Daily Times

“War becomes perpetual when it is used as a rationale for peace” — Norman Solomon.

The recent $ 52.6 billion ‘Black Budget’ for the fiscal year 2013 has been obtained by The Washington Post from the former intelligence fugitive, Edward Snowden, who had leaked classified secrets about US surveillance efforts. The 178-page summary on the Black Budget explains precisely how the US uses its funds or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress. The National Intelligence Programme details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the US intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.

It seems very obvious that despite the massive budget, manpower, technological expertise and all their technology, the intelligence agencies did (do?) an extremely poor job monitoring their own. However, the recent leaks exposed that it was no targeted surveillance but absolute surveillance of citizens at the urging of the US security agency. For instance, we can take the example of the Echelon system that was built for the interception of private and commercial communications.

It was created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s. Of course, it is all in the name of profits, profits for military equipment, profits for security companies and profits for natural resource companies.

While US intelligence agencies spend billions monitoring enemies like al Qaeda and Iran, they pay just as much attention to the ‘ally’ Pakistan. The war on terror is shown to be a complete hoax. It was based on a MIH-type (make it happen) inside job. Rather, it was claimed to be the response on terrorism, especially the 9/11 incidents.

The US has intensified surveillance of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, is concerned about biological and chemical arms sites there, and tries to evaluate the loyalty of Pakistani counterterrorism agents recruited by the CIA, The Washington Post reported recently.

Pakistan does not manufacture or use chemical and biological weapons, but it still needs a contingency plan to counter attacks by such weapons on its soil. The country has signed and ratified the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), and is a member in good standing of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Simultaneously, Pakistan has insisted that the trade of chemicals for peaceful uses should not be overly hindered by any treaty. As a confidence-building measure, Pakistan and India signed a Joint Declaration on the Complete Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in 1992, undertaking not to develop, produce, acquire or use chemical weapons, and both countries signed the CWC in 1993. However, upon the ratification of the CWC in June 1997, India declared that it had conducted “testing and development of chemical weapons” for defensive purposes and that CWC-prohibited chemicals existed in certain military facilities.

Dr Yamin on October 19, 2012 while addressing a conference discussed that in modern history, gas attacks had been used by the Germans against the Allied Forces while the US had used 20 million gallons of herbicides in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam in 1961. The effects of the US attacks were so drastic and prolonged that recently the US had to commit $ 43 million for environmental remediation in Vietnam.

Also US biodefence programmes have raised concerns that the US may be pursuing research that is outlawed by the BWC. According to a compliance report published by the Russian government in August 2010, the US is undertaking research on smallpox, which is prohibited by the World Health Organisation. The US is also accused of undertaking BW research in order to improve defences against bio-terror attacks, which are “especially questionable from the standpoint of Article I of the BTWC.”

The Guardian on Tuesday, October 29, 2002, revealed that the US was developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.

The Russian report also alleges that the US has legislation that could inhibit inspections and investigations of US chemical facilities. Russia has also accused the US of not fully reporting chemical agents removed from Iraq between 2003 and 2008 to the US for testing and subsequent destruction.

Not surprisingly, the apparent Syria chemical weapons attack is blamed on Bashar al-Assad, but where is the evidence? This entire episode can be viewed as a possible preparation for an attack on Syria, the same as they did in Iraq 2003 in which the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission found no evidence of any WMD, but could not verify the accuracy of Iraq’s declarations regarding what weapons it possessed, killing millions.

Other assertion can be that this publication of the news of Edward Snowden’s leaks regarding the Black Budget summary can be an intention to mellow down the situation of Syria in international and national media as it added flames to the old situation like the Iran-Iraq war, the 9/11 attack and the invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003.

Hence as above discussed, US surveillance capabilities against Pakistan’s nuclear weapons depict a treatment full of doubt and mistrust is given by the US to his frontline ally in the WoT. Although many strategists in the US proclaim that Pakistan’s nuclear assets are in safe hands under the supervision of a robust command authority, the question then is what the concerns of the US regarding Pakistan’s nukes are, as Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence capability is aimed at maintaining regional stability in South Asia.

The writer is a student of Defence and Strategic Studies and currently working as an independent researcher