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Pakistan feels let down by US spy satellites

Tara Shankar Sahay in New Delhi

The political leadership in Pakistan feels let down by the US failure to give advance information about India's nuclear tests.

American spy satellites had reported business as normal in Pokhran, only to be blindsided by the three nuclear tests on Monday and two more on Wednesday.

No less than Bill Richardson, US ambassador to the United Nations and President Clinton's special envoy to South Asia, recently acknowledged that the US viewed Pakistan as its "strategic ally".

Since this entailed the sharing of vital information -- especially those relating to the sub-continent -- between Islamabad and Washington, Pakistan now feels badly let down by the failure of the spy satellites to provide advance information about the nuclear tests carried out in India.

This failure has resulted in red faces among technical intelligence specialists in Washington.

With internal pressure mounting on the Pakistan leadership to conduct its own tests, Islamabad has reportedly told Washington that the latter's intelligence lapse has proved very costly to Pakistan.

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharief now has a tricky job to do, in assuaging the country's military leadership which is rooting for immediate nuclear testing, even at the cost of facing America's ire. Already, former Pakistan foreign secretary Tanveer Ahmed Khan has said that as soon as Islamabad conducted a nuclear test, "We should be ready and prepared to see the United States coming down on us like a ton of bricks."

Meanwhile, Union HRD Minister (with additional charge of science and technology) Dr Murli Manohar Joshi's statement that India would put a nuclear warhead on its missiles the instant Pakistan conducted a nuclear test is being viewed as an expression of the Vajpayee government's unrelenting stand on the security scenario in the region.

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