U.S. Has No Good Option In Pakistan Nuclear Nightmare

If one ever needs to understand why it is a bad idea to let a country like Iran, or North Korea, get nukes, then here is the lesson:

The US armed forces are virtually powerless to prevent Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal from falling into Islamist hands if the political crisis in Islamabad
spins out of control, analysts warned.

Instead, they said, Washington can do
little but help to resolve the crisis and preserve its strong ties with
Pakistan's pro-Western military elite, whether or not General Pervez Musharraf
stays in power.

"There's no good military option at all," Daniel Markey,
a former US government policy planner for South Asia, told AFP on Tuesday in
Washington.

It would be an "incredibly ugly scenario," he said, for US
forces to try to find and secure the nuclear sites in the event of an Islamist
takeover because they lack the intelligence needed to do so in such a large
country.

"Having some certainty of finding them is just, I think, out of
the realm of reality," said Markey, a former State Department official who is
now at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank.

Averting such a
"nightmare scenario," he added, "means having a good working relationship" with
the army, as has been the case for years.

"We shouldn't kid ourselves
that we can work with Pakistan without working with their army and that doesn't
mean we have to back a dictator."


If the US government decides to
drop Musharraf, he warned, it will have to be careful to avoid burning ties with
the institution he heads. "That's the difficult balancing act."


Hopefully, this lesson will not be driven home more forcefully.