Pakistan: Nuclear Security and the U.S. Strategy for Southwest Asia
May 13, 2009 by SAF Desk
Analysis
As the Pakistani Taliban spread their insurgency beyond the northwestern Pashtun areas and into the country’s core — the government is trying to contain them in an area some 100 miles from Islamabad — concerns are being raised about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. These concerns are not unfounded. Although security forces are beginning to wage a more concerted campaign against the insurgents, the Pakistani state continues to be weakened by mounting political, economic and security issues. Indeed, it is unclear to what extent the government can effectively counter the Taliban’s advance.
But the idea of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal falling into jihadist hands is of such security significance worldwide that it is important to understand the true nature of the threat and put it into context. While the concerns are not unfounded, neither are they presumptive in the context of the Taliban offensive. There are significant differences between Pakistan’s northwestern periphery and its core that limit the Taliban’s ability to make territorial gains beyond the Pashtun areas and in the core provinces of Punjab and Sindh. Moreover, the guarantor of state security and stability in Pakistan is the army, and as long as it holds together as an institution, the Pakistani state, despite its many problems, is unlikely to collapse or become the stage for a nuclear launch. Six of the nine corps that make up the Pakistani army are permanently based in Punjab, compared to one corps for all of the North-West Frontier Province and the tribal areas.
It is also in Punjab where the country’s nuclear arsenal is reportedly located. And despite the deteriorating security situation in Pakistan, the country’s powerful military establishment has managed to isolate its nuclear arsenal from its jihadist problem. While Pakistan’s primary means of containing India were many of these very jihadist actors, who originally were employed by the government’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate (and many of whom have now gone rogue), Islamabad has long known that its nuclear weapons were the ultimate deterrent against a conventional war with its far more powerful regional rival. Thus, since the early days of the Pakistani nuclear program, the army has treated the nuclear assets as its most prized possession and has invested a great deal to protect it from both internal and external threats.
Pakistan is believed to have acquired nuclear capability sometime during the 1980s, but it was only in 1998 that it became a declared nuclear-weapons state. This was when it tested six devices in response to Indian tests — the only full-scale tests that Pakistan is known to have ever conducted. In the aftermath of the 1998 tests, Islamabad embarked on a path to develop a serious command-and-control infrastructure for its nuclear assets. However, it was not until after military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf (now retired) became president that the country engaged in a major initiative to develop a multilayered institutional mechanism for the maintenance, control and possible use of the weapons. The fact that Musharraf was a military ruler greatly helped the army, which had long enjoyed de facto control over the nuclear program, to create a strong and strategic command-and-control infrastructure to manage the nuclear assets.
This multilayered infrastructure is based on the advanced C4-I2-SR (command, control, communication, computers, intelligence, information, surveillance and reconnaissance) protocol, which was put in place in early 2000. The system is composed of three main organizations and multiple subgroups. At the apex is the 13-member National Command Authority (NCA), the chief decision-making body responsible for policy, procurement, planning and use of nuclear weapons. It includes the president, prime minister, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff committee (CJCSC), the chiefs of the army, air force and navy and the ministers of foreign affairs, defense, interior and finance. The NCA is further subdivided into two main committees: the Employment Control Committee, which is responsible for strategic and political issues, and the Development Control Committee, which is responsible for tactical and operational issues.
The Strategic Plans Division (SPD), headed by a three-star general, forms the second layer under the NCA. It is the nerve center of the NCA and is responsible for day-to-day operations of the country’s strategic weapons systems. Under the guidance of the NCA, the SPD is responsible for developing policy, providing security for the arsenal and overseeing the entire nuclear establishment.
The third and final layer of this hierarchy consists of the Strategic Forces Commands (SFC), with a separate command for each service (army, air force and navy). Each of the three services is responsible for the training, technical control and administration of its respective strategic force. Operational control of all three, however, remains in the hands of the NCA.
The protocol for launching weapons reportedly follows a “two-man rule†in which two officers are required to access and authenticate launch codes, and both would have to concur on the authenticity of an order and the release of a weapon. Additionally, under normal circumstances, warheads remain “de-mated†from missiles; components are to be dispersed and incorporated only with the consent of the NCA. (This would likely be done in a time of heightened tensions.) Islamabad also has reportedly developed its own version of “permissive action links,†which is a sophisticated type of locking mechanism that the United States developed to prevent the unauthorized launching of a nuclear weapon.
