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Old Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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Arrow Worth Reading Articles from "The New York Times"

Musharraf Sets No Date to End Emergency Rule


By DAVID ROHDE and JANE PERLEZ
Published: November 12, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 11 — Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, appeared to yield to intense American pressure on Sunday by restoring parliamentary elections in early January, but he said his emergency decree would last at least through then, immediately raising new questions about the vote’s legitimacy.

American officials and General Musharraf’s most important political rival, the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, endorsed his announcement as a small step. Still, any election held when basic civil liberties have been scrapped could create new credibility problems for General Musharraf, who has become increasingly isolated politically, and for Ms. Bhutto, who returned to Pakistan from a life in exile to participate in the electoral process.

At a combative news conference where General Musharraf sweated visibly, he defended his Nov. 3 emergency decree as the tough decision-making of a selfless leader intent on saving his country from anarchy.

“I found myself between a rock and a hard surface,” said General Musharraf, who mostly spoke in English. “I have no egos, personal egos and no personal ambitions to guard.”

He also said he was committed to holding elections by Jan. 9.
But many opposition politicians and Western diplomats called the election date a ruse to ease the outcry against General Musharraf’s seizure of additional power. They questioned how Pakistan could have fair elections when his security forces have arrested 2,500 civilians, suspended the Constitution, blocked independent news channels and banned public gatherings.

“It’s an attempt at a sop,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol. “He’s looking to see whether simply announcing an election date will placate people.”

In another expansion of power, the government announced Saturday that it had amended an army law so that civilians could be prosecuted by military courts. The last time Pakistani civilians faced courts-martial was during the 11-year military dictatorship of Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, which ended in 1988.

In Baluchistan, the government said two politicians from the province, Mir Hasil Bizenjo and Yusuf Mastikhan, would be charged with treason for protesting emergency rule. Muhammad Ali Saif, a government legal adviser, said the burning of army uniforms by protesters would be prosecuted in military courts.

General Musharraf’s news conference was his first since proclaiming emergency powers, a move that has created global alarm about the political stability of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country where Islamic militants have been expanding their reach. But General Musharaff rejected demands at home and abroad to set a date for ending the emergency decree, which has effectively placed Pakistan under martial law.

Defiant and increasingly authoritarian, General Musharraf said the decree was precisely what was needed to fight the growing Islamic terrorism threat and “ensure absolutely fair and transparent elections.”

Raising his voice at times and showing flashes of anger, the normally poised general, who seized power from the last democratically elected government in a military coup eight years ago, spoke a day after President Bush described him as an ally America needed in the fight against Al Qaeda. Some Pakistanis felt General Musharraf was emboldened by President Bush’s embrace.

The general insisted that he remained popular in Pakistan. But he refused to specify a time when he would end the state of emergency, a step that American officials, including Mr. Bush, have repeatedly asked General Musharraf to take.

“I cannot give a date,” General Musharraf said. “We are in a difficult situation, therefore I cannot give a date.”

He also declined to give a date for stepping down as chief of the military, a move that the United States and other Western countries have requested as a sign of his seriousness about a transition back to democracy.

In Washington, American officials said that General Musharraf should be given more time. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised the announcement of an election date but called for an end to the state of emergency.

“The key is to take this in steps,” she said on the ABC News program “This Week.” “And the first step is to make certain that the state of emergency ends, to make sure that people can compete for free and fair elections for the Parliament.”

Ms. Bhutto, who is supported by Washington in her return to politics here, echoed Ms. Rice’s tone. She called General Musharraf’s announcement a “first, positive step” at a news conference in Lahore, the eastern city where she has threatened to lead a protest march on Tuesday.

Ms. Bhutto also said that holding fair elections under the state of emergency “seems to be difficult.” But she said she had “not shut the door” to talks with the Pakistani leader, perpetuating speculation that she and General Musharraf may be privately negotiating a power-sharing agreement.
The events on Sunday appeared to again place in jeopardy a troubled effort by American officials to unite General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto in an alliance to combat members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban who operate out of the country’s rugged northwest area adjoining Afghanistan.

Pakistani analysts say that General Musharraf’s popularity is plummeting and that a review of that idea is urgently needed.

“The U.S. administration is not willing to accept that Musharraf has messed up,” said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a leading political and defense analyst based in Lahore. “They don’t want to do any new thinking on Pakistan. At the highest level, they stick to their own framework.”

The analysts also warned that Ms. Bhutto, who has been advised by American officials not to rule out an agreement with General Musharraf, might taint herself by associating too closely with him. If she were elected under emergency rule, they said, she too would likely lose popular support.
“Over time, this simmering resentment and cynicism about her and her deal will undermine whatever elections results there are,” said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Studies. “The new generations want some respect for the country, a Pakistan that is in the mainstream of modern civilization.”

Western diplomats and Pakistani analysts questioned several aspects of General Musharraf’s performance at the news conference. Many of his statements, they said, were inaccurate or contradictory, and his demeanor was unusually tense.

“It was a pure defense of all his actions,” said Ikram Sehgal, a retired military officer and friend of General Musharraf’s who flew the helicopter used by the general’s commando unit. “He was not the same confident general I used to know.”

Dressed in a blue blazer and gray slacks instead of his customary military uniform, General Musharraf insisted throughout the news conference that he had not violated the Constitution. Instead, his declaration of emergency and suspension of the Constitution put the “derailed part of democracy back on the rail.”

