Revealing Slices of 'Quarterlife'

DATE November 13, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, investigative
journalists and author of "Deception," on the United States'
secret trades with Pakistan for nuclear weapons
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guests have described Pakistan as the epicenter of terror, a disingenuous
regime with its hands on the nuclear tiller. That was their assessment before
the current crisis. Now the situation is more dire: a country with nuclear
weapons and a sizeable population of Islamic extremists has a president who
has suspended the constitution to remain in power. President Musharraf has
put the opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, under house arrest for the second
time. Today she called for him to step down.

My guests, Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, are investigative
journalists with the British newspaper The Guardian. They've written a new
book about Pakistan, how it developed nuclear weapons and how it helped North
Korea and Iran develop nuclear programs. The book is called "Deception:
Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons." The
authors say for three decades, US administrations--Republican and Democrat--as
well as governments in Britain and other European countries have allowed
Pakistan to acquire nuclear technology and disguised how Pakistan sold it.

Adrian Levy, Catherine Scott-Clark, welcome to FRESH AIR. As you say in your
book, Washington's nightmare is a nuclear Pakistan controlled by
fundamentalists. What do you think the odds are that Musharraf might be
overthrown by fundamentalists?

Mr. ADRIAN LEVY: Well, I say everything, at the moment, is up in the air in
the sense that the country is unraveling before our eyes. We have the
suspension of the constitution, the national assembly. We have seen the
streets alive with protesters, the radicalization of those protesters. But I
think the chances of Musharraf falling to some kind of Islamist coup is zero.
I think this is very much in line what's being delivered by certain elements
of the Pentagon who are propping up the Musharraf regime.

GROSS: Wait, so are you saying you think the Bush administration is playing
up fears of an Islamist coup to justify what Musharraf is doing?

Ms. CATHERINE SCOTT-CLARK: I think, to justify the fact that Washington has
given $10 billion since 9/11 to Musharraf in exchange for his promise to fight
with the West in the war on terror, something that he really hasn't kind of
followed through on. I mean, all the promises he made after 9/11--to cut back
on madrassas, religious schools, and to clip the wings of the radical groups
operating outside Pakistan--none of these things have actually happened, so I
think partially to save face. And also there is no long-term alternative, as
far as Washington is concerned. I mean, everything has been put into the
Musharraf basket, and I think even a State Department spokesman said a few
days ago that, having spent so much money on Musharraf, at this point it was
like giving too much of a loan from a bank. You couldn't just pull out.

GROSS: How many estimated nuclear weapons does Pakistan have, and what are
your concerns about the possibility of a weapon or weapons getting into hands
outside of the official government in Pakistan during this chaotic period?

Ms. SCOTT-CLARK: It's very difficult to say exactly how many nuclear weapons
Pakistan has because they're not part of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, and they haven't signed the nonproliferation treaty. So there is no
access for international monitors to go into Pakistan and inspect their
weapons facilities. But the best guesstimate is somewhere between 40 and 70
assembled warheads.

I think the real problem is not a nuclear warhead getting into the wrong
hands--I think that's relatively unlikely, according to most Western
experts--but the problem is fissile material in Pakistan, of which there is a
lot that is unsecured. When we were researching our book, we spoke to people
very close to A.Q. Khan, the so-called father of the Islamic bomb, and they
said that the laboratories at Kahuta, which is the weapons base outside
Islamabad, there were something like 40 canisters of highly enriched uranium
gas, which had gone missing in 2004, 2005. And, I mean, that's a vast amount
of fissile material, and it hasn't been found. And if you think that you only
need something like 100 grams of metalized fissile material to make a dirty
bomb, then there's a lot of material potentially out there, and there were no
answers coming back from Pakistan about where it's actually gone.

Mr. LEVY: Not only that, but scientists within the establishment have become
increasingly radicalized, and already two were found to have reached out to
al-Qaeda elements in Afghanistan in 2002.

GROSS: A.Q. Khan, who's the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb and the single
person responsible for the most nuclear proliferation, you know, to countries
like North Korea and Iran, is under house arrest. But you say that there's
evidence that Pakistan has continued to sell nuclear technology under
Musharraf during A.Q. Khan's house arrest. What is the evidence?

