Pakistan, ‘one of the most dangerous nations in the world’
Recently the US President Joseph Biden called Pakistan the most dangerous country. While referring to China’s role in the fast-changing world, he said, at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Reception, “How do we handle that? How do we handle that relative to what’s going on in Russia? And what I think is maybe one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion.”
Pakistan is one of the few nuclear weapons countries in the world. It is well known how A. Q. Khan, an architect of Pakistan’s nuclear program, admired in Pakistan but viewed with suspicion outside, employed all means to make Pakistan a nuclear weapon state. In 2004, Khan had apologized for his role in illegally transferring nuclear secrets to other countries. He admitted that due to his activities including “unauthorized proliferation activities, the security of Pakistan “could have been placed in serious jeopardy.”
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program is India specific. Since its foundation Pakistan considered India as its archrival. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was the leader during India-Pakistan war in 1971, promised a thousand-year war with India. Even as a teenager he wrote to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, “Musalmans should realise that Hindus can never and will never unite with us, they are the deadliest enemies of your Quran and prophet.” After the partition, multiple wars were waged between India and Pakistan. Pakistan’s inferiority in conventional warfare led it to explore other means including proxy war and developing nuclear weapons to fight India. Called the ‘the merchant of menace,’ ‘worldwide dealer in weapons technology,’ A. Q. Khan’s shoddy journey to develop the nuclear program could be considered a part of this mission to wage a thousand-year war with India.
Pakistan’s India orientation in developing nuclear weapons should not be something surprising. Also, from a Pakistani viewpoint, one could find in the building of the weapons a sure bulwark for national security. The past two decades have provided enough indication that Pakistan has employed enough caution not to play nuclear card despite a limited war in 1999 and border skirmishes multiple times later. It seems Pakistani policy makers are well aware that a nuclear war will cause much devastation. A study in 2019 estimates that an India-Pakistan nuclear war could result in loss of 50 to 125 million lives. Besides killing people, the war could cause environmental disaster in the region that crisscrosses Himalayas, Karakoram and Hindukush mountain ranges, Indus river system, and a host of other biodiverse systems.
But the situation seldom remains static. While one could draw solace from the Pakistani establishment’s restraint in the context of nuclear weapons, it is possible that the volatile situation in the region changes the equation. Fear of Pakistan nuclear weapons falling into the hands of non-state actors’ is not new. When the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria was in the height of power, there were fears that the terrorist group could bribe corrupt officials in the establishment to obtain nuclear technology. The Brookings expert, Marvin Kalb, wrote last year, “Governed by a shaky coalition of ineffective politicians and trained military leaders trying desperately to contain the challenge of domestic terrorism, Pakistan may be the best definition yet of a highly combustible threat that, if left unchecked, might lead to the nightmare of nightmares: jihadis taking control of a nuclear weapons arsenal of something in the neighborhood of 200 warheads.”
Former US President Barack Obama had in a sense anticipated Biden’s remark on Pakistan. Obama had observed, “The single biggest threat to U.S. security, both short term, medium term and long term would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon.” As Pakistan’s fragility increases with internal political squabbling, rise of jihadi and terrorist elements, increasing instability in the Af-Pak region, it might be possible that the terrorist groups exploit the state weakness and obtain nuclear weapons and/or technology. As other nuclear weapons countries do not have fragility as Pakistan witnesses, it is the only nuclear weapons country that raises concern. The nuclear weapons of Pakistan falling into the hands of the nonstate actors including terrorist groups might appear a distant possibility, but even then, it generates concerns as such a such a development would not only be a challenge to the United States, as Obama observed, but to South Asia and the entire world.
President Biden at the same event also remarked, “The world is changing. It’s changing rapidly. And it’s beyond the control, and it’s not because of any one single individual or one nation at all.” The 21st century world is full of challenges and opportunities, but while the opportunities could be explored by the nations separately, the challenges – for example, prospects of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists – could not be addressed by a single nation. Peace and security in the globalized world can no longer be a mission of a single country but must be a policymaking imperative for all countries.