Kapil Komireddi: Take Pakistan's Nukes, Please

For more than six decades, Pakistan has been at war with itself, torn between competing ideas of what it means to be Pakistani. In Pakistan's volatile trundle through history, the events that have unfolded so far this year -- the assassination of Governor Salman Taseer for expressing moderate views, the instant deification of his killer by a substantial cross-section of the country's "civil society," the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan's most conspicuously military town -- may have resolved that conflict. The attack on Sunday, May 22, by Taliban fighters on the Mehran naval air base in Karachi -- its audacity, the foreknowledge it implied, the militaristic precision with which it was executed -- carried a message: Pakistan is no longer a contested territory; it is now emphatically their turf. The reins of official power may not be in their hands yet, but the men with whom they rest dare not challenge the extremists' conception of Pakistan. The battle for hearts and minds is over. Moderate Pakistan, if such a thing ever existed, is dead.

The Taliban insists that the attack on Mehran was payback for bin Laden's "martyrdom." This means that it took them less than three weeks to select their target, identify its assets -- the Orion P-3C aircraft -- and map out its most vulnerable points of entry. The attacks occurred on a day when U.S. personnel, more valuable than the aircraft, were on-site. It is inconceivable that this attack could have materialized without insider support. It was always known that a substantial number of Pakistan's armed forces -- 30 percent, by some estimates -- sympathized with the objectives of the forces they were fighting. The Pakistan Army will present Sunday's clash as proof of its valor in an attempt to assuage Pakistanis outraged by its incompetence. But the world must now acknowledge the fact that Pakistan's military is so deeply riven, its loyalties so thoroughly fractured, that it is incapable not only of defending Pakistan but is also dangerously unfit to be the custodian of its nuclear arsenal. It is time for Washington, Pakistan's principal paymaster in the West, to pursue the option of comprehensively denuclearizing Pakistan.

It is often said that Pakistan's decision to build the bomb was motivated by India's explosion of its own device in 1974. But in reality Pakistan's nuclear program was in response to the loss of East Pakistan in 1971. Founded as a safe haven for India's Muslims, Pakistan ended up perpetrating, over nine bloodcurdling months in 1971, the single biggest genocide of Muslims since the birth of Islam, slaughtering 3 million Bengalis, displacing 30 million, and turning half a million women into sex slaves. Pakistan has never offered an official apology, but at the peak of their inhumanity Pakistan's leaders persisted in presenting their country as a victim. As Ramachandra Guha documents in India After Gandhi, they described India's acceptance of 10 million refugees and its subsequent intervention as an "Indo-Zionist plot against Islamic Pakistan." One influential newspaper in Pakistan assured its readers that Pakistan would re-emerge with "renewed determination to unfurl the banner of Islam over the Kafir land of India." At the United Nations in New York, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a feudal megalomaniac often unfairly accused of harboring democratic instincts, put on a spectacle, tearing up documents and pledging to "fight for 1,000 years as we have fought for 1,000 years in the past."...