WASHINGTON, Dec 3: While the Foreign Office in Islamabad is busy denying US media’s claim that religious extremists are about to grab Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, an official Pakistani delegation currently visiting the United States is busy reinforcing such fears.
Islamabad has sent three special envoys – Nasim Ashraf, Mohammad Ali Saif and Kashmala Tariq – to convince the Americans that they should continue supporting the Musharraf government as they did before the imposition of emergency on Nov 3.
Mr Ashraf, a US-based physician before picked by the Musharraf regime to oversee social development and then turned into cricket tsar, leads the delegation because of his perceived or real influences in the United States.
Other two – a lawyer and a former parliamentarian – have been selected because they are considered eloquent advocates of the government’s policies, including the state of emergency.
Their arrival in the United States coincided with a media campaign claiming that the current political instability in Pakistan also has created doubts about Islamabad’s ability to guard its nuclear weapons.
According to sources in the US media and academia, at more than one meetings, the delegation used the nuclear bogey to scare the Americans into supporting the Musharraf government.
At one such meeting with the officials of the Asia Society in New York, the delegation blamed the former chief justice and other judges of the Supreme Court for releasing 61 top terrorists.
All these terrorists, the delegation claimed, had links to Al Qaeda and were capable of not only capturing nuclear weapons but also of successfully installing an Islamist government in Islamabad.
Such claims do get a sympathetic hearing in the United States, particularly in Washington’s officials circles where there is a strong aversion to the suggestion that the sacked judges be restored.
Washington, like the members of the delegation, blames them for releasing suspected terrorists and does not want them back.
The delegation members, however, were cornered when some Asia Society officials urged them to hand over a list of these terrorists to US officials so that they could keep a watch on them.
And on Monday, the US media quoted former prime minister Benazir Bhutto as saying that religious militants could take control of the country’s nuclear weapons if the situation worsened.
“Whatever is happening in Swat and the tribal area today that can come to Islamabad tomorrow,” she said. The world “will not look on as spectators if Kahuta falls into their hands”.
