Ask not on whom the bombs fall..

Letting nuclear powers get their way
It's nonsensical for the US to sell arms to both India and Pakistan - two nuclear foes - while cancelling a deal with Taiwan

Ian Williams
guardian.co.uk, Monday July 28 2008

It's been a long time since anyone expected consistency in foreign policy from Washington, but last week saw a cluster of developments that tax belief, even in these years of incredulity that followed the declaration of the war on terror.

The US is allowing Pakistan to use aid earmarked for counterterrorism to upgrade the F-16 fighter jets that the US has sold them, reversing the earlier freeze on the sales because of Pakistan's overt nuclear weapons programme.

And we should remember that this was the fast breeder of nuclear programmes. Earlier this month, the brain behind the scientific part of it, Abdul Qadeer Khan, claimed that he was acting under the orders of Bush's pet president, Pervez Musharaff, in providing technology to North Korea's successful bomb project, and to the subsequently abandoned Iranian and Libyan efforts.

The F-16 sales went ahead despite reports that the Pakistani military had been reconfiguring the planes to carry nuclear payloads. Military analysts all agree that the F-16 is no use for the close-up ground support that could have lent a spurious plausibility to disguising jet sales as counterterrorism instruments. Could have, that is, if the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies were not, for many years, the main sponsors of the Taliban and even now seem somewhat under-committed to spending the $10bn in aid that Bush has given them on rooting out the fundamentalist threat.

While there is a complete lack of ethics in the sale, there is, nonetheless, a certain chilling Bushian logic to it. The Pakistan F-16 sales kept the production line going in the Lockheed plant in Fort Worth,Texas. In that vein, with equally callous logic, the only plausible target for the Pakistani weaponry is India, which the Lockheed/department of defence salesmen are targeting for even bigger sales. India also has nuclear weapons, so the stakes in this macabre manoeuvre are even higher than merely cynical arms peddling.

The Bush administration has of course already agreed to overlook the Indian nukes and has been preparing to roll a diplomatic juggernaut through the nuclear non-proliferation treaty by allowing Indian access to nuclear technology. To add the Through the Looking Glass ambience, part of the Indian pay-off for the US overlooking its triumphant nuclear bomb production was to gang up in the IAEA on Iran by referring to the UN security council the allegations of Teheran's nuclear programme that the US National Intelligence Estimate has since dismissed.

But no one can accuse the US of absolutely unbridled arms sales. The F-16s so blithely dangled before India and delivered to Pakistan will not, it seems, be sold to Taiwan, despite the Taiwan Relations Act and the threats to the island from Beijing, which has over a thousand missiles pointing at it from across the Straits, and which has not withdrawn its threat of military invasion of the democratic state. By openly kowtowing to Beijing and abandoning its commitments, the White House is sending signals to the PLA – and other powers in the region like Japan and South Korea, and indeed Taiwan, that they might want to consider their own nuclear programme since the US was only kidding with its defence promises.

So there we have it. Under the rubric of the war on terror, you renege on your legal and moral commitments to defend a democratically elected government against overt threats from a totalitarian regime, you arm two nuclear powers that have been to war with each other three times since they were created and you encourage Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, to attack a country your own intelligence agencies have determined has stopped using the equipment it got from your Pakistani ally to make bombs.

It does seem a lot of confusion to keep voters employed in Lockheed's plant in the Texas heartland, not least since Taiwan's order could do that as well. If there is an ethical dimension here, it seems to be tangled up somewhere in string theory. And if it is just realpolitik, it really is an inept form of it, even by Bush administration standards.