Jan 28, 2004: Pakistan & Dangers of Nuclear JIHAD  
 
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Advisory Committee, Observer Research Foundation, Chennai Chapter. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com)

Pakistan is not the original birth place of the Islamic fundamentalist and jihadi organizations. Islamic fundamentalism and jihadi terrorism were born elsewhere in the Islamic Ummah and thereafter spread to Pakistan after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

2. But, Pakistan is the original birth place of the concept of the nuclear jihad, which highlighted the need for an Islamic atomic bomb and advocated the right and the religious obligation of the Muslims to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and use them, if necessary, to protect their religion. The jihadi terrorists and their ideologues in Pakistan perceived the nuclear weapon as the ultimate weapon of retribution against States which they viewed as enemies of Islam, particularly the USA and Israel.

3. It was, in fact, the late Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, a Western-influenced liberal and not a religious fundamentalist, who first projected Pakistan’s clandestine quest for an atomic bomb as the quest for an Islamic bomb to counter what he described as the Christian, Jewish and Hindu atomic bombs. He used this depiction in order to convince other Islamic States such as Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iran to fund Pakistan’s clandestine military nuclear programme.

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Pakistan & Dangers of Nuclear JIHAD
http://www.saag.org/papers10/paper904.html
by B.Raman