He called the emergency decree “a bitter pill to swallow” and “no doubt that this was the most difficult decision I have ever taken in my life.” But his sole motivation, he said, was to save Pakistan from continued “turmoil and shock and confusion.”

The Pakistani leader spent 10 minutes giving a detailed accounting of corruption and abuse of power allegations against the chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who became highly popular in recent months for challenging General Musharraf’s authority. “Nobody is above the law, ladies and gentlemen,” General Musharraf said.

He said he had replaced Mr. Chaudhry after the emergency declaration to regain control of a court whose decisions left the country’s police forces “totally demoralized and shattered” and terrorists “encouraged.” Knowing that the move would lead to international condemnation, he said he went ahead with it anyway.

“I needed to take a decision in the interest of this nation, to preserve this nation, to safeguard it,” he said. “And risk myself.”
Opposition politicians have said the president acted because the Supreme Court was days away from ruling on the legality of his re-election last month. The verdict had been widely expected to declare General Musharraf ineligible to serve another term.

The country’s election commission, whose chairman General Musharraf appointed, will provide “absolutely aboveboard” election rules, he said, and opposition figures detained over the last week would be released and allowed to run in elections. But no one would be allowed to “disturb law and order,” he said, or “create anarchy in Pakistan in the name of election, in the name of democracy.”

Resigning his military post would sharply reduce General Musharraf’s power, according to Pakistani analysts. And many believe he will delay giving up the post as long as possible.

Defending the closing of independent television news stations, General Musharraf said he favored an independent press, but wanted safeguards on “defamation by design, distortion of facts, projecting nontruths, humiliation.”

“If the media is going to make heroes of terrorists,” he said at one point, “God save our battle against terrorism.”

Raising his voice, General Musharraf lectured journalists seated in the presidential building, complaining that the West did not understand Pakistan. He said foreign journalists overestimated Ms. Bhutto’s political support in Pakistan and that you “cannot impose sudden change.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/wo...html?th&emc=th
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  #2  
Old Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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Arrow Bhutto’s Persona Raises Distrust, as Well as Hope

Bhutto’s Persona Raises Distrust, as Well as Hope


By JANE PERLEZ
Published: November 11, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 10 — A day after she was barricaded in her home, surrounded by police officers and barbed wire, the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was quickly back to a world to which she is more accustomed on Saturday.

Ms. Bhutto’s supporters were beaten by the police Saturday as she arrived, in the white car, at the home of the ousted justice.
By the evening Ms. Bhutto was guest of honor at a high-flying diplomatic reception in the Parliament building here, greeting ambassadors and exchanging nods before television cameras, even as anxieties about the future of Pakistan, now entering its second week of de facto martial law, intensified at home and abroad.

If the sudden turnabout seemed incongruous with the troubles that have befallen her nation, it was telling of just how fluid the crisis here remains — and of how easily Ms. Bhutto moves from rallying her supporters on the streets to soaking up the trappings of power and ceremony with which she has long been familiar.

Such paradoxes have only added to the skepticism that swirls around her here, less than a month after her return from eight years in exile to avoid corruption charges. And it has added to the speculation that, tense as the situation remains, she and her old nemesis, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, may yet have enough ambition in common to run Pakistan together.

Ms. Bhutto, 54, returned to Pakistan to present herself as the answer to the nation’s troubles: a tribune of democracy in a state that has been under military rule for eight years, and the leader of the country’s largest opposition political party, founded by her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, one of Pakistan’s most flamboyant and democratically inclined prime ministers.

But her record in power, and the dance of veils she has deftly performed since her return — one moment standing up to General Musharraf, then next seeming to accommodate him, and never quite revealing her actual intentions — has stirred as much distrust as hope among Pakistanis.

A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, she brings the backing of Washington and London, where she impresses with her political lineage, her considerable charm and her persona as a female Muslim leader.

But with these accomplishments, Ms. Bhutto also brings controversy, and a legacy among Pakistanis as a polarizing figure who during her two turbulent tenures as prime minister, first from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996, often acted imperiously and impulsively.

She also faces deep questions about her personal probity in public office, which have resulted in corruption cases against her in Switzerland, Spain and Britain, as well as in Pakistan.

Ms. Bhutto has long seen herself as the inheritor of her father’s mantle, her colleagues say, and she has talked often about how he encouraged her to study the lives of legendary female leaders ranging from Indira Gandhi to Joan of Arc.

Following the idea of big ambition, Ms. Bhutto calls herself chairperson for life of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, a seemingly odd title in an organization based on democratic ideals and one she has acknowledged quarreling over with her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, in the early 1990s.

Saturday night at the diplomatic reception, Ms. Bhutto showed how she could aggrandize. Three million people came out to greet her in Karachi on her return last month, she said, calling it Pakistan’s “most historic” rally. In fact, crowd estimates were closer to 200,000, many of them provincial party members who had received small amounts of money to make the trip.

It is such flourishes that lead to questioning in Pakistan about the strength of her democratic ideals in practice, and a certain distrust, particularly amid signs of back-room deal-making with General Musharraf, the military ruler she is said to oppose.

“She believes she is the chosen one, that she is the daughter of Bhutto and everything else is secondary,” said Feisal Naqvi, a corporate lawyer in Lahore who knows Ms. Bhutto.

