By Greg Seigle

Global Security Newswire

Pakistan’s crackdown on radical Islamic groups within its borders is intended not only to prevent war with India, but is also rooted in U.S. demands that Pakistan keep its nuclear secrets out of Islamic fundamentalists’ hands, U.S. analysts told Global Security Newswire today.

During the past week, Pakistan has arrested dozens of members of two Kashmir extremist groups believed responsible for the Dec. 13 machine gun attack on India’s Parliament. The attack, which left nine security guards and all five gunmen dead, prompted the U.S. State Department to add both groups to its list of terrorist groups Dec. 26.

In addition to adding Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed to its list, the United States has begun the process of freezing any U.S. financial assets of Umma Tameer-e-Nau, which until recently was an unknown outfit believed headquartered in Pakistan (see GSN, Dec. 21).

Umma Tameer-e-Nau is “an organization that claimed to feed the hungry and needy of Afghanistan but that in fact provided information about nuclear weapons to al-Qaeda,” U.S. President George W. Bush said recently.

The two retired Pakistani nuclear physicists arrested last month for sharing undisclosed amounts of nuclear secrets with al-Qaeda—Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid—headed Umma Tameer-e-Nau, U.S. officials have said.

“There’s still a fear that the semiautonomous militant groups might gain a sympathetic ear with [Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency] and might be able to get their hands on fissile material—nuclear material, radiological material [or] anything that can be used to make a ‘dirty’ bomb,” said Chris Gagne, a research associate with the Henry L. Stimson Center. “The fear of insider collaboration [between the ISI and terrorists] is less than it was two or three months ago, but it is still there.”

The threat of war between India and Pakistan, which both tested nuclear weapons in 1998, has sparked high-level actions by U.S. officials. In the past week alone U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has made a flurry of phone calls to both Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. Powell has also had several communiques with the foreign ministers of both countries, which have fought three wars in the last half-century, the last being in 1971 over Bangladesh.

Threat of Islamic Fundamentalists

While the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear materials has been a major concern of top U.S. officials the past few years due to the rise of Islamic insurgency in the country and Islamabad’s reluctance to share its safety procedures or allow outside inspections, the concerns have been exacerbated since the two Pakistani nuclear physicists were arrested, analysts said.

“There has been a lot of talk, quietly so, of fears of an Islamic coup in Pakistan and the nukes getting in the hands of radical Islamic groups,” said Cheryl Loeb, a Monterey Institute for International Studies research associate. “One of the major concerns of the United States is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.”

The pressure Washington puts on Islamabad is made all the more sensitive because U.S. troops in Afghanistan are relying on Pakistani troops to bottle up their mountainous border with Afghanistan to keep Taliban or al-Qaeda militants from escaping into Pakistan, analysts noted.

Analysts agree that the United States seeks to avert a war between India and Pakistan, and to help Pakistan shore up control of its nuclear assets (see GSN, Nov. 5). A large part of that concern is to keep any rogue elements within Pakistan from gaining control of the nuclear materials or passing nuclear secrets to terrorists groups such as al-Qaeda, they said.

Fears of losing control of nuclear weapons or secrets are “a secondary concern,” said Selig Harrison, director of the National Security Project at the Center for International Policy, who has written five books on South Asia. “It’s a concern, the spread of these nuclear materials … but it’s motivated by how Pakistan keeps, stores and monitors its nuclear assets.”

“I think the underlying cause is the desire of Musharraf to recenter the politics of Pakistan,” said the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Dennis Kux, author of The United States and Pakistan 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies, recently published by Johns Hopkins University. “He had wanted to move things back [before Sept. 11] but he didn’t have the political muscle … to bring Pakistan politics back from the Islamic brink.”

How Serious Is the Crackdown?

In recent weeks India has massed its troops on its 1,800-mile border with Pakistan and is threatening military action unless Musharraf arrests dozens of members of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed and hands them over to New Delhi for trial—the latter of which is an unprecedented and unlikely scenario.

Musharraf has cracked down on the two groups, however, arresting Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, head of Lashkar-e-Tayibba, and placing Maulana Masood Azhar under house arrest. But Indian officials have scoffed at the moves, with two ministers separately terming Azhar’s house arrest “a joke.”

 “Nothing has changed, in fact,” declared Harrison. “The situation is still dicey … On the ground in Kashmir there’s been no sign of a crackdown.”

Indeed, skirmishes along the Kashmir border region between Indian and Pakistani forces this past week have killed at least a dozen soldiers and wounded scores more.

“It’s similar to [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat and his crackdowns on Hammas,” said Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation. “Just how effective are these crackdowns?”

“They haven’t cracked down yet,” Harrison continued. “The U.S. may be trying to freeze the assets [of Umma Tameer-e-Nau] but we don’t know if they’ve simply shifted from one [bank] account to another.”

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