Bush buried Musharraf's al-Qaeda links
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON
- Pervez Musharraf's resignation as Pakistan's president on Monday brings to an
end an extraordinarily close relationship between Musharraf and the George W
Bush administration, in which Musharraf was lavished with political and
economic benefits from the United States despite policies that were in sharp
conflict with US security interests.
It is well known that Bush repeatedly praised Musharraf as the most loyal ally
of the United States against terrorism, even though the Pakistani military was
deeply compromised by its relationship with the Taliban and Pakistani Islamic
militants.
What has not been reported is that the Bush administration
covered up the Musharraf regime's involvement in the activities of the Abdul
Qadeer Khan nuclear technology export program and its deals with al-Qaeda's
Pakistani tribal allies.
The problem faced by the Bush administration when it came into office was that
the Pakistani military, over which Musharraf presided, was the real terrorist
nexus with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
As Bruce Riedel, National Security Council (NSC) senior director for South Asia
in the Bill Clinton administration, who stayed on the NSC staff under the Bush
administration, observed in an interview with this writer last September,
al-Qaeda "was a creation of the jihadist culture of the Pakistani army".
If there was a state sponsor of al-Qaeda, Riedel said, it was the Pakistani
military, acting through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Vice President Dick Cheney and the neo-conservative-dominated Bush Pentagon
were aware of the intimate relationship between Musharraf's regime and both the
Taliban and al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda was not a high priority for the Bush
administration.
After 9/11, the White House created the political myth that Musharraf, faced
with a clear choice, had "joined the free world in fighting the terrorists".
But as Asia expert Selig S Harrison has pointed out, on September 19, 2001,
just six days after he had supposedly agreed to US demands for cooperation
against the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda, Musharraf gave a televised speech in
Urdu in which he declared, "We are trying our best to come out of this critical
situation without any damage to Afghanistan and the Taliban."
In his memoirs, published in 2006, Musharraf revealed the seven specific
demands he had been given and claimed that he had refused both "blanket
overflight and landing rights" and the use of Pakistan's naval ports and air
bases to conduct anti-terrorism operations.
Musharraf also famously wrote that, immediately after 9/11, under secretary of
state Richard Armitage had threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age"
if Musharraf didn't side with the United States against Osama bin Laden and his
Afghan hosts. But Armitage categorically denied to this writer, through his
assistant, Kara Bue, that he had made any threat whatsoever, let alone a threat
to retaliate militarily against Pakistan.
For
the next few years, Musharraf played a complicated game. The Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) was allowed to operate in Pakistan's border provinces
to pursue al-Qaeda operatives, but only as long as they had ISI units
accompanying them. That restricted their ability to gather intelligence on the
northwest frontier. At the same time, the ISI was allowing Taliban and al-Qaeda
leaders to operate freely in the tribal areas and even in the southern port
city of Karachi.
The Bush administration also gave Musharraf and the military regime a free ride
on the Khan network's selling of nuclear technology to Libya and Iran, even
though there was plenty of evidence that the generals had been fully aware of
and supported Khan's activities.
Journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins wrote in their book The Nuclear
Jihadist that one retired general who had worked with Khan told them
there was no question that Khan had acted with the full knowledge of the
military leadership. "Of course the military knew," the general said. "They
helped him."
But the Bush administration chose to help Musharraf cover up that inconvenient
fact. According to CIA director George Tenet's memoirs, in September 2003, he
confronted Musharraf with the evidence the CIA had gathered on Khan's operation
and made it clear he was expected to end its operations and arrest Khan.
The following January and early February, Khan's house arrest, public
confession of guilt and pardon by Musharraf was accompanied by an extraordinary
series of statements by high-ranking Bush administration officials exonerating
Musharraf and the military of any involvement in Khan's activities.
That whole scenario had been "carefully orchestrated with Musharraf", Larry
Wilkerson, then a State Department official but later Colin Powell's chief of
staff, told Inter Press Service in an interview last year. The deal that had
been made did not require Musharraf to allow US officials to interrogate Khan.
But the Bush administration apparently conveyed to the Pakistani military after
that episode that it now expected the Musharraf regime to deliver high-ranking
al-Qaeda officials - and to do so at a particularly advantageous moment for the
administration. The New Republic magazine reported July 15, 2004, that a White
House aide had told the visiting head of ISI, Ehsan ul-Haq, "It would be best
if the arrest or killing of any HVT [high-value target] were announced on 26,
27 or 28 July." Those were the last three days of the Democratic National
Convention.
The military source added, "If we don't find these guys by the election, they
are going to stick the whole nuclear mess up our a**hole."
Just hours before Democratic candidate John Kerry's acceptance speech, Pakistan
announced the capture of an alleged al-Qaeda leader.
Meanwhile, Musharraf was making a political pact with a five-party Islamic
alliance in 2004 to ensure victory in state elections in the two border
provinces where Islamic extremist influence was strongest. This explicit
political accommodation, followed by a military withdrawal from South
Waziristan, gave the pro-Taliban forces allied with al-Qaeda in the region a
free hand to recruit and train militants for war in Afghanistan.
Yet another deal with the Islamic extremists in 2006 strengthened the
pro-Taliban forces even further.
But Bush chose to reward Musharraf by designating Pakistan a "Major Non-NATO
Ally" in 2004 and by agreeing to sell the Pakistani Air Force 36 advanced F-16
fighter planes. Prior to that, Pakistan had been denied US military technology
for a decade.
In July 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that al-Qaeda's new
"safe haven" was in Pakistan's tribal areas and that the terrorist organization
had reconstituted its "homeland attack capability" there. That estimate ended
the fiction that the Musharraf regime was firmly committed to combating
al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
Had the Bush administration accurately portrayed Musharraf's policies rather
than hiding them, it would not have avoided the al-Qaeda safe haven there. But
it would have facilitated a more realistic debate about the real options
available for US policy.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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