Mr. LEVY: There appears--there are several pieces of evidence that appears
to show the proliferation never stopped, even though A.Q. Khan held his hands
up in 2004 in a now notorious live television interview, claiming sole
responsibility for the racket, him and a group of scientists. However, a very
widespread intelligence-gathering project run by agencies in the West, post
this 2004 confession by Khan, showed that Pakistan was continuant to procure
vast numbers of...(unintelligible)...components for its nuclear program, far
more than any one country could need for itself, leading the intelligence
agents to conclude that they were procuring to sell to other agents. Not only
that, but an operation by US justice uncovered, post-2004 again, a company in
Islamabad working for the Pakistan military that was buying, through South
Africa, US-supplied nuclear triggers, an event that was taking place well past
A.Q. Khan's mea culpa.

GROSS: If this nuclear technology is being sold, is it being sold with the
blessing of Musharraf or behind his back?

Ms. SCOTT-CLARK: With the blessing of Musharraf and the Pakistan military,
who have always been in charge of the nuclear program. And from the evidence
that we gathered inside Pakistan and outside Pakistan from the US and
intelligence services in Europe, it's quite clear that the military was
running the proliferation racket right from the moment that it began in
roughly 1990, when the then head of the army, a general called Mirza Aslam
Beg, he actually said to the US ambassador and to General Norman Schwarzkopf,
who was then head of CENTCOM, and to a Pentagon official, `You're about to cut
us off because the Soviet war in Afghanistan has ended and our US gravy train
of aid over the past 10 years is about to finish, and we're going to be broke,
and we're going to sell the only thing that we have that's worth any money,
which is our nuclear technology, and our first customer is going to be Iran.'
And those messages were reported back to Washington by those three US
officials, and yet nothing was done. And Pakistan was cut off, and that was
the beginning of the proliferation racket, which was controlled by the
Pakistan military from that point up until present day.

GROSS: And we'll get to Iran a little bit later. This would be a good point
to mention that a foreign office spokesperson from Pakistan described the
allegations in your book as `a pack of lies,' and said that `some people
cannot digest our nuclear capability and are involved in negative propaganda,
but Pakistan is an anchor of peace and stability in the region.' So I just
want to mention that.

My guests are Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark. They're the authors of
the new book "Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in
Nuclear Weapons." And they're senior correspondents with the British newspaper
The Guardian.

Now, you know, as you said, A.Q. Khan, who is the father of Pakistan's
nuclear bomb and then became the chief renegade proliferator, you know, in
black market nuclear weapons technology, made this 2004 public confession on
Pakistan television saying that he was the person responsible for this, and
then he was put under house arrest. So, you know, job done. But you say that
that TV confession was actually part of a plan that was cooked up by Musharraf
and by Richard Armitage, who was then deputy secretary of state. What did you
learn about this?

Mr. LEVY: After talking to many people within the US State Department and
within the Pakistan military, and those close to A.Q. Khan, it became clear
that there was a concerted effort to recalibrate, to re-characterize the
proliferation of the Pakistan military as the crime of an individual. And the
thinking behind this was that Pakistan in 2001, the end of the 2001, beginning
of 2002, had obviously signed up to the war on terror, and the Pakistan
military were being presented as a key ally in helping to track down the
remnants of the Taliban and to close up al-Qaeda. However, the proliferation,
the deal, if you like that was put on the table, was that proliferation would
stop, that the efforts made by the Pakistan military would increase, that we
would see some positive intelligence feeding back about both the closure of
the proliferation activities and also who--which individuals and nation
states--had been reached out to by the military.

And yet we reached this extraordinary situation where, by 2006, President
Musharraf tells the West that his investigations are over, he discovered
nothing, the proliferation was shut down. And everyone we know on the US and
British side said to us, `We asked questions, we repeatedly asked questions,
and yet we received pretty much zero intelligence back.'

Ms. SCOTT-CLARK: If I could just add to that. We spoke to a lot of the
scientists who worked with Khan who had been blamed as being part of this
racket, and they were really very shocked. I mean, they were in a state of
shock in early 2004 when they were all being taken into custody because they
said they'd just been doing their jobs for the whole of their careers. They'd
done what the military had asked them to do, they'd put the bomb together.
And then when the military had asked them to sell it on, they had sold it on.
And there was one aide to A.Q. Khan in particular who characterized for us
what it was like to physically bring materials in and out of the lab, and he
said there were so many responsible authorities who needed to be informed on a
daily, hourly basis what was coming in and out of the Kahuta laboratories that
he spent most of his time filling in paperwork for the intelligence services,
for the military, for various other agencies, the military intelligence. So
the idea that there were these kind of secret transports coming out of the
labs and being sent off on secret planes to Dubai or to Tripoli or to Tehran
was ridiculous, was ludicrous, because the military knew at every stage. And,
in fact, most of the materials that Khan supposedly single-handedly supplied
to Gaddafi or to the Iranians went out on Pakistan international airlines or
on Pakistan military transport planes.

