Dialogue: US gives Pakistan the gift of no more sanctions

By PETER POPHAM

ISLAMABAD - The United States yesterday announced the lifting of sanctions imposed on Pakistan and India in July 1998 in punishment for testing nuclear weapons.

President Bush's decision to reward Pakistan for cooperating in the hunt for elusive terrorist Osama bin Laden following the atrocities of 11th September, abruptly terminates the US policy of trying to discourage states that do not possess nuclear weapons from developing or testing them.

Most commentators here were confident that the pill of Pakistani cooperation, not easy for a Muslim nation with a vociferous pro-Osama minority to swallow, would be sugared by some rollback of sanctions, especially as President Bush indicated as long ago as July that he wanted to lift them.

But the decision followed with startling speed on Pakistan's pledge of cooperation.

Ex-President Clinton's cherished goal of making the world a safer place by cajoling enough states to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) to bring it into effect is now history. It was already heading that way in the summer of 1999, when the US Senate rejected the treaty. But now it is plain that the world has entered a new and unpredictable era.

The sanctions suspended military sales to the chronically hostile South Asian neighbours, prohibited new credit guarantees and international loans, and banned the export to them of "items controlled for nuclear or missile reasons".

India, with its far larger and more buoyant economy, was little effected, but Pakistan, which has scant foreign reserves and a huge burden of debt repayment, was plunged into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge. Now the fast decision by General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler and self-elected president, to back President Bush, has been doubly rewarded.

As well as the lifting of sanctions, the US has also agreed to reschedule $US600 million of Pakistan's debt, according to a senior US diplomat here.

But by bartering nuclear restraint for cooperation on terrorism, President Bush risks giving a green light to other countries that might be on the verge of developing nuclear weapons, and which will now draw the lesson that they can proceed without fear of penalty.

In his haste to make the world free from one form of terror, President Bush risks condemning it to a different type a year or two down the road.

A similar myopic approach 20 years ago, when the CIA poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan's Mujahideen and Islamic radical groups from other Muslim countries to enable them to fight America's proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union, produced a monster called Osama bin Laden.

Twenty years from now, yesterday's decision may also be condemned as putting the day after tomorrow in hock for today.

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