Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, did not support President Asif Ali Zardari’s “no first use” statement on nuclear policy in 2008, a 2009 Wikileaks cable from US Ambassador Anne Patterson to Washington said.
The cable that was made public on Friday also said the biggest worry for the US has been about nuclear weapons in Pakistan. “Our major concern has not been that an Islamic militant could steal an entire weapon but rather the chance of someone working in the Government of Pakistan facilities could gradually smuggle enough fissile material out to eventually make a weapon and the vulnerability of weapons in transit.”
This cable confirmed the US decision not to involve Pakistan, otherwise an apparently trusted ally, in the operations against Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.
CIA chief Leon Panetta’s distrust of Pakistan was palpable in an interview he gave to Time magazine after Osama bin Laden was killed: “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets.”
The cable revealed the extent of distrust between the two countries, depite being allies. It showed the extent to which the US was fighting India’s battle with Pakistan. Written ahead of Kayani’s US visit, it said: The US should press Pakistani prosecution of the Mumbai suspects. The military and the ISI are reluctant to abandon the notion that India was the principal threat, not the militant insurgency on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
“They (Pakistan military and ISI) continue to provide overt or tacit support for proxy forces (including the Haqqani group, Commander Nazir, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Lashkar-e-Taiba) as a foreign policy tool,” the cable said. In contrast, the civilian leadership is much more sensitive to the threat of militant Islamic terrorism.
While India believes the US has not been pressing Pakistan enough to punish the perpetrators of 26/11, the cable said the US must make the point forcefully to Kayani that support to Islamic insurgent groups to wage war – not just against India but also in Afghanistan – must end.
Washington is told that US must tell Kayani that such support would recoil on Pakistan eventually.
The cable confirmed media reports that the US eliminated 10 of the top 20 al-Qaida operatives in Pakistan in 2008. Therefore, the current breastbeating over unilateral US action on bin Laden could be contrived. However, the cable acknowledged that the “strikes have put increasing political pressure on the Pakistani Government, which has struggled to explain why it was allowing an ally to violate its sovereignty”.
The cable suggested that Kayani had always known in advance about unilateral attacks from bases in Pakistan. ‘Kayani knows full well that the strikes have been precise (with a few civilian casualties) and targeted primarily at foreign fighters in the Waziristans’. The only inadvertant inaccuracy in the cable was that Kayani was an ‘avid’ golfer. The cable said: “He smokes heavily and can be difficult to understand as he tends to mumble”.
