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Pakistan, India and the nuclear deal
Editorial:
Daily Times
Monday, October 06, 2008
The US Congress has passed the US-India nuclear agreement and the $100 billion Indian nuclear market will now be open to American business after President Bush has signed the deal. The deal gives legal space to India outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) though Mohamed ElBaradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is on record as denying the notion of the five recognised nuclear powers under the NPT as legitimate. A sharp international lawyer, Mr ElBaradeis interpretation is consistent with Article VI of the NPT which insists on total disarmament. He has also advocated pulling Pakistan and Israel into the recognised nuclear regime.
Pakistan has officially protested the deal in the past. However, it faced a paradox. It could either go all out and oppose it or demand a similar deal for itself in which case it could not use the proliferation argument to oppose the US-India deal. In reality, it happily let the non-proliferationists in the US oppose the deal while lobbying for it herself. There was never a consistent policy but privately everyone in Islamabad had realised that it could not stop the deal from outside. Pakistan therefore hoped that the deal would make shipwreck on a number of rocks, given the meandering course it had to take to fruition. Ironically, the deal nearly got wrecked because of the Left and Right within India!
Some elements within Pakistan are trying to present a bleak picture of what India can get out of this deal. The fact is that the advantage of the deal to India is not that it will be able to make more bombs or become energy-efficient. It already has enough bombs to deter Pakistan and the deal is unlikely to address its energy needs beyond 10 to 12 percent. The real advantage is that the United States and with it Russia, France, Australia et al have accepted Indias rising status as a partner state and gone a couple of extra miles to accommodate its nuclear status legally outside the NPT. That is where the rub lies.
When President Bush said that Pakistan could not get a similar deal, he was pointing to how Pakistan is looked at despite being an ally. The Pakistani public has never made any bones about being anti-American. Washington knows that Pakistan is allied with it not because it accepts the current global status quo but because it cannot break free of it presently. India, on the other hand, has accepted the global architecture and gone to work on enhancing its status within it. There is a world of difference between the two approaches, present as they do two different worldviews.
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has brushed aside the deal by saying that it provides moral justification for Pakistan to get the same kind of deal from someone who can supply nuclear technology to it. President Asif Ali Zardari, who says he expects the international community to come up with a $100 billion bailout grant for Pakistan,
is miffed about the Indo-American nuclear deal, but not overly so. He knows Pakistan is in dire straits economically and politically and the charges of proliferation continue to haunt it. In fact, he said in New York that India has never been a threat to Pakistan. I, for one, and our democratic government are not scared of Indian influence abroad. He is also in favour of trading freely with India.
Opinion in Pakistan thinks Islamabad is not doing enough to get a similar deal from China. Such thinking is unrealistic and totally unaware of the compulsions China has with regard to breaking,
not so much the NPT, which is broken now anyway, as the agreement with the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) of countries who have nuclear technology on offer. It has helped Pakistan and will continue to do so but within certain constraints and, most importantly, it would not want to go around flaunting such help.
At the nuclear club, China, while voting with the rest on the Indo-US deal, has spoken in favour of giving Pakistan the same kind of exemption from the NPT as was given to India. Here is the beginning of Pakistans march back to being a normal state. In the coming months the government should show the world that it wants to become normal despite all the internal pressures to continue on the path of anarchy and international isolation. And as its first big step in that direction it must get on the fast track of normalisation of relations with India. Pakistans insecurity is coming from its economy because in the past it has done almost nothing to rectify those structural problems that can unleash the countrys economic potential.
The world was not all in favour of the nuclear deal between the US and India. Anti-proliferationists inside and outside the US warned against violating the NPT and throwing the world open to proliferation. They envisage many states in the Middle East with ample supplies of oil to burn trying to set up nuclear power plants, a clear indication of ultimate nuclearisation. But everyone thought that the hurdle of getting a no-objection certificate from the 45 countries with bans placed on India would be un-crossable. However, when the NSG said yes, the deal was finally done.
