Obama’s Worst Pakistan Nightmare
Published: January 8, 2009
TO GET TO THE HEADQUARTERS of the Strategic Plans Division, the branch of the Pakistani government charged with keeping the country's growing arsenal of nuclear weapons away from insurgents trying to overrun the country, you must drive down a rutted, debris-strewn road at the edge of the Islamabad airport, dodging stray dogs and piles of uncollected garbage. Just past a small traffic circle, a tan stone gateway is manned by a lone, bored-looking guard loosely holding a rusting rifle. The gateway marks the entry to Chaklala Garrison, an old British cantonment from the days when officers of the Raj escaped the heat of Delhi for the cooler hills on the approaches to Afghanistan. Pass under the archway, and the poverty and clamor of modern Pakistan disappear.
Chaklala is a comfortable enclave for the country's military and intelligence services. Inside the gates, officers in the army and the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, known as the ISI, live in trim houses with well-tended lawns. Business is conducted in long, low office buildings, with a bevy of well-pressed adjutants buzzing around. Deep inside the garrison lies the small compound for Strategic Plans, where Khalid Kidwai keeps the country's nuclear keys. Now 58, Kidwai is a compact man who hides his arch sense of humor beneath a veil of caution, as if he were previewing each sentence to decide if it revealed too much. In the chaos of Pakistan, where the military, the intelligence services and an unstable collection of civilian leaders uneasily share power, he oversees a security structure intended to protect Pakistan's nuclear arsenal from outsiders — Islamic militants, Qaeda scientists, Indian saboteurs and those American commando teams that Pakistanis imagine, with good reason, are waiting just over the horizon in Afghanistan, ready to seize their nuclear treasure if a national meltdown seems imminent.
In the second nuclear age, what happens or fails to happen in Kidwai's modest compound may prove far more likely to save or lose an American city than the billions of dollars the United States spends each year maintaining a nuclear arsenal that will almost certainly never be used, or the thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan to close down sanctuaries for terrorists.
Just last month in Washington, members of the federally appointed bipartisan Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism made it clear that for sheer scariness, nothing could compete with what they had heard in a series of high-level intelligence briefings about the dangers of Pakistan's nuclear technology going awry. "When you map W.M.D. and terrorism, all roads intersect in Pakistan," Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and a leading nuclear expert on the commission, told me. "The nuclear security of the arsenal is now a lot better than it was. But the unknown variable here is the future of Pakistan itself, because it's not hard to envision a situation in which the state's authority falls apart and you're not sure who's in control of the weapons, the nuclear labs, the materials."
For Kidwai, there is something both tiresome and deeply suspicious about the constant stream of warnings out of Washington that Pakistan is the epicenter of a post-cold-war Armageddon. "This is all overblown rhetoric," Kidwai told me on a rainy Saturday morning not long ago when I went to visit him in his office, which is comfortably outfitted with oversize white leather chairs and models of the Pakistani missiles that can deliver a nuclear weapon to the farthest corners of India. Even if the country's leadership were to be incapacitated, he insisted, Pakistan's protections are so strong that the arsenal could never slip from the hands of the country's National Command Authority, a mix of hardened generals (including Kidwai) and newly elected politicians. Kidwai has spent the past five years making the same case to American officials: just because a savvy metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan, a national hero for his role in turning Pakistan into a nuclear-weapons power, managed to smuggle nuclear secrets and materials to the likes of Iran, North Korea and Libya for profit in the 1980s and 1990s, it doesn't mean that such a horrendous breach of security could happen again.
"Please grant to Pakistan that if we can make nuclear weapons and the delivery systems," Kidwai said, gesturing to the models and a photo of Pakistan's first nuclear test, a decade ago, "we can also make them safe. Our security systems are foolproof."
"FOOLPROOF" IS MOST likely not the word Barack Obama would use to describe the status of Pakistan's nuclear safety following the briefings he has been receiving since Nov. 6, which is when J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, showed up in Chicago to give the president-elect his first full presidential daily brief. For obvious reasons, neither Obama nor McConnell will talk about the contents of those highly classified briefings. But interviews over the past year with senior intelligence officials and with nuclear experts in Washington and South Asia and at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna provide strong indications of what Obama has probably heard.
By now Obama has almost surely been briefed about an alarming stream of intelligence that began circulating early last year to the top tier of George W. Bush's national-security leadership in Washington. The highly restricted reports described how foreign-trained Pakistani scientists, including some suspected of harboring sympathy for radical Islamic causes, were returning to Pakistan to seek jobs within the country's nuclear infrastructure — presumably trying to burrow in among the 2,000 or so people who have what Kidwai calls "critical knowledge" of the Pakistani nuclear infrastructure.
"I have two worries," one of the most senior officials in the Bush administration, who had read all of the intelligence with care, told me one day last spring. One is what happens "when they move the weapons," he said, explaining that the United States feared that some groups could try to provoke a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope that the Pakistani military would transport tactical nuclear weapons closer to the front lines, where they would be more vulnerable to seizure. Indeed, when the deadly terror attacks occurred in Mumbai in late November, officials told me they feared that one of the attackers' motives might have been to trigger exactly that series of events.
"And the second," the official said, choosing his words carefully, "is what I believe are steadfast efforts of different extremist groups to infiltrate the labs and put sleepers and so on in there."
As Obama's team of nuclear experts have discovered in their recent briefings, it is Pakistan's laboratories — one of which still bears A. Q. Khan's name — that still pose the greatest worries for American intelligence officials. It is relatively easy to teach Kidwai's security personnel how to lock down warheads and store them separately from trigger devices and missiles — training that the United States has conducted, largely in secret, at a cost of almost $100 million. It is a lot harder for the Americans to keep track of nuclear material being produced inside laboratories, where it is easier for the Pakistanis to underreport how much nuclear material has been produced, how much is in storage or how much might be "stuck in the pipes" during the laborious enrichment process. And it is nearly impossible to stop engineers from walking out the door with the knowledge of how to produce fuel, which Khan provided to Iran, and bomb designs.
After more than four years, no one in Washington has a clear sense of whether the small, covert American program to help Pakistan secure its weapons and laboratories is actually working. Kidwai has been happy to take the cash and send in progress reports, but auditors from Washington have been rebuffed whenever they have asked to see how, exactly, the money was being spent. Kidwai, when pressed, says that the Americans shouldn't offer lectures about nuclear security, not after the U.S. Air Force lost track of some of its own weapons in 2007 for 36 hours, flying them around unguarded to air bases and leaving them by the side of the tarmac. He makes use of another argument as well, a legacy of the Bush era that will last for many years: how can an intelligence apparatus in the United States that got Iraq's nuclear progress so wrong in 2003 be so certain today that Pakistan's arsenal is at risk?
Pakistani officials are understandably suspicious that the real intent of the American program is to gather the information needed to snatch, or neutralize, the country's arsenal. So they have met most requests with the same answer they gave the C.I.A. when it wanted to interview Khan: Don't waste your time submitting a formal request. "It is a matter of national sovereignty," Kidwai says, "and a matter of our honor."
Khalid Kidwai is only a few years younger than Pakistan itself, and he has spent much of his life trying to create pockets of order in a nation to which order does not come naturally. His father, Jalil Ahmed Kidwai, was one of the country's best-known authors and critics; his mother founded a school in Karachi. Kidwai was born into an era in which the overriding question on the minds of most Muslims in Pakistan was whether the country could withstand India's onslaughts, and it did not take long for the young Khalid to settle on his dream: to fly with the Pakistani Air Force, the most romantic branch of the armed forces in a new nation that believed it needed to be able to strike deep into India if it was to survive. At age 12, he passed the exam for the air-force-sponsored school in Sargodha, the site of the country's largest air base, but when he graduated, Kidwai received the disheartening news that he would never become a pilot: a mild eye disorder disqualified him. "My next obvious choice was the army," he told me, and like many in his generation of military men in Pakistan, he never fully left it, even after his retirement, or lost the professional pride and the security blanket it provides.
In 1971, Kidwai was captured during a war with India and held as a prisoner of war for two years in the north Indian city of Allahabad — an experience he is still reluctant to discuss. After returning to the Pakistani officer corps, he was posted in 1979 to the artillery training school at Fort Sill, Okla., as part of a program that allowed the American military to get to know a rising generation of Pakistani officers. Kidwai recalls that whenever the fort's brass turned to nuclear-weapons training, they found something else for the foreign officers to do. "We'd be sent off for trips to Washington or someplace," Kidwai recalled with a laugh, "so that we were out of earshot."
In 1998, Pakistan responded to a round of Indian nuclear tests by exploding its own bombs. Like the rest of the country, Kidwai watched on television as the Chagai hills shook from Pakistan's underground tests. His nation had done more than answer India's challenge; it had built the ultimate deterrent. Along the way, Pakistan had overcome a series of halfhearted efforts, led by the United States, to cut off its nuclear supplies. Year after year, Pakistan lied to Washington when confronted with all-but-definitive evidence that it was constructing a weapon. Pakistan simply endured the resulting economic sanctions. It all seemed worth it, Pakistani officials have told me, after India detonated five test bombs and Pakistan came back with six.
"That was one-upmanship," Kidwai said, smiling proudly as we looked at a photograph of one test, which was hanging on his office wall. "India had conducted only five." Below the photographs, Kidwai keeps a small fragment of the Chagai mountain under glass, displayed like a moon rock at the Smithsonian. The explosion had turned it bright white.
NO SOONER HAD THE radioactive and diplomatic dust settled from the test site than Kidwai was called in by his army superiors, and ultimately, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and told that he would now head an urgent project: to come up with a system to protect Pakistan's new weapon from all of its enemies — the Indians, Western Europeans and the angry Americans.
Kidwai knew speed was of the essence. Pakistan's leaders feared that if the West thought that Pakistan had just a few weapons in its inventory, and no system to assure their safety, they would come under even more pressure to roll back the program and give up the handful they had manufactured. The only way to resist that pressure, they knew, was to create a large arsenal quickly and to hide it in underground facilities where neither the Indians nor the Americans could seize or destroy the warheads. Then they needed to convince the world that Pakistan could become a responsible nuclear power, one capable of securing its weapons as well as the Russians, the Chinese or the Israelis did. That meant Kidwai had to learn the arts of nuclear safety from the Americans, but without teaching his teachers how to neutralize Pakistan's arsenal.
Kidwai got off to a rocky start. The Pakistani nuclear program owes its very existence to the government-endorsed and government-financed subterfuges of A. Q. Khan, who then turned the country into the biggest source of nuclear-weapons proliferation in atomic history. And while Khan may be the most famous nuclear renegade in Pakistan, he is not the only one. Soon after Kidwai took office, he also faced the case of the eccentric nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, who helped build gas centrifuges for the Pakistani nuclear program, using blueprints Khan had stolen from the Netherlands. Mahmood then moved on to the country's next huge project: designing the reactor at Khushab that was to produce the fuel Pakistan needed to move to the next level — a plutonium bomb.
An autodidact intellectual with grand aspirations, Mahmood was fascinated by the links between science and the Koran. He wrote a peculiar treatise arguing that when morals degrade, disaster cannot be far behind. Over time, his colleagues began to wonder if Mahmood was mentally sound. They were half amused and half horrified by his fascination with the role sunspots played in triggering the French and Russian Revolutions, World War II and assorted anticolonial uprisings. "This guy was our ultimate nightmare," an American intelligence official told me in late 2001, when The New York Times first reported on Mahmood. "He had access to the entire Pakistani program. He knew what he was doing. And he was completely out of his mind."
While Khan appeared to be in the nuclear-proliferation business chiefly for the money, Mahmood made it clear to friends that his interest was religious: Pakistan's bomb, he told associates, was "the property of a whole Ummah," referring to the worldwide Muslim community. He wanted to share it with those who might speed "the end of days" and lead the way for Islam to rise as the dominant religious force in the world.
