White House set to clash with Congress as concerns mount about Osama bin Laden's presence in Pakistan and its nuclear stockpile
The Obama administration is facing a clash with Congress where pressure is building to slash the huge aid budget to Pakistan as punishment for Osama bin Laden's presence in the country.
Members of Congress are lining up to question continued spending on Pakistan, the third highest recipient of US aid and threatening retaliation. Barack Obama and US officials have said the fact that Bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, home to Pakistan's main military academy and many retired officers 40 miles north of the capital, Islamabad, suggests he had benefited from an extensive support network, possibly involving Pakistani officials.
The US administration is, however, urging Congress not to make snap judgments. It is stressing the overriding need for Islamabad's continued co-operation in the war in Afghanistan and for a crackdown on militants in Pakistan.
The discovery that Bin Laden was living in a largely military town has raised concerns about the security of the country's fast-growing nuclear stockpile, and the possibility that a terrorist group could steal the components for a bomb.
"There is no doubt Congress will cut aid," said Michael Krepon, a specialist on South Asia at the Stimson Centre think tank in Washington, who gave evidence on Pakistan last week to the Senate foreign relations committee. "It is hard to see Congress just waving away the presence of Bin Laden in Abbottabad," he said.
Members of Congress will not be appeased by remarks by Pakistan's prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, who on Monday said any future US operation within its borders similar to the unilateral strike against Bin Laden would be met with full force by the Pakistan military.
The US has allocated $1.5bn (£900m) in aid for Pakistan this year and again next year. Only Israel and Afghanistan receive more. Even before the Bin Laden row, resentment had been growing in Congress over the mismanagement of funds. The US government accountability office, in a report this year, found only $179.5m of $1.5bn allocated for this year has been disbursed.
The tension between the US and Pakistan over the CIA operative Raymond Davis this year also angered members of Congress, as did a report revealing an expansion in Pakistan's nuclear programme.
John Kerry, the Democratic chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, and Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the committee, caution against hasty judgments on Pakistan. But both are the authors of a bill originally authorising aid to Pakistan.
They are easily outnumbered by members of Congress looking for cuts or at least concessions from Pakistan in return for continued aid. Some are demanding immediate suspension. Ted Poe, a Republican Congressman, introduced a bill last week "to prohibit any foreign aid from being sent to Pakistan until it can demonstrate that it had no knowledge of Osama Bin Laden's whereabouts".
Poe, who is a member of the House foreign affairs committee, said: "Pakistan has a lot of explaining to do ... Unless the state department can certify to Congress that Pakistan was not harbouring America's number one enemy, Pakistan should not receive one more cent of American aid."
A Republican senator, James Risch, who sits on the Senate foreign relations committee, told a hearing on Pakistan last week: "I have to tell you that my feeling is the American people, they're not stupid, and they aren't too red hot about doling out money to people who, number one, don't want it and aren't particularly appreciative of it ... in the future there is going to be massive cuts in federal spending. And I suspect this is one area that's going to get looked at pretty closely."
Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat, at the same hearing, said: "What does Pakistan's inability, just taking it at face value, to detect Osama bin Laden within Pakistan say about the security of its nuclear arsenal? It's one of the fastest-growing nuclear arsenals in the world."
The administration, sensing Pakistan's vulnerability and embarrassment over the issue, is hoping that it can use the row to push Pakistan into capturing other senior al-Qaida figures, such as its deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, who many members of Congress claim is in Pakistan, or the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, or to crackdown on lesser known militant groups. It may also seek concessions elsewhere, such as promises of increased safeguards or monitoring in relation to its nuclear stockpile.
Olli Heinonen, the UN's chief nuclear inspector until last year, said he believed Pakistan could have the world's fourth biggest nuclear arsenal by the end of the decade, as a result of a programme of rapid expansion involving the construction of four military reactors and two reprocessing plants for producing weapons-grade plutonium.
"It is really important that the security system is not compromised. The investigation has to be wide enough, not just into why Bin Laden happened to be in this particular town. The whole security regime has to be reviewed to ensure that the nuclear assets are secure," said Heinonen.
Until now, the US has publicly accepted Pakistani assurances that its nuclear warheads – of which there are now thought to be about 100 – are under tight military control, but Heinonen said there were greater concerns about the security of the nuclear reactors and reprocessing plants, where the plutonium is made. "It is easier to steal from these bulk-handling facilities, and the question is: are they really as well-secured as the warheads? There is no international monitoring whatsoever at these places."
David Albright the head of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) in Washington said: "He was right in the heart of Pakistan and active, which raises the question that Bin Laden was more active than we thought, and that he may have been trying to infiltrate the nuclear programme by recruiting an insider. I'm sure [US officials] are looking frantically for that."
Bin Laden had declared the acquisition of a nuclear bomb a "religious duty", and his top lieutenant in Afghanistan, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, said two years ago that the group hoped to seize and use weapons from Pakistan's arsenal.
"There are thousands of people involved in the production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium," said Albright, adding that Pakistan's expansion programme would inevitably put strains on security. "If you have to hire a lot of people at once time, it's harder to do the security checks and harder to monitor them."
Earlier this year, ISIS published a satellite photograph that it said showed a reactor under construction at the Kushab nuclear complex in Punjab province. If confirmed, it would be the fourth heavy water reactor to be built at the site, where work appears to be accelerating. Pakistan has one reprocessing plant for separating plutonium from spent nuclear fuel near Islamabad, and is thought to be building another at Chashma, near to two new civilian reactors it is building with Chinese help.
"When more plants are producing and reprocessing more fissile material and there is more of it moving around, there is more chanced of it being seized," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a former state department official now a proliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.