Author: Chidanand Rajghatta
Publication: The Times of India
Date: October 1, 2004
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-870259,curpg-1.cms
Pakistan's military ruler Pervez
Musharraf brazenly lied that the world community had not asked for access
to nuclear proliferator A Q Khan, fresh disclosures by the International
Atomic Energy Agency has indicated.
Officials of the IAEA on Thursday
publicly rebutted Musharraf's claim in a television interview last week
that "nobody" had asked to question Khan in connection with the spread
of nuclear technology and materials.
"We have not been allowed by Pakistan
to talk to the man," Mohammed El Baradei, the Director-General of the Agency
said in a BBC interview aired on Thursday.
Asked why then Musharraf had made
such a statement, El Baradei said: "I can tell my Pakistani friends that
I will be happy to send a team tomorrow to talk to him if we can, absolutely."
In an interview with ABC World News
in New York last week, Musharraf was explicitly asked by anchor Peter Jennings
why he had not made Khan available to the US and IAEA for questioning.
"Nobody has asked, number one,"
Musharraf blustered, before bluntly saying that even if Pakistan was asked
it would not make him available "because we have good interrogators" and
because "it undermines our own capability." Musharraf also claimed to have
"shared all the information that we have."
But the IAEA sees it differently.
Although Pakistan had supplied information from the tests it had conducted,
El Baradei said the IAEA needed results from its own testing to be able
to draw definitive conclusions.
The IAEA is hamstrung by the reluctance
on part of the US, which claims to be acting against nuclear proliferation,
to back its demand to access Khan. Several American analysts have suggested
that Bush is not pushing Pakistan on the Khan issue because he hopes Musharraf
will deliver Osama bin Laden before the November 2 election to ensure him
a second term.
Some commentators have gone so far
as to warn that if the United States is attacked with nuclear weapons,
its origins would most likely be Pakistan.
Describing US policy on Pakistan's
proliferation as a "colossal mistake that could have devastating repercussions,"
the Chicago Tribune said in an editorial this week that "Bush can't let
Musharraf off the hook. International authorities need to know everything
Khan knows. In many ways, that's as crucial to the war on terror as finding
Bin Laden." Several other American newspapers have expressed similar views.
