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Pakistan Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said that his country would
agree to a verifiable bilateral fissile material moratorium as its nuclear
weapons program was “driven by the threat perception of India.” Addressing
Washington-based think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he
created wiggle room for himself by saying that he is not “the chief decision
maker.”
Kasuri’s address ironically titled "Pakistan: Promoting Peace, Security and
Development," claims that Pakistan’s “weaponisation (sic) was driven by India's
nuclearisation (sic) of South Asia” and that his country “had offered India
after 1974 to keep South Asia nuclear free.”
Pakistan’s ploy is to regain the lost South Asian parity abandoned by the US
in 2000 by President Bill Clinton and reaffirmed in 2006 by President George
Bush. Pakistan is also trying desperately to gain leverage with the US as it
sees a tilt in US policy towards India, especially through the Indo-US Civilian
Nuclear Deal. Kasuri thinks that it is “only a matter of time” that the US
would “begin to see the logic of our argument” of giving a “package” civilian
nuclear deal to Pakistan similar to the one it has reached with India.
Although it is seen as the front-line partner in the War on Terror, {increasing
vexation with the lack of progress in capturing remnant al Qaeda and Taliban
terrorists finding safe haven in Pakistan is affecting it deeply. The US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on a recent
facilitation trip to patch up relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan
and also prod the country to do more on terror—President Pervez Musharraf
responded that he will deploy
10,000 more troops to fight terrorism. Although the US has given it a
generous
defense aid package, it has also
cut aid to Pakistan. Some say that the aid cut was because of Pakistan’s
reluctance to allow the US to interview disgraced nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan
whom Pakistan claims acted alone in
proliferating nuclear weapons technology . Despite mounting evidence and
confessional statements from Libya, it even
denied that such exports did happen.
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