These and other advanced security features mean that theft is not simply a matter of a jihadist group gaining access to a nuclear facility. Attempts to arm a warhead improperly or without the proper codes — or even to improperly access the core of the warhead known as the “physics package†— can trigger other safety features that permanently lock or disable the weapon. We do not know how advanced Pakistan’s security features are on its nuclear weapons, but they almost certainly exist to some degree.
In a third-world state like Pakistan, where political instability has been hardwired into the political system, such an institutional command-and-control infrastructure plays a critical role in centralizing and ensuring the management of the country’s nuclear weapons. It works particularly well when the state mainly has to worry about external threats. But in Pakistan’s case, its main threat is internal and from Islamist nonstate actors with whom its premier intelligence service, the ISI, has had a long and murky relationship. Indeed, Pakistan is a unique state, one that is armed with nuclear weapons and also the global hub of jihadists. This is why the threat is not from the Taliban taking control of nuclear weapons. Instead, it has to do with the security of the nuclear arsenal being compromised by jihadist penetration of the state security apparatus, especially at the lower operational level.
The SPD’s response to this has been the creation of a dedicated 10,000-personnel security force to guard nuclear facilities. This security group, led by a two-star general, has its own intelligence unit but coordinates with all three national intelligence agencies in identifying and dealing with threats to the nuclear establishment. While the ISI chief is not a full member of the NCA, the directorate works in conjunction with the SPD’s security division.
Considering how jihadists have been able to target so many sensitive military installations over the past two years, this is a valid concern. High-profile suicide attacks on sensitive military and intelligence facilities, the assassination of a general and an attack on the country’s main weapons production facility did not happen without a significant degree of inside help. Therefore, the most pressing question on the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is the efficacy of the systems it has put in place to prevent penetration of the facilities by covert enablers who are sympathetic to Islamist militant groups, not by the militant groups themselves.
The view within the U.S. intelligence community is that there is simply no sound way to independently assess the workings of the systems with any great certainty. Obviously, for reasons of national security and sovereignty, the Pakistanis will try to keep the system as opaque as possible. This means Washington has to rely on what it is hearing from Islamabad about control over its nuclear facilities, and on unilaterally obtaining information from third-party intelligence sources and intelligence-sharing with other countries, such as India.
Given the history of security concerns in Pakistan and the problematic relationship between the Bush administration and the Musharraf regime in the context of the jihadist war, Washington has a significant trust issue with Islamabad. The issue is not that Islamabad is providing false assurances; rather, it has to do with the fluidity of the situation in a country in which the government itself cannot be completely certain that all its moving parts are in synch. Even if the reality is that Pakistan’s nuclear facilities are secure from any intrusion by a nonstate actor, one cannot be sure that this is the case.
Hence the Bush administration’s move in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to get the Musharraf government to agree to allow U.S. military and scientific personnel access to Pakistan’s facilities. At the time, Pakistan was in a state of heightened tensions with India over an attack by Pakistan-based Islamist militants on the Indian parliament that had brought the two countries to the nuclear brink. Washington agreed to intervene on behalf of Pakistan and cool down matters in exchange for access to the nuclear sites, which was a way of making sure that al Qaeda and its local allies were not in a position to acquire a device through their contacts in the Pakistani nuclear establishment.
The United States works very closely with India on the issue of Pakistan’s nuclear security. New Delhi is a key source of intelligence on the status of that security, and a good — albeit imperfect — measure of valid concern is the degree to which India is worried about it, since it stands the greatest risk of being targeted by Pakistan-based nukes. And although India continues to underscore the threat it faces from Pakistan-based militants, it remains comfortable with Pakistan’s nuclear command-and-control infrastructure. This would explain to a considerable degree the current U.S. comfort level. In the past week, following media coverage of Pakistan’s nuclear security, several senior U.S. officials — Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus — all said Islamabad’s nuclear sites were secure.
The public discourse over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is part of an issue much wider than simply the country’s nuclear security or the Taliban threat to Islamabad. The Obama administration is in the process of downgrading expectations about the war in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater. There is a growing realization within the White House that the counterinsurgency successes in Iraq are unlikely to be replicated in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Therefore, the emerging objective in southwest Asia is not to defeat the Taliban, but to neutralize al Qaeda prime and help Pakistan ensure that its nuclear sites remain secure. The Obama administration’s strategy to deal with the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is to be able to demonstrate success on these two fronts, which are the most immediate of concerns regarding U.S. national security.
Courtsey-stratfor.com
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