It is clearly impossible for us to vouch for the accuracy or otherwise of President Reagan’s reported letter to President Zia-ul-Haq. On the face of it, it is difficult to believe that a communication of such far reaching importance – it offers a nuclear umbrella to Pakistan and a continuation of the existing security relationship between the two countries beyond the present provision of 1987 – would not have become known to the American press and that it would have been left to the Washington correspondent of the Nawa-i-Waqt, Lahore, to disclose its contents. The timing of it is also rather odd. President Reagan is engaged in an election campaign and should normally be expected to await its result before making such a proposal. This argument would, of course, not hold if the US administration has reasons to apprehend that Pakistan is about to hold a nuclear test and thus cross the rubicon. But President Zia cannot possibly be planning to renege on his assurances, however phoney in terms of his intentions and long-term plans, regarding the peaceful nature of his nuclear programme so long as the current US military assistance programme is in operation. He knows that a nuclear test by him would make it virtually impossible for the Reagan administration to continue the military assistance. However, if this line of reasoning would suggest that President Reagan’s reported letter is a plant, the nature of the offer, though far-reaching, is in conformity with Washington’s broad approach towards Pakistan except in respect of the nuclear umbrella.
There is another line of speculation which could lend a measure of credence to the possibility that President Reagan might in fact have written to President Zia. It cannot, for example, be ruled that President Zia has written to President Reagan saying that Pakistan faces a threat on both the eastern and the western front and that the US chief executive has replied to the Pakistani general to reassure him. There is a catch in this argument. Which is that whatever view General Zia takes of India’s nuclear programme and overall designs towards Pakistan and of Soviet-Afghan intentions, he cannot possibly argue that he faces a nuclear threat from either direction. Why then the US offer of the nuclear umbrella? And we know from our own experience of our discussions with the US, the USSR and Britain during the sixties that a nuclear umbrella is not a feasible proposition without bases and storage of nuclear weapons in that country. Like the multilateral force which President Kennedy proposed for Europe and then abandoned as being unpracticable, the concept of a nuclear umbrella raises too many problems. But it is on the other hand possible that President Reagan has made the offer as a kind of ploy to persuade Pakistan to accede to the non-proliferation treaty. Leaving the nuclear issue aside, however, it can safely be assumed that the US would be willing to do whatever is necessary to reassure Pakistan about its security, that it would have no objection to the transfer of AWACS by Saudi Arabia to Islamabad and that it would wish to continue the present security relationship beyond 1987. This does not prove that Mr Reagan has sent a specific communication to President Zia. But that is not a particularly important issue for us in India to settle. We are more interested in assessing the US view of its ties with Pakistan and in that context the Nawa-i-Waqt report is interesting regardless of whether it is accurate or whether it is a plant.