主题：【原创】北非风暴和以色列的军事态势 -- 晨枫

Here is the shocking, three-decade story of A. Q. Khan and Pakistan’s nuclear program, and the complicity of the United States in the spread of nuclear weaponry.

In December, 1975, A. Q. Khan—a young Pakistani scientist working in Holland—stole top-secret blueprints for a revolutionary new process to arm a nuclear bomb. His original intention, and that of his government, was purely patriotic—to provide Pakistan a counter to India’s recently unveiled nuclear device. However, as Levy and Scott-Clark relate in their investigation of Khan’s career over the past thirty years, over time that limited ambition mushroomed into the world’s largest clandestine network engaged in selling nuclear secrets—a mercenary and illicit program managed by the Pakistani military and made possible, in large part, by aid money from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Libya, and by indiscriminate assistance from China.

The authors reveal that the sales of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North Korea, and Libya, so much in the news today, were made with the clear knowledge of the American government, for whom Pakistan has been a crucial buffer state and ally—first against the Soviet Union, now in the “war against terror.” Every successive American presidency, from Carter to George W. Bush, has turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s nuclear activity—rewriting and destroying evidence provided by its intelligence agencies, lying to Congress and the American people about Pakistan’s intentions and capability, and facilitating, through shortsightedness and intent, the spread of the very weapons we vilify the “axis of evil” powers for having and fear terrorists will obtain. Deception puts our current standoffs with Iran and North Korea in a startling new perspective, and makes clear two things: that Pakistan, far from being an ally, is a rogue nation at the epicenter of world destabilization; and that the complicity of the United States has ushered in a new nuclear winter.

Now, up until 1979, the whole of the world, the Western world, was against Pakistan’s program and did everything it could to inderdict that program, fearing the instability of Pakistan, fearing a nuclear arms race between Pakistan and India. And in fact, at one point, the CIA and the Pentagon looked at sending over a team to destroy the program in a covert operation that was discussed in a meeting with General Brent Scowcroft. But come 1979, things changed, and really, this will completely alter the West’s attitude to the Pakistan program.

In ’79, of course, the Soviets invade Afghanistan, and prior to that, the U.S. ally, the Shah in Iran, flees, enabling Khomenei, the Ayatollah, to come back, and the CIA loses its listening stations, it loses a great ally. And suggestions are made to Carter from Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser, that America reconsider for the first time the gold standard of nonproliferation and shove it down the agenda in order to begin a new relationship with Pakistan, that was struggling to obtain nuclear weapons. So the suggestion from Brzezinski was the beginning of turning a blind eye, let’s say.

But Carter runs out of steam. And it will be only Reagan, when Reagan comes in in ’81, that effectively can lead to this policy being implemented. And then we will see ten years of what State Department people describe as U.S. permissiveness, but I think what the rest of us would describe as collaboration, covertly, between the Reagan administration and the Pakistan military, to cement security relationship, enabling their nuclear program. And really—I suppose we can go back into some detail on this at a later point, but over that ten years, the whole program would be facilitated. They would cold test a bomb, which means computer simulate one in ’82. ’83 they’d repeat that process. In 1984, the Chinese would take that bomb and hot test it, actually let it off in a Lop Nor test site, their Lop Nor test site. By ’87, that bomb, the Pakistani bomb, had been fixed under a U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter jet and was ready to deploy, a jet sold on the precondition that it could never be used by Pakistan for the nuclear program.

And one thing to remember here is that, year in, year out, throughout that chronology that I’ve given you, Reagan was telling the American people and Congress Pakistan has no bomb, Pakistan cannot deploy a bomb, and it’s not seeking a bomb. And so, you know, the ground was created for the Pakistan weapons program. But it’s more overt than that even, in that there was actual direct U.S. covert aid to that program supplied through the Pentagon and the disruption of CIA operations to inderdict the weapons program by Reagan official appointees who were working with the Pakistanis, collaborating. The results in the ’90s were that Pakistan did proliferate, because U.S. aid was cut off and the U.S. turned its back on Pakistan. And the Pakistanis milked their nuclear program for hard cash, selling to Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, the Axis of Evil powers. And we also know there is intelligence to show that they began negotiations very much with Saudi Arabia, with Syria, and of course there are tentative contacts with al-Qaeda elements, as well.