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DECEPTION: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, by Adrian
Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark. Walker & Company, 586 pp.
Later this month, a movie called Charlie Wilson's
War will be released, with Tom Hanks as the title character. He is a playboy congressman from Texas who - apart from
drinking whiskey and goosing strippers - uses his high office to support the Afghan resistance to the Red Army during the
early 1980s. To judge by the trailers, it will be as much historical comedy as historical drama. While helping to create a
pipeline for weaponry running through Pakistan, Charlie orders booze! In a Muslim country! Where they don't drink! Hilarity
ensues.
So it turns out that a lovable rogue helped bring down the Soviet empire. I somehow doubt that there will
be much more than a somber little postscript - if even that - to note that Charlie Wilson's efforts had other consequences.
Having defeated those ruthless Russians, a generation of mullahs concluded that the next step, taking on decadent America,
would be easy.
That was one legacy. And another - as Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark show in their new book,
Deception - will be the mushroom cloud almost certain to rise one day from some city picked as a target in the global
holy war.
During the 1960s and '70s, international efforts to monitor and hinder Pakistan's development of nuclear
weaponry had been erratic and halfhearted, at best. But once the military dictatorship there proved a vital ally in turning
Afghanistan into a debacle for the Soviets, the United States didn't just turn a blind eye.
Most of the budget for
Pakistan's nukes program was skimmed from the copious American aid gushing through the country on its way to the Afghans.
The State Department issued "scores of approvals for the Pakistan embassy in Washington," write Levy and Scott-Clark, "to
export hi-tech equipment that the Commerce Department had refused to license" because the United States was at least nominally
opposed to nuclear proliferation. An analyst for the CIA and Pentagon who tried to blow the whistle on such dubious (indeed,
illegal) activities was harassed and ultimately hounded out of government service.
Thus was Pakistan able to build
not just its own bomb (successfully tested in 1998) but an industry in the manufacture of uranium-enrichment technology, which
it could then export, for a nice fee, to countries like Iran, Libya and North Korea. After 9/11, Pakistan again proved to
be our special friend in the region. Its president, Gen. Musharraf, started quoting Abraham Lincoln in his speeches, and made
clear that he was shocked - simply shocked - to learn that a few bad apples in his country had been participating in the international
gray market in nukes.
There are levels of cynicism it is difficult to criticize too directly, because mere words will
never convey the bottomlessness of it all. Better simply to narrate and describe, and leave readers to face the implications
for themselves. The authors of Deception are investigative reporters who have been correspondents for the Sunday
Times of London and the Guardian. They occasionally pause to utter an exclamation or two, but the main force
of their book comes from an unrelenting, massive accumulation of facts drawn from numerous interviews, as well as government
reports and published sources.
Some aspects of the story have been told elsewhere - with the rise and fall of A.Q.
Khan (the charming megalomaniac who created Pakistan's nuclear-enrichment program) recently covered in William Langewiesche's
book The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, for example. And the realization that Pakistan is the most
ambiguous and unstable of partners in the confrontation with Islamist terror ought to have dawned, by now, on anyone who can
read a newspaper. The Bush administration's emphasis on Iran's nuclear program looks incredibly bizarre and shortsighted,
given that it hardly compares as a force for atomic proliferation.
But one of the major implications of Levy and Scott-Clark's
extensive reporting (which covers developments on three continents across four decades, on what approaches a month-by-month
basis) is that the United States has long had a vested interest in ignoring Pakistan's nuclear efforts.
This was not,
of course, because anyone in the United States ever tacitly conceded that nonproliferation was just a way for powerful countries
to remain top dogs. It was simple opportunism. The Pakistani military was a reliable ally - even, and perhaps especially,
when it throttled whatever elements of electoral democracy functioned there. And so, when expedient, we pretended to believe
what they pretended to tell us.
The unintended consequence being the creation of a global infrastructure for the manufacture
of nuclear weapons (at what is now, all things considered, a fairly low price). Over the years, tough-minded advocates of
realpolitik in Washington thereby helped ensure that glint-eyed fanatics will sooner or later get their hands on one of them.
This is the most horrifying book I have read in a while. At one point, the authors cite a question posed by one senior
State Department official about some of his colleagues. "Why," he asks, "when it came to the destruction of the world, did
these guys find it so hard to play it straight?" No answer is given; but then none, I suppose, is possible.
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