(Jerusalem Post) Hirsh Goodman - Hafiz Saeed, the leader of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and accused of planning the 2008 attacks on Mumbai, on Wednesday taunted the U.S. at a news conference in Rawalpindi, near Pakistan's military headquarters, a day after Washington offered $10 million for information leading to his capture. The Saeed press conference could not have been held unless the Pakistani security services wanted it to. The American killing last year of Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil where he had been hiding for several years was as open a signal as one could wish for that military trust has broken down between the Pakistanis and the Americans. What I hear are alarm bells; a wake-up call. It is time for the world to start being worried about Pakistan as well. According to the 2010 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Pakistanis have between 70 and 90 nuclear weapons; others have claimed 250, a figure reported in the Washington Post in 2011. They have 10,000-20,000 highly advanced centrifuges producing bomb-grade material in Kahuta and missiles with a range of 2,500 km. Imagine a world with multiple fundamentalist Islamic nuclear powers, with Pakistan and Iran at its head. The writer is a senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.
2012-04-10 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive