[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by CM: *
Losing Bangladesh is the best thing to happen to Pakistan.
[/QUOTE]
Next will be,
Losing nukes is the best thing to happen to Pakistan.
I do not believe my eyes! Kasuri interview on CNN International
I just watched Kasuri answering a few pointed questions on CNN International. First two or three questions about the AQK proliferation, he came out swinging (tone fluency and clarity better than a UK parliamentary debate). Then on the 4th question the man completely lost it and sorta disintegrated. The question was : Why did AQK simply get a pardon for the crime he has confessed to. Wow! Kasuri lost it at this point and went "very good question but what timeframe are we talking about? this happened in the 80's and 90's when it was a different govt and the command authority had not been created...etc etc.." thus defending Musharaf while the question was about AQK's punishment being too lenient.
Thats called diplomacy!
North Korea and Iran have denied that they received any support from Pakistani scientists, but we claim that we have provided them with support in their nuclear programs. 
**NKorea denies nuclear disclosures
**
North Korea has denied an admission by Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist that he sold nuclear weapons technology to the Communist state.
A statement by a foreign ministry spokesman described the claim as “false propaganda” spread by the US, the state-run KCNA news agency reported.
The spokesman said the “US smear campaign” justified Pyongyang’s moves “to build nuclear deterrent force”.
It was North Korea’s first official response to the Pakistan disclosures.
It comes just weeks before new six-way talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme are set to begin in Beijing on 25 February.
Last week, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, publicly confessed he had sold nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya through a black market.
Islamabad has pledged to fully co-operate with the UN nuclear watchdog, following strong US pressure on Pakistan to dismantle the secret nuclear trading network.
On Monday US Secretary of State, Colin Powell said he had urged President Pervez Musharraf to make sure that no more of the secret nuclear exchange network remained.
**‘Pretext’ for attack
**
“This is nothing but mean and groundless propaganda,” the North Korean spokesman said.
“The United States is now hyping the story about the transfer of nuclear technology… in a bid to make DPRK’s (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) enriched uranium programme sound plausible,” he said.
“This is aimed to scour the interior of the DPRK on the basis of a legitimate mandate and attack it just as what it did in Iraq in the end and invent a pretext to… scuttle the projected six-way talks,” the statement said.
The nuclear dispute was triggered in 2002 when the US said Pyongyang had admitted to harbouring an enriched uranium programme.
North Korea has since claimed to have finished reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods being stored at Yongbyon - enough to help it build up to six nuclear weapons.
Last month, North Korea said it had shown its “nuclear deterrent” to an unofficial delegation from the United States.
The US team confirmed they had seen the secret nuclear complex that Washington believes is being used to develop nuclear weapons.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FB11Df03.html
South Asia
Iran, North Korea join nuclear blame game
Iran has rejected a confession by top Pakistani scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan that he passed nuclear secrets to Tehran for personal profit. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said on Monday that “what is being raised in the media” about Khan’s admissions “is not true”.
The spokesman acknowledged that Tehran obtained some foreign nuclear know-how from middlemen, but made no mention of having received technology made available by Khan on the black market. He said the Iranian government recently provided the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), with the names of some of the illicit brokers at the agency’s request.
North Korea, too, has denied the admission by Khan that he sold nuclear-weapons technology to the state. A statement by a Foreign Ministry spokesman described the claim as “false propaganda” spread by the United States, the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. The spokesman said that the “US smear campaign” justified Pyongyang’s moves “to build [a] nuclear deterrent force”. It was North Korea’s first official response to the Pakistani disclosures. The denial comes just weeks before new six-way talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program are to begin in Beijing on February 25.
All the things are pointing to what most of us were saying, that the humiliation of Abdul Qadeer Khan was just the beginning, it will end with the complete ro
All the things are pointing to what most of us were saying, that the humiliation of Abdul Qadeer Khan was just the beginning, it will end with the complete roll back of Pakistan's nuclear program. With the admission of Qadeer Khan on TV we have presented a proof to the Western community, to use against us.
*Europe wants to discuss Pak N-imbroglio at UNSC
*
By Zia Iqbal Shahid
BRUSSELS: Despite a wide international acknowledgement of the official Pakistani position that ‘only a few individuals, not the government of Pakistan’ was involved in nuclear peddling, European members of the IAEA apex board want to raise in the UN Security Council what they describe as the core question: "whether a country incapable of guarding nuclear secrets can be trusted with nuclear weapons", a credible diplomatic source here told The News.
