Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has reacted positively to the latest proposals on the nuclear issue brought to Teheran by the special envoy of the European powers and US, Javier Solana. The proposal offers to Iran direct participation of US in the negotiations and guarantee Iran's territorial integrity in return for Iran suspending its enrichment activity during negotiations.

The United States which had been refusing to engage in direct negotiations with Iran for the last 26 years has climbed down offering Iran a major face-saving device. Iran has been declaring that it has no intention to make nuclear weapons. But it insists on exercising its right to enrich Uranium for peaceful purposes. In such circumstances there are no reasons why Iran should not accept the compromise in which the Russians have offered to get the Iranian enrichment of Uranium carried out in their soil. Iran had a clandestine enrichment programme from 1987 onwards with the assistance from Dr AQ Khan of Pakistan. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), after three years of investigation, is not able to certify as yet that Iran has no more clandestine materials, equipments or research programmes. This is at the root of suspicion of the western powers about the Iranian enrichment programmes.

It is not clear why the Western European countries and US finally decided to climb down and be reasonable. Recently more information has become public that the problem about Iranian  enrichment is largely black market supplies  of equipment and technology from European companies. They have been assisting Iran through export of plant and equipment illegally even while preaching non-proliferation. The major proliferators have been those Western European companies who supplied to Pakistan and through Pakistan to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

Non-prolifearion expert Dr Leonard Weiss has referred to The Guardian which says that a joint report prepared by British, French, German and Belgian Intelligence Agencies for the European Union claim that since early 2004, the Pakistanis were making extensive efforts to procure materials and components for their  nuclear and missile programmes.  The document is said to have listed 20 government entities in Pakistan, active in the procurement effort and hundreds of companies around the world that are said to be involved in some aspect of the production of weapons of mass destruction. According to the experts a successor to the Khan network has been revived and this is Pakistan controlled.

The US is not in a position to hold Pakistan accountable for proliferation to Iran though the IAEA has produced incontrovertible evidence on that issue. According to reporter William Langeuresche  the   Americans were fully acquainted with  Khan's proliferation to Iran from 1987. He quotes US correspondent Mark Hibbs who wrote about Pakistani proliferation to Iran in the Nuclemics Week in May, 1991 and received a call from Richard Kennedy, US Ambassador for nonproliferation who admitted that Khan was under US observation. This account also tallies with Dutch PM Ruud Lubbers’ account that CIA was interested in Khan and intervened twice in 1976 and in 1986 to get him freed from Dutch prosecution. One sometimes wonders whether the US was attempting to use Khan to mislead the Iranians in their enrichment efforts initially. They may have got genuinely alarmed when they found that Iranians were able to develop an effective enrichment programme on their own.

The Americans know that if the full facts of Khan’s proliferation to Iran were to come out then the permissiveness of previous US administrations will become public. The hands of the European powers are not also clean on proliferation. Therefore the US and the Western Europeans could push the Iranians upto a point and not beyond that.
Their threat did not work partly because the Iranians should have been aware of their vulnerability.

The Europeans can stop the Iranian proliferation if they have the adequate political will to stop their companies  from proliferating nuclear technology to Iran.   One  can only speculate  whether they have reached that  stage and are therefore in a position to reach a compromise solution with Iran.  Next time when some US Ayatollah or a Congressman like Tom Lantos talks of India’s  stand on Iranian proliferation they should be asked to explain  about US-AQ Khan-Iran proliferation linkage.

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst based in Delhi.