Why the world tolerates Pakistan terror-nuclear nexus

For years, the United States and its Western allies have argued that a state accused of sponsoring terrorism and destabilising its region cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. That argument is now used repeatedly against Iran. American officials describe Iran as an ideological state whose links with armed groups across the Middle East make its nuclear ambitions dangerous not just for the region but also for the wider world. The message coming from Washington is simple that a country accused of supporting proxy warfare cannot be trusted with atomic weapons.

But the moment this principle is examined critically, one country immediately exposes the contradiction at the heart of this entire argument. That country is Pakistan. If the same standards applied to Iran had been applied consistently to Pakistan over the last four decades, Pakistan’s nuclear programme would have faced overwhelming international isolation long before it became operational. Instead, the world watched Pakistan build nuclear weapons through stolen technology, clandestine procurement networks and international smuggling operations while simultaneously turning itself into the global epicentre of jihadist infrastructure. Yet despite all of this, Pakistan not only escaped a meaningful punishment but gradually succeeded in normalising itself as a nuclear state.

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That contradiction in itself remains one of the biggest failures of the modern international order. Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions accelerated after the 1971 war with India and the creation of Bangladesh. The military defeat shattered Pakistan psychologically, and it convinced the Pakistani establishment that conventional military parity with India was impossible. From that point onwards nuclear weapons were no longer viewed merely as strategic assets. They became tied to Pakistan’s sense of survival itself.

But Pakistan did not build its nuclear programme the way major nuclear powers historically did through decades of open scientific development and massive industrial infrastructure. Its programme expanded through covert acquisitions, espionage, black-market procurements and foreign assistance networks operating across multiple countries, and the man who made it all possible was Pakistan’s ace nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Inside Pakistan, AQ Khan was celebrated as a national hero and the father of the Islamic bomb. Outside Pakistan, he became known as the architect of the largest illegal nuclear proliferation network in modern history. While working in the Netherlands during the 1970s, Khan gained access to sensitive centrifuge designs connected to the European nuclear consortium URENCO. Western intelligence agencies later concluded that critical enrichment technology and technical data were stolen and transferred to Pakistan. Through an elaborate network of shell companies, middlemen and covert suppliers that spread across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, Pakistan acquired components and expertise necessary for uranium enrichment.

Yet the most alarming part of Pakistan’s nuclear story came later, as it also became a source of nuclear proliferation to the rogue nations themselves. The AQ Khan network secretly transferred nuclear technology, centrifuge designs and technical expertise to countries including Iran, North Korea and Libya. AQ Khan, while being Pakistan’s lead scientist, was also running an organised international black-market operation involving some of the world’s most sensitive technologies.

The irony could not have been more glaring. For years, Washington described Iran as a dangerous regime that could never be trusted with nuclear technology. Yet much of Iran’s nuclear advancement itself was linked to the proliferation network run from Pakistan. The same Pakistan that the West increasingly treated as a strategic ally had helped spread nuclear technology into some of the very regions and regimes that the United States later described as existential threats to global security.

Despite the scale of this scandal, Pakistan was allowed to escape the kind of sustained international isolation that other states would likely have faced under similar circumstances. AQ Khan was eventually placed under nominal house arrest inside Pakistan, but the larger state structure behind the proliferation network was never seriously dismantled or internationally punished in proportion to the gravity of the offence.

The sole reason behind it was the US's own geopolitical interests. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Pakistan became indispensable to the United States. The anti-Soviet jihad was coordinated largely through Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment. Billions of dollars in American and Saudi funding flowed into Pakistan. Weapons, fighters, and ideological networks were mobilised through Pakistani territory under the supervision of the Pakistan military wing Inter-Services Intelligence.

This was the period during which modern jihadist infrastructure expanded dramatically across the region. Militant training camps multiplied as the radical seminaries grew rapidly. Islamist fighters from across the Muslim world entered Afghanistan through Pakistan. Networks that later on evolved into organisations like Al-Qaeda emerged from this very ecosystem.

Washington understood that Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions were advancing during this period, and the American intelligence agencies were not unaware of what was happening. But the Cold War priority of defeating the Soviet Union outweighed non-proliferation concerns, resulting in strategic convenience clearly overruling the declared principles.

This pattern continued even after the Cold War ended. By the 1990s, Pakistan’s military establishment had fully integrated jihadist proxy warfare into its regional security doctrine, especially against India in Jammu and Kashmir. Terrorist groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed operated openly from Pakistani soil for years. Terror attacks linked to these organisations kept on repeatedly targeting India.

From the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the evidence trails consistently pointed towards Pakistan-based terror networks. Yet every major crisis eventually ran into the same barrier of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and became Islamabad’s greatest shield.

Its nuclear arsenal fundamentally changed how the world dealt with Pakistan. Terrorism was no longer treated solely as a law-and-security issue. It became tied to fears of nuclear escalation in South Asia. Every confrontation involving Pakistan raised the spectre of conflict between the two nuclear-armed states.

Over time this created a dangerous equation. Pakistan learned that its nuclear capability gave it strategic space that non-nuclear states simply did not possess. The deeper the crisis became, the stronger international pressure grew not on Pakistan to dismantle its terror infrastructure but on India to avoid escalation.

Hence, the nuclear weapons became Pakistan’s ultimate insurance policy against accountability. Nothing exposed this contradiction more brutally than the discovery of Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan in 2011 as the mastermind behind the September 11 terror attacks was found living in Abbottabad, a Pakistani garrison town located near the country’s premier military academy. The world’s most wanted terrorist had not been hiding in an inaccessible mountain cave that Pakistan insisted to its partner the US during the War on Terror but was found living comfortably inside a major Pakistani military zone.

The implications were devastating, as for years Pakistan had presented itself as America’s frontline ally in the ‘War on Terror’. It had received enormous military and financial assistance from Washington, yet the leader of Al-Qaeda was discovered deep inside Pakistani territory. But despite the global outrage, the larger strategic relationship between Pakistan and the West survived. And that is precisely what continues to expose the double standards in the global nuclear order.

When Western governments argue today that Iran cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons because of its support for armed proxies and regional terrorism, many countries immediately point towards Pakistan. The larger problem is that the international system never truly resolved the Pakistan question but merely learned to manage it.

Every major power understood the dangers associated with Pakistan’s combination of nuclear weapons, military dominance, ideological radicalisation and proxy warfare. But once Pakistan became a declared nuclear state, confronting it directly became far more dangerous.

The concern is no longer only about terrorism. It is about the possibility of instability inside a nuclear-armed country with a long history of militant entanglements. That fear has repeatedly pushed the international community towards caution, compromise and selective silence. This is where the credibility of the global non-proliferation system begins to collapse.

Because the issue is no longer just about Iran or Pakistan alone. The issue is whether international principles are applied consistently or only when geopolitically convenient. The world has repeatedly argued that states associated with terrorism must never be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. But in Pakistan’s case, the world continued to look away until it was too late.

Pakistan understood this reality better than most countries. Its nuclear weapons did not merely deter larger wars. They have also altered the entire diplomatic framework through which the world engages with Pakistan. Terror attacks, proxy warfare, extremist infrastructure and proliferation scandals all became secondary to one overriding international concern of preventing deep instability inside a nuclear-armed state, wherein the focus should have been on dismantling Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities instead.

That is why Pakistan is treated differently. And that is why the global order not only struggles to explain this contradiction but also struggles with effectively dealing with Pakistan’s state policy of using terrorism as a legitimate instrument of power.

(Raja Muneeb is an independent journalist and columnist. He tweets @rajamuneeb. The views expressed in this article are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.)