When Ms. Bhutto was re-elected to a second term as Prime Minister, her style of government combined both the traditional and the modern, said Zafar Rathore, a senior civil servant at the time.

But her view of the role of government differed little from the classic notion in Pakistan that the state was the preserve of the ruler who dished out favors to constituents and colleagues, he recalled.

As secretary of interior, responsible for the Pakistani police force, Mr. Rathore, who is now retired, said he tried to get an appointment with Ms. Bhutto to explain the need for accountability in the force. He was always rebuffed, he said.

Finally, when he was seated next to her in a small meeting, he said to her, “I’ve been waiting to see you,” he recounted. “Instantaneously, she said: ‘I am very busy, what do you want. I’ll order it right now.’“

She could not understand that a civil servant might want to talk about policies, he said. Instead, he said, “she understood that when all civil servants have access to the sovereign, they want to ask for something.”

Today Ms. Bhutto still rules the party with an iron hand, jealously guarding her position, even while leading the party in absentia for nearly a decade.

While Ms. Bhutto has managed to maintain much of her freedom of movement this week, her biggest rival in the party, Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers’ movement against General Musharraf, was jailed on the first night of the emergency rule.

Mr. Ahsan is a Cambridge University-educated lawyer who served in her father’s cabinet, and then hers, and he defended Ms. Bhutto in a series of corruption cases in the early 1990s.

But in an illustration of Ms. Bhutto’s attitude to competition, he was quickly frozen out by Ms. Bhutto after he was introduced around Washington last year as a possible counterbalance to General Musharraf, senior members of the party said.

Mr. Ahsan’s wife, Bushra Ahsan, said Ms. Bhutto, a frequent e-mailer who is addicted to her Blackberry, failed to congratulate her husband when he won the case to reinstate the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in July.

Both men have spearheaded the resistance to General Musharraf’s military rule this year at great personal risk.

When Mr. Ahsan won election as the leader of the Supreme Court Bar Association this month, again he heard nothing from Ms. Bhutto, Ms. Ahsan said. “She has not shown any approval of my husband,” Ms. Ahsan said.

Members of her party who have rallied around Ms. Bhutto on her return argue that she has attributes in Pakistan’s sparse political landscape that make her the best choice against General Musharraf. Chief among them, they say, is sheer determination.

“I’ve tried to suggest to her that Musharraf is not willing to share power,” said Syeda Abida Hussain, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington. “If he can dodge the world, why can’t he dodge you?” Ms. Hussain said she asked Ms. Bhutto.

But in returning to Pakistan, Ms. Bhutto believed that it was possible to join General Musharraf in some kind of transition to democracy, she said.

Of Ms. Bhutto’s personal qualities, Ms. Hussain said: “I see her as a vulnerable, hurt person. She’s a chilly, imperial person. She’s firm.”

In the last few months, as she has prepared her comeback, Ms. Bhutto has attended a swirl of public and private events, including a black-tie dinner for 150 at the Royal Air Force Club in London, and she has sought to bring her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, back into the public fold.

Ms. Bhutto’s marriage to Mr. Zardari was arranged by her mother, a fact that Ms. Bhutto has often said was easily explained, even for a modern, highly educated Pakistani woman.

To be acceptable to the Pakistani public as a politician she could not be a single woman, and what was the difference, she has asked, between such a marriage and computer dating?

Ms. Hussain, the former ambassador, described Mr. Zardari as “a warm-hearted fool,” who lacked Ms. Bhutto’s education. He is known for his love of polo and other perquisites of the good life like fine clothes, expensive restaurants, homes in Dubai and London, and an apartment in New York.

He was minister of investment in Ms. Bhutto’s second government. And it was from that perch that he made many of the deals that have haunted the couple in the courts, said a former prosecutor general at the National Accountability Court, Farooq Adam Khan, who in 2000 headed the body set up to investigate corruption among public officials.

In an interview, he said the court believed the couple had illegally taken $1.5 billion from the state. It is a figure that Ms. Bhutto has vigorously contested.

Indeed, one of Ms. Bhutto’s main objectives in seeking to return to power is to restore the reputation of her husband, who was jailed for eight years in Pakistan, said Abdullah Riar, a former senator in the Pakistani Parliament and a former colleague of Ms. Bhutto’s.

“She told me, ‘Time will prove he is the Nelson Mandela of Pakistan,’” Mr. Riar said.

One of Ms. Bhutto’s informal advisers is a longtime friend, Peter W. Galbraith, a former senior staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a former American ambassador to Croatia.

Mr. Galbraith said he and Ms. Bhutto believed they first met in 1962 when they were children: he the son of John Kenneth Galbraith, the American ambassador to India; she the daughter of the future Pakistani prime minister. Mr. Galbraith’s father was accompanying Jacqueline Kennedy to a horse show in Lahore.

They met again at Harvard, where Mr. Galbraith remembers Ms. Bhutto arriving as a prim 16-year-old fresh from a Karachi convent who liked to bake cakes.

Cohabitation — with Ms. Bhutto as prime minister and General Musharraf as president — made a lot of sense for Ms. Bhutto and the Bush administration before last week, Mr. Galbraith said.

As prime minister, Ms. Bhutto would not be able to control the military, the institution that mattered most in Pakistan, he said. But she would confer legitimacy to a government that has seen its authority steadily erode under General Musharraf.

