How America Set Bhutto up for the Kill, Funded Her Enemies and Gave Pakistan the Bomb (Page 1 of 2)

Assuming first America is to blame is getting to be a safe bet.

The problem with blaming other countries is that we can't fix them. Try as we might, we bomb the wrong people, make devils' bargains, create new enemies and bring misery to friends.

Take Benazir Bhutto. Our government's hands could hardly be bloodier lest we had pulled the trigger, set off the bomb or trained her assassin.

I'm not a betting man, so when I blame America, it's only because your daily paper and the talking heads on TV won't, and because it's God's own truth, as I'll spend most of this column documenting: how Condoleezza Rice unwittingly set Bhutto up for the kill by convincing her to return to Pakistan last October; how American policy led to the creation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda — forces officially blamed for killing her; how America funneled those forces into Pakistan from Tora Bora and elsewhere, and worst of all, how our government allowed Pakistan to develop the long-dreaded "Islamic bomb" by turning a blind eye to the activities of A.Q. Kahn, beloved father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. In serving as midwife for those nukes, we raised the stakes so high in Pakistan that events there now imperil our world.

Don't take my word for it. Four new books chronicle the sad truth of how we enabled Pakistan to get the bomb. The Nuclear Jihadist by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins. Iran and the Bomb by Therese Delpech. America and the Islamic Bomb by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento. Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark.

All four tell more or less the same story when it comes to Pakistan, according to press reports, and the players are depressingly familiar. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Presidents Carter, Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes, a variety of spooks, politicos, business interests and the arch-villain of them all, A.Q. Kahn.

His activities made Pakistan a trader in nuclear merchandise across a broad Muslim crescent and as far beyond as North Korea.

"The man who knew too much," an article headlined in the Oct. 13, 2007, edition of The Guardian, chronicles how Rich Barlow, an expert on Pakistan's nuclear secrets, was thrown out of the CIA and disgraced when he blew the whistle on Pakistan's nukes.

So why would America allow Pakistan to gain nuclear weapons? Mostly for the same reasons we funneled money and arms to that country's government and extremist Muslim organizations in the 1970s and ’80s. It was part of the price tag for Pakistan's help in driving the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

The strategy?

First, lure the Soviets INTO Afghanistan, a then-Soviet ally. President Carter's national security adviser, Brzezinski, used to brag about how he set out "to give them their Vietnam" by luring the Soviets into invading Afghanistan by encouraging guerilla attacks on the country's infrastructure, back when this God-playing strategy still seemed like a good idea.

Next, support the Mujahideen and Arab Jihadists — forerunners of the Taliban and al-Qaeda respectively — as we enable these groups to fight the Soviets, often using Pakistan soil as a staging ground. To ensure Pakistan's cooperation, we turned a blind eye to its nuclear ambitions and offered arms and aid.

Much is made of this strategy in From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War a book written by Robert Gates before he became our secretary of defense.

You'll see precious little evidence of the blowback from this cynical ploy — which resulted in millions of casualties as war led to war — in the new Tom Hanks flick, Charlie Wilson's War, which carefully tiptoes around many of the character flaws and other inconvenient truths of history.

Rather, read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, if you want the big picture. No darling of the Left, Wright chronicles how Osama bin Laden, his ally Ayman al-Zawahiri, some Afghani ethnic groups and Jihadists from across the Muslim world used Pakistan in the war against the Soviets, with the approval of the Reagan/Bush administration.