But yes, I mean, there were US officials also who were saying very much that
all the evidence was pointing to this being a military-run program and that
scientists were doing the military's bidding.

GROSS: OK. So as we said before, you say that Musharraf and Richard
Armitage, who was then a deputy secretary of state in the Bush administration,
cooked up this drama for A.Q. Khan to confess that he was the head of this
black market nuclear network, and then he was being put under house arrest so
it would look like that was taken care of and now we could just, like, back
Musharraf and not worry anymore about nuclear proliferation coming from
Pakistan. Did you talk to Richard Armitage? What does he have to say about
this? Does he agree? Does he say that this happened, or is he denying that
this happened?

Mr. LEVY: He didn't want to talk about it. He absolutely didn't. But we
talked to lots of other people in the State Department who were around him,
who gave corroborative information as to this being the plan at the White
House. I mean, you're portraying this as an Armitage plan, but actually this
is very much the thinking. He is carrying out the bidding of a White House
strategy, and that strategy was, at all costs, to keep stability in Pakistan.
And of course, that in itself is not a bad idea if there was a quid pro quo.
And yet, you know, the quid pro quo was that we would get access, the West
would get access to the critical intelligence on proliferation, that the
proliferation itself would cease and that Pakistan would de-radicalize. And
of course on all three levels, we received nothing.

GROSS: So do you think that Pakistan is still proliferating, that it's still
selling nuclear technology?

Mr. LEVY: There is evidence that Pakistan is procuring for its program more
than it needs, leading those people who gather that evidence to conclude that
they are buying to sell. We know that part of the network run by the military
is still up and running from this investigation into a Islamabad company that
tried to buy nuclear triggers from the United States post-2004. We know that
they are selling proscribed metals and electrical equipment that they are
prohibited from buying from the United States and from Europe, but are
themselves exporting. So this picture tends to suggest that the country is
still making money out of its nuclear network.

GROSS: Now, when you say that the Pakistan military was selling nuclear
technology to countries like North Korea, Iran, where was the money going?
The money goes back to the government, to the military, to the scientists?
Like, if you were following the money there, what would it tell you?

Mr. LEVY: Well, this is the very interesting thing with Pakistan, it doesn't
operate like a normal country in the sense that it has a civilian cabinet and
it has the military, but the military actually are a claw, and a paid class of
their own. So regarding all military funding, the civilian politicians have
no access to that information. It's impossible to know, for example, the
precise budgets for the Pakistan military. And they don't even sit in on the
cabinet-level discussions. The Pakistan military has direct access to cash as
and when it needs it, and its accounts are not regulated by the civilian
government. There are no sets of books there kept to an international
standard which could be viewed either internally or externally. So in terms
of the generation of capital, we can only speculate through whatever documents
have been recovered along the way.

We know, for example, that they made an offer, an extraordinary offer, to
Saddam Hussein to sell a completed bomb. And we know this through documents
recovered by weapons inspectors in 1995. And they were looking at hundreds of
millions of dollars from Saddam for that one trade. We also know from Iran
some of the amounts that were involved in the menu of items offered the
Iranians. Again, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. So from this
we can extrapolate a rough idea of what they were trying to make. But
following the money forensically--as one could probably in the UK or the
US--in this case, it's out of the question.

Ms. SCOTT-CLARK: If I could just characterize just one particular sale which
might go some way to explaining the kind of the difference between the
military and the civilian governments of Pakistan. We sat down with Benazir
Bhutto to ask her about the North Korea sale of technology, which has been
hotly debated about for many, many years. This happened in 1993 in December,
when she was prime minister for the second time. And she described how she
was approached just before she was going on a trip to China by A.Q. Khan who
came to see her and prime minister secretariat with several military aides
with him. And he said, `Look, you're going to China. It's only a short hop
over to Pyongyang, to North Korea, and we'd really like you to go to North
Korea to ask the president there if we can have access to his No-dong missile
technology. We'd like some blueprints,' basically.

And she said she was concerned about doing this because she knew nothing about
the military side of things. She was worried about the ramifications because
this missile technology would be used potentially against India, and she was
in the middle of negotiating with the Indians to kind of cease such hostile
relations. But eventually she agreed to do it, and she went to North Korea
and she had her sit-down banquet with the president, and over steamed fish and
water chestnuts, she wrangled over how to introduce this subject, and
eventually just came out with it and said that, `We'd like to buy your missile
technology.'