Eventually Mahmood's religious intensity, combined with his sympathy for Islamic extremism, scared his colleagues. In 1999, just as Kidwai was beginning to examine the staff of the nuclear enterprise, Mahmood was forced to take an early retirement. At a loss for what to do, Mahmood set up a nonprofit charity, Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, which was ostensibly designed to send relief to fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. In August 2001, as the Sept. 11 plotters were making their last preparations in the United States, Mahmood and one of his colleagues at the charity met with Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, over the course of several days in Afghanistan. There is little doubt that Mahmood talked to the two Qaeda leaders about nuclear weapons, or that Al Qaeda desperately wanted the bomb. George Tenet, the C.I.A. chief, wrote later that intelligence reports of the meeting were "frustratingly vague." They included an account that there was talk of how to design a simple firing mechanism, and that a senior Qaeda leader displayed a canister that may have contained some nuclear material (though almost certainly not bomb-grade).
In the weeks after 9/11, the tales of the meeting were enough to set off panic. Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a longtime C.I.A. nuclear expert, was given perhaps the most daunting job at the agency in the aftermath of 9/11: to make sure that Al Qaeda did not have a weapon of mass destruction at its disposal. "The worst nightmare we had at that time was that A. Q. Khan and Osama bin Laden were somehow working together,"
Mowatt-Larssen told me one day last winter in his basement office in a secure vault at the Energy Department, where he moved after his time at the C.I.A. to head up the department's intelligence unit. As if to drive home the point to visitors to his underground lair, Mowatt-Larssen, who is leaving the government this month to become a senior fellow at Harvard, keeps a floor-to-ceiling centrifuge in the corner of his office, where most people might put a potted plant. The gleaming silver device, which is meant to spin at terrifying speed to enrich uranium, was seized in Libya — part of the cache that Muammar el-Qaddaffi bought from Khan.
Musharraf tried to tamp down American alarm. He told Tenet and Mowatt-Larssen that "men in caves can't do this." He had Mahmood and his colleague rearrested, though they were never prosecuted. Pakistan did not want to risk a trial in which the country's own nuclear secrets came out. Today, Mahmood, like Khan, is back home, under tight surveillance that seems intended primarily to keep him a safe distance from reporters.
Kidwai insists that the Mahmood incident was overblown, raised time and again by Americans to create the image that Pakistan is a nuclear sieve. "Nothing went anywhere," he assured me. "It's over." But what's terrifying about Mahmood's story is not what happened around the campfire, but rather that the meetings happened at all. They took place three years after Kidwai and his team started their work and demonstrated the huge vulnerabilities in the Pakistani nuclear infrastructure at the time.
Kidwai says he has not received any specific intelligence from the United States about "sleeper" scientists trying to infiltrate Pakistan's facilities. Moreover, he says, there is now also a far more effective screening process in place. When we met, Kidwai spent considerable time describing the extensive "personal-reliability program" that he has created to screen existing employees and applicants to the program. Kidwai's intelligence agency monitors nuclear employees' private bank accounts, foreign trips and meetings with anyone who might be considered an extremist. But Americans have their doubts. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted to me that "there is no human vetting system that is entirely reliable," pointing out that lie detector tests and other screening techniques that C.I.A. employees regularly undergo have, at times, failed to identify spies. In Pakistan, the problem is made worse by the fact that the universities — where the nuclear program draws its young talent — are now more radicalized than at any time in memory, and the nuclear program itself has greatly expanded. Kidwai estimated that there are roughly 70,000 people who work in the nuclear complex in Pakistan, including 7,000 to 8,000 scientists and the 2,000 or so with "critical knowledge."
If even 1 percent of those employees are willing to spread Pakistan's nuclear knowledge to outsiders with a cause, Kidwai — and the United States — have a problem.
