Pakistan’s nuclear oddballs

Reports that Abu Musab Zarqawi, al Qaeda’s top honcho in Iraq, now has a nuclear device or a radiological weapon — so-called “dirty” bomb — are hardly news.

But in Washington, where institutional memories, or any kind of memories, are scarce, old news is recycled daily as the scoop du jour. Just last February, CIA Director Porter J. Goss warned Congress there could be such an attack at any time. What do we know and how long have we known it? The record:

• Three months before September 11, 2001, two Pakistani nuclear scientists were in Kandahar conferring with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. When United Press International broke the story, Pakistan said their three-week visit to Afghanistan had been to advise the Taliban government on “agricultural business.”

• On Oct. 23, 2001, at the request of the Bush administration, these two scientists were detained for questioning about their activities in Afghanistan. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, former director of a nuclear reactor, and his associate Chaudri Abdul Majid, failed their polygraph tests.

• Pakistan said the two lacked the know-how to help al Qaeda develop nuclear weapons. But that was a given. What bin Laden sought was help in developing a dirty bomb — nuclear materials wrapped in conventional high explosives. Bin Laden told them he had managed to obtain old Soviet fissile materials from Uzbekistan.

• In his last message before the defeat of the Taliban regime in November 2001, Mullah Omar said nobody could begin to realize the devastation that would soon incinerate the United States. Omar was probably reflecting what his companion-in-crime bin Laden told him had been obtained from the nuclear Mutt and Jeff team from Pakistan.

• Two other Pakistani nuclear scientists also traveled to Kabul the month before Operation Enduring Freedom. When news of this visit broke, the government said they were unavailable for questioning, as they were both in Burma on another “agricultural project.”

• All four were known as al Qaeda and Taliban sympathizers. Mahmood even said, “The ideal form of government for Pakistan was Taliban,” the regime that took Afghanistan back to the obscurantism of the Middle Ages.

• In 1987, Mahmood published a 232-page essay titled, “Doomsday and Life after Death — the Ultimate Fate of the Universe as Seen Through the Holy Koran.” In another article in 1998, titled “Cosmology and Human Destiny,” he wrote about the correlation of sunspot activity and the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and World Wars I and II. He was clearly ahead of his time and gave a new definition to the long gloomy view of history. Sample: “At the international level, terrorism will rule, and in this scenario use of weapons of mass destruction [WMD] cannot be ruled out. By 2002, millions may die through WMD, hunger, disease, street violence, terrorist attacks and suicides.”

• All four scientists had been close associates of A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear black marketeer who made a fortune selling nuclear wherewithal to America’s enemies — North Korea, Iran and Libya. The “dirty” four presumably decided it was OK to add two more U.S. enemies — Taliban and al Qaeda.

• Mahmood resigned from the Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) in 1999 to protest what he perceived to be the government’s willingness to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). He then launched a campaign to denounce CTBT and advocated extensive production of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium to help other Islamic nations develop nuclear weapons. They would then know how to defend themselves against American and Israeli heathen crusaders bent on destroying Islam. Mahmood also made clear Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was the property of the whole Ummah (the global Muslim community). His public pronouncements piqued U.S. ire and Washington asked for his removal.

• PAEC officials praised Mahmood publicly after his retirement to say this former key player of Pakistan’s nuclear buildup made significant contributions to his country’s reactor programs and uranium enrichment. With a 1965 master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the U.K., he became prominent after developing a technique in the 1970s to detect heavy water leaks at a nuclear power reactor near Karachi.

• After his forced resignation from PAEC, Mahmood and Majid established Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (UTN), or “Reconstruction of the Muslim Ummah,” whose stated mission was “investment” in Afghanistan.

• Found in Kabul’s al Qaeda safe houses after the fall of the Taliban regime were drawings showing how to marry the ingredients of a radiological bomb.

If anyone still believes the radioactive pair traveled to Afghanistan for an “ag” project, there is a bridge for sale — over the Hindu Kush. Of course, al Qaeda has a dirty bomb capability. The terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2001, also proved Osama’s Terror Inc. thinks big. What, in bin Laden’s terrorist vision, could achieve what he publicly avows seeking — the same fate for America in Iraq as the Soviets’ in Afghanistan? Rendering downtown Washington or the Pentagon and the Green Zone in Baghdad radioactive and uninhabitable with dirty bombs is plausible and realistic.

The news from one of Pakistan’s neighbors was not reassuring. Iran, whose nuclear weapons efforts were boosted by A.Q. Khan’s expensive ministrations over the last 18 years, will have a new president next July — who could well be former President Hashemi Rafsanjani. Some Iranian experts in America see him as the kind of moderate “we can do business with.” Perhaps the Ayatollah Rajsanjani’s latest pronouncement meets the criterion of “radical moderate”:

“The teachings of Jesus do not exist in the Christian world today. Those who ignore the crimes America commits all over the world cannot serve as popes. It’s true they opposed the war on Iraq, but then ignored what America does all over the world in the name of the war on terrorism, the way in which it plunders the resources of peoples in needy and backward countries, its aggression in international organizations, which belong to all of the world’s peoples, and the inflammatory propaganda it uses to undermine other countries — all of these certainly contradict the teachings of Jesus.”

Israel’s Ariel Sharon told President Bush on his last visit he was concerned the expected 2006 U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would increase regional tensions that could lead to another Middle East war. Israeli intelligence sees Iran either leading or playing a major role in any future war against the Jewish state. The Israeli assessment is that, emboldened by nuclear weapons and medium-range missiles and U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, Iran may be tempted to lead its own coalition of the willing.

For the second time in five months, the authoritative Defense News reported, the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia operating an Iranian-made, pilotless UAV penetrated Israel’s vaunted air defenses and flew unmolested on April 11 over western Galilee cities and settlements and returned safely to south Lebanon.

Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz called the breach “a very grave incident.” Configured as a bioweapons dispenser, the Hezbollah drone could have killed thousands of Israelis.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.