[yt_dropcap type=”square” font=”” size=”14″ color=”#000″ background=”#fff” ] R [/yt_dropcap]ahmatullah Nabil, an Afghan politician, recently penned a politically motivated article “The world must secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons” and exposed the biased journalistic platform, “New York Times.” Nabil’s opinion has transmitted negative narrative about Pakistani nuclear weapon and pleaded international community to get control over them. He used substandard arguments to strengthen inference of nuclear weapons’ insecurity in Pakistan.
Nabil offered some preposterous and worthless evidence to substantiate his arguments. Contrary to his claims, Pakistan has taken measures, including setting up of the Pakistan’s Centre of Excellence for Nuclear Security, to strengthen its nuclear safety. Pakistan is continuously improving its security measures while implementing new laws and regulations, to provide physical protection to nuclear sites and on-site reviews of security. Notwithstanding, safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons has unremittingly scrutinized by baseless and unnecessary media trial since the country tested its nuclear device.
Pakistan is engaged with the international community on nuclear safety and security issues, and is working to ensure that its strategic export controls are in line with international standards. Unfortunately, nuclear security issue has been hijacked by interests based international politics in which an undue focus has been brought on specific countries and diverting the attentions from actual concerns. In this context, The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies annual report of 2015 pointed out that the U.S. tops the rank in the world with 59.4% of negligence, loss or theft incidents related to nuclear material, followed by France 5.9%, Canada 5.9%, Ukraine 5.3%, and Russia 5.3%.
Similarly, Adrian Levy and Jeffrey Smith exposed in a detail report that Indian nuclear weapons program is not safe. Previously in 1994, 2003, 2008 and 2013 terrorist groups obtained the uranium from India’s state-owned mines. Recently, a criminal group was uncovered in India, which was involved in smuggling radioactive substances. In this regards, safety of Israel nuclear programme is under severe condition, as it lies in a region where terrorist organizations like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas are more powerful than the Taliban’s in the South Asian region. Even the Israeli nuclear reactors are ‘an easy target’ of the missiles possessed by such terrorist groups.
Unfortunately, Nabil completely ignored these incidents and deliberately carried out politically motivated campaign against Pakistan. Rather than wasting his inoperable energies against Pakistan, he has to urge international community to sort out “Afghanistan mess”, which is the mother of all insecurities in the region. India is financing, supporting and directing terrorism in Pakistan from Afghanistan. Consequently, there is a perception emerging within analysts that one day India will orchestrate a terrorist attack in Pakistan to target a nuclear facility. India will use that incident to brand Pakistan so weak that nuclear technology is not safe in its hands.
Nabil should urge his government to block the Indian support for terrorists via Afghanistan. He is still not understating the gravity of the situation though he served in Afghanistan intelligence. There are some facts and truth hurts – not the searching after; the running from! Nabil should accept the truth that India is using Afghan soil to finance the problems for Pakistan. The unrestricted Indian influence in Afghanistan is a mounting threat for Pakistan. India wants to establish resilient anti-Pakistan sentiments in Afghanistan. Pakistan on many occasions has provided sufficient evidence to Afghan authorities, about Indian covert support in a number of terrorist acts in Pakistan. In this regards, Indian spy agent Kulbhushan Yadav and TTP spokesperson Ehsanullah Ehsan can be seen admitting the terrorist organisations’ nexus with Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies and security forces in carrying out subversive activities in Pakistan.
Concisely, the opinion by Mr. Rahmatullah Nabil is prejudiced and overstated. Commanding authorities in Pakistan are well aware of the nuclear terrorism threat, acknowledging it as a global menace and committed to eliminate it. Whereas, author wrongly interpreted the classified documents. Both documents periodically review the current security challenges, as a regular practice adopted by all responsible nuclear weapons states.