By this weekend, with General Musharraf giving little sign of when he would let up on his emergency powers, Ms. Bhutto was straddling a fine line, Mr. Galbraith said.

“Now,” he said, “Benazir can only cohabit with him at great cost to her legitimacy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/wo...html?th&emc=th
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Old Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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Arrow Pakistan Detains Bhutto in Bid to Stop Protest March

Pakistan Detains Bhutto in Bid to Stop Protest March


By DAVID ROHDE and JANE PERLEZ
Published: November 13, 2007

LAHORE, Pakistan, Tuesday, Nov. 13 — The Pakistani government placed the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest on Monday for seven days. The move was an attempt to block a planned “long march” of her supporters from this eastern city to the capital, Islamabad.

Relatives of a man who was killed in a bomb attack last month in Karachi wait in Lahore yesterday for a visit by Benazir Bhutto.

Police officers arrested hundreds of workers from her political party around this city on Tuesday. Riot police officers were deployed outside government buildings here as well, in anticipation of protests by Ms. Bhutto’s supporters.

It was unclear what Ms. Bhutto would do in response to the government’s move. Dozens of police officers surrounded the house where she was staying here. On Friday, a huge police presence in the city of Rawalpindi prevented a rally planned by her there.

A government spokesman, Tariq Azim Khan, citing intelligence data, suggested that Ms. Bhutto could be a target for militants.

She survived a suicide-bombing attack last month in Karachi when she returned to Pakistan, after eight years in self-imposed exile, to lead her party in parliamentary elections. Although there is widespread agreement that a threat to her exists, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is widely seen here as using the specter of terrorism to expand his own powers and squelch all opposition. Ms. Bhutto had vowed to go ahead with the protest before the order on Monday, issued by Punjab Province.

The government, now nine days into an emergency decree that has effectively put Pakistan under martial law, would stop the protest in the same way it shut down a rally that had been planned by Ms. Bhutto on Friday, Mr. Khan said.

On that day, in a huge show of force, lines of policemen, barbed wire and concrete barricades confined Ms. Bhutto to her home in Islamabad. At the same time, thousands of police officers locked down the site where the rally was to have taken place, in a park in Rawalpindi, the garrison city close to Islamabad.

Mr. Khan said he did not know the details of how the police would prevent protesters from converging on the route of the planned march this week, 160 miles through Punjab Province from Lahore to Islamabad.

About 140 of Ms. Bhutto’s party workers were killed in the attack in Karachi on Oct. 18. The government has used that attack as public justification for stopping her protests. It has also made clear that any demonstrations are illegal under the emergency decree.

The decree has also cast uncertainty on parliamentary elections, scheduled for January.

Two of Pakistan’s bigger opposition parties said Monday that they would probably boycott the elections if emergency rule was still in place. Ms. Bhutto has not said whether she would pull her party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, out of the election.

General Musharraf, said Sunday that the elections would be held in January and that emergency rule would continue at least until then.

On Sunday, Ms. Bhutto called the announcement a “positive” but insufficient step. She assumed a slightly tougher tone on Monday, suggesting that her negotiations with General Musharraf had come to an end.

“We cannot work with anyone who has suspended the Constitution, imposed emergency rule and oppressed the judiciary,” she said in Lahore.

Raza Zafarul Haz, the chairman of one of the country’s biggest parties, the Pakistan Muslim League of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said that for free and fair elections to go ahead, emergency rule would have to be lifted and judges who were fired after the imposition of the rule would need to be reinstated.

“Under the current circumstances it is very difficult to expect there will be fair elections in the country,” Mr. Haz said. His party will make its final decision within a week on whether to participate, he said.

Liaqat Baloch, the secretary general of Pakistan’s most popular Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, said the party was considering withholding its candidates if the emergency was still in place in January.

Despite Ms. Bhutto’s tougher comments on Monday, analysts said they believed she had not completely moved away from her original plan, devised with the backing of the Bush administration, to seek a power-sharing deal with General Musharraf.

As the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, which has usually commanded about a third of the popular vote, Ms. Bhutto is trying to steer a path between a desire to return to power and not to appear to be too close to the widely unpopular president.

Ms. Bhutto was prime minister of Pakistan twice and was twice dismissed before she was able to complete her terms.

She spent part of Monday at the house of a lawmaker from her party in Lahore, meeting party aides. Separately, foreign ministers from the Commonwealth of Britain and its former colonies said Pakistan would be suspended from the organization unless the state of emergency was repealed and General Musharraf stepped down as army chief by Nov. 22, The Associated Press reported.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/wo...kistan.html?hp
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Old Thursday, November 15, 2007
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Arrow Rebuffing U.S., Musharraf Calls Crackdown Crucial to a Fair Vote

Rebuffing U.S., Musharraf Calls Crackdown Crucial to a Fair Vote


By CARLOTTA GALL, DAVID ROHDE and JANE PERLEZ
Published: November 14, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 13 — Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, on Tuesday rejected an appeal by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to lift his state of emergency, insisting in an interview that it was the best way to ensure free and fair elections.

He vigorously defended the emergency decree issued 10 days earlier that suspended the Constitution, dismissed the Supreme Court, silenced independent news stations and resulted in the arrests of at least 2,500 opposition party workers, lawyers and human rights advocates.
“I totally disagree with her,” General Musharraf said in an interview with The New York Times at the presidential building here in the capital. “The emergency is to ensure elections go in an undisturbed manner.” He said Sunday that elections would go ahead by Jan. 9.

