The Pakistani junta has always been unstable coalition (well, more so than most juntas) of the military brass, the ISI, and the societal elites who backed Musharraf over the last prime minister to begin with and the man has been doing one hell of a balancing act ever since he took over (I would honestly say that he's only nominally in control of the country, no Pinochet or even Chavez-esque despot would tolerate the open existence of a viable extremist opposition in the form of the MMA).

Ayman al-Zawahiri called for Musharraf's overthrow last fall and my guess is we're seeing the answer to that call right now, combined with the fact that Musharraf has actually taken part in what could easily be the beginning of real negotiations over Kashmir with India. That revolutionary stance isolates him from a lot of Pakistanis in the nationalist camp that he has generally used as a wedge against the extremists.

Sadly, Mr. Rashid is probably right and the US needs to be ready both to secure Pakistan's nuclear assets in the event of a counter-coup or to prepared for open warfare in South Asia in the event that Pakistan balkanizes and India or Iran tries to take advantage of the situation (which goes back to the security of the nation's nuclear assets). Musharraf's already living on borrowed time and we need to make sure that should he be pushing up daisy in the next few months we're ready to act.

Some very unusual happenings are taking place in the ME. A realignment of forces. Egyp, Libya, Paklistan. At minimum.

Now THAT's what I call sobering. Does any one know what kind of handle we have on those nukes? Like, do we know how many, and where they are kept? I would not like to be living downwind from Pakistan if Mush gets himself kilt.

Marvin Zonis, a Middle Eastern expert at the University of Chicago (who is quite sane for an academic), predicted in either 2001 or 2002 that Musharraf was a goner, and that U.S. Special Ops had plans to swoop in and grab Pakistan's nukes if necessary. Looks like all that was off was his timing.

Whether the U.S. has a grip on where the damn nukes are is the concern. I would also assume that certain Pakistani scientists are also targeted for pickup.

To Percy Dovetonsils:
I've seen media reports that Pakistan's nukes are kept in a disassembled state, with modularized components dispersed widely to avoid being destroyed by a nuclear first-strike.

It would be difficult to find all the nukes or nuke parts. It's a big country, with a population of over 150 million and 650,000 troops, and an area of 800,000 sq.km. Searching for a needle in a haystack would be a picnic compared to trying to find pieces of uranium buried in fields, basements, caves or whatever.

Also, it's not clear how many nukes it has. I saw estimates a couple of years ago that said it could have as many as 150. Assuming their rate of Uranium enrichment has possibly increased (they said last year that they upped the production to three shifts) they could have even more today.

So I don't think going in with special forces is a viable option.

To Dan Darling:
I wouldn't call it a junta. The term implies a ruling council of military officers. Musharraf has pretty much imposed his will on the other senior generals, as he demonstrated by removing some of them. ISI is not an independent force, but part of the military. Musharraf has evicted over two-thirds of the officers who were in ISI on/before 9/11. The New York Times reported that the units that were dealing with Afghanistan & Kashmir were completely gutted.

Yes, Pinochet would not have tolerated this level of opposition. But Pakistan is a semi-democracy. You can arrest people and throw them in jail, and they'll get a lawyer and the judge will order their release if you don't have enough evidence. Or you could act the dictator and defy the judge, but then you would lose popular support and risk revolt. Remember that Musharraf was forced to hold the Nov.2002 elections because of a Supreme Court order. There are checks and balances in the Pakistani system. They're weak and flawed, but they're there, and no Pakistani 'dictator' has ever been able to exercise absolute power.

Dan,

As far as I have been able to determine there is no contingency American government plan for a post-Musharraf Islamist controlled Pakistan. The one thing that this war has taught me is that there is a world of difference between policy paper place holders and fully vetted policy with Presidential support.

Pre-9/11 I read a number of policy papers that dealt with American foreign policy options in the aftermath of a post mass casualty terrorist attack. They called for "Stand and Deliver" ultimatums to nations like Musharraf's Pakistan to turn over their WMD. That didn't happen. Neither State nor CIA wanted to go there so we didn't. They had no people in their organizations that were part of the policy paper creation process and they opposed using those policy papers from the outset.

They both still don't want to go anywhere near the idea of an Islamist controlled Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

The Defense Department cannot by itself create a national policy on this without a multi-agency vetting process via the National Security Council.

Condi Rice should be shot gunning such a policy. It hasn't happened. We haven't heard jack on the subject, and we would have given the disobedience State and CIA are engaging in if Bush supported Condi in creating a national security policy contingency plan to address that contingency.

This is why I am so pessimistic about the final outcome of the war. As bad as the Bush Administration has been on policy here, a Dean Administration would be far worse.

Now if Bush actually had a policy of Democritization (you know- its the justification du jour for our Iraqi invasion since the whole WMD thing is proving to be a big lie) we should have thrown a fit and told Mushi that he should step down from being president and resume control of the military. That way maybe Pak could go the way of Turkey and evolve a viable civilian government for Mushi to hand off to.