But she explained to us she had no idea of how that was going to be paid for.
She assumed it would be with cash, and she came back from Pyongyang to
Islamabad with her handbag now famously full of blueprints, and she handed
them over to the military. And Khan said, `Thank you very much.' And the army
chief at the time came to her and said, `Look, we've put this particular
general in charge of the project, and we thank you for your contribution.' But
that was the end of her involvement. She never got to find out how it was
paid for. She claims she never was told that the payment would be made in
enrichment technology rather than cash because Pakistan had no cash at that
time.

But I think we have to remember that civilian governments through the 1990s,
which is the greatest period of proliferation for Pakistan, knew very little
about the people who were really running the country, which was the military,
which is a similar scenario which we're facing today.

GROSS: How much do you think the Bush administration knew about what you
describe as the government and the military's complicity in the underground
sales of nuclear technology?

Mr. LEVY: I think they knew pretty much the lengths and breadths of the
operation. When I say I think I knew, I mean, this is not based on my opinion
at all. It's based on the opinion of people who were running or working
within nonproliferation, working within the intelligence agencies, both in the
US and very much in Europe. And what they describe is a vast dossier which
showed how the military was continuing to reach out, and in particular of
concern at that time, when Bush came to power, was North Korea, Libya and
China, which had been helping Pakistan to arm and to proliferate, to sell
onwards.

In fact, so detailed was the information that they had, of course, by this
stage, the entire floorplans for all of the nuclear facilities, they knew what
the Pakistan bomb looked like and they had models for it, and they knew very
much the trading routes used by the Pakistan military to sell on. In fact,
the CIA had penetrated, partially, part of the Khan network, turning one of
the key European suppliers who was passing information back about who, where,
what, why and when. And this would, you know, come together in a vast dossier
presented to the White House. So it was quite clear in 2001 that one could
say there was a military clique connected to al-Qaeda, with connections to the
Taliban, that had also been a rogue proliferator. But of course, that wasn't
Iraq. It was, according to the intelligence, Pakistan.

Ms. SCOTT-CLARK: And we mustn't, also, forget that Pakistan was on the verge
of being declared a terrorist state before 9/11. The head of the intelligence
services, General Mahmoud Ahmad, was brought over to Washington very shortly
before the World Trade Center attacks, and he was warned that that was what
his country was about to be declared by the Bush government. And then,
immediately after 9/11, obviously the world changed and history began again.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with investigative
journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark. They're senior
correspondents for the British newspaper The Guardian. Their new book,
"Deception," is about how Pakistan managed to develop nuclear weapons in spite
of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and the efforts of the International
Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA. The authors say the US allowed Pakistan to
acquire nuclear technology and disguised how Pakistan sold it to countries
like North Korea and Iran.

You say that consecutive US administrations, Republican and Democrat, dating
back to Jimmy Carter, enabled Pakistan to arm the axis of evil powers. You
say the US and Europe secretly allowed Pakistan to get the bomb and develop a
stockpile of weapons technology. They then turned their backs on Pakistan as
it began to sell it. How do you think that the US and Europe helped Pakistan
get the bomb?

Ms. SCOTT-CLARK: The critical year is 1979, when the shah of Iran fled and
Khomeini returned to Tehran and the US lost its primary listening stations in
the Middle East and its primary ally in the Middle East. And then just a few
months later the Soviets marched into Kabul in Afghanistan, and that
December--speaking of Brzezinski, the national security adviser to
Carter--wrote a classified memo in which he advised that the gold standard of
nonproliferation that Carter had upheld until that point would have to take a
backseat if the US was going to counter the threat of the Soviets in
Afghanistan, because the closest and necessary buffer state and ally would
have to be Pakistan, and that Pakistan was already seeking a bomb.

Carter ran out of steam, but within two weeks of Reagan coming into the White
House, a deal had been done with Islamabad. And from that point throughout
the 1980s, billions flowed from Washington to Islamabad for the Soviet war,
but millions of that aid money went sideways, redirected by the Pakistani
authorities into their nuclear program. The US also supplied components
through the Pentagon to the Pakistan nuclear labs. These are components which
have been banned by the US Commerce Department for sale, but that the Pentagon
felt was necessary to ease their relationship, military man to military man,
to allow these components to go through.

