WASHINGTON, 26 September 2006 — Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf came to America full of surprises, and now for a second time in a week, he has the Bush administration squirming — this time due to allegations the CIA paid Pakistan millions of dollars for hundreds of Al-Qaeda prisoners.
Gen. Musharraf’s memoir, In the Line of Fire, was launched in New York. According to The Times of London, which is serializing the book, the CIA paid an unspecified amount for 369 Al-Qaeda suspects from a fund that was earmarked for individuals — not foreign governments — who helped capture terrorists.
In the book, Gen. Musharraf says he was so angry about US demands after Sept. 11, 2001, that he “war-gamed” the US as an adversary. He wrote: “The question was: If we do not join them, can we confront them and withstand the onslaught? The answer was: No.”
Last week, Musharraf embarrassed the US by claiming that soon after Sept. 11 the then Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if it did not cooperate in the war against terrorism.
However, in an interview aired Sunday on 60 Minutes in the US, he said Armitage did not make the threat directly to him.
“The director of intelligence told me that he (Armitage) said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed, be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,”’ Gen. Musharraf told 60 Minutes.
“It will be noted that Musharraf made these comments while he is beginning a book tour,” Armitage said. “I think you have ample reason to see why he might want to use this language. I think it probably sells books.”
Yesterday, however, Armitage admitted having “a very strong conversation” with Pakistan’s intelligence chief after the Sept. 11 attacks but denied threatening to bomb the country.
Armitage repeated denials that he had threatened US bombing of Pakistan when he spoke to Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, who was head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency at the time, and said he thought it likely that his message had been misunderstood by Musharraf.
“This conversation (on bombing) never happened,” Armitage told a forum in Seoul, saying he believed the intelligence chief had given an “inflammatory” account of the exchange to President Pervez Musharraf.
“I had a very strong conversation with the intelligence chief,” Armitage said in answer to a question at the forum.
“I told him that for Americans this was a black and white issue. Pakistan was either with us or against us, that US-Pakistan history would begin on that day.”
Armitage said he asked Ahmed to report back to Musharraf and come to see him the next day and that “if they agreed to help, then I would give them a list of requirements that were not negotiable. So it was a strong presentation.”
The White House said it was not US policy to threaten Pakistan after Sept. 11 because it was seeking Islamabad’s cooperation against the Taleban, which was sheltering Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
Although Musharraf says his book counteracts claims Pakistan is not doing enough in the fight against terrorism, his comments have fuelled suspicions his country is a reluctant ally.
Gen. Musharraf also denied there had been cooperation from within Pakistan’s military to sell nuclear weapons secrets to North Korea, Libya and Iran. He blamed Abdul Qadeer Khan, the scientist who sold the secrets, who, he said, was motivated by “ego, satisfaction and money.”
After being confronted by the then CIA director, George Tenet, with proof that Pakistan’s nuclear secrets were being sold, Gen. Musharraf sacked Qadeer Khan as his science adviser. Qadeer confessed to running a nuclear proliferation ring, and Gen. Musharraf pardoned him. The general said the Pakistani people would not tolerate a long trial and jail sentence for a man who was considered a hero of Pakistan, “because he’s given us the atom bomb”.
Apart from 60 Minutes, Gen. Musharraf has scheduled a round of interviews with US television shows.
Musharraf, in his book also said, his best guess is that Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Kunar.
Musharraf also wrote that he thought Taleban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was most likely to be close to his original base in southern Afghanistan, where NATO forces are facing fierce resistance from insurgents.
Musharraf, who has survived at least two Al-Qaeda inspired assassination attempts, listed a number of successes in tracking, capturing or killing members of Bin Laden’s network. One of the most important catches he described was that of a Pakistani computer engineer, whose capture in July 2004 he said led to numerous other arrests and uncovered plans to bomb Heathrow Airport and London’s subway system.
Information gathered from this prisoner, who British officials were allowed to see, also revealed links to Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, two of the British-born Muslims who carried out suicide bomb attacks on London’s transport system a year later, Musharraf wrote.
— With input from agencies
