VCI BUREAU PDAS FORD COMPLIANCE DIPLOMACY

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 BANJUL 000441

SIPDIS

SENSITIVE
SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: PARM KNNP PREL TRGY XA EG
SUBJECT: VCI BUREAU PDAS FORD COMPLIANCE DIPLOMACY
CONSULTATION WITH EGYPT



1. (SBU) SUMMARY: VCI Bureau PDAS Christopher Ford
accompanied by Maher Tadros, Office of Nuclear Affairs, and
Eric Wong, U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, met June 30, 2006
with Egypt's Deputy Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs
Ambassador Taher Farahat in Banjul on the margins of the
Summit of the African Union. The purpose of the meeting was
to initiate consultative discussions on compliance policy and
compliance enforcement approaches. Both sides agreed upon
the importance of upholding the credibility of
nonproliferation regimes, and that there is a need to improve
ways to cooperate in addressing compliance issues.
Ambassador Farahat emphasized Egypt's commitment to arms
control and nonproliferation and stressed the importance of a
Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). PDAS
Ford emphasized the importance both to international security
and to international technology cooperation of ensuring
compliance with Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and
other nonproliferation regime rules, and discussed
initiatives to enhance peaceful use of nuclear technology,
CWC concerns, and lessons learned from past failures to
confront noncompliance clearly and effectively. Ford also
addressed issues raised by the Egyptian official regarding
disarmament progress. Ambassador Farahat invited PDAS Ford
for more detailed discussions in Egypt. END SUMMARY.


2. (SBU) PDAS Ford gave an overview of the Verification,
Compliance, and Implementation Bureau and its missions,
emphasizing that the purpose of this consultation was to
improve dialogue about how the U.S. and foreign partners can
work together to augment the international community's
ability to respond to compliance challenges within
nonproliferation regimes, and to raise the level of
understanding of appreciation for nonproliferation
obligations and compliance policy. He noted that although
the origins of U.S. verification and compliance policy
development lay in bilateral context of U.S.-Soviet
geopolitical rivalry, today's nonproliferation challenges are
multinational ones that concern all countries and not just
the major powers ) and that require all States Party to work
together effectively in compliance enforcement. This
"democratization" of verification and compliance, he said,
meant that all states have a responsibility, individually and
collectively, to exercise rigor and diligence in watching for
violations, and vigor and fortitude in combating
noncompliance. Ford outlined the "internal" and "external"
aspects of compliance policy, explaining that the former term
refers to the steps a country takes in order to ensure its
own compliance (e.g., enacting implementing legislation or
making declarations and meeting reporting requirements) while
the latter refers to collective efforts to address other
countries' inability or refusal to comply with theirs. He
pointed out that many countries have good intentions and wish
to comply fully, but may need assistance with, for example,
drafting legislation, declarations, or progress reports for
resolution 1540 compliance. Capacity-building and compliance
assistance, Ford explained, can help solve such problems.
External challenges due to unwillingness to comply, however,
are more troublesome ) and should be a first-order concern
of all States Party. Ford emphasized that all countries have
a stake in addressing such external compliance challenges in
part because the sharing of benefits under nonproliferation
regimes can only be assured if all countries comply with
rules designed to mitigate the proliferation dangers of
sharing technology. Threatening one part of a regime, he
told Farahat, threatens the whole regime, and all countries
should thus understand their interests in ensuring effective
compliance policy not only for security reasons (i.e.,
preventing neighbors from acquiring weapons of mass
destruction) but for technology-sharing reasons (i.e., in
support of the benefits of advanced technologies).


3. (SBU) Ambassador Farahat emphasized that external
challenges vary from region to region. In the Middle East,
he said, "one neighboring country" (he clearly meant Israel,
but did not say so explicitly) is believed to possess 200
nuclear weapons. Farahat said that instability in the region
due to the existence of nuclear, chemical, biological, or
even small arms affect all countries there. For this reason,
he continued, Egypt's policy for the last 20 years, has been
to promote arms control. He said the African Nuclear Weapons
Free Zone Treaty, signed in Cairo 40 years ago, is an example
of Egypt's approach to arms control, and that conclusion of a

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Middle East WMD-free zone is Egypt's policy and there was a
need to bridge the gap between the interests of all states in
the region. PDAS Ford replied that the U.S. also believed
the Middle East should have no weapons of mass destruction )
neither chemical and biological weapons, nor nuclear ones )
and that this should be achieved within an overall framework
for peace. With respect to Farahat's comments about nuclear
weapons in a "neighboring country," Ford added that unless
the international community is able to ensure by firm
compliance enforcement policy that NPT rules are followed,
there was little point in worrying about how to bring non-NPT
states into the regime. If compliance with Article II of the
NPT were in effect made optional, in other words, it would
become irrelevant whether or not today's non-parties accede
to the Treaty. For this reason, Ford emphasized, he hoped
and expected that countries such as Egypt, which worry about
alleged WMD programs in non-NPT states such as Israel, would
support firm compliance enforcement against NPT violators
such as Iran.