Mr. LEVY: But there's another element to this, as well. Obviously Reagan
throughout both administration is forced in order for foreign aid to be
released to Pakistan and to lubricate the relationship with Pakistan assisting
the US to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan, Reagan has to certify every year
that Pakistan has no bomb and is not seeking a weapon. And so you'd have this
process of annual certification while officials working for the administration
were going out to Pakistan and saying precisely the opposite. So Al Haig was
the first, then secretary of state, he met with the number two, General Araf,
and said, `We can live with the Pakistan bomb.'

And we documented a whole series of conversations whereby the message would be
delivered that America would turn a blind eye. And yet, as Cathy's described,
that blind eye actually then became something far worse, which was concrete
aid being delivered by the Pentagon.

GROSS: It's been reported that the Bush administration has drawn up a plan
for attacking Iran, attacking some of Iran's nuclear development sites. How
serious the Bush administration is of actually carrying through on those plans
is completely unclear. What role do you think Pakistan played in helping Iran
go nuclear?

Mr. LEVY: Well, we know, through declarations made by the Iranians
themselves to the IAEA in Vienna, and also from the IAEA inspectors who
visited the Iranian plants, that the technology that they've adopted for
uranium enrichment is the same as the Pakistan program. We also know from
intelligence communities, both in America and the UK, who had tracked some of
the deals, that the meetings were held in Dubai, and we know what kind of
centrifuges were offered and roughly what was paid and the methods of
transport for that. And so there's a very clear idea of the genesis of the
Iranian project. And, of course, one should add that the Iranians claim that
all of this was simply for creating energy rather than for creating a weapons
program, and that of course the European project way back, that Khan worked
for, also was looking at creating energy and not for weapons programs. It was
the Pakistanis who took the technology and modified it in order to enrich
uranium to levels at which it was sufficient to weaponize a nuclear device.

So the position we have now is that Iran has taken the Pakistan technology,
modified itself. And the information that we have from the IAEA, the best
guesses, looking at the rate at which the equipment works and the time taken,
is that they're still many, many years off being able to weaponize uranium.
And the equipment is incredibly sensitive. One greasy thumbprint on a
centrifuge spinning at 72,000 revolutions a minute is enough to send the
machine off kilter, making the rotors warp and twist and bend and effectively
shattering the entire centrifugal plant.

GROSS: What you're describing here is the United States supporting Pakistan,
looking the other way as Pakistan develops and then sells nuclear technology,
and then the United States turning around again and threatening to bomb Iran
after Iran is sold nuclear technology and uses it, sold by Pakistan, the
country that we've been supporting. I mean, that picture that you're painting
is a very odd picture.

Ms. SCOTT-CLARK: I think the picture that we're facing today is even more
alarming and inexplicable, in a way. I mean, London and Washington are today
backing a military dictator who has instituted martial law in his country, has
started putting civilians in front of military courts, who is accusing people
of treason if they go out on the streets to protest, who claims that he's
fighting the war on terror by rounding up the country's entire judiciary, who
has suspended the constitution, now claims that he's going to hold free and
fair elections under emergency powers in January. I mean, this is supposedly
one of the West's--this is the West's most significant ally in the war on
terror in South Asia, and yet we see very, very limited and soft responses
both from London and Washington to what is happening in today's Pakistan. And
this is the legacy of the long-term relationship with Pakistan. So I think
what's happened in the past should not really be surprising, because what's
actually happened today on the streets on the Pakistan and the responses from
Washington and London have been extraordinary.

GROSS: My guests are journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark.
Their new book, "Deception," says the US allowed Pakistan to acquire and sell
nuclear technology.

Well, what do you think that the Bush administration and the British
government have in terms of options for dealing with Musharraf now?

Mr. LEVY: I think options are very limited. I think one think we can see
from 2001 is that our influence over the Pakistan military has been
insignificant. They have their own agenda, their own philosophy, their own
series of strategic goals. And they have set out to pursue those, regardless
of the money that pours in. In the sense that, for example, Pakistan wants to
see a conservative Pashtun administration raised in Kabul. They're hostile to
the pro-Western, pro-Indian Hamid Karzai. And so it's in their interest to
make the border areas between their two countries bubble and boil. It's in
their interest to see attacks increasing on NATO forces to destabilize Karzai.
And yet somehow there's been no consideration that their strategic goals and
our strategic goals might not actually marry up. One thing is for certain:
If we cut aid to Musharraf and to the military and redirected that to targeted
humanitarian responses, that would have a devastating effect. He's very much
kept in power by the leverage he can call on from the West, the hard cash that
comes in. And that what's keeps the other generals around him from
cannibalizing him.

