Critical Triangle continues .......

It was in this menacing environment that Pakistan confirmed it had a nuclear bomb. A Q Khan the self-proclaimed father of the
Pakistani bomb claimed in an interview with Indian Journalist Kuldip Nayar “we have done it.” While this did not immediately
disrupt US aid it certainly made it tougher. Congress, for example, allowed the six year nuclear waiver granted to Pakistan to expire and waited a few months till December 1987 to issue a fresh waiver, this time for only two and half years.

This was based on tenuous language used by Reagan claiming that the waiver had to be based on “statutory standard legislated by congress” on whether it “possesses a nuclear explosive device, not whether Pakistan is attempting to develop or has developed various relevant capacities.”

Ominously however, for Pakistan, the announcement of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan once again meant that the temporary confluence of interests that had arisen was about to diverge again.

The main US concern was to hold and then roll back the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and they were not invested in the subsequent political settlement there. Pakistan, on the other hand, felt that the risks and costs it had borne in the eight years of the war had entitled it to run the show in Kabul and install a government that was friendly to it.

Conventional wisdom held that the Najibullah government would collapse quickly and that a mujahideen government would take over rapidly. However, Pakistani establishment were not convinced. The main reason for this was that as per the terms of the Geneva Accords, the USSR was allowed to continue supplying arms to the Kabul government, but had made it mandatory for the Pakistanis to stop aid to their proxies within 30 days of the Soviet withdrawal. The US acting as guarantor had the added responsibility to stop its aid to the mujahideen as well.

To be continued....