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U.S. Handles Pakistan Pardon With Kid Gloves

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Times Staff Writer

The United States will neither sanction Pakistan for pardoning the top scientist who passed nuclear bomb technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, nor demand an independent investigation of the Pakistani military’s suspected role in aiding the transfers, U.S. officials said.

That’s because the Bush administration wants Pakistan’s cooperation in pursuing at least two larger strategic interests: tracking down and halting the shadowy international procurement ring that has been peddling nuclear bomb technology, and rooting out Al Qaeda and Taliban networks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Our goal is not to denounce people, our goal is not to jail people, our goal is to get results... ,” said a senior administration official. “If we can help that happen by leaving it to [Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf] and not trying to dictate from Washington what he has to do, then that’s what we’re going to do.

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“It’s just another case where you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” the official added. “And there’s a lot of flies to be caught in Pakistan.”

But some analysts say the administration’s decision to handle Musharraf with kid gloves may have unintended and possibly dangerous consequences.

Several said the implicit U.S. stance was that the U.S.-declared war on terrorism trumped the goal of nonproliferation and that such a position would send the wrong message to other nuclear aspirants. Some also argued that acquiescing to Musharraf’s decision to pardon the scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, poses a moral hazard for an administration that toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein because of alleged offenses involving weapons of mass destruction that were arguably less severe than Khan’s.

But Pakistan experts agreed Washington feared that pushing Musharraf too hard in public to crack down on Khan, the revered creator of the “Islamic bomb,” could weaken the Pakistani general’s fragile hold on power. The Bush administration’s nightmare is that Musharraf will fall and a nuclear-armed extremist Islamic government will follow.

“There’s a strong belief here in Washington that Musharraf is the only thing that stands between us and chaos,” said Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan specialist at the Brookings Institution. Nevertheless, Cohen said, “Pakistan could be our biggest foreign policy problem, because it’s an Iraq with nuclear weapons. The government may not be as brutal, but it is as dangerous.”

Musharraf announced Thursday that he would pardon Khan, and he insisted that the scientist and associates in Pakistan’s nuclear laboratories had acted alone. “The reality is that the government is not involved and that the military is not involved,” Musharraf said.

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White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said Musharraf had given assurances that his government was not involved in any kind of proliferation. “We value those assurances and his actions since he made [them] demonstrate his commitment,” McClellan said Thursday.

But the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, took a contrary view, saying that Khan was not working alone and calling him “the tip of an iceberg.”

The administration is right to put cracking the global proliferation network ahead of punishing Pakistan, said Henry Sokolski, head of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. But claims that the Pakistani government was not involved in the nuclear transfers were “absurd” and the Bush administration should say so, Sokolski said.

“We found [nuclear] weapons designs in Libya .... Khan didn’t have access to those,” but Pakistan’s military did, Sokolski said.

Moreover, Pakistani military planes reportedly ferried centrifuges used to enrich uranium to North Korea. Bush administration critics say such evidence calls into question the reliability of the Pakistani military as a vaunted U.S. ally.

Khan’s escape from punishment sat poorly with those who support the administration’s emphasis on cracking down on proliferators.

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“I can’t think of any[one] who deserves less to be pardoned than A.Q. Khan ... , “ said David Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq.

“These guys aren’t even suffering the penalties you would get from smuggling marijuana,” said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He said the administration was using a double standard for friend Pakistan and foes Iraq and North Korea. “It’s terrible that North Korea would export Scud [missile] technology, but it’s a forgivable offense if Pakistan exports nuclear bomb technology to half the developing world.”

Musharraf also incensed international critics Thursday by chastising Libya and Iran for cooperating with the IAEA, thus exposing Pakistan as their crucial nuclear supplier.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Friday that Khan and his network no longer posed a proliferation threat and that alone was a “big success for the international community.”

However, Powell added, “I expect to be talking to President Musharraf over the next several days to make sure that there is a full understanding of what the A.Q. Khan network has done over the years so that there are no remnants of it left.”

The decision not to pummel Pakistan is “hardly surprising,” said Robert Hathaway, head of the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. “We’ve turned a blind eye not simply on this most recent episode.”

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The United States has had fairly conclusive evidence for almost a year that the Pakistanis were continuing to transfer nuclear technology to North Korea, “and we’ve chosen to do virtually nothing about it,” Hathaway said. “There’s clearly a disconnect between what they say about keeping [weapons of mass destruction] out of the hands of rogue states and what they actually do.”

But Cohen said Pakistan had allowed U.S. forces to operate quietly from its territory, even use two or three bases, prompting Musharraf’s government to feel that it had gone out on a limb to help the Americans.

U.S. officials say Pakistan has sacrificed its soldiers’ lives to help capture more than 550 Taliban remnants and Al Qaeda terrorists. And they hint at greater behind-the-scenes cooperation from Pakistan on the Khan investigation than Musharraf’s statements have indicated.

“We can say what we want to them in private, we don’t have to scream at them in public,” the senior administration official said. “They know we’ve followed them closely enough to know where we think [the investigation] is going to lead.”

The tension between the administration and its critics is mirrored by a long-running debate inside the U.S. intelligence community over Musharraf’s overall reliability as an ally and the depth of his commitment to cracking down on terrorism, several sources said.

While one senior administration official insisted that there was no rift, others reported a “raging debate.” Some think Musharraf is doing all he can against proliferators and terrorists, while others think he is doing only enough to placate the U.S. without further upsetting domestic supporters of the Taliban.

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Some believe elements of the Pakistani security forces are protecting Taliban and Islamic radicals to retain influence in Afghanistan if the U.S. fails or pulls out.

“They’re keeping the Taliban alive as Plan B,” one U.S. official said.

Pakistanis, meanwhile, fear that their usefulness to the U.S. will end as soon as the anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan does, Cohen said.

He suggested that the administration might seek to extract maximum advantage from Pakistan for America’s public forbearance on the Khan affair. The U.S. may increase pressure on Musharraf to round up Al Qaeda operatives and the Taliban forces who are feared to be planning a major offensive across the Pakistani border into Afghanistan as soon as the spring snow melts, he said.

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