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By Wajahat S Khan
It's happening, again. A major US publication, The Atlantic, has claimed that a fast failing Pakistan, run by inept civilians and praetorian generals, is an "Ally from Hell", suffers a completely dysfunctional relationship with Washington, and is an accident away from unleashing its nuclear weapons upon the world via infiltration, theft, sabotage and/or even rebellion among its ranks.
The nine and half thousand words treatise cites various (unnamed, except for a spokesperson) Pakistani intelligence officials, retired (but unnamed, except for Pervez Musharraf) Pakistani military officials, several former (some unnamed) and serving (unnamed) US officials, a platoon of American experts, barely any local analysts or officials (except for Hussain Haqqani), and digresses a lot before it issues a dubious verdict: Pakistan's nukes are very, very loose.
In a cliched narrative, ranging from the journalist Saleem Shahzad's murder to the Mumbai attacks, from the James Baker era to the Quetta Shura, The Atlantic hammers hard on the "untruth" of Pakistan's spies, the ISI, but eventually focuses on the role of Islamabad's nuke watchers, the Strategic Plans Division, while projecting various scenarios in which the overseers of the SPD, Pakistan's atomic Knights Templar, are bound to lose control of the 100 or so nuclear warheads they are sworn to protect.
In particular, The Atlantic emphasizes, in a post-Abbotabad operation world, Pakistan's paranoia of the US destroying or disabling its weapons carries critical weight among the country's nuclear establishment, so much so that Islamabad/Rawalpindi have 'freaked out' and started taking radical measures to protect Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, including the bizarre revelation of moving it around in a "shell game" all across the country in regular, civilian-style vans with no protection, that too on congested public routes.
Expectedly, Pakistan's Foreign Office and its military's public relations arm, the Directorate of Inter-Services Public Relations, have rejected these claims. The US Embassy in Islamabad has issued an innocuous 'all is well' press release and moved away from the crime scene. Local journalists like Ejaz Haider, contributing editor of The Friday Times, have critically dismantled the The Atlantic's position, while global opinion-makers, like CNN's Fareed Zakaria, have highlighted its strengths. India's media has made hay of this creatively imagined nightmare scenario, and Twitter has trended the story for days. Game, Set, Match: Pakistan's nukes are/aren't safe.
Regardless of the (in)credibility of The Atlantic's allegations, some crucial questions arise. What exactly are the trappings of Pakistan's nuclear regime? How is that inner temple organized? What is its genesis? As it is guarding Pakistan's guards - those 'national assets' that comprise of dozens of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons - warheads, delivery vehicles etc - while 'mating', 'de-mating' them, developing and testing them, and camouflaging them from Indian agents, American Special Forces, or even Al Qaeda operatives, what exactly is size and scope of Pakistan's nuclear command and control structure?
In the beginning, there was nothing
From the mid-1970s till 1998, Pakistan was in denial. Technically, the country's nukes didn't exist, which meant that there was no public debate about nuclear policy. "However, more inexplicable is the fact that even an in-house debate did not take place within the military or the foreign policy establishment," maintains Brigadier (retd) Naeem Salik of the National Defence University in his Genesis of South Asian Nuclear Deterrence. Salik was among a small group of officers assigned to establish the Nuclear Command and Control Structure after the May 1998 tests, which was the beginning of Pakistan's official formation of a nuclear regime.
Previously, semi-formal Nuclear Command Authorities had existed: one under General KM Arif during the Zia era, and the other under the troika of President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and COAS General Mirza Aslam Beg. The latter assemblage, which Beg has referred to as a "sham", was briefly touted by Bhutto to postulate her "Benazir Doctrine": not assembling weapons, but having all the components ready, while building trust with the Americans by reducing uranium production. Little surprise that it was short-lived, much like her government and person.
But the genesis of Pakistan's incumbent nuclear regime is as random as the development of its nuclear arsenal. Salik maintains that by the winter of 1996, Chief of Army Staff General Jahangir Karamat had established a small think-tank in GHQ, reporting directly to the COAS, to analyze the country's strategic issues. This group, "by coincidence...in February 1998, during a brainstorming session", came up with the issue of a formal command and control structure for the country's nukes, and decided to write a concept paper to formalize the process. The timing couldn't have been better. 'JK' was either a genius, very lucky, or had excellent intelligence on the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party government's plans; for as India and Pakistan went nuclear in May 1998, the original paper written by Karamat's think-tank came into play.
Finally, some structure
Immediately following the Chaghai tests, Karamat's GHQ assigned a working group of officers with relevant experience to formulate policy and processes. The highest ranked of these men may have been a two-star major general, who went ahead with drafting plans for a prospective National Command Authority secretariat.
By February 1999, a presentation was made to the new Chief of Army Staff, the artilleryman and former Corps Commander Mangla, General Pervez Musharraf. Salik claims that after approval, Musharraf presented the new command and control strategy to then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in April 1999, who "continued to vacillate" about signing off on the new structure till he was overthrown later that October.
In yet another timely move, Musharraf's new cabinet and National Security Council formally approved the NCA in February 2000, this time to pre-empt the visiting American president Bill Clinton, who publicly asked "Pakistan to be a leader in non-proliferation" in a live broadcast while bringing up - for the first time at an executive level with the pariah Musharraf - American concerns over the activities of AQ Khan. According to Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, two investigative journalists who interviewed US envoy Karl Inderfurth, one of the first American diplomats to operate in post-coup Pakistan, Musharraf was "slippery" and "dismissive", telling off Clinton that his NCA had disempowered the influential nuclear czars of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and the Kahuta Research Laboratory, and that the new Strategic Plans Division would now serve as a secretariat to the NCA, headed by his friend, General Feroze Khan, with all staff being subjected to rigourous "personal reliability tests". Even a raid or too was conducted around Clinton's visit by the ISI on tip-offs regarding 'suspected' nuclear activity, as Musharraf drove his point home.