Dressed in a dark business suit rather than his military uniform, General Musharraf spoke in a confident tone, saying the decree was justified because the Supreme Court had questioned the validity of his re-election, and because of the seriousness of threats from terrorists. He refused to say when he would step down as army leader and become a civilian president, a demand that President Bush has made publicly and, in a telephone call last week, privately. “It will happen soon,” he said.

General Musharraf, who has been criticized as being increasingly isolated and receiving poor advice from a shrinking circle of aides, insisted he was in touch with the mood of Pakistanis. Dismissing consistent reports that a vast majority of Pakistanis oppose his emergency decree, he said he had information from “several organizations” and feedback from politicians and friends that the move was popular.

“I know what they feel about the emergency when all these suicide bombings were taking place,” he said, speaking of the rising number of suicide bombings in Pakistan. “Their view is, Why have I done it so late.” He sharply criticized the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, saying she was confrontational and would be difficult to work with. Ms. Bhutto returned to Pakistan last month in a deal brokered by the Bush administration, which hoped that the two could find a way to share power, in order to increase public support for General Musharraf’s increasingly unpopular military government.

The understanding was that she would take part in elections that could make her prime minister, while he would run for re-election as president. Instead, they have engaged in increasingly public sparring, and Ms. Bhutto has come in for criticism that she is an American pawn who is not mounting serious opposition to the general. Early Tuesday, 900 police officers surrounded the house where Ms. Bhutto was staying in the eastern city of Lahore, preventing her from leading a march to Islamabad to protest what opposition groups say is martial law. After waiting for more than a week, on Tuesday she joined other opposition leaders and called for General Musharraf to resign.

“You come here on supposedly on a reconciliatory mode, and right before you land, you’re on a confrontationist mode,” he said in the interview, conducted in English. “I am afraid this is producing negative vibes, negative optics.” As for her demand that he resign, he said “she has no right” to ask.

On Nov. 3, General Musharraf imposed emergency rule when it became clear that the Supreme Court was about to declare his re-election last month illegal. That election was carried out by the national and provincial assemblies and boycotted by many opposition parties, though not by Ms. Bhutto’s.
After a more compliant court was impaneled this week, General Musharraf said he expected to be sworn in as a civilian president after the new court validated his re-election. But asked when emergency rule would end, he said matter-of-factly, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” He said Pakistan was suffering from a “disturbed terrorist environment,” and he appeared to be unaffected by calls from Europe as well as the United States for an end to the emergency rule.

Instead, the general, whose government has received more than $10 billion in aid from the Bush administration, mostly for the military, asked for even more support, and more patience. The Bush administration has called the general the best bet to fight Al Qaeda and Islamic militants, but has also complained that the cooperation of the Pakistani military has been sporadic and often ineffective.

Analysts here and abroad have said that the state of emergency has diverted thousands of police and intelligence agents from the fight against terrorism to the enforcement of the crackdown. But General Musharraf said the decree had done no such thing. “If we are dealing with moderates, that doesn’t mean that we are not dealing with terrorists,” he said. “Who has said that? They are two different issues.”

He said his army was limited in its resources for taking on the militants. “Ten days back, of 20 Cobra helicopters, we have only one that was serviceable,” he said. “We need more support.” His army even needed help from the United States on efforts to shut down the FM radio signal of a leading pro-Taliban religious leader, Maulana Fazlullah, whose militant followers have been rapidly gaining territory in the area of Swat in the North-West Frontier Province.
“You give us the technical means to do it,” he said. “We’ve tried everything.”
“We’ve adopted all technical means,” he added, but so far his forces have failed to squelch the imam’s transmissions, which are believed to be fairly amateurish.

Militant activity in the rugged northwest has increased markedly this year, raising questions among Pakistanis about how American money for the army was being used. General Musharraf said the army had now regrouped in northern and southern Waziristan, where it faced the strongest challenge from the militants, whom he called a “vicious enemy.”

“Now wherever the disturbance, we will strike very, very strongly,” he said.
In Washington, Bush administration officials said privately that they were increasingly frustrated with both General Musharraf and Ms. Bhutto. Administration officials said they were quietly trying to take the temperature of Pakistan’s army for signs that General Musharraf’s top officers were starting to turn cool toward him.

“It’s not a question of trying to prompt anything,” one senior official said. “We’re just trying to make sure we’re keeping tabs of all the concerned parties.”

Ms. Rice, meanwhile, is dispatching John D. Negroponte, her deputy, to Pakistan for a face-to-face meeting with General Musharraf, they said. The envoy, who last week called the general “indispensable” to American interests, is expected to arrive in Islamabad at the end of the week.

But other administration officials fretted that Mr. Negroponte’s efforts may yield as little as the phone calls from his boss, Ms. Rice, and her boss, President Bush.

Officials at both the White House and the State Department also said they were worried that Ms. Bhutto had overplayed her hand in calling for General Musharraf to resign, and that she may no longer be able to accept an olive branch from him on a power-sharing deal, should he decide to extend one.
General Musharraf said Ms. Bhutto had been placed under house arrest because she had accused the chief minister of the province of Punjab, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi, of plotting against her.

The detention, he said, was to prevent an incident that she could then use to lay blame on the government. He added that her plan for her party members to participate in the march across the Punjab to Islamabad was “a preposterous thing to do.”

