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Bhutto promises
to hand over AQ Khan
WSN Network
 Washington: Pakistan’s exiled political leader Benazir Bhutto has
promised that she would allow international nuclear watchdog IAEA to
question A Q Khan in what appeared to be a move to win Washington’s
support for her power bid, but her offer has outraged domestic
opponents in Pakistan.
Bhutto’s unexpected
concession came during a low-key visit to the US capital that began
over the weekend.
But for one limited
public engagement at a think tank, her meetings were mostly kept
secret as she navigated the power circles to win back US support to
return to Pakistan and share power with Washington’s favoured
dictator Pervez Musharraf.
Her remarks about
providing access to Khan, who has been kept under “house arrest” by
Pakistan’s military leadership to prevent him from revealing the
full extent of the country’s nuclear proliferation, was welcomed in
the US, but attracted sharp criticism in her home country, where one
minister suggested she had no right to make such concessions.
“It’s the wrong
statement at the wrong time, and its sole purpose is to please the
United States,” Sheikh Rashid, Pakistan’s railways minister and
front man for Musharraf told Geo news channel in Pakistan, adding,
“Dr Khan was our hero yesterday and he will remain our hero
tomorrow.” Rashid said Pakistan would never allow anyone to directly
contact Khan.
But in remarks at
Washington DC’s Middle East Institute, Bhutto practically implicated
the country’s military in nuclear proliferation activities,
pointedly saying any future government led by her party would hold
parliamentary hearings to determine if Khan alone was responsible
for selling Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to other states or “other
elements were also involved.”
It has long been
said in non-proliferation circles in the West and even in political
quarters in Pakistan that Khan could not have sold or smuggled
nuclear secrets without the knowledge of the country’s generals.
Bhutto indicated as much by suggesting Khan “fell on the sword” to
save the military.
Her remarks made it
even more unlikely that there would be any accommodation between her
and the country’s military that Washington has been trying to
engineer. But there were enough indications in any case that the
scheme is falling apart. Bhutto sharply criticised the Bush
administration for supporting the military dictatorship of general
Musharraf, calling it a “strategic miscalculation’’ which was
actually aggravating extremism. While Musharraf has tried to
convince the world that only he stands in the way of extremists
hoping to overrun nucleararmed Pakistan, “in fact, military rule is
the cause of the anarchic situation in Pakistan,” Bhutto argued.
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October, 2007
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