4. (SBU) Ambassador Farahat voiced concerns that the Chemical
Weapons Convention (CWC) could have a potentially harmful
effect upon a country,s industry. (Note: Egypt has not
signed the CWC.) Tadros then pointed out that such concerns
had fortunately not been borne out in practice, citing the
fact that, with 178 states party to the Treaty, no such
complaint has surfaced. To the contrary, Tadros suggested,
non-participation in the CWC had the potential to hurt trade
in industrial chemicals, because CWC States Party may be less
willing to trade with countries not subject to
nonproliferation rules and transparency obligations, and
because the export of certain chemicals to non States Party
is prohibited outright while transfers of another group of
chemicals to non-States Party must be reported to the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
Ford added that this illustrated a broader point about
nonproliferation regimes, in that both non-participation and
noncompliance inhibit trade and technology-sharing, thus
giving the developing world an additional stake in effective
regime-promotion and compliance policy. Farahat stated that
as a matter of principle Egypt supported the goals of the CWC
but due to the situation in the Middle East, with a nuclear
neighbor, Egypt should not be penalized twice.


5. (SBU) Farahat then returned to the NPT, and argued that
requiring the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
Additional Protocol (AP) would hurt the integrity of the
system as a whole by "raising the bar" for compliance. He
stated that peaceful use of nuclear energy is an important
pillar of the NPT, but complained that the behavior required
in order fully to participate was being raised. Farahat
then stated that disarmament (by the nuclear weapons states)
is also an important element under the NPT that did not meet
Egypt,s expectations because thousands of nuclear warheads
remain in existence.


6. (SBU) With regard to peaceful uses of nuclear energy,
PDAS Ford outlined the nuclear suppliers, recent initiative
) built upon President Bush,s February 2004
nonproliferation initiatives ) to provide reliable fuel
supplies for civilian power reactors in conjunction with
moves away from enrichment and reprocessing technology. He
also said that the AP was an important tool made necessary by
lessons learned in the early 1990s. Regarding disarmament
under the NPT,, Ford indicated that he was surprised that the
Ambassador seemed not to be aware of the dramatic progress
that had been made by the U.S. and Russia in moving away from
the huge arsenals and confrontational strategic posture of
the Cold War. Ford pointed out the progress that had been
made in recent years in eliminating many thousands of
warheads and hundreds of delivery systems ) including entire
classes of system ) and vast swathes of the infrastructure
needed to build Cold War nuclear arsenals. He noted that
Article VI of the NPT (the disarmament provision) requires
good faith negotiations toward disarmament, and said that the
United States was proud of its Article VI accomplishments and
wished they were more widely understood. Additionally, Ford
pointed out that only one P-5 country, China, was still
building up its strategic nuclear forces, yet this had
elicited not a word of public complaint from the Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM). Indeed, he observed, Article VI applied to
all NPT States Party, not merely to the nuclear weapons

BANJUL 00000441 003 OF 003


powers ) and it spoke not only to disarmament but to the
termination of nuclear arms races and the pursuit of general
and complete disarmament. Article VI's provision about
nuclear arms races, said Ford, underlined the point that
countries such as Egypt should join the United States in
pursuing effective compliance enforcement policies against
violators of NPT Article II, lest new nuclear arms races be
created. There was, therefore, a conceptual link between
Article II compliance policy and the Article VI obligations
of all States Party. Finally, with respect to the danger of
regional arms races, Ford reiterated to Farahat that
countries such as Egypt which are concerned about possible
Israeli nuclear weapons should ensure that others in the
Middle East, such as Iran, do not acquire such capabilities.
After all, said Ford, the surest way to convince Israel that
it must acquire nuclear weapons ) or that it could never
give them up once acquired ) would be to permit its hostile
neighbors to inaugurate an escalating spiral of nuclear
competition in the region. Egypt should thus understand that
it has a strong interest in supporting a firm compliance
enforcement strategy.


7. (SBU) Ambassador Farahat then said that the Iraqi
situation had left "a dent" in the verification system
leading Egypt to strongly believe in mechanisms such as the
IAEA. He went on to emphasize, however, that no country with
aggressive intentions should be permitted to acquire WMD.
Ford replied that perhaps Iran felt that it had learned a
lesson about the ineffectiveness of international compliance
enforcement policy when the international community did not
react to Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran during
the Iraq-Iran war. It was thus doubly important, therefore,
that the international community respond to today's
nonproliferation challenges quickly and firmly. Otherwise,
Ford said, tomorrow,s proliferators will also conclude that
nonproliferation regimes may indeed be violated at one,s
discretion.


8. (U) Farahat then described Egypt's approach to Africa's
problem with small arms and light weapons (SA/LW). He said
Egypt preferred to deprive non-state actors of the need to
acquire these arms by actively participating in solving
regional issues. This policy was based upon the principle
that "where there is a demand there is a supply." Ford
replied that he had heard a great deal from African
governments about verification and compliance issues related
to SA/LW, and appreciated the importance of these issues in
the region.


9. (U) The discussion concluded with Ambassador Farahat
inviting PDAS Ford to visit Egypt for more detailed
discussions with experts, and indicating that he will relay
the contents of this discussion to Egyptian officials.


10. (U) This message has been cleared by VCI Bureau PDAS
Christopher Ford.
STAFFORD