General Musharraf questioned Ms. Bhutto’s popularity, and at one point scanned an article she recently wrote for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that he had brought to the interview. In reaction to her claim that her party would most likely sweep parliamentary elections, the general said, “Let’s start the elections, and let’s see whether she wins.”

“Constitutionally today she has been prime minister twice,” he said. “What about the third time? She is not legally allowed; she is not constitutionally allowed. Why are we taking things for granted?”

Western governments and Western news media, he said, have overestimated Ms. Bhutto’s support because they listen too much to human rights advocates in Pakistan.

“You go and meet human rights activists,” he said, challenging his interviewers. “Ninety percent of them may have never cast their votes. They sleep on the day of elections.”

General Musharraf said 58 privately owned television channels in Pakistan that had been closed under the emergency decree — including a dozen independent news stations — would be allowed to open if they agreed to a government code of conduct.

“The media is independent,” General Musharraf said. “We have taken certain actions against the media because we want to bring some responsibility to them.”

Journalists and Western diplomats have condemned the code as a blatant attempt at political censorship. The code carries a jail sentence of up to three years for journalists whose coverage “ridicules” the president or other government officials, they said. Regarding his opponents other than Ms. Bhutto, General Musharraf yielded no ground.

Asked why Asma Jahangir, who heads the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, had been arrested when she attended a meeting at the commission’s headquarters on the first day of emergency rule, he replied, “Because she was agitating and trying to disturb the peace.”

General Musharraf said Ms. Jahangir, the leading human rights advocate in Pakistan and one of the first women to become a lawyer, was too ambitious in her fight for women’s rights. He agreed that Pakistani women deserved more opportunities, and he cited his own legislation amending the laws to protect women against accusations of rape and adultery.

But Ms. Jahangir, he said, wanted to go too fast, and would therefore fail. He called her “quite an unbalanced character.”
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Arrow Bhutto Calls for President to Resign

Bhutto Calls for President to Resign


By DAVID ROHDE and JANE PERLEZ - Nov 14, 2007

LAHORE, Pakistan, Nov. 13 — Hundreds of riot policemen blocked the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and her supporters from setting out today on a planned march from Lahore across 160 miles of Punjab Province to the capital, Islamabad.

Ms. Bhutto, barricaded in her home here, called for the resignation of Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in a telephone interview with CNN this morning. She told a group of reporters by telephone that her political party, which usually commands about one-third of the popular vote, will probably boycott the parliamentary elections planned for January, The Associated Press reported.

Ms. Bhutto told CNN that she and her party, the Pakistan People’s Party, were not in discussions with General Musharraf, either directly or indirectly, over a possible power-sharing agreement, which the United States had urged the two sides to reach.

Instead, Ms. Bhutto told the group of reporters, her party will pursue an alliance with other opposition groups, including its main rival, the Pakistan Muslim League of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to restore democracy.About 900 police officers surrounded the house where Ms. Bhutto is staying here. Workers from her political party who tried to cross police lines to reach her were arrested. Riot policemen sealed off the neighborhood using barbed wire and dump trucks loaded with sand.

Early in the day, a party spokesman, Farzana Raja, told reporters, “We will definitely try to come out,” and added about Ms. Bhutto, “She will definitely try to come out.” Minutes later, the police arrested Ms. Raja and several dozen other party workers. Ms. Bhutto said in the telephone interview, “My plans have been taken out of my hands by force.”

Some 3,500 police officers were deployed around Lahore, and they arrested hundreds of Pakistan People’s Party workers. Riot police were stationed outside government buildings here as well, in anticipation of protests by Ms. Bhutto’s supporters. The government has moved repeatedly to head off mass demonstrations planned by Ms. Bhutto and her party. The city of Rawalpindi was flooded with police on Friday to prevent a rally there, and on Monday, the government placed Ms. Bhutto under house arrest for seven days.

Other opposition groups have accused her of mounting only token protests while negotiating with General Musharraf. But a party vice-president, Yousuf Arza Giani, stood in front of police barriers today and told reporters that the party had broken off all talks with the government. “It’s really bad, extremely bad,” he said.

A government spokesman, Tariq Azim Khan, citing intelligence reports, suggested that Ms. Bhutto could be a target for militants. She survived a suicide-bombing attack on her motorcade last month in Karachi when she returned to Pakistan, after eight years in self-imposed exile, to lead her party in parliamentary elections.

While it is generally agreed that a threat to her safety exists, though, General Musharraf is widely seen here as using it, and the larger specter of terrorism, as a pretext to expand his own powers and squelch all opposition. Officials of Ms. Bhutto’s party scoffed at the notion of an imminent threat. “It’s a drama — there is no reality to it,” a local spokeswoman said today.

The attack on Oct. 18 in Karachi killed about 140 party workers. The government has used that attack as public justification for stopping demonstrations, which it says are illegal under General Musharraf’s emergency-rule decree.

The Muslim League and another important opposition party, the Jamaat-e-Islaami, said on Monday that they would probably boycott the elections if emergency rule was still in place. General Musharraf said on Sunday that emergency rule would continue at least until the elections are held.
Ms. Bhutto was prime minister of Pakistan twice and was twice dismissed before she was able to complete her terms. In the CNN interview, she reiterated her desire to stay in the country. “I prefer to live in Pakistan in jail,” she said, “than to leave.”

