James Durso
The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran to destroy the country’s nuclear program and perhaps force regime change. Yet just next door to Iran sits Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state, an opponent of Israel and a frenemy of the U.S. How did Pakistan succeed in getting the bomb, whereas Iran’s regime is now in a fight for its life?
First, the Americans wanted revenge for the humiliation of 1979, when 52 Americans were held for 444 days by the revolutionary government. Iran may have decided the 1980 election, handing the White House to Ronald Reagan — ensuring future presidents would do anything to avoid Jimmy Carter’s fate. America’s internal propagandizing has ensured that few citizens know the cause of Iran’s enmity is the 1953 coup, sponsored by Washington and London, against the freely elected government in Tehran after Iran’s parliament voted to nationalize the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
Second, Pakistan made itself useful to the U.S. in the insurgency against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the U.S. punitive expedition in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021.
In the 1980s, Pakistan distributed U.S. weapons and money to the anti-Soviet mujahideen; America obliged by overlooking Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons, though the U.S. stopped its “willful gullibility” in 1990 when President George H.W. Bush was no longer able to certify that Pakistan no longer possessed a nuclear weapon. Many in Pakistan believe America no longer needed them in Afghanistan and so betrayed its long-standing ally, but the real reason may have been the Kashmir crisis that caused Pakistan to raise the enrichment of its uranium to weapons grade, which “removed the last fig leaf.”