Experts box it out on the Indo-US N-deal

Roundtable on ‘Imperatives of Strategic Stability in South Asia: Challenges and Prospects’ held in Islamabad.

The US nuclear deal with India does not auger well for deterrence stability in South Asia, as it has enabled India to fast-track its fissile stockpiles that will enable it to spare more fissile material for its nuclear weapons programme.

This was the dominant perspective at a roundtable on ‘Imperatives of Strategic Stability in South Asia: Challenges and Prospects’ organised by the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS), Islamabad on Tuesday, said a press release issued by the IRS.

Guest speaker Toby Dalton, Deputy Director of the Nuclear Policy Programme at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, expressed concern over the future of strategic stability in South Asia and strongly felt that “strategic stability was weakening.”

“Conventional wisdom on South Asian stability among American analysts is that the region’s stability has been weakening since Pakistan and India went nuclear in 1998,” he said in his opening remarks, adding that “Pakistani officials plan against worst-case assumptions about Indian intentions and capabilities.”

The discussion that followed strongly challenged the American perception and “discriminatory policy” over nuclear stability in the region.

Adil Sultan called the Indo-US nuclear deal a disaster.

He said that the “Pakistan specific” Fissile Material Control Treaty (FMCT) was meant to restrain only Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities.

Professor Nazir Hussain was of the view that the resolution of the Kashmir issue would solve half the problem. He said that on the one hand, the US was defending the Indo-US nuclear deal and on the other, it was blaming Pakistan on nuclear issues, which was a blatant contradiction of American policies towards South Asia.

Asif Ezdi, former ambassador to Germany, suggested that the US offer Pakistan a nuclear energy deal similar to the Indo-US deal. In his opinion, the US had meted out a discriminatory attitude to Pakistan by indirectly legitimizing India’s nuclear programme in the form of the civil-nuclear deal.

Dr Shaheen Akhtar was of the view that America’s strategic backing to India would create further strategic imbalance in South Asia.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 2^nd, 2011.