Separately, foreign ministers from the Commonwealth of Britain and its former colonies said Pakistan would be suspended from the organization unless the decree was repealed and General Musharraf stepped down as army chief by Nov. 22, The Associated Press reported.
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Arrow U.S. Is Looking Past Musharraf in Case He Falls

Plz go through the article below and understand the political dilema of Pakistan and need of time to voice for the restoration of constitution. Now it is said internationally that Pak - Army has lost its place and they are failed to curb the insurgency even under the rule of emergency. We have to realize that Youth is the biggest power of this nation and till they are not joining hands for democracy in the country dictators like Musharaf would put our solidarity on stake. Plz give it a reading and think for a while that how we can do something for our dearest Pakistan.....?

U.S. Is Looking Past Musharraf in Case He Falls


By HELENE COOPER, MARK MAZZETTI & DAVID ROHDE
Published: Nov 15, 2007

WASHINGTON, Nov. 14 — Almost two weeks into Pakistan’s political crisis, Bush administration officials are losing faith that the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can survive in office and have begun discussing what might come next, according to senior administration officials.

In meetings on Wednesday, officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon huddled to decide what message Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte would deliver to General Musharraf — and perhaps more important, to Pakistan’s generals — when he arrives in Islamabad on Friday.

Administration officials say they still hope that Mr. Negroponte can salvage the fractured arranged marriage between General Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. But in Pakistan, foreign diplomats and aides to both leaders said the chances of a deal between the leaders were evaporating 11 days after General Musharraf declared de facto martial law.

Several senior that with each day that passed, more administration officials were coming around to the belief that General Musharraf’s days in power were numbered and that the United States should begin considering contingency plans, including reaching out to Pakistan’s generals.

More than a dozen officials in Washington and Islamabad from a number of countries spoke on condition of anonymity because of the fragility of Pakistan’s current political situation. The doubts that American officials voiced about whether General Musharraf could survive were more pointed than any public statements by the administration, and signaled declining American patience in advance of Mr. Negroponte’s trip.

Officials involved in the discussions in Washington said the Bush administration remained wary of the perception that the United States was cutting back-room deals to install the next leader of Pakistan. “They don’t want to encourage another military coup, but they are also beginning to understand that Musharraf has become part of the problem,” said one former official with knowledge of the debates inside the Bush administration.

That shift in perception is significant because for six years General Musharraf has sought to portray himself, for his own purposes, as the West’s best alternative to a possible takeover in Pakistan by radical Islamists.

While remote areas in northwestern Pakistan remain a haven for Al Qaeda and other Islamic militants, senior officials at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon now say they recognize that the Pakistani Army remains a powerful force for stability in Pakistan, and that there is little prospect of an Islamic takeover if General Musharraf should fall.

If General Musharraf is forced from power, they say, it would most likely be in a gentle push by fellow officers, who would try to install a civilian president and push for parliamentary elections to produce the next prime minister, perhaps even Ms. Bhutto, despite past strains between her and the military.
Many Western diplomats in Islamabad said they believed that even a flawed arrangement like that one was ultimately better than an oppressive and unpopular military dictatorship under General Musharraf.

Such a scenario would be a return to the diffuse and sometimes unwieldy democracy that Pakistan had in the 1990s before General Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup.

But the diplomats also warned that removing the general might not be that easy. Army generals are unlikely to move against General Musharraf unless certain “red lines” are crossed, such as countrywide political protests or a real threat of a cutoff of American military aid to Pakistan.

Since he invoked emergency powers on Nov. 3, General Musharraf has successfully used a huge security crackdown to block large-scale protests. Virtually all major opposition politicians have been detained, as well as 2,500 party workers, lawyers and human rights activists, and on Wednesday, a close aide to General Musharraf said the Pakistani leader remained convinced that emergency rule should continue.

Pakistan’s cadre of elite generals, called the corps commanders, have long been kingmakers inside the country. At the top of that cadre is Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, General Musharraf’s designated successor as army chief. General Kayani is a moderate, pro-American infantry commander who is widely seen as commanding respect within the army and, within Western circles, as a potential alternative to General Musharraf.

General Kayani and other military leaders are widely believed to be eager to pull the army out of politics and focus its attention purely on securing the country.

Senior administration officials in Washington said they were concerned that the longer the constitutional crisis in Pakistan continued, the more diverted Pakistan’s army would be from the mission the United States wants it focused on: fighting terrorism in the country’s border areas.

The officials said there was growing worry in Washington that the situation unfolding in the mountainous region of Swat, where Islamic militants sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda are battling Pakistan’s Army, was a sign that General Musharraf — and the Pakistani Army — might be too busy jailing political opponents to fight militants.

The administration officials said they were also dismayed that General Musharraf last week released 25 militants in exchange for 213 soldiers captured by militants in August, and agreed to withdraw soldiers from certain areas of South Waziristan.

Since spring, concern has been growing in the armed forces that General Musharraf’s battle to remain in power and his recent political blunders have cost him popularity with the public and damaged the reputation of the armed forces, Western and Pakistani military analysts say.

The army’s poor performance battling militants in the country’s rugged tribal areas in the northwest has placed enormous strain on the army as well. Hundreds of soldiers have died, dozens have surrendered without a fight and militants have carried out beheadings to demoralize the force.

“The army is getting more and more concerned and worried and disturbed,” said Talat Masood, a retired general and political analyst. “They have a genuine engagement in the tribal belt of Frontier Province and Baluchistan,” he said, referring to armed clashes. “And now they have such a major confrontation between the military and civil sectors of society, and the lines are getting sharper.”

While the military supports the emergency, it is doing so with caution, and there are red lines the army will not cross, Western military officials in Pakistan said. “Kayani is loyal to Musharraf,” said one Western military official. “But also to Pakistan.”

One red line the military would probably not be prepared to cross would be if it were called on to maintain internal security anywhere beyond the areas of the insurgency. If widespread political protests were to emerge, the army could be called out to enforce law and order.

While no large-scale protests have emerged since the emergency was declared, the apparent collapse over the last week of American-backed talks to create a power-sharing deal between Ms. Bhutto and General Musharraf could lead to more street confrontations, diplomats said.
As General Musharraf has refused to lift his emergency declaration, lawmakers in Washington have stepped up threats to freeze aid payments to Islamabad.

“There is widespread disapproval in Congress of these actions,” said Representative Nita M. Lowey, a New York Democrat who is on the House Appropriations Committee. “As long as the emergency rule continues, I don’t know if we can provide direct cash assistance to the Musharraf government.”

But other top Democrats say they are wary about endorsing cuts in aid, citing concern that it could undermine efforts to fight Al Qaeda in Pakistan. And the Western military official in Pakistan warned that an aid cutoff could anger Pakistan’s army.


Other experts argue that pressure could build on General Musharraf if the corps commanders believed that the president’s actions threatened the $1 billion in annual aid Washington provides to Pakistan’s military.

“The military is pretty demoralized right now,” said Christine Fair, a Pakistan analyst in Washington. “But what keeps Musharraf in the position he is in with the military is the huge largess from the United States.”
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Arrow Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem

Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem


By FREDERICK W. KAGAN and MICHAEL O’HANLON
Published: November 18, 2007
Washington

AS the government of Pakistan totters, we must face a fact: the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss. Nor would it be strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq to cope with a deteriorating one in Pakistan. We need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that.

We do not intend to be fear mongers. Pakistan’s officer corps and ruling elites remain largely moderate and more interested in building a strong, modern state than in exporting terrorism or nuclear weapons to the highest bidder. But then again, Americans felt similarly about the shah’s regime in Iran until it was too late.

Moreover, Pakistan’s intelligence services contain enough sympathizers and supporters of the Afghan Taliban, and enough nationalists bent on seizing the disputed province of Kashmir from India, that there are grounds for real worries.

The most likely possible dangers are these: a complete collapse of Pakistani government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the vacuum; a total loss of federal control over outlying provinces, which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism.

All possible military initiatives to avoid those possibilities are daunting. With 160 million people, Pakistan is more than five times the size of Iraq. It would take a long time to move large numbers of American forces halfway across the world. And unless we had precise information about the location of all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and materials, we could not rely on bombing or using Special Forces to destroy them.

The task of stabilizing a collapsed Pakistan is beyond the means of the United States and its allies. Rule-of-thumb estimates suggest that a force of more than a million troops would be required for a country of this size. Thus, if we have any hope of success, we would have to act before a complete government collapse, and we would need the cooperation of moderate Pakistani forces.

One possible plan would be a Special Forces operation with the limited goal of preventing Pakistan’s nuclear materials and warheads from getting into the wrong hands. Given the degree to which Pakistani nationalists cherish these assets, it is unlikely the United States would get permission to destroy them. Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place.

For the United States, the safest bet would be shipping the material to someplace like New Mexico; but even pro-American Pakistanis would be unlikely to cooperate. More likely, we would have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops. It is realistic to think that such a mission might be undertaken within days of a decision to act. The price for rapid action and secrecy, however, would probably be a very small international coalition.

A second, broader option would involve supporting the core of the Pakistani armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in the face of an ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership. This would require a sizable combat force — not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations.

Even if we were not so committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western powers would need months to get the troops there. Fortunately, given the longstanding effectiveness of Pakistan’s security forces, any process of state decline probably would be gradual, giving us the time to act.

So, if we got a large number of troops into the country, what would they do? The most likely directive would be to help Pakistan’s military and security forces hold the country’s center — primarily the region around the capital, Islamabad, and the populous areas like Punjab Province to its south.

We would also have to be wary of internecine warfare within the Pakistani security forces. Pro-American moderates could well win a fight against extremist sympathizers on their own. But they might need help if splinter forces or radical Islamists took control of parts of the country containing crucial nuclear materials. The task of retaking any such regions and reclaiming custody of any nuclear weapons would be a priority for our troops.

If a holding operation in the nation’s center was successful, we would probably then seek to establish order in the parts of Pakistan where extremists operate. Beyond propping up the state, this would benefit American efforts in Afghanistan by depriving terrorists of the sanctuaries they have long enjoyed in Pakistan’s tribal and frontier regions.

The great paradox of the post-cold war world is that we are both safer, day to day, and in greater peril than before. There was a time when volatility in places like Pakistan was mostly a humanitarian worry; today it is as much a threat to our basic security as Soviet tanks once were. We must be militarily and diplomatically prepared to keep ourselves safe in such a world. Pakistan may be the next big test.

Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/op...html?th&emc=th
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Arrow Bush Failed to See Musharraf’s Faults, Critