.” Zulfi was hanged later on, but Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, went on to build a huge network of suppliers, and he eventually sold nuclear technology to Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea, among others. To get an idea of how brazen he was, consider this: one of Khan's blueprints for a bomb was recovered in Libya from the laundry bag of his Pakistani tailor ("Good Looks Fabrics and Tailor").
We don't know the extent of the Pakistani state's involvement, but virtually everyone I spoke to in Pakistan believed that the state was complicit in those sales; Musharraf made Khan the scapegoat. A.Q. Khan's house is a fort right now. He is an embarrassment to the army, but, in the fractured entity that is Pakistan, an asset of sorts to Zardari's civilian government precisely because he threatens the army. He cannot be eliminated because he's still a national hero. And by all accounts he is unapologetic.
AQ's network -- including China's support to the Pakistani program -- is brilliantly detailed in Gordon Corera's invaluable book Shopping for Bombs. Washington's approach to Iran's programme right now is eerily reminiscent of the U.S. attitude to Islamabad's programme in the 80s -- except that the Afghan war made it difficult for Reagan to take drastic action, while there are no similar constraints right now over Iran.