GROSS: What are a couple of the possible scenarios you see playing out now in
Pakistan? Like, how do you think this crisis might resolve?

Mr. LEVY: I think there are two possibilities at the moment. The military
itself is a vastly rich consortium of generals who are businessmen, as well.
They control around 12 percent of all Pakistan real estate. They've got a
turnover of around $10 billion a year, the same as a good-sized European bank.
And they also cannot afford this kind of instability, both politically,
strategically and commercially. And there is a lot of talk coming out of Raul
Pindi and Islamabad, where the military are based, of replacing Musharraf with
the acting chief of the army staff, a man called General Kiyani, who was
formerly the head of the intelligence service, a man who led the negotiations
with Bhutto over the last year to 18 months, who reached out to try and bring
her together with Musharraf. So one thing we should expect possibly is an
internal reorganization of the military, whereby Musharraf may well be moved
into some kind of ceremonial role and Kiyani will take over the day-to-day
running of Pakistan.

Ms. SCOTT-CLARK: There's definitely a sense coming out of the Pakistan
military now that Musharraf is going really out on a limb on his own and that
the Pakistan army can't follow him because it will never be able to rescue its
reputation if it sticks with Musharraf's extreme position in recent days. So
very much, there is a call for Kiyani to take over. And I mean, he seems very
much a moderate. He was partially educated at military college in the States.
He seems an heir who would be acceptable to the West. So I think that is
definitely a strong possibility of something we might well see in the next few
weeks.

GROSS: You said there's two possible scenarios that you were thinking about.
What's the other?

Mr. LEVY: The second is a terrible period of deadlock. We're seeing the
tightening up of the state of emergency in Pakistan, and talk from Musharraf
of the state of emergency running all the way through to the election, which
may now be January 9th or the middle of the January. Now, effectively that
means this election will be null and void because there'll be no freedom to
canvas, there'll be no ability to operate as political parties. Already
thousands of activists have been rounded up. And if that situation prevails,
I actually think that we may well be seeing a terrible showdown between the
military and the people for the first time in Pakistan on this scale.

And what we're talking about here, and I think it's mischaracterized
sometimes, is the middle classes largely speaking, who are backing the
campaign for the restoration of democracy. It's not just lawyers, it's
teachers, it is all aspects--it is bankers, it is architects, it is the people
who are sitting around in homes in Karachi and Lahore having conversations
like we're having now, you know, who are used to previously a free press, to
watching CNN and the BBC on their newly-supplied cable news services, who are
just alienated from the West support of a dictatorship and basically won't
stand for it anymore.

Now, if this movement picks up even more momentum, you know, this could well
make the elections in themself inoperable. You know, it's a slow-moving car
crash.

GROSS: Well, one more question. What will the United States stand to lose if
Musharraf was kicked out or left on his own volition and something much more
closer to a real democracy evolved?

Mr. LEVY: Well, I think a falsehood has occurred here, whereby, for the last
seven years, we've all been told that Musharraf is necessary, that the
military is the largest stable force in Pakistan. And because Pakistan is
genuinely so essential as an ally in the war on terror, that it's Musharraf or
nothing. But the problem here has been that his agenda is contrary to the
agenda of the West, and it's very much been Musharraf manipulating the
conservative Islamist factions in Pakistan. And so, in fact, you know, some
blue sky thinking here, which would actually aim to wrestle power back from
the power, to stop propping them up, and actually to go about the less
headline-grabbing messy business of building a democracy in Pakistan, might
give us all much more long-term security vis-a-vis this country.

I think already we had a forum, talking to previous ambassadors like Wendy
Chamberlain, who was very much for the end of big-ticket items being sent to,
you know, the Pakistan military. Other great thinkers within the State
Department previously, people like Teresita Schaffer and her husband, Terry
Schaffer, one now at Georgetown, the other at CSIS, both who rose to assistant
secretary of state level and served ambassadorially, are all suggesting the
same thing, you know: stop giving the military all the power, wrestle the
cash away, make targeted aid, aid that is not opaque, that we can see it's
achieving results. Otherwise, you know, if this continues with the Pentagon
stepping in and crowding out the voice from the State Department, we may well
see an insufferable situation which leads to an explosion in Pakistan, one we
cannot afford to happen.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you both very much for talking with us.

Mr. LEVY: Thank you so much.

Ms. SCOTT-CLARK: Thank you.