JUST AS KIDWAI FEARS, every few months someone in Washington — either at the Pentagon, or the Energy Department, or on the campus of the National Defense University — runs a simulation of how the United States should respond if a terrorist group infiltrates the Pakistani nuclear program or manages to take over one or two of its weapons. In these exercises, everyone plays to type: the State Department urges negotiations, while the Joint Special Operations Command loads its soldiers and nuclear teams into airplanes. The results of these simulations are highly classified, for fear of tipping off the Pakistanis about what the United States knows and doesn't know about the location of the country's weapons. But most of these war games conclude in a sea of ambiguity, with the participants who are playing top officials in Islamabad and Washington unable to get a clear picture of what happened and, if something is missing, the Pakistanis unwilling to admit it. As one frequent participant in these tabletop exercises put it to me, "Most of them don't end well."
The Pakistanis insist that these American fears are exaggerated and that it would be next to impossible for someone to steal all the elements of a weapon. As Kidwai paced me through PowerPoints and diagrams, his message was that Pakistan's nuclear-weapons-safety program is up to "international standards." But back in Washington, military and nuclear experts told me that the bottom line is that if a real-life crisis broke out, it is unlikely that anyone would be able to assure an American president, with confidence, that he knew where all of Pakistan's weapons were — or that none were in the hands of Islamic extremists. "It's worse than that," the participant in the simulations told me. "We can't even certify exactly how many weapons the Pakistanis have — which makes it difficult to sound convincing that there's nothing to worry about."
Over time, it appears that the deep mutual suspicions have impeded the effort to ensure the safety of Pakistan's arsenal. One of America's key nuclear-safety technologies — PALs, or "permissive action links" — is a series of codes and hardware protections that make sure only a very small group of authorized users can arm and detonate a nuclear weapon. It is a cold-war leftover, designed to make sure some rogue sergeant in a silo didn't wing a weapon toward Moscow. But it may be more important in the second nuclear age than it was in the first. When countries that have little or no experience with nuclear weapons suddenly find themselves stacking their arsenal up in tunnels and caves, it would be nice to know that a terrorist who procured a weapon could not simply set the timer and walk away.
PALs depend on what is essentially a switch in the firing circuit that requires the would-be user to enter a numeric code to start a timer for the weapon's arming and detonation. If the sequence of numbers entered turns out to be incorrect in a fixed number of tries, the whole system disables itself. It is pretty similar to what happens when you repeatedly type the wrong password into an A.T.M., and the machine eats your bank card. But in this case, imagine that someone trying to use your stolen card entered the wrong code one time too many, and a series of small explosions was set off to wreck the innards of the bank machine. That's what happens to an American warhead — it is rendered useless.
Pakistan would clearly benefit from a PALs system of its own. But under U. S. law, Washington cannot transfer nuclear technology to the Pakistanis, even technology to make their weapons safer, because the country is a rogue nuclear state. By all accounts, the Bush administration has abided by the law. Nuclear experts like Harold M. Agnew, the former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, view the restriction as ridiculous. "Anybody who joins the club should be helped to get this," he told my colleague Bill Broad. "Whether it's India or Pakistan or China or Iran, the most important thing is that you want to make sure there is no unauthorized use. You want to make sure that the guys who have their hands on the weapons can't use them without proper authorization."
Even if Washington had made PALs available, it's doubtful that the Pakistanis would have trusted the United States enough to accept them. Any PALs devices delivered in a FedEx box from Washington, they would have figured, would come with a secret "kill switch" allowing someone deep inside the bowels of the Pentagon to track or disable Pakistan's nuclear assets. They would have undoubtedly been right.
Kidwai insists that he solved this problem by sending Pakistani engineers off to develop what you might call "Pak-PALs," a domestic version of the American system. He told me that it was every bit as safe as the American version. No one will talk about what role, if any, the United States played in helping design this system. But history provides a possible guide. Back in the early 1970s, the United States sought to help France protect its own arsenal without directly divulging its own methods. American nuclear scientists began highly secretive discussions with their French counterparts that amounted to a game of 20 Questions, though in Washington-speak it was termed "negative guidance."
IN BUSH'S LAST YEAR in office, Pakistan's downward spiral came to dominate the meetings of the principals down in the Situation Room of the White House. First came the assassination in late December 2007 of Benazir Bhutto, which resulted in a secret trip by McConnell, the intelligence chief, and the director of the C.I.A., Michael V. Hayden, to Islamabad. It was the first of a series of secret missions to convince Musharraf and his handpicked successor as the chief of the army, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, that the militants in the tribal areas were now aiming to bring down the government in Islamabad. The message was simple and direct: The Pakistani leadership needed to forget about India and focus on the threat from within.
