EDITORIAL: Joe Biden, the oldest-ever American to be president of the United States, did slip while boarding the aircraft, but his remark about Pakistan’s nuclear programme he made at his party’s fundraising function last Thursday is not a misstep; it was a deliberate attempt at maligning Pakistan, expected as it was following Pakistan’s abstention from UN General Assembly vote on the war in Ukraine.
Though India too abstained, but the United States ignored it as it sees it through its Indo-Pacific security prism. To President Joe Biden: “This guy (Xi Jinping) who said what he wants but has an enormous array of problems. How do we handle that? How do we handle that relative to what’s going on in Russia? And what I think is may be one of the most dangerous nations in the world: Pakistan. Nuclear weapons without any cohesion”.
Such an outlandish negative position on Pakistan’s nuclear programme, the security and safety of which is recognised without any reservation by the international community and nuclear safeguards management organisations, was bound to hurt the government and people of Pakistan. There was uproar in the country against President Biden’s negative comment, and while it was rejected by leadership across the political landscape the generality questioned the diplomatic attempts now in process to reset the relationship with the United States.
And response from Washington was slow in coming: at first, the White House spokesperson said: “nothing new … President Biden made such remarks before as well”. But there were no takers of that dubious stance here in Pakistan, forcing the State Department to come up with an elaboration of President Biden’s comment. “President Biden has always viewed a secure and prosperous Pakistan as critical to US interests and more, broadly, the United States values our long-standing cooperation with Pakistan”, said the spokesperson of State Department in response to a query by media.
Pakistan is a nuclear power since mid-1960s, and since then it has not only mastered the plutonium route to nuclear power but also built on its own the uranium route by enriching it to weapons grade.
Today, Pakistan not only proficiently runs a number of nuclear reactors that produces electricity it is also one of the nine nuclear weapon states in the world.
And to the utter amazement of its declared and hidden enemies, this 60-year journey has been absolutely accident-free. While the United States cannot get away from its guilt of nuking the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and India for its misfire of nuclear-capable missile and being a flourishing market for sale and purchase of uranium cakes, Pakistan has no such ‘credit’ to its performance. It is hermetically committed to the implementation of IAEA safeguards at its declared nuclear power reactors and so is the potential of Pakistan’s N-weapon capability that its deterrence has ensured peace in this otherwise volatile region.
So, even now, when the government in Pakistan is set about improving its relationship with the United States it should not forget that with the sole superpower since the demise of the Soviet Union it was always a kind of transactional relationship.
When enlistment of Pakistan as an ally in the Cold War suited the United States it was granted membership of regional security pacts, but when it was considered to be neutral in crisis following Nine/Eleven the then US president George W Bush sounded ultimatum “either you are with us or against us”. That kind of transactional uncertainty is not there in Pakistan-China cooperative relationship that is so much an irritant for Washington. Of course the positive optics of recent visits of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari to the United States tended to suggest that the countries can bridge over their differences, but given the fickle mindset as President Joe Biden is seen to be blessed with, can subvert the growing bonhomie anytime at any stage.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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