The European countries also intend to raise the issue related to Pakistan at the forthcoming meeting of the IAEA board of governors in Vienna on March 8. The meeting is scheduled to discuss a report on the IAEA’s verification of nuclear programmes in Iran and Libya. IAEA Director General Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, according to the source, is engrossed in finalising the report, which he would send to the IAEA board of governors over the coming week.
"The issue of investigations on Pakistani scientists’ alleged involvement in nuclear trafficking will also be touched during discussion on the director general’s report on the IAEA’s verification of nuclear programmes in Iran and Libya," a source in Vienna confirmed.
Eleven EU countries represented at the 35-member IAEA board are: Denmark, Germany, France, the UK, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain (full members) and Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (EU accession countries).
The EU members abhor Washington paradigm of unilateralism in handling the sensitive issue like nuclear proliferation and plead that the UNSC should play a key role in such problems, the source said.
The IAEA cannot do much in preventing nuclear proliferation by the non-NPT member states. The agency can only provide information to the member states, besides taking the case to the UN. "Coaxing non-NPT states to join the international treaty is essentially the responsibility of the member states, particularly the members of the nuclear club", the IAEA source said. There is a move in Europe to raise this issue in the forthcoming meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board meeting on March 8, the official source confirmed.
Even the European countries including the UK and France that have applauded the Pakistani government’s handling of the nuclear scientists are raising what they describe as the core question: "whether a country incapable of guarding nuclear secrets can be trusted with nuclear weapons",
I can argue the complete opposite - that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme will continue unaffected by this all.
Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, our Foreign Minister.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27180-2004Feb9.html
“The Pakistani people must understand that there will be no nuclear rollback. We have scheduled new missile tests to make that point. We are a declared nuclear power and the world must accept it. We are, however, taking steps to control our nuclear assets” more carefully and halt proliferation"
I laugh at this article. What a blatant case of malafide propaganda, and waste of bandwidth too. The author’s so obvious in his bias that I actually feel bad for him. The guy doesnt even know how to write a convincing piece. Listen to him:
Whats that got to do with scientists? Non-muslims in Pakistan aren’t prohibited from joining nuclear facilities. One of KRL’s scientists rented our house, and he was a Quaidiani!
Again, basless propaganda. First: The write seems to convinitently forget the fact that India’s own politicians are one of the world’s most corrupt. Maybe he forgot the whole bofors incident, eh?
Second: Pakistan was dragged into nuclear arms by India when it conducted its tests in 1974. It was after those tests that Pakistan decided to work on its own nuclear programe. It has nothing to do with Qadeer’s personal whims. If India hadn’t conducted a nuclear test, our govt. would most likely have refused Qadeer’s offers even if he made any.
Whats the basis of that statement? Maybe the author of this article doesn’t know but when Khan returned to Pakistan he lived in govt. quarters for several years. And if you know anything about Pakistan, then these quarters aren’t exactly heaven on earth. If he wantedlavish lifestyle he would’ve gone back.
Bottom line: This article is a complete and utter BS. Its as good or bad as me claiming that Kalam is a fickle, old brainless fart who didn’t undertake foreign education because nobody gave him admission. Marathi Maanus, by posting this article you too have lost whatever credibility you had left.
“If you wrote to him that you wanted to attend a seminar or that your daughter was getting married, he would write back and there would be a check in there for you,” said Pervez Hoodhboy, a physicist at Islamabad’s prestigious Quaid-e-Azam University. “Sometimes there would be $50,000 or $100,000. He was very generous and he bought a lot of support, so people didn’t say anything.”
The decision followed a secret report by an anti-corruption body that found Khan had amassed a $40 million fortune, two senior intelligence officials said.
Despite a $2,000-a-month government salary and no family fortune, Khan lived well. He snapped up property in Pakistan and Dubai, and even bought a hotel in Timbuktu, in the West African nation of Mali. He was known for handing out free food to poor people on Fridays and Saturdays, a practice which greatly enhanced his image as a patriot and a pious Muslim.