GROSS: Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark are the authors of the new book
"Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear
Weapons." They're senior correspondents for The Guardian.

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Review: David Bianculli on the new Web-based show "Quarterlife"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Two TV producers with a track record are trying something different. Marshall
Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, the creators of "Thirtysomething" and "Once and
Again," and the executive producers of "My So-called Life," have a new show
launching this week, but it's not on TV--not yet, anyway. TV critic David
Bianculli has an explanation and a review.

Mr. DAVID BIANCULLI: We're only in week two of the strike by the Writers
Guild of America and already TV is changing in front of our eyes. For now, no
late night monologues, no "Daily Show" or "Colbert Report," and no season
finale by Bill Maher. In a few weeks, if the strike continues, it'll change
even more. Once we get to the other side of the November ratings sweeps, most
of the scripted shows will vanish. In their place, lots and lots of new
reality shows.

The issue at the heart of the strike is whether writers will get paid when
their programs are distributed or downloaded over the Internet. So it's
coincidental, maybe even ironic, that one of the best new shows of the season,
arriving this week, was made exclusively for, and right now is viewable only
on, the Internet. The name of the show is "Quarterlife," and it's about six
young adults, 20-somethings, who have hopes and dreams and talent but don't
quite have solid careers or plans. What makes the show distinctive is that it
doesn't look like something thrown together for the Web. It looks like
exactly what it is: a first-class television show made by some of the best
producers in the business, with music, scripts and acting that are excellent.

Except that "Quarterlife" isn't on TV. Each one-hour episode is subdivided
into six eight-minute chunks which will unspooled at a rate of two episodes
per week. The popular term for these chunks is Webisodes, which I think is
"widiculous." But whatever you call them, you can find them at their own brand
new Web site, quarterlife.com, or at myspace.com. You have to find them
because they're not coming to you. But they're worth the effort because these
are superbly crafted little programs.

In the first eight-minute installment, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick,
creators of "Thirtysomething" and executive producers of "My So-called Life,"
introduce us to those six characters. That's almost a minute per character,
tops, yet by the time those eight minutes are up, we not only know them all,
we already care about them all. That's impressive.

"Quarterlife" the title refers not only to the age of the central characters
but to a new social Web site being beta tested as the show opens. Dylan
Krieger, the central character, played by Bitsie Tulloch, starts the show
"Quarterlife" by signing on to the Web site quarterlife to share her innermost
thoughts. Only problem is, at first, she doesn't really have any.

(Soundbite of "Quarterlife")

Ms. BITSIE TULLOCH: (As Dylan Krieger) What--what is a blog? Why do we
blog? We blog to exist, therefore we...

We are idiots. Um. Argh! Blog, blog, blog, blog...

(End of soundbite)

Mr. BIANCULLI: Very quickly, though, Dylan finds her voice by speaking
honestly about herself, her friends and her job. Her voice turns out to be
very familiar. Remember Angela Chase, the 15-year-old played with such
beautiful vulnerability by Claire Danes in "My So-called Life"? Well, imagine
her 10 years older, working at a women's magazine, but at a very low-level,
uninspiring position. Dylan, like Angela, narrates her own life story. Dylan
is doing it in a video blog, but the observations are just as honest and
funny, even when she's talking about herself.

(Soundbite of "Quarterlife")

Ms. TULLOCH: (As Dylan Krieger) A sad truth about my generation is that we
were all geniuses in elementary school, but apparently the people who deal
with us never got our transcripts because they don't seem to be aware of it.

(End of soundbite)

Mr. BIANCULLI: Bitsie Tulloch is winningly believable in this role, and so
are her five young co-stars. Dylan's central universe consists of two female
roommates, one earnest and passionate, the other gorgeous and a little
clueless, and three male friends, two of whom are pitching their first idea
for an independently-produced car commercial. This close-knit group is made
up of wannabe writers, actors and directors, and their yearning doesn't end
there. Sometimes they yearn for each other, and Dylan, on her blog, reveals
it all.

(Soundbite of "Quarterlife")

Ms. TULLOCH: (As Dylan Krieger) It's my curse that I can see what people are
thinking, what they want to say and can't say, who they want to be with.

(Soundbite of music)

Ms. TULLOCH: (As Dylan Krieger) And what good does that do me if nobody can
see me?

(End of soundbite)

Mr. BIANCULLI: On the real-life Web site quarterlife, watching the show is
only the beginning. Fans also can logon, submit their own profiles and videos
and music clips and artwork, and even embrace the show's characters as their
official online friends.

