How the U.S. Rescued Pakistan From India And Israel
Damn! This is news to me.
London, Oct. 27: India and Israel had secretly planned to strike at Pakistan’s nuclear facility in Kahuta, outside Islamabad, in 1983-84, but backed off when the CIA in 1984 tipped off then Pakistan President Gen. Zia-ul Haq, according to details revealed by investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark in their new book, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Weapons Conspiracy.
“The talk was that Washington had betrayed India’s secret plans to strike at Pakistan’s nuclear project. But what made India’s joint intelligence committee livid was that it had been sitting on the plan to strike KRL (Khan Research Laboratories) for a year,” the book states.
The authors have also given details of India’s secret intelligence links with Israel at the time when officially the two countries did not have any diplomatic contacts. “In February 1983, with the strike plan at an advanced stage, Indian military officials had travelled secretly to Israel, which had a common interest in eliminating (A.Q.) Khan, to buy electronic warfare equipment to neutralise Kahuta’s air defences,” Levy and Scott-Clark have written.
New Delhi put its plans on hold after Raja Ramanna, then director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, was warned by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission’s Munir Ahmed Khan in Vienna in the autumn of 1983 that Islamabad would hit Trombay if its facilities in Kahuta were attacked. At this juncture, the authors say, Israel suggested that they would carry out the raid on Kahuta using the Indian Air Force base at Jamnagar in Gujarat to launch its jets and another IAF base in northern India to refuel. “In March 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi signed off (on) the Israeli-led operation, bringing India, Pakistan and Israel to within a hair’s breadth of a nuclear conflagration.”
However, India and Israel backed off from the plan after the CIA tipped off Gen. Zia and the US state department warned India that “the US will be responsive if India persists.” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi then aborted the operation despite protests from military planners in New Delhi and Jerusalem, the book adds. The authors quote Gen. K.M. Arif, who was deputy chief of the Pakistan Army under Gen. Zia, as saying: “Our friends had let us know what the Israelis and Indians intended to do, and so we let them know how we would respond. Both sides were harrying the other and were absolutely aware of the consequences of every move. In the end, it was India that blinked.”
n KASHMIR: After Gen. Zia died in a plane crash in August 1988, Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who had taken over as chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence in March 1987, began talking about replicating the Afghan-style insurgency in Kashmir by sending trained terrorists to the State, which was at the heart of the Indo-Pak. “We wanted to mirror the mujahideen’s successes in Afghanistan by sending them into Indian-administered Kashmir to manipulate the Kashmiri people’s anger at India’s refusal to grant them autonomy. We would train the freedom fighters. We would arm them,” Gen. Gul is quoted in the book as saying.
Gen. Gul’s agenda was taken forward by Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who as an artillery officer in 1987 had led a specialist snow warfare commando force to try and reclaim the Siachen glacier from Indian control, but had failed.
Source: Deccan Chronicle (October 28, 2007)
I’m stunned, actually. The fact that India would ally itself with the insane Israelis and perform an act of war on a neighbouring country shows that Indira Gandhi was nuts. But atleast we had a spine, unlike now where the moderates have completely taken over. Their response to every international issue is to sit on it.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:09 am
That isn’t having a spine, that’s foaming at the mouth lunacy. Idiots. And with Israel?! What were they thinking?
October 29th, 2007 at 8:01 am
Interesting, I must say !
October 29th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Oh!
October 29th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
Dude, that strike on their nuke facility would have been bloody good for this world. A.Q.Khan is an asshole, because of him Iran and NK got their nukes. And probably the other authoritarian countries too.
Man I hate the U.S. even more, now.
October 29th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
We have nuclear weapons. So long as we do, we cannot call for someone else to disarm.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Vinny, the U.S. are a bunch of bastards. However we remain relatively safe as long as we don’t have any ties with them. But if we do we open ourselves to attack from all sides.
George, if we didn’t have nukes, they’d ignore us.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
I wish they would indulge more in such machiavellian acts. I’m tired of Indians being passive.
October 30th, 2007 at 1:17 am
i doubt it would have been wise to blow up the nuclear facility especially with the US supporting them.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
What do you think nuclear disarmament would result in? I’m curious.
Also, I wish the NAM actually had the balls to stick together.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Less risk of a holocaust.
NAM is just a bunch of sissies that carry no weight trying to band together against bullies.
October 31st, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Very good. Then let’s get rid of the bombs.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:33 pm
As if it were up to us.
October 31st, 2007 at 9:50 pm
george will petition his neighbourhood and start a residential association.
October 31st, 2007 at 10:17 pm
ROFL. Good one.
November 1st, 2007 at 6:46 am
Marc,
I knew about this long back. However, not that the US leaked it out, but that Indira Gandhi did not have the spine to go through with it. The missed opportunity in history will remain one of its imponderables, but I think India was well within its rights to have launched a pre-emptive strike on the facility. Whatever lunacy you are thinking of happened after that, with a spineless capitulation to all manner of terrorism. Remember the hijacked plane to Kandahar, much later?
I think you were born by that time, weren’t you?
November 1st, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Well, most of us weren’t around when this incident happened. Did everybody know about it then? Was it in the papers?
I don’t think India could have launched an attack and not be ostracised by the international community. Pakistan would have called it an act of war and retaliated. But perhaps the attack should have gone ahead as planned so as to not give nuclear weapons to a country that was and is ruled by a dictator.
November 1st, 2007 at 5:27 pm
It’s not up to you because you don’t do anything.
November 1st, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Don’t start again. This is India. A place where this happens: link
November 1st, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Raja Deepak.. please do something
November 1st, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Get him to read my blog. It’ll be awesome. I’ll send him a scrap in Orkut.
November 8th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Who is Raja Deepak?
November 8th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
Shame on you! You don’t know Raja Deepak!
November 8th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
How am I supposed to know who he is? He’s an engineering student! There are millions of you all over!
November 8th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
But it’s Raja Deepak. He is the master of paramelody!
November 9th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
That’s not reason enough for me to have to know him.
November 9th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
Is too! See here.