US aid to Pakistan tapered off when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. Dejected and impoverished, in 1987 Pakistan’s ruling military responded by selling its nuclear hardware and know-how for cash, something that would have been obvious to all if the intelligence had been properly analysed. “But the George HW Bush administration was not looking at Pakistan,” Barlow says. “It had new crises to deal with in the Persian Gulf where Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait.”
Context: a rather sad story about Rich Barlow, a CIA agent who was fired for complaining too loudly that selling Pakistan nuclear secrets in the 80s and 90s was a bad idea. I have little to say on the rest of the story, at least in this space—it is that year that concerns me. I thought the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989? And that as of 1987 Pakistan was being flooded with almost a billion U.S. dollars each year in weapons and currency?
So how, then, was Pakistan so impoverished and desperate in 1987 that it had to resort to selling nuclear materials? I think I’m missing something there.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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