A regime is born
Critically, in those heady days of near isolation, Pervez Musharraf's GHQ would manage to establish Pakistan's three-tier nuclear regime umbrella: The 'principal' (National Command Authority), the 'secretariat' (Strategic Plans Division), and the 'operators' (Services Strategic Forces).
The ranking organization, the NCA, wouldbe the military-political 'command group'. Initially chaired by presidents Musharraf and Zardari, legislative changes now ensure that the NCA is 'headed' by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and, in essence, tasked with the decision to deploy and develop Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Its "Employment Control Committee", which is formally assigned with answering the 'to nuke or not to nuke' question, has the Foreign Minister in the deputy chair, with the Ministers for Defence, Interior, Finance and inter-services top brass as permanent members. Analysts consider this a 'drawing room' committee - the one Pakistan shows off to the world - as it espouses the country's best-imagined practices of parliamentary democrats 'leading' the powerful military combine.
But the NCA's more powerful 'steering group' is the "Development Control Committee", with the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee 'assisting' the Prime Minister in the deputy chair. Comprised of 4-star level top brass from all three services, this clusteralso includes the country's top intelligence chiefs, and is considered the real nexus of the powerful military-scientific nuclear elite. A smaller, tighter gang of uniforms, this grouping gets regular briefings from Pakistan's nuclearized gatekeeper, the SPD, and decides what weapons to test, and when. If push comes to shove, and the nuclear option is exercised, the chances are that all, or part, of this group will be in the loop before anyone else.
Chaklala's Dr Stranglove
The New York Times'David Sanger maintains that for Washington insiders, the position of the man at the helm of Chaklala Garrison's Strategic Plans Division is far more consequential than that of the person who resides in Islamabad's presidential palace. Lt Gen (retd) Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, who has held his job for almost a decade, is probably Pakistan's longest serving official in and out of Army uniform. Both he and Musharraf officially retired in 2007, except Kidwai's luck didn't run out. Now at least 60, this artilleryman, parented by an author and teacher and schooled in Sargodha (reputedly the home of much of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, including the famously nuclearized 22nd Independent Artillery Brigade) is perhaps the world's most important retiree on extension, for he is the long serving Director General of the SPD. For the romantics, Kidwai is the Birbal of the Akbar that is Pakistan's great nuclear arsenal.
Back in 1998, an inexperienced Kidwai, then a Brigadier, was part of the post-Chaghai think-tank tasked with securing and indoctrinating Pakistan's nuclear regime. The fact that he has survived three Army Chiefs, three Presidencies, four Prime Ministers, Kargil, 9/11, Operation Parakram, AQ Khan's scandal, Mumbai, the tumult of the ****** war, and of course, his own retirement, should say something about him as well as ambit, the SPD.
Rarely interviewed or seen, published reports cite Kidwai claiming command over about 70,000 personnel associated with Pakistan's nuclear complex. Of these, he's told The New York Times, 7000 to 8000 are directly involved with the program, with 2000 being "hard-core nuclear scientists and engineers". To watch over his small army, Kidwai's SPD runs a parallel intelligence organization (not connected with the ISI) that closely monitors everything - from the beards to the bank accounts - related to the activities of his nuclear wizards. He calls this oversight a part of the SPD's "Personal Reliability Program". Former ISI Chief Lt Gen (retd) Asad Durrani has confirmed the presence of this separate, unnamed intelligence entity to this author in a television interview for Dawn News in 2007, claiming the organization also watched over the activities of Dr AQ Khan.
As for his own convictions, perhaps Kidwai's resume could provide some hints. Captured by India as a POW in the 1971 War, Kidwai has been trained at the US Army's artillery school in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, as well as served on detachment in Saudi Arabia. He has seen his SPD absorb US aid worth 100 million dollars for the protection of Pakistan's nukes, while dispatching around 200 of his scientists for safety training at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, but not given away much to Washington about location or safeguard specificities.
Actors versus institutions
As an inadvertent compliment to the SPD's discreet services, a Bush administration official told the Times in 2008: "Every morning I could see what was happening inside the Soviet nuclear system. I've never had a morning when I could inside Pakistan's." Another American official told the same paper regarding the SPD's operations: "It's a very professional military. But the truth is, we don't know how many of the safeguards are institutionalized, and how many are dependent on Musharraf's guys."
As the post-Musharraf Pakistan Army remains actor-dependent, with COAS Ashfaq Kayani and DG-ISI Shuja Pasha running their institution on extensions, Kidwai's long tenure takes the debate between professionalism and existentialism to the next level. Kidwai, also one of "Musharraf's guys", may be a remarkable performer, but why is Pakistan's nuclear structure - the cornerstone of its security regime - dependent on one man, and for so long? What happens, simply, if Kidwai doesn't turn up at work one day? In the most conflicted pocket of the world, that question is critical; in a country that has lost many of its leaders mysteriously and violently, it is crucial; and in an Army that has made a habit of being personality-driven, it is just disturbing.
Interestingly, Kidwai seems to understand this problem, and is keeping busy with the institutionalization of the SPD. His Security Division is turning out batch after batch of purpose-trained commandos (several hundred skilled in counterterror as well as nuclear armaments handling and dismantling just graduated), and he projects that by 2013, over 8000 of these men - the guards who shall guard our guards, the nukes - will be protecting Pakistan's arsenal. But then, again, another question: Who guards them?
Khan is a 2011 Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Goldsmith Fellow, writes op-eds for The News and works for Samaa TV. Tweet him @wajskhan and email him at wajahat_khan@hks.harvard.edu