Well it would certainly be bad news if Al Qaeda or other religious extremists got ahold of 'the Islamic Bomb' but it wouldn't necessarily be the end of the world. After all, the Soviet Union had numerous nukes and were every bit the ideological extremists, but they never used them.

The thing that makes Al Qaeda or similar movements hard to beat is that they don't have a country - mutually assured destruction just doesn't work as a deterant. However, once a group gets power in a country, they suddenly find themselves with...a country! Someplace for those U.S. nukes to go!

I'm not saying that such a group, in the heady first days following takeover, might not pass on some fissionables to their operatives overseas - in fact, the first few months would be the most dangerous - it's just that most 'outsider' ideological groups tend to become 'insiders' once they take over. Like in Animal Farm, the pigs become indistinguishable from the people whose farm they took.

If we still keep to King George the Witless' pre-emptive strategy, however, we might provoke an attack. My two cents.

Gnostrope:

I would say that "junta" is fairly apt description of the national security council of which Musharraf is the chief. He's the highest-ranking general, but his lieutenants are men like Rashid Qureshi or Shaukat Sultan who exercise a lot of power on their own right. And while the ISI is theoretically part of the military, in practice it seems to pretty much act on its own accord, unaccountable to anyone, that's one of the reasons that it's known around Pakistan as "the invisible government."

I don't deny that he fired Mehmood Ahmed as ISI Director right after 9/11 and then replaced him with his loyalist Ehsan ul-Haq who began to purge the agency of al-Qaeda sympathizers, but you'll keep in mind that Ahmed was the one who told Mullah Omar to fight the US and his departure as well as the subsequent purge of the ISI was basically a case of Ahmed and the al-Qaeda moles in the ISI having to go or the military government would. Pakistani anti-terrorism politics are also complicated by the problem that while Pakistan has done a great deal to disrupt al-Qaeda's operations inside of Pakistan (including netting Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Yasser al-Jaziri, Tawfiq Attash Khallad, and Ammar al-Baluchi), with the exception of the aftermath of the attack on the Indian Parliament Musharraf has yet to really clamp down on the actual operation of groups that are members of bin Laden's International Islamic Front like the Harakat ul-Mujahideen trio, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. These groups may not be receiving government support anymore, but in most cases their members have been released and they have been allowed to reform and reorganize under new names with the assistance al-Qaeda money from Saudi Arabia as well as their own political infrastructure in Pakistan proper. Most of these groups have foundations or political parties that were either founded or supported by bin Laden going all the way back to the mid-1990s and beyond.

This is one of the reasons why the US should be working with Musharraf to negotiate a formal agreement between India and Pakistan over the state of Kashmir (something Musharraf has made tentative steps towards in recent weeks) because the moment he no longer needs the jihadis (or even just those jihadis that are known al-Qaeda affiliates) as irregular forces in the event of a war with India, that's the moment he can really start cracking down on them.

Musharraf may not have absolute power, but he can still rig his referendums and he still seems to have at least the obedience of the military, which is the ultimate kingmaker as far as actual power goes in Pakistan. He certainly doesn't have any problems rounding pro-democracy protesters when the time comes and has already given himself the power to rewrite the constitution and veto just about anything he likes, thereby making any actual legislation that is passed in parliament little more than a pious fraud (remember the Iraqi parliament angrily refusing to have UNMOVIC back in last November, only for Saddam to step in and undertake the "reasonable" course of action?) that he can nullify if he doesn't like it.

Trent:

I don't mean to disagree with you, but Time Magazine reported quite differently back in October 2001, saying that there had been a US plan in place to neutralize Pakistan's nuclear weapons stockpiles in the event that they continued to back the Taliban after 9/11. Musharraf saw which way the wind was blowing and left Mullah Omar to twist in the wind, though not after his rogue ISI general had told the Taliban to fight.

AnyonebutBush2004:

I'm certain you remember the aircraft carrier with its now-famous (infamous) "Mission Accomplished" banner. If you backtrack to the actual speech in question, you'll note that one of the claims he made about the war was "we removed an ally of al-Qaeda." Collin Powell argued much the same thing at the UN in February 2003 and to the best of my knowledge nobody's backed off of it. It sounded like a sufficient casus belli at the time and still does, at least to me.

Green Boy:

Al-Qaeda already had a country in Afghanistan that their puppet Taliban ran for them. They also still have some rather noteworthy patrons among both the IRGC and the Sudanese NIF (to say nothing of their bases in Georgia and Mindanao or all of their moneymen in Saudi Arabia) - more than enough places for nukes to fly if we wanted to respond with overwhelming force to 9/11. Even if you accept that bin Laden did not believe that the US would retaliate seriously against Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, the network has continued to carry out mass casualty attacks even in the wake of Afghanistan.

