U.S. Imposes Sanctions on Pakistanis

By The Media Line news agency

The United States is imposing sanctions on 13 Pakistani individuals and three private Pakistani companies for their involvement in the nuclear proliferation network of Pakistani scientist Abd Al-Qadir Khan, the U.S. State Department said.

The announcement comes in the wake of a multi-year government review of the information regarding the network.

"We believe these sanctions will help prevent future proliferation-related activities by these private entities, provide a warning to other would-be proliferators and demonstrate our ongoing commitment to using all available tools to address proliferation-related activities," the statement said.

A.Q. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, is a scientist and a metallurgical engineer, who confessed in 2004 to being involved in a vast network of military nuclear technology proliferation.

Khan's network extended to as far as Libya, Iran and North Korea.

He was pardoned by then Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, but remains under house arrest.

Khan publicly acknowledged his involvement in the network in 2004 but later retracted his statements.

According to the State Department, Khan led an extensive international network for proliferating nuclear equipment and know-how, providing a one-stop shop for countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

He provided Iran and Libya with centrifuge components, designs and in some cases entire centrifuges, which are used for enriching uranium, a key component in the nuclear process.

Libya announced it was abandoning its weapons for mass destruction program in 2003.

Iran is still under heavy international pressure, especially from the United States, to suspend its nuclear program, which many countries fear is being used to covertly manufacture a nuclear bomb.

"With the assistance of Khan's network, countries could leapfrog the slow, incremental stages of other nuclear-weapons-development programs," the State Department said.

It said Khan's network "irrevocably changed the proliferation landscape and has had lasting implications for international security."

Governments of Pakistan, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland and Malaysia have worked closely with the U.S. to investigate and shut down the network.

It is believed the network is no longer operating.

The United States and Pakistan have a tense relationship, the result of policies taken by U.S. President George W. Bush over the past five years, Ahmad Qureishi, a Pakistani broadcaster and columnist told The Media Line.

The general impression of Pakistan in the West is a country that supports terrorism and Al-Qa'ida, he said, but many forget that Pakistan has the right to have legitimate security interests that do not always meet the interests of the United States.

"I firmly believe this [tension] is the result of the last eight years," Qureishi said. "In the past five years we've seen disturbing developments in the areas in Pakistan that are closer to Afghanistan, which is a territory under American administration. Those areas have been transformed into inhospitable regions that are ungovernable, with militias and insurgencies - things that were non-existent just five years ago."

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