Wall Street Journal
Abdul Qadeer Khan
Tuesday, February 17 2004 @ 06:38 PM CST
Bernard Henri Levy
We observed the Abdul Qadeer Khan affair, the incredible story of this Pakistani nuclear scientist who delivered over 15 years – freely and with impunity – his most sensitive secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Then we learned that President Musharraf in person, after an interview from which little or nothing has been divulged, ended up granting Khan his “pardon.” Case closed? End of story? That’s what the American administration, falling oddly in step with the official Pakistani doctrine, would have us believe. But knowing something of the case – and being the first French observer, to my knowledge, to have tried to alert public opinion to the extreme gravity of the situation – I believe that we are only at the very beginning this story.
Far from ending on Sept. 11, 2001 – the day, we are told, on which “the world changed” – this terrifying nuclear traffic continued until well after: A last trip to Pyongyang, his thirteenth, was made in June 2002 by the good doctor Khan; not to mention the ship inspected last August in the Mediterranean, transporting elements of a future nuclear plant to Libya. The eyes of the world, emulating the eyes of America, were fixed on Baghdad, while the tentacles of nuclear proliferation were being extended from Karachi. We will soon learn that far from being the overexcited, but in the end isolated, “Dr. Strangelove” that most of the press has described, Khan was at the center of an immense network, an incredibly dense web. There were Dubai front companies, meetings in Casablanca and Istanbul with Iranian colleagues, complicities in Germany and Holland, Malaysian and Philippine agents, and detours through Sri Lanka, with Chinese and London connections – a world of crime and dirty war that the West, mired in a big game that is beginning to get ahead of it, has so blithely allowed to develop.
We will find that, since Pakistan is steered by the iron hand of its secret service and its army, it is inconceivable that Khan operated alone without orders or cover. We will understand more precisely that we cannot repeat without contradiction that, on the one hand, the Pakistani nuclear arsenal is under control, and that not a warhead can budge without the authorities’ knowledge, and, on the other, that Khan was acting alone, working on his own account, with no official connivance. To put it simply and disconcertingly: Pakistan’s nuclear weapons need to be secured. They cannot – will not – be secured by Pakistan alone.
We will come back to Gen. Musharraf – and Pakistan being what it is, we will come back also to other generals and ex-generals, such as Mirza Aslam Beg and Jehangir Karamat, both former army chiefs of staff. But we must not shift our gaze from the president himself, whose knowledge of Khan’s dark machinations no one in Islamabad doubts, and who, at the very moment of his confounding, celebrated Khan once more as a “hero.” What does Khan know of what Gen. Musharraf knows? And what does Khan’s daughter, Dina, who announced in London that she has suitcases of compromising files, know?
And at last, sooner or later, we will come to the real secret: that of al Qaeda; and of Khan’s links to Lashkar-e-Toiba, the fundamentalist terrorist group at the heart of al Qaeda; and the fact that this “mad scientist” is first of all mad about God, a fanatical Islamist who in his heart and soul believes that the bomb of which he is the father should belong, if not to the Umma itself, at least to its avant-garde, as incarnated by al Qaeda. So let us not shrink from measuring the probability of a nightmare scenario: to wit, a Pakistani state which – in the shelter of its alliance with an America that is decidedly not counting inconsistencies – could furnish al Qaeda with the means to take the ultimate step of its jihad.
Complete article from the Wall Street Journal.
Pakistan is not developing nuclear tech, it has already achieved that and much more and thus has nuthinig to hide and declare unlike Iran and Libya (too bad for them and ummah) Look what Musharraf said to Financial Times:
ISLAMABAD, Feb 18: President Gen Pervez Musharraf has said that Pakistan would under no circumstances permit foreign inspectors to enter the country and monitor its nuclear weapons or civil nuclear facilities.
“This is a very sensitive issue … Would any other nuclear power allow its sensitive installations to be inspected? Why should Pakistan be expected to allow anybody to inspect?” he asked in an interview with the Financial Times published on Wednesday.
“We are not hiding anything - what is the need of any inspection? What for?” he said and added: “We will cooperate with any organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, or anybody. But don’t treat us as if we do not know what we are doing. We are doing everything according to international standards.”
Bernard Henri Levy's articles seem very amateurish and sensational. Not to mention he was wrong on many things to do with Daniel Pipes case.