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EDITORIAL: The low-down on India-US nuclear deal

Pakistan seems to have woken up to the United States-India nuclear deal the two countries signed during President George Bush’s visit to South Asia last month. First General Pervez Musharraf said that Pakistanis shouldn’t be India-centric and demand parity with India on the nuclear deal because our energy needs were well addressed domestically and by China’s offer to help build nuclear reactors in Pakistan. But then suddenly something snapped and the Pakistanis starting demanding the same deal as India. Mr Bush chose to ignore Pakistan’s demands but that did not stop General Musharraf from broaching the issue time and again. Then Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri came on-line and thundered that the US-India deal was “discriminatory” and therefore “unacceptable”. Mr Kasuri was followed by Pakistan’s outgoing ambassador to the US, General (r) Jehangir Karamat, who said in a widely circulated statement that “this is not the time for an imbalance” in the South Asian region and pleaded that “there should be a package for both countries [India and Pakistan], and not country-specific deals on a subject as critical as nuclear technology”. Now Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, who is in New York for a United Nations moot, has said in an interview on Thursday that the energy needs of both India and Pakistan are growing. Not content with this hint, Mr Aziz also said that Pakistan’s economy was growing at sic to eight percent “and our energy needs are very acute”. To underscore the fact that the United States deal with India could lead to instability in the region, Mr Aziz suggested an even-handed approach so that that “opportunity [can] be used to come up with [a] nuclear restraint environment”.

Why has the India deal become so irksome and what is Pakistan demanding?

It seems that Pakistan did not initially fathom the full import of the deal. And if it did, it thought it wouldn’t get the same deal given different “needs and history”. It is also possible that it did not think the deal could survive the rigours of the American legislative process on the Hill. But now, with the debate in the US Congress and opposition mounting, it has decided to queer the pitch for India by demanding that it should be treated at par. Equally, however, it may mistakenly think that with some pleading and lobbying it might be able to clinch a similar deal.

Why is the deal significant?

It is about energy but more than that it is about legitimacy. The United States has, for all practical purposes, accepted India as a legitimate nuclear-weapons state (NWS), the dissembling by the State Department and the White House, notwithstanding. How so? The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) rests on three pillars: non-proliferation, disarmament and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. It envisaged that all the states would accept the legitimacy of five nuclear-weapons states and renounce their own weapons programmes. The prize for doing so would be (a) the nuclear-weapons states would negotiate in good faith towards disarmament; and (b) the non-nuclear-weapons states will have the right to nuclear energy. However, the right to nuclear energy was contingent upon their signing and ratifying the NPT.

India opposed the NPT from the word go and called it a discriminatory treaty. It did not sign it and went on to develop a nuclear-weapon capability. Finally, it tested its capability in May 1998. The deal the US has given it is significant not so much because it would give India energy (nuclear energy would amount to about seven percent of India’s energy needs) but because it accepts India as an NWS without any reference to the NPT.

This per se is not bad. Indeed, an analyst in The Friday Times proposed as far back as February 2004 that the second-generation nuclear-weapons states — namely, Israel, Pakistan and India — must be accommodated in some 5+3 framework outside the NPT, especially if Israel were to come out of nuclear hiding and declare itself an NWS. This idea has since recurred and was also taken up by Avner Cohen and Thomas Graham Jr in an article in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (May/June 2004). What the US has done instead is to give India special treatment and leave Pakistan out in the cold. As for Israel, it has its own secret deal with the US. In any case, it cannot be brought into the ambit of such acceptance until and unless it comes out of the closet.

This is what is bothering Pakistan. However, since the discourse is being woven around the issue of energy, we have continued to peg our demand on that. The problem with the energy discourse, however, is that the US has said that it is prepared to take cognisance of Pakistan’s energy needs, via gas pipelines from Turkmenistan. But that, as we have said, is not the issue. Furthermore, now that the deal seems to have entered rough waters in the Senate, Pakistan needs to draw and present its (the deal’s) correct contours to the world. In doing so it would also help the non-proliferationists in the US who continue to oppose it.

The issue at this point can be posited thus: either Pakistan gets the same deal, which would be very good, or it does everything it can to ensure that the Bush administration’s deal with India does not go through, or is at least amended by Congress in such a manner that India refuses to accept it and it falls through. If Pakistan manages the first — which is very unlikely — then there is no quarrel. If it manages to do the second — difficult, but not impossible — then both India and Pakistan remain in the nuclear twilight zone. Neither gets it, so neither is happy or unhappy.

Meanwhile, France has already signed its own deal with India and China may well do the same with Pakistan. The bilateral nature of the deal means that any legitimate NWS can have a similar deal with another state. But while the Bush administration is trying so hard to win its deal with India, it might do itself some good if it were to hear what Tehran has to say about Iran’s right to enrich uranium. There is a connection between what Washington is doing to the east and west of Pakistan and it may not be very healthy for non-proliferation. *

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