"Pakistan will lose any conventional war with India": Former CIA officer John Kiriakou

In an interview with ANI, Kiriakou, who was in CIA for 15 years and was the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan, also said that the United States could have taken out Abdul Qadeer Khan (AQ Khan), who was deeply involved in Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme and was infamous for nuclear smuggling, if they had adopted Israeli approach but he had support of Saudi government who wanted him to be left alone.

India has said it will not tolerate Pakistan's nuclear blackmail and will respond decisively to any terror attack.

India has taken concerted action for terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir and carried out surgical strikes on terror launchpads across the LoC in 2016, Balakot airstrikes in 2019 and Operation Sindoor in May this year, when it targeted terror infrastructure in Pakistan and PoJK and repelled Islamabad's subsequent escalation by pounding its airbases.

Operation Sindoor was carried out in response to the Pahalgam terror attack in which 26 people were killed.

Kiriakou said when he was stationed in Pakistan in 2002, he was told unofficially that the Pentagon controlled the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

"That Musharraf had turned control over to the United States...But the Pakistanis in the intervening years, and remember, I was there 23 years ago...over the last 23 years, the Pakistanis have come to say that is absolutely not true. The United States has nothing to do with the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, that Pakistani generals are the ones who control it," he said.

Asked about his remarks about having been unofficially told that during his tenure that Pentagon controlled the Pakistani nuclear arsenal and if this information was shared with India, Kiriakou said he doubts it.

"I doubt that the Americans ever told India that the control of Pakistani nukes also lies with the US because of the vociferousness with which the Pakistanis have publicly maintained that they control their own nuclear weapons. But I can tell you definitively that the State Department was telling both sides -- if you're gonna fight, fight. Keep it short and keep it non-nuclear. If nuclear weapons are introduced, the whole world is going to change. And so I think there was restraint on both sides," Kiriakou said.

"Nothing, literally nothing good will come of an actual war between India and Pakistan because the Pakistanis will lose. It's as simple as that. They'll lose. And I'm not talking about nuclear weapons -- I'm talking just about a conventional war. And so there is no benefit to constantly provoking Indians," he added.

Kiriakou said while he was dealing specifically with counterterrorism, a colleague of his dealt with the issue of AQ Khan.

"If we had taken the Israeli approach, we would have just killed him. He was easy enough to find. We knew where he lived. We knew how he spent his day. But he also had the support of the Saudi government. And the Saudis came to us and said 'please leave him alone. We like AQ Khan. We're working with AQ Khan. We're close to the Pakistanis...Just leave him alone'. This was a mistake that the US government made, not confronting AQ Khan head on...," Kiriakou added.

In CIA, Kiriakou spent the first half of his career in analysis and the second half in counterterrorism operations.

In 2007, he blew "the whistle on the CIA's torture program in a nationally televised interview in the United States" and said "that the CIA was torturing its prisoners".

Kiriakou said charges against him were dropped, but he ended up spending 23 months in prison. He said he has "no regrets, no remorse" and "did the right thing". (ANI)