Being an information security specialist, the recent events revolving around Pakistan’s nuclear program do not surprise me. In Pakistan nothing is safe – from the common man who walks the street to our President; from our most crucial assets and secrets to our utility supply lines, all are an open and fair game to malicious attacks.

I for one am not at all concerned about who is involved or why they are involved. Those things are all secondary, and the more attention these two elements get, the more I have to believe that this is a cover up and a deliberate diversion to avoid the real truth from hitting the fan.

But - again – it just doesn’t matter. Why? That is exactly how we got where we are in the first place. We did not inherit an Elbert Einstein or Robert Oppenheimer, who by the way were world’s very first nuclear-proliferators, we got our technology through a shrewd high profile scientist, backed by an outlaw bank, and supplied by a shady smuggler.

The primary and haunting questions remain unanswered about the performance of the administration around this imbroglio. Why wasn’t there a debriefing session when these top scientists were released from duty in 2001? Why wasn’t there a watch on their phone conversations and movements through and after their service? And above all why weren’t their financial accounts kept under close watch all through and even after the conclusion of their services?

In 1998, Pakistan conducted several nuclear tests and our then “champion,” Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared that Pakistan is now “the big brother of the Muslim world,” and from now onwards we would be members of the big boys’ club. In reality he should have said, “We are the little boy with the big boys’ stick,” because to play with the big boys means to be brutal in policymaking, and viciously cunning in strategy, the two crucial elements that Pakistan has always lacked.

No matter how much our caring Information Minister pleads the case that he saw tears in the eyes of our dear President to learn about Dr. AQK’s involvement in this scandal, no one with half a wit is willing to believe that this was an individual rogue security compromise, especially the western analysts.

The common belief here is that there is substantial truth to the March 1999 story of New York Times, warning the Clinton administration that harsh economic embargos on Pakistan will eventually force it to sell some nuclear information to Iran and North Korea in exchange of financial leverage and missile technology from the two accordingly.

In all honesty, it does not suit Pakistan to be involved in these endeavors because neither Iran nor North Korea has the maturity level or the economic depth to manage a sensitive nuclear program. Secondly, if it did - it should have been through “compromisable” human assets not top military Generals and the very father of the Pakistan’s own program – that was the first mistake.

Secondly, our country gave undue attention to the program and the scientists who worked in these laboratories. This information should have been top secret primarily for the scientists’ own personal safety and the safety of the program at large. If Pakistan had actually maintained a program where no one knew of the scientists and their rankings within the programs, it would not have had much difficulty in disavowing anyone whose name may have come up in any investigation.

All through the 60s and 70s both the United States and Soviet Union embarked on daring missions to acquire, smuggle, and steal each others secrets but no one came to know of them till the information was deliberately declassified by the Department of Defense some 30 years later.

Case in point, remember the massive ocean mining news in 1968 that a top American businessman Howard Hughes is launching an expedition to mine ocean floor for minerals. In reality Howard Hughes volunteered to be front and cover for a strategic CIA operation to recover a fully armed and equipped Soviet nuclear submarine named K-129 that sank to the ocean floor intact.

To achieve this objective multiple companies were incorporated that started conducting “business as usual” and employed experts without their explicit knowledge that they are working for an actual CIA undercover operation.

Almost 36 years later, when the Department of Defense declassified information, one of those involved, Wayne Collier, disclosed that it was not months into the project when he discovered that he was actually working for the CIA and the floors above his office space where occupied by CIA experts and operatives watching him and his colleagues perform their daily routines. Finally when time came for the actual operation all those participating where informed of the risks that were involved, from being captured by the Soviets to Nuclear contamination, and in either event they would disavowed by the government.

Also in the 60s, US government embarked on a $17 billion project placing highly sensitive sonar detection equipment (microphones) on the ocean floor to detect fleet movement using the cover of transcontinental communications cable. The US government under Ronald Regan went to the extent of plugging into the actual communications cable of the Soviet Northern Fleet and connected it to a secret installation in Greenland.

In 2001 critical information leaked in form of stolen hard drives from a very sensitive US installation – presumably destined for China and that is all that was disclosed to the press. No one knows what actually happened and the depth of damage. No one knows the name of the installation, accused, or the boss of the facility – the matter was disclosed by a lowest possible officer at the Pentagon and no questions were answered.

Even in my line of work exceptional measures are taken to guard sensitive information and programs from falling in the wrong hands. Coca Cola for example holds a secret ingredient known as “7X” which no single person in the company knows how to produce. Sensitive software programs are broken into segments where no one programmer has access to the entire code, rather to just variables that concerns them.

This is how the big boys play and Pakistan is no where close to this kind of thinking, planning, and execution.

While our English dailies carry headlines on how the scientists are being mistreated, I for one would like to know how in the world this information was leaked to the press. Who was that obnoxious “well placed informant” who tipped the press in the first place causing a huge compromise and embarrassment?

Why is it that our intelligence czar has not gone hot and heavy on that information leak? Why haven’t that soldier, secretary, politician and journalist caught and strung from the highest pole?

Wouldn’t it be much better that this was an undercover debriefing event resulting in appropriate actions while on the face value no defamation of the scientific institutions had happened, and the nation would have learnt about it 30 or 50 years from now after declassification of information?

Or perhaps did we even take into consideration any of the wild cards, especially the “deduction theory”. Maybe – just maybe, there was no real evidence, just as there wasn’t any when Bush, Powell and Blair univocally claimed to have undisputable evidence of WMDs in Iraq, perhaps this, too, was just a tactic to see how we panic, and panic we did, to be judged guilty by the deduction theory.

In a mature environment there are protocols, secondary protocols, and counter protocols to deal with situations like this. Pakistan on the other hand decided to embark on public defamation strategy thinking that the envious Pakistani mentality would take its toll and general public would love to drag the names of the Nation’s top research scientists in the mud.

If we really need to learn we should take a peak across the border to see how top scientists are awarded.

If Pakistan wants to join the big boys club than we need to learn to play like big boys and we need to stop making these costly oversights.

Our information security is a complete mess, most of our strategic information is hosted by foreign companies, a large majority of our ministers, MNAs and Senators use Indian based Hotmail for email, and most scary of all our Military echelon use unencrypted commercial cell phone for private conversations.

Information is life blood of any institution civilian or military, public or private and in this day and age strategic human assets need to be put in place to develop real checks and balances for future, otherwise our President would keep on getting attacked, information will keep on getting in the wrong hands, and we instead of being proactive will always be working on damage control when “it” hits the fan again.