WASHINGTON: Political turmoil in Pakistan has not seriously threatened the military’s control of its nuclear weapons “but vulnerabilities exist”, US intelligence said in a report on Tuesday.
“We judge the ongoing political uncertainty in Pakistan has not seriously threatened the military’s control of the nuclear arsenal, but vulnerabilities exist,” the US intelligence community said in its annual threat assessment.
Noting that the Pakistan Army was responsible for the country’s nuclear programs, the report said, “we judge that the Army’s management of nuclear policy issues – to include physical security – has not been degraded by Pakistan’s political crisis.”
US intelligence chief Mike McConnell told a Senate hearing that al-Qaeda, increasingly shut down in Iraq, is establishing cells in other countries as Osama bin Laden’s organisation uses a “safe haven” in Pakistan’s tribal region to train for attacks in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa and the United States.
“Al-Qaeda remains the pre-eminent threat against the United States,” McConnell said. He said that fewer than 100 al-Qaeda terrorists had moved from Iraq to establish cells in other countries as the US military clamped down on their activities, and “they may deploy resources to mount attacks outside the country”.
The al-Qaeda network in Iraq and in Pakistan and Afghanistan has suffered setbacks, but he said the group posed a persistent and growing danger. He said that al-Qaeda maintained a “safe haven” in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it was able to stage attacks supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani tribal areas provide al-Qaeda “many of the advantages it once derived from its base across the border in Afghanistan, albeit on a smaller and less secure scale”, allowing militants to train for strikes in Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa and the United States, McConnell said.
Terrorists use the “sanctuary” of Pakistan’s border area to “maintain a cadre of skilled lieutenants capable of directing the organisation’s operations around the world”, McConnell told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The next attack on the United States will most likely be launched by al-Qaeda operating in “under-governed regions” of Pakistan, Adm Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned to tell Congress on Wednesday.
“Continued congressional support for the legitimate government of Pakistan braces this bulwark in the long war against violent extremism,” Mullen states in remarks prepared for a separate budget hearing and obtained by The Associated Press.
Still, McConnell praised Pakistan’s cooperation in the fight against extremists, saying that hundreds of Pakistanis have died while fighting terrorists. He said Islamabad had done more to “neutralise” terrorists than any other partner of the United States.
Despite the Pakistani cooperation, Lt-Gen Michael Maples, director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, said the Pakistani military had been unable to disrupt or damage al-Qaeda terrorists operating in the tribal border region. And the US military is prohibited by Pakistan from pursuing Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters that cross the border to conduct attacks inside Afghanistan.
McConnell also told the Intelligence Committee that the Taliban, once thought to be routed from Afghanistan, had expanded its operations into previously peaceful areas of the west and around the capital of Kabul, despite the death or capture of three top commanders in the last year.
At the same hearing, CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly confirmed for the first time the names of three suspected al-Qaeda terrorists who were subjected to a particularly harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, and why.
“We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time,” Hayden said. “There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaeda and its workings. Those two realities have changed.”
Hayden said that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the purported mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, and Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were subject to the harsh interrogations in 2002 and 2003.
Waterboarding is an interrogation technique that critics call torture. Waterboarding induces a feeling of imminent drowning with the restrained subject’s mouth covered and water poured over his face.
“Waterboarding taken to its extreme, could be death, you could drown someone,” McConnell acknowledged. He said waterboarding remains a technique in the CIA’s arsenal, but it would require the consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general.
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