There’s some tough competition but Pakistan is probably the scariest foreign policy problem the world faces. It is where the issues of weak states, Islamic extremism, nuclear weapons and terrorism all come together. Considering Britain’s ties to the place it is a problem that should cause particular concern here.
If you doubt how big a problem Pakistan is, read David Sanger’s excellent piece on the safety, or otherwise, of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal in The New York Times magazine. Here is the key section:
‘By now Obama has almost surely been briefed about an alarming stream of intelligence that began circulating early last year to the top tier of George W. Bush’s national-security leadership in Washington. The highly restricted reports described how foreign-trained Pakistani scientists, including some suspected of harboring sympathy for radical Islamic causes, were returning to Pakistan to seek jobs within the country’s nuclear infrastructure — presumably trying to burrow in among the 2,000 or so people who have what Kidwai calls “critical knowledge” of the Pakistani nuclear infrastructure.
“I have two worries,” one of the most senior officials in the Bush administration, who had read all of the intelligence with care, told me one day last spring. One is what happens “when they move the weapons,” he said, explaining that the United States feared that some groups could try to provoke a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope that the Pakistani military would transport tactical nuclear weapons closer to the front lines, where they would be more vulnerable to seizure. Indeed, when the deadly terror attacks occurred in Mumbai in late November, officials told me they feared that one of the attackers’ motives might have been to trigger exactly that series of events.
“And the second,” the official said, choosing his words carefully, “is what I believe are steadfast efforts of different extremist groups to infiltrate the labs and put sleepers and so on in there.”’There is no tidy answer to how to deal with this problem. Seizing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is pretty much out of the question. But at the same time, it is hard to feel confident that the weapons are safe as Islamabad won’t let Washington see what it is doing with the money provided to secure them.
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