With Pakistan Spinning Out Of Control, How Safe Are The Nukes?

One of those little symbols looks like it's WAY too close for comfort

Last week, I suggested at my travel site, The Around The World Blog that one of Pakistan's most beloved tourist destinations, the picturesque Swat Valley, might be a good place to cross off your future travel plans, although if you're just in your teens or twenties, it could be ok for your grandchildren-- maybe. And that's a big maybe, but one that means a lot to Barack Obama today. "We have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don't end up having a nuclear-armed militant state."

Late last night Reuters was reporting a full-scale assault by the American-equipped Pakistani Army on Taliban positions in the Swat Valley, which had been previously ceded to the Taliban as part of a ceasefire God told the Taliban to break immediately. They bombed the hell out of the place-- planes, helicopter gunships... the whole works. Half a million civilians had already fled but a curfew, later lifted, was keeping anyone else in the line of fire from getting out.

Apparently cleaning the Taliban out of Swat, which is 80 miles from the capital of the country, was a demand Obama made of Pakistani President Zardari when he was in DC last week. It was basically, get your ass in gear or forget any more aid, aid that keeps the country from falling into total chaos. Obama also promised to help-- or threatened not to help-- with Zardari's rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Pakistan's army went on a full-scale offensive after the government ordered troops to flush out militants from the Islamist stronghold, once an exotic tourist destination.

...In an incident that could hurt government efforts to rally support for the offensive, suspected pilotless U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles Saturday at targets in South Waziristan, an al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuary on the Afghanistan border, intelligence officials said.

One official as well as a Taliban source said the missiles killed five militants. Another intelligence official put the death toll at as high as 20.

Hours later, Pakistani security forces killed 18 militants in the same region, the military said. The shootout erupted after militants attacked a military convoy, killing one soldier and wounding two.

U.S. attacks have been criticized for killing civilians and violating sovereignty, and have caused opposition to Islamabad cooperating with Washington in fighting militants.

This morning the kill claims by the military are growing, thousands more flee their homes, creating a serious internal refugee problem, and Prime Minister Gilani said in a press conference after an emergency cabinet meeting that the battle with the Taliban is a "battle for survival of Pakistan."

Most Americans don't care about any of this at all. The only aspect that gets anyone's attention is the possibility of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of the Taliban. Could it happen? The Obama Administration says no. Richard Lugar (R-IN), who knows a lot about this stuff and, unlike most of his Senate Republican colleagues, puts America first and partisan differences on the backburner, isn't as optimistic. So how secure is Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? The Bush Regime put a lot of money into helping the Pakistanis put a good system of controls into place-- although I always suspected that those controls had more to do with preventing more proliferation (ala A.Q. Khan) than preventing a radical government from getting its hands on the weapons. Everything I've read indicates that the nukes are pretty secure. Is pretty secure enough? The U.S. doesn't know where all 60 to 100 weapons are and, supposedly, the Pakistanis refuse to tell their American counterparts, concerned "that the United States might be tempted to seize or destroy Pakistan’s arsenal if the insurgency appeared about to engulf areas near Pakistan’s nuclear sites."

As the insurgency of the Taliban and Al Qaeda spreads in Pakistan, senior American officials say they are increasingly concerned about new vulnerabilities for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, including the potential for militants to snatch a weapon in transport or to insert sympathizers into laboratories or fuel-production facilities.

...“We are largely relying on assurances, the same assurances we have been hearing for years,” said one senior official who was involved in the dialogue with Pakistan during the Bush years, and remains involved today. “The worse things get, the more strongly they hew to the line, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got it under control.'"... [C]ooperation, according to officials who would not speak for attribution because of the sensitivity surrounding the exchanges between Washington and Islamabad, has been sharply limited when the subject has turned to the vulnerabilities in the Pakistani nuclear infrastructure. The Obama administration inherited from President Bush a multiyear, $100 million secret American program to help Pakistan build stronger physical protections around some of those facilities, and to train Pakistanis in nuclear security.

But much of that effort has now petered out, and American officials have never been permitted to see how much of the money was spent, the facilities where the weapons are kept or even a tally of how many Pakistan has produced. The facility Pakistan was supposed to build to conduct its own training exercises is running years behind schedule.

UPDATE: This Is Going To Be REALLY Bad

I'm sure you've noticed what a mess Iraq and Afghanistan have been. Iraq has 31,234,000 people, approximately the same as Afghanistan, although I doubt Afghanistan has half that many. Pakistan has 165,900,000, over a hundred million more than both combined. And then there are those 60-100 supposedly secure nuclear weapons. I've been to Pakistan twice and the place creeped me out both times, although I was absolutely in love with both India and Afghanistan. Pakistan, a weird and dysfunctional construct more than a real country to begin with, is falling apart right in front of our eyes now-- and it's going to be very, very ugly, much worse than anything we've experienced in Iraq or Afghanistan. The problems there are strictly about religious fundamentalism alone. There is also a class aspect and an uprising against a rotten out and corrupt feudal society. Today's NY Times reports that "It remains unlikely that Islamic militants could seize power in Pakistan, given the strength of Pakistan’s military, according to American intelligence analysts." Now where have I heard that before? Certainly Iran and Cuba. I'm not sure if they said that about Libya in 1969; I was in Afghanistan when 27 year old Muammar Gaddafi overthrew U.S. puppet King Idris. The strength of the Pakistani army is illusory, unless you mean they have tons and tons and tons of expensive American equipment that is unlikely to do them any good in a guerilla war against determined jihadis. There is no there there and there's nothing propping it up. I suspect there are an awful lot of people transferring their savings to Britain around now.