One final twist: It's been reported that NBC, frantic for substitute
programming if this strike goes on as long as predicted, has talked to
Herskowitz and Zwick about re-packaging "Quarterlife" as a standard prime-time
hour. If that happens, you'll get a chance to see "Quarterlife" on TV. But
why wait?

And here's the question that really frightens me: If both the strike and
homemade Internet shows keep going and going and going, why watch TV at all?

GROSS: David Bianculli is the founder of tvworthwatching.com, and is its TV
critic.

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Review: Ken Tucker on "Raising Sand," a CD featuring Robert Plant
and Alison Krauss
TERRY GROSS, host:

Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and bluegrass performer Alison Krauss teamed up
for the first time on their new CD, "Raising Sand." The week it was released,
it debuted at number two on the Billboard pop chart, just behind Britney
Spears' new album. Rock critic Ken Tucker says the teaming of the hard rock
shouter and the trilling fiddle player is neither as artistically odd or as
commercially gimmicky as you might suspect.

(Soundbite of "Killing the Blues")

Mr. ROBERT PLANT and Ms. ALISON KRAUSS: (Singing in unison)
Leaves were falling
Just like embers
In colors red and gold
They set us on fire
Burning just like a moonbeam
In our eyes
Somebody said they saw me
Swinging the world by the tail
Bouncing over a white cloud
Killing the blues

(End of soundbite)

Mr. KEN TUCKER: It took me a few weeks to get around to playing "Raising
Sand." The marketing concept of matching a subdued Robert Plant with an
ethereal Alison Krauss produced with the predictably tasteful eclecticism of
T-Bone Burnett, well, the project smacked a tad too much of--you'll excuse the
expression--bait for baby boomers. Of which demo, to be sure, I count myself
a member. At any rate, my mistake. While "Raising Sand" is indeed
assiduously mannerly, mostly low-key and pretty, it's also starkly beautiful
with an undercurrent of bleak humor that makes the crucial difference in a
collection of harmony songs like this.

(Soundbite of "Stick with Me Baby")

Mr. PALMER and Ms. KRAUSS: (Singing in unison)
Everybody's been talking
They say our love wasn't real
That it would soon be over
That's not the way I feel
But I don't worry, honey
Let them say what they may
Come on and stick with me, baby,
We'll find a way
Yes, we'll find a way

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: That's Alison Krauss and Robert Plant doing a song that country
singer/songwriter Mel Tillis wrote for The Everly Brothers in 1960. Krauss
and Plant make the song sound like two lovers speaking from the grave, their
ghostly voices entwining to pledge eternal devotion.

The deeper you go into this album, the more interesting it becomes. For one
thing, the duo actually does not engage in much romantic by-play. This isn't
Sonny and Cher or even George and Tammy. The material they've chosen with
producer Burnett is often first person stuff, such as Gene Clark's 1969
country/rock song "Through the Morning, Through the Night," about a fella
who's telling his ex how empty she's left him, empty enough to think about
killing.

(Soundbite of "Through the Morning, Through the Night")

Ms. KRAUSS: (Singing) Believe me when I tell you
I will try to understand
Believe me when I tell you
I could never kill a man

Mr. PLANT and Ms. KRAUSS: (Singing in unison)
But to know that another man's holding you tight
Hurts me, little darling,
Through the morning, through the night

Ms. KRAUSS: The bond has...

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: Robert Plant has modulated his trademark wail before, of course,
both on Led Zeppelin albums and especially his solo work. And Krauss
specializes in this sort of subtle anguish.

Given T-Bone Burnett's knowledge of old-time country music, they probably
listened a fair amount to the brother harmonies of not just the Everlys, but
also the Stanley Brothers and the Osborne Brothers. Those acts shared an eery
fatalism found in songs on this album such as "Sister Rosetta Goes Before
Us." This was written by--not to confuse you, but just as a point of
interest--Burnett's ex-wife, Sam Phillips.

(Soundbite of "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us")

Ms. KRAUSS: (Singing) Strange things are happening
Every day
I hear the music up above my head
Though the sight of my heart has left me again,
I hear music up above

(End of soundbite)

Mr. TUCKER: What makes "Raising Sand" cohere is not merely the beauty of
Plant and Krauss's voices, but its openness to the strangeness of the world,
the way love rises up and vanishes, the way loneliness can fill a life with
obsession, the way, to paraphrase one song title here, loss can be a lesson--a
lesson in how to endure.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is editor at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
"Raising Sand," featuring Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.