A couple of days ago I wrote about Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Islamic bomb:

With all this news about Khan’s financial motives for spreading nuclear secrets, we shouldn’t forget that as a hard-line Pakistani Islamist, he also had jihad in mind.

Bernard Henri-Lévy makes a similar point in this scary piece about the possibility that the ultimate jihad weapon will come from Pakistan: Abdul Qadeer Khan.

We will find that, since Pakistan is steered by the iron hand of its secret service and its army, it is inconceivable that Khan operated alone without orders or cover. We will understand more precisely that we cannot repeat without contradiction that, on the one hand, the Pakistani nuclear arsenal is under control, and that not a warhead can budge without the authorities’ knowledge, and, on the other, that Khan was acting alone, working on his own account, with no official connivance. To put it simply and disconcertingly: Pakistan’s nuclear weapons need to be secured. They cannot—will not—be secured by Pakistan alone.

We will come back to Gen. Musharraf—and Pakistan being what it is, we will come back also to other generals and ex-generals, such as Mirza Aslam Beg and Jehangir Karamat, both former army chiefs of staff. But we must not shift our gaze from the president himself, whose knowledge of Khan’s dark machinations no one in Islamabad doubts, and who, at the very moment of his confounding, celebrated Khan once more as a “hero.” What does Khan know of what Gen. Musharraf knows? And what does Khan’s daughter, Dina, who announced in London that she has suitcases of compromising files, know?

And at last, sooner or later, we will come to the real secret: that of al Qaeda; and of Khan’s links to Lashkar-e-Toiba, the fundamentalist terrorist group at the heart of al Qaeda; and the fact that this “mad scientist” is first of all mad about God, a fanatical Islamist who in his heart and soul believes that the bomb of which he is the father should belong, if not to the Umma itself, at least to its avant-garde, as incarnated by al Qaeda. So let us not shrink from measuring the probability of a nightmare scenario: to wit, a Pakistani state which—in the shelter of its alliance with an America that is decidedly not counting inconsistencies—could furnish al Qaeda with the means to take the ultimate step of its jihad.

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