ISLAMABAD, 21 February 2004 — The United States and Pakistan held talks yesterday on arms control and strategic and security issues in the region as part of an ongoing dialogue between the two allies, officials said.
A 10-member US delegation led by US Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker held discussions with a Pakistani team headed by Tariq Usman Hyder, a Foreign Ministry statement said.
“These discussions are part of a broad ongoing dialogue on strategic and security issues, including regional security,” the statement said.
The two sides also discussed recent global developments in arms control, it said, without elaborating.
Rademaker “conveyed US views that in certain circumstances missile defense could contribute to regional stability and the US was ready to further discuss this issue with Pakistan.
“Both sides agreed to continue discussions on these issues.”
The talks were the first since a recent nuclear proliferation scandal involving the architect of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Foreign office spokesman Masood Khan told AFP that the talks had “nothing to with the nuclear proliferation issues.”
After the revelations about Pakistan’s role in the nuclear black market, Islamabad is seen as primarily responsible for ending the arms trade but the United States is not pushing it to have its facilities inspected and cooperation is limited, US officials and experts say.
While most experts agree Washington should not press President Pervez Musharraf, target of two assassination attempts, so hard that he may be ousted, some are concerned that the Bush administration is not demanding enough action from the Pakistani leader to combat the nuclear threat.
“We do have interests in not putting the kind of pressure on Musharraf that would compromise his domestic position, but the leakage of nuclear material is transcendent,” said Selig Harrison of the Center for International Policy.
The real danger is not just the scandal of disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan confessing to selling nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
More ominous is the possibility that nuclear material may fall into the hands of terrorist groups.
In what some analysts call a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach, the administration has given Musharraf “a pass” by accepting his insistence that he and his government were not involved in Khan’s network.
In the 1980s, Washington adopted a similar stance, ignoring Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program because it needed Islamabad as an ally against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
US officials consier Musharraf a critical ally in the war on terrorism and the best leader for Pakistan at this time.
But Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute finds a contradiction in Pakistan claiming it has control of its nuclear arsenal while denying it knew about Khan. “Those two statements don’t jibe. One must be untrue,” she said.