For example, Chechen al-Qaeda leader Shamil Basayev knew that Russia could (and would be far more likely to than the US) nuke his base in the Pankisi Gorge if Barayev's strike team failed in October 2002. That didn't stop him from ordering what happened at the Poshipnikov Zavod Dubrovka theater in Moscow - they planned on killing nearly 1,000 hostages in an act of calculated mass murder knowing the consequences. When you're dealing with a leadership mentality like that, conventional means of deterrence mean next to nothing.

In addition, how in God's name can we "provoke" an attack from al-Qaeda? Bin Laden's 1998 declaration of war describes it as a religious duty for all Muslims to kill Americans indiscriminately, regardless of whether they are soldiers or civilians anywhere in the world. I really don't think that you can "provoke" individuals willing to subscribe to such an ideology - what more can they possibly do to us than what they already have?

You know I fault Clinton's pre-emptive strategy for the first WTC attack.

Or maybe it was his non-pre-emptive strategy.

Any way what I think is that Clinton got them all riled up so as to make Bush look bad for stealing the election.

Or maybe it was so Gore could have something to do ifhe had won. Any way whatever happen's it is because of what Americans do or don't do or are thinking of doing or not doing.

And that is my 20 cents worth. Which obviously has ten times the value of two cents. And worth every dime.

>I don't mean to disagree with you, but Time
>Magazine reported quite differently back in
>October 2001, saying that there had been a US
>plan in place to neutralize Pakistan's nuclear
>weapons stockpiles in the event that they
>continued to back the Taliban after 9/11.
>Musharraf saw which way the wind was blowing
>and left Mullah Omar to twist in the wind,
>though not after his rogue ISI general had told
>the Taliban to fight.

Dan,

The only practical military plans to "to neutralize Pakistan's nuclear weapons stockpiles" in October 2001 would have been a full scale counter-force and C3I decapitation nuclear strike followed up by Special Forces insertions for BDA and kidnap/assasination of Pakistani nuclear scientists and nuclear related military officals. The targeting of which would have been woefully bad, if the case of Iraq WMD is any indication.

Pre-9/11 policy papers called for the permanent removal of the WMD threat ASAP by political or military means.

That didn't happen.

We now have no real idea where the Pakistani nukes really are and the Pakistanis will have taken steps to make sure some will survive any American pre-emption and make it to the hands of Al-Qaeda as a revenge weapon.

Trent:

I dunno about just how bad our intel guys were, as one of the theories that David Kay has cited as to what happened to Iraq's WMD stockpiles is that they were destroyed during the course of Operation Desert Fox. The plan, as outlined by one of Time Magazine's early October 2001 issues, called for a massive bombing campaign against Pakistani nuclear assets and a concerted effort to capture or kill both the military leadership and the scientists who supervised the program. Nothing about a preemptive nuclear strike, but I assume that it could have been included in such a plan.

According to Time, the US military planners had been aware that any potential military campaign against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan might have to involve military action against Pakistan as well and plans were drawn up accordingly. As to why it wasn't acted upon, Musharraf's cutting the Taliban's umbilical chord and siding with the United States was cited upon as the primary reason.

>I dunno about just how bad our intel guys were,
>as one of the theories that David Kay has cited
>as to what happened to Iraq's WMD stockpiles is
>that they were destroyed during the course of
>Operation Desert Fox. The plan, as outlined by
>one of Time Magazine's early October 2001
>issues, called for a massive bombing campaign
>against Pakistani nuclear assets and a concerted
>effort to capture or kill both the military
>leadership and the scientists who supervised the
>program. Nothing about a preemptive nuclear
>strike, but I assume that it could have been
>included in such a plan.

Dan,

The key phrase I used was "The only practical military plans.."

Much to my distress, the American military has been infected with the "Nukes is forbidden magic" meme since the purge of Strategic Air Command officers from the USAF. The US Military as a whole actively avoids going anywhere near nuclear issues in their planning if they can help it.

For instnce in 1991 Gen. Schwarzkof (sp?) as CENTCOM Theater commander in the build up for the first Gulf War, actively purged all Lance missile batteries from his deployment plans because they were dual use nuclear delivery platforms.

Nuclear strategy of the 1980's made clear you don't fool with conventional military toys when you are doing a counter-force strike. The offical motto of SAC may have been "Peace is our Business," but the unoffical one was "Overkill is good and more overkill is better" and this applied squared to a preemptive counter-force attack.

>It would be difficult to find all the nukes or
>nuke parts. It's a big country, with a
>population of over 150 million and 650,000
>troops, and an area of 800,000 sq.km. Searching
>for a needle in a haystack would be a picnic
>compared to trying to find pieces of uranium
>buried in fields, basements, caves or whatever

If Pakistan's nukes are so widely dispersed to protect them against a pre-emptive nuclear strike, they would be essentially useless, wouldn't they? What would be the plan, in a 3rd world country that has just been nuked, for bringing the bits of weapons and knowledgeable people together so that the weapons could be re-assembled for use (let alone delivered as a response to the pre-emptive strike)?