From the Washington Post
Report Cites China-Pakistan Missile Links
A new, draft U.S. government report states that all intelligence agencies believe with `high confidence' that Pakistan has obtained medium-range ballistic missiles made by China, and says for the first time that Pakistan probably has finished developing nuclear warheads for these missiles, U.S. officials said yesterday.
The classified report's unanimous reaffirmation of a long-standing intelligence conclusion that complete Chinese M-11 missiles are in Pakistan puts additional pressure on the Clinton administration to consider imposing tough economic sanctions against both nations, as required under a U.S. law aimed at punishing the global spread of such missiles, the officials said.
In the past, U.S. policymakers have repeatedly said that while components of the M-11 missiles may be in Pakistan, Washington lacks concrete evidence that the complete missiles are there. As a result, these policymakers have said, Washington need not invoke the law and cut off U.S. government contracts with China, halt licenses for U.S. exports to China or ban Chinese imports worth up to several billion dollars.
But with the imminent completion of the new report, which updates a U.S. intelligence assessment on the issue that was prepared in 1994, policymakers may have a tougher time fending off calls by many proliferation experts, intelligence analysts and certain lawmakers to acknowledge publicly that the M-11 missiles are in Pakistan.
Details of the draft report are emerging at a sensitive moment in U.S.-Chinese relations, as administration officials are conducting final negotiations with Beijing regarding possible sanctions against China for copying U.S. commercial goods. The administration is also defending a decision by President Clinton to renew the most-favored-nation trading status that allows Chinese goods to be imported with low U.S. tariffs.
The refusal of top policymakers to accept the intelligence community's judgment regarding the presence of the M-11 missiles, as well as its recent decision not to impose sanctions against China for selling nuclear weapons-related equipment to Pakistan, has rankled certain U.S. officials who favor a much tougher policy toward China. This dissatisfaction has helped fuel a series of leaks about Chinese wrongdoing over the years.
The first U.S. intelligence report regarding the M-11s was leaked in 1992. Last July, the Washington Post quoted Intelligence officials as saying that more than 30 of the missiles were stored in crates at Pakistan's Sargodha Air Force Base west of Lahore.
Several U.S. officials said yesterday that is where the entire intelligence community believes the missiles remain. But they added that a sharp dispute has broken out within the community over whether the missiles should nonetheless be described in the new report as `operational,' a term that would raise policy alarms in Washington and upset the Indian government.
Yesterday's Washington Times reported the existence of the new draft report and first described the dispute about its contents.
Representatives of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, in particular, have argued that because a unit of the Pakistani army has been assigned to operate the missiles and has been trained by Chinese experts, the missiles can probably be withdrawn from their crates and deployed in the field within a matter of days.
The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), alone among U.S. intelligence agencies, has argued to the contrary that not enough information is known about Pakistani training practices to reach this judgment. The missiles cannot be considered operational until they have actually been withdrawn from the crates and been used in such training--and act that has not yet occurred, the bureaus has argued.
`There is nothing new on this issue [of missile operations],' said one policymaker. That means `it is kind of a semantic question,' rather than an act reflecting a shift in Pakistani military strategy or security policy.
A similar dispute has broken out over the draft report's new conclusion that `it is probable' Pakistani weapons engineers have completed the arduous task of creating nuclear warheads compact enough to fit atop the missiles.
Several officials said this conclusion is derived from an estimate of how long Pakistan has been trying to complete this task and certain information about the sophistication of its weapons designs. But INR analysts have argued to the contrary that the effort cannot be considered successful until the warhead has been flight-tested--an act that again has not yet occurred.
Officials said the final wording of the report is to be decided by CIA Director John M. Deutch, after further drafting by the Weapons and Space Systems Intelligence Committee, a little-known panel that includes representatives of all U.S. intelligence agencies as well as officials from Australia, Canada and Britain, Australia and Canada have sided with INR in concluding the M-11s are not yet `operational' and that Pakistan might not yet have completed the requisite nuclear warheads.
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