But with each successive trip it became clearer and clearer, particularly to McConnell, that the gap between how Washington viewed the threat and how the Pakistanis viewed it was as yawning as ever. Even worse, suspicions grew that Inter-Services Intelligence was directly aiding the Taliban and other jihadist militants, seeing them as a useful counterweight to India's influence in the region.
Washington's sanguinity was not increased when Pakistan's new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, arrived in Washington over the summer for what turned out to be a disastrous first visit. Gilani, as the country's first civilian leader in more than a decade, was under huge pressure to show he could bring the intelligence agency, and the country, under control. He couldn't — a brief effort to force the ISI to report to the civilian leadership was quashed — but he thought he had better show up with a gift for President Bush.
Gilani wanted to tell Bush that he had sent forces into the tribal areas to clean out a major madrassa where hard-line ideology and intolerance were part of the daily curriculum. There were roughly 25,000 such private Islamic schools around Pakistan, though only a small number of them regularly bred young terrorists. The one he decided to target was run by the Haqqani faction of Islamic militants, one of the most powerful in the tribal areas.
Though Gilani never knew it, Bush was aware of this gift in advance. The National Security Agency had picked up intercepts indicating that a Pakistani unit warned the leadership of the school about what was coming before carrying out its raid. "They must have called 1-800-HAQQANI," said one person who was familiar with the intercepted conversation. According to another, the account of the warning sent to the school was almost comic. "It was something like, 'Hey, we're going to hit your place in a few days, so if anyone important is there, you might want to tell them to scram.' "
When the "attack" on the madrassa came, the Pakistani forces grabbed a few guns and hauled away a few teenagers. Sure enough, a few days later Gilani showed up in the Oval Office and conveyed the wonderful news to Bush: the great crackdown on the madrassas had begun. The officials in the room — Bush; his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley; and others — did not want to confront Gilani with the evidence that the school had been warned. That would have required revealing sensitive intercepts, and they judged, according to participants in the discussion, that Gilani was both incapable of keeping a secret and incapable of cracking down on his military and intelligence units. Indeed, Gilani may not even have been aware that his gift was a charade: Bush and Hadley may well have known more about the military's actions than the prime minister himself.
WHAT OBAMA NOW inherits in Pakistan is a fully dysfunctional relationship between that country and the United States. Last summer, Bush signed secret orders allowing American special forces to run ground raids into Pakistani territory to root out not only Al Qaeda but also a list of other militants who could be targeted by either the C.I.A. or American military commandos. The first such raid, in September, provoked such a firefight and outrage in Pakistan that most other raids were suspended. But the reasons for the Pakistani government's anger went beyond the concern that Bush was publicly violating Pakistani sovereignty. If American special forces were now authorized to come into the country to snatch or kill a range of militants, several Pakistani officials said to me, would it be very long before they tried to get the country's nuclear weapons as well?
Though few in Washington will admit it, it is the right question. At the end of Bush's term, his aides handed over to Obama's transition team a lengthy review of policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, concluding that in the end, the United States has far more at stake in preventing Pakistan's collapse than it does in stabilizing Afghanistan or Iraq.
"Only one of those countries has a hundred nuclear weapons," a primary author of the report said to me. For Al Qaeda and the other Islamists, he went on to say, "this is the home game." He paused, before offering up the next thought: For anyone trying to keep a nuclear weapon from going off in the United States, it's our home game, too.
David E. Sanger is chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times. His book "The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power," from which this article is adapted, will be published this week by Harmony Books.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 25, 2009
An article on Jan. 11 about the options and possible reactions of the United States if Pakistan's nuclear weapons fell into the hands of jihadists misstated part of the name of an American military unit that has run simulated responses to such an event. It is the Joint Special Operations Command, not the Joint Special Forces Command.
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