WASHINGTON, March 31: No previous or present Pakistani governments were involved with the network that sold nuclear technology to other countries, the US administration told a powerful Congressional committee on Tuesday.
"The issue is the extent to which, if at all, the top levels of the government of Pakistan were involved in (these) activities. And...we have no evidence to that effect," said John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Mr Bolton, who appeared before the House Committee on International Relations as a witness of the Bush administration, did acknowledge that senior government officials other than Dr A.Q. Khan might also have been involved with his proliferation network.
The undersecretary said he had no doubt that there were officials in the government of Pakistan - 'perhaps at the Khan Research Laboratories, perhaps in the military - who participated in Dr Khan's network and probably enriched themselves just as Dr Khan himself did'.
He rejected the suggestion that the United States should re-impose strict nuclear sanctions on Pakistan. The proliferation, he said, was done by individuals and not the government and that's why there was no evidence to support the demand for re-imposing nuclear sanctions on Pakistan.
When Congressman Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York and a known anti-Pakistan lobbyist, asked the US official 'when can we expect President Bush to reintroduce nuclear sanctions on Pakistan', Mr Bolton said: "If we had information about complicity of top levels of the government of Pakistan, we would act on it. At this point, there's no such information".
He also disagreed with Mr Ackerman's suggestion that the Bush administration might defer granting Pakistan a major non-Nato ally status before applying the sanctions. These two subjects were not inter-related, said Mr Bolton.
The decision to make Pakistan a major non-NATO ally, he explained, was based on other factors. "I mean, we have been saying to the Pakistanis for quite some time" that they were a key US ally in the war against terror.
He said the US acted 'on the basis of what we know to be the case' while applying nuclear-related sanctions. "Based on the information we have now, we believe that the proliferation activities that Dr Khan confessed to recently - his activities in Libya, in Iran and North Korea, and perhaps elsewhere - were activities that he was carrying on without the approval of the top levels of the government of Pakistan. That is the position that President Musharraf has taken, and we have no evidence to the contrary," said Mr Bolton.
Mr Ackerman, however, insisted that senior members of the then government in Pakistan were aware of the activities of nuclear proliferators. "You cannot use the military transport planes of Pakistan to deliver that kind of materiel and programme to North Korea and other (countries) without the implicit support of the Pakistan army.
And it seems to me that we know the name of the guy who was the head of the army of Pakistan then," he said. Mr Bolton rejected the assumptions as not grounded in facts. "You can make assumptions about the use of military aircraft in Pakistan. (But) those assumptions at some point have to be grounded in facts," he said.
He said the US administration had the understanding that the KRL had extraordinary autonomy and added that quite likely it could have used military aircraft for purposes that people in the military would not necessarily know.
When Congresswoman Betty McCollum, a Democrat from Minnesota, read out quotes from a magazine article saying Dr Khan's daughter had information with her that 'implicates very high-level government officials,' Mr Bolton said he did not want to comment on that in public.
At one point during the hearing Mr Bolton challenged Ms McCollum to produce if she had any evidence that the government of Pakistan was involved in selling nuclear weapons technology.
Mr Bolton did not comment when a Congressman said he knew the name of the person who was involved with Dr Khan and 'he was the head of the army of Pakistan then'.
