An elite US special forces squad operating covertly could already be at the US embassy in Islamabad to prevent the takeover of Pakistani nuclear weapons by the Taliban, Pulitzer-winning American journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed.
Such squads include anti-terrorism and non-proliferation experts from the US intelligence community, which includes the Pentagon, the FBI, and the DOE, Hersh said in an interview to Pakistan’s Geo News channel, adding that the Americans have been constituting crack teams for various purposes. The team in question would deal with any eventuality involving the nukes.
Senior journalist and the group editor of The News, Shaheen Sehbai, linked the statement to former president Pervez Musharraf’s recent harsh remarks on president Asif Ali Zardari.Musharraf had called the latter a fraud and a cheat who could not be trusted. Shebai said it must be investigated why Musharraf had accused Zardari of not being a patriot.
He said Hersh must have had some inside information which he did not reveal. Former director general of ISI Hamid Gul, while vouching for the credentials of Hersh, gave a detailed account of the US presence in sensitive areas in Pakistan. He said that the US wanted to delegate the role of proxy super power of the region to India and for that Pakistan had to be de-nuclearised.
However, former Pakistani foreign secretary Shamshad Ahmad Khan ruled out any possibility of the US team being in a position to gain access to Pakistan’s nuclear facilities.
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