Wheels within wheels

Two gunfighters warily take to the street and face each other. What compels them to put themselves in this situation where the death of your opponent is the only victory, and your own death is the only defeat?

Honor, perhaps a desire to prove one's manhood, a fear of being branded a coward.

Each feels pushed into the street by forces they don't know how to control. They have no desire to die, yet the challenge cannot be refused, cannot be ignored.

In their minds, each knows that if the other draws, he must draw. And when a weapon is drawn, a point of no return is crossed.

But while the weapons remain holstered, and hands are poised, the gunfighters focus on only one question. When will my opponent draw?

That uncertainty in the moment before committing to a course of action is a cause for false hope, but it is time to get one's calculations right.

The confrontation over its nuclear program that Iran has provoked with the Western world is vastly more serious than a white hat/black hat battle in a Saturday matinee.

Yet, that same element of uncertainty is what is driving the players. The West would like to know the answer to one question: how close is Iran to obtaining a nuclear weapon? The answer to that question, if known, would immediately collapse all hypothetical scenarios into a finite set of responses.

The answer, or part of the answer, to that question may lie in the person of Dr. Khan, the father of Pakistan's bomb.

Khan has admitted to selling nuclear technology to other countries, including Iran.

Question persist, however, on whether Khan helped Iran obtain enriched uranium. From this Aki article:

It was the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the political wing of the People's Mujahdeen, that in 2002 gave a decisive contribution to revealing the existence of the secret plant at Natanz, used by the Iranians to enrich uranium, though some of their subsequent claims have been proven incorrect.

In Vienna, in November 2004, Farid Soleimani, the Council leader, alleged that in 2001 Khan had handed over to Iran a significant quantity of enriched uranium. The government of Islamabad swiftly issued a denial. However, a high-level source, who asked to remain anonymous, says that the allegation was founded and that the transferral of enriched uranium (as well as components for building centrifuges for enrichment and of designs for building missile heads able to transport the bomb) dated back much earlier.

What is troubling about Pakistan's response to the revelations about Khan's activities is this:

For two years Khan has been under house arrest in his home in Rawalpindi and to date Islamabad has allowed neither the Americans nor the inspectors of the UN's atomic watchdog the IAEA, to interrogate Khan.

Why won't Pakistan let the US or the UN ask Khan about whether or not he transferred enriched uraniumm to Iran? It begs the question of how much direct aid the Pakistani government has provided the Iranian nuclear program.

Is Pakistan playing a double game here? Trying to give the US enough cooperation in the war on terror to give the chimera of cooperation, while at the same helping Iran to achieve its own bomb?

Some have charged that Pakistan manages to capture or kill some high-level Al Qaeda memeber periodically, just to throw a bone to the US. This is why the attack over the weekend intended for Zawahiri is so interesting. If the attack failed to get Zawahiri, what really happened?

Access to Khan is a bargaining chip. Did elements sympathetic to Iran, eager to drive a wedge between the US and Pakistan, engineer this attack that killed women and children to make it less likely Musharraf would ever allow the US access to Khan?

There are larger aspects to the game. The US has its own bargaining chips. India is one. The US has not strongly supported India's right to hold military nuclear weapons, but that could change if Pakistan swings too far towards the terror masters in Iran. Yet, India has a need for Iranian oil. How far can India go in opposing Iran?

And so, nations stand in a dusty street, not knowing when the other will act. Let us hope it is not yet high noon.