Pakistan has nuclear weapons and they will always be a good minimum deterrent if Pakistan walks the road of peace and begins to address its internal problems. One irreducible consequence of deterrence between two nuclear powers is the freezing of the status quo. Every time Pakistan has tried to change it, it has lost trust and prestige in the world. The decision to devote more attention to Pakistans internal disorder must come from the elected leadership of the country and not from the army. Pakistan is in the process of coping with the blowback of the doctrine of strategic depth, a purely military idea which no one is able to explain and justify. *
Editorial:
Daily Times
Monday, October 06, 2008
The US Congress has passed the US-India nuclear agreement and the $100 billion Indian nuclear market will now be open to American business after President Bush has signed the deal. The deal gives legal space to India outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) though Mohamed ElBaradei, Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is on record as denying the notion of the five recognised nuclear powers under the NPT as legitimate. A sharp international lawyer, Mr ElBaradeis interpretation is consistent with Article VI of the NPT which insists on total disarmament. He has also advocated pulling Pakistan and Israel into the recognised nuclear regime.
Pakistan has officially protested the deal in the past. However, it faced a paradox. It could either go all out and oppose it or demand a similar deal for itself in which case it could not use the proliferation argument to oppose the US-India deal. In reality, it happily let the non-proliferationists in the US oppose the deal while lobbying for it herself. There was never a consistent policy but privately everyone in Islamabad had realised that it could not stop the deal from outside. Pakistan therefore hoped that the deal would make shipwreck on a number of rocks, given the meandering course it had to take to fruition. Ironically, the deal nearly got wrecked because of the Left and Right within India!
Some elements within Pakistan are trying to present a bleak picture of what India can get out of this deal. The fact is that the advantage of the deal to India is not that it will be able to make more bombs or become energy-efficient. It already has enough bombs to deter Pakistan and the deal is unlikely to address its energy needs beyond 10 to 12 percent. The real advantage is that the United States and with it Russia, France, Australia et al have accepted Indias rising status as a partner state and gone a couple of extra miles to accommodate its nuclear status legally outside the NPT. That is where the rub lies.
When President Bush said that Pakistan could not get a similar deal, he was pointing to how Pakistan is looked at despite being an ally. The Pakistani public has never made any bones about being anti-American. Washington knows that Pakistan is allied with it not because it accepts the current global status quo but because it cannot break free of it presently. India, on the other hand, has accepted the global architecture and gone to work on enhancing its status within it. There is a world of difference between the two approaches, present as they do two different worldviews.
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani has brushed aside the deal by saying that it provides moral justification for Pakistan to get the same kind of deal from someone who can supply nuclear technology to it. President Asif Ali Zardari, who says he expects the international community to come up with a $100 billion bailout grant for Pakistan,
is miffed about the Indo-American nuclear deal, but not overly so. He knows Pakistan is in dire straits economically and politically and the charges of proliferation continue to haunt it. In fact, he said in New York that India has never been a threat to Pakistan. I, for one, and our democratic government are not scared of Indian influence abroad. He is also in favour of trading freely with India.Opinion in Pakistan thinks Islamabad is not doing enough to get a similar deal from China. Such thinking is unrealistic and totally unaware of the compulsions China has with regard to breaking,
not so much the NPT, which is broken now anyway, as the agreement with the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) of countries who have nuclear technology on offer. It has helped Pakistan and will continue to do so but within certain constraints and, most importantly, it would not want to go around flaunting such help.At the nuclear club, China, while voting with the rest on the Indo-US deal, has spoken in favour of giving Pakistan the same kind of exemption from the NPT as was given to India. Here is the beginning of Pakistans march back to being a normal state. In the coming months the government should show the world that it wants to become normal despite all the internal pressures to continue on the path of anarchy and international isolation. And as its first big step in that direction it must get on the fast track of normalisation of relations with India. Pakistans insecurity is coming from its economy because in the past it has done almost nothing to rectify those structural problems that can unleash the countrys economic potential.
The world was not all in favour of the nuclear deal between the US and India. Anti-proliferationists inside and outside the US warned against violating the NPT and throwing the world open to proliferation. They envisage many states in the Middle East with ample supplies of oil to burn trying to set up nuclear power plants, a clear indication of ultimate nuclearisation. But everyone thought that the hurdle of getting a no-objection certificate from the 45 countries with bans placed on India would be un-crossable. However, when the NSG said yes, the deal was finally done.
Pakistan has nuclear weapons and they will always be a good minimum deterrent if Pakistan walks the road of peace and begins to address its internal problems. One irreducible consequence of deterrence between two nuclear powers is the freezing of the status quo. Every time Pakistan has tried to change it, it has lost trust and prestige in the world. The decision to devote more attention to Pakistans internal disorder must come from the elected leadership of the country and not from the army. Pakistan is in the process of coping with the blowback of the doctrine of strategic depth, a purely military idea which no one is able to explain and justify. *
