A Congressional Research Service paper, Pakistan's Nuclear Weapons: Proliferation and Ssecurity Issues (July 30, 2009, 18 pages), examines the issue that scares more thinking Americans than any other in Southwest Asia. Ex-CIA agent Reuel Marc Gerecht sees Pakistan & Iran as future WMD threats, being more educated than Arab Islamists:
No doubt bin Laden and Mr. Zawahiri would probably prefer to have the central front again in the Arab world. But in Afghanistan and Pakistan they have wars that their side might win. Now, or in the not-too-distant future, it may be impossible operationally and philosophically to tell the difference between Arab Al Qaeda and Afghan and Pakistani radical groups, which have as a lodestar the Pashtun militants who make up the neo-Taliban on both sides of the border. The foot soldiers of this cause are not as worldly as their Arab forerunners; they do not have any noteworthy thinkers drawing large crowds.
But they do offer the promise of great success, and within Pakistan and India are highly educated Muslims who just might join the cause. Arab Al Qaeda never enlisted first-rate – or even second-rate – scientific talent. Pakistan and India, with vastly better educational establishments than the Arab world, might just provide what modern holy warriors have so far lacked: the requisite skill to deploy weapons of mass destruction against the United States.
Pakistan, indeed, has become one of the great battlegrounds of the Muslim civil war. It's not an Arab-only endeavor. Pakistan and Iran, the most dynamic laboratory of Islamic political thought, and post-Saddam Hussein Iraq are the guides to a better (or worse) future for believers. They are trying to rework the way modernity and religion have, so far, unsuccessfully married. They are trying to work democracy effectively into the faith, and with it the promise of less easily traumatized mores.
Comments