COMMENTARY
The nuclear black market

David Polhemus is an editorial writer for The Honolulu Advertiser.

Pakistan has been providing weapons information to the world's pariah states. We better find out what else it is up to.

One of the many subplots in the intense international debate preceding the Iraq war involved the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency.

The strongest dissenting voice to the Bush administration's assertion that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons was Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA's general director. Defending his team of in-country inspectors, ElBaradei said his agency had a great deal of knowledge about Iraq's many efforts to dabble in this area, but was confident that the country was far from becoming a nuclear threat.

The Bush team dismissed ElBaradei as being weak on nuclear proliferation. One of the grave dangers posed by Saddam, they warned, was the likelihood he would pass nuclear weapons or technology to terrorists or to other rogue states.

What a difference a year makes. Now the White House is trying to figure out ways to defend its ally in South Asia, Pakistan, even as it is exposed as the ringleader in a robust global black market in nuclear components, exposed almost by accident as its wares were discovered in, or en route to, Libya and Iran.

In a dismaying little bit of kabuki, a contrite Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, swore that President Pervez Musharraf was totally ignorant of his marketing of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea. In exchange, Musharraf pardoned Khan, who is so popular in Pakistan he is probably beyond prosecution anyway.

It's impossible to believe, however, that Musharraf wasn't "in the loop." He can read; Khan's many trips to North Korea had been widely reported.

So were the satellite photos of Pakistani aircraft on North Korean runways. Musharraf says Khan's motive was greed, but it's fairly clear that North Korea was swapping its missile know-how to Pakistan for the uranium enrichment technology that touched off the current crisis on the Korean peninsula.

"Khan and his network have been dealt a crushing blow," said CIA Director George Tenet, whose intelligence services had overlooked the operation, apparently for years.

But, responds ElBaradei, Khan represents only "the tip of an iceberg" in a veritable supermarket of nuclear goods. In an indication of the reach of this network, a precision-engineering company controlled by the son of Malaysia's prime minister allegedly fabricated sophisticated centrifuge components — the parts intercepted en route to Libya — for a Dubai-based company on a contract negotiated by a Sri Lankan.

Pakistan has been a valuable ally in the war on terrorism — some of the time.

But Afghanistan's repressive Taliban wouldn't have been born without the help of Pakistan's intelligence service. In an awkward moment during the Afghan war, U.S. bombers and allied northern warlords had to call a lull in their assault on the Taliban stronghold at Konduz while Pakistan's air force evacuated its trapped intelligence advisers.

While the White House pronounces itself grateful for the some 500 al-Qaida members arrested in the past two years by Pakistani security forces, it fails to add that Pakistan has yet to arrest a single Taliban member.

Certainly Musharraf's nominally secular rule is preferable to the goals of the mullahs who plot his downfall; one can only imagine the difficulties of dealing with Pakistan as the first nuclear-armed radical Islamic state.

President Bush observed last month that Musharraf is a "stand-up guy" when it comes to dealing with the terrorists. But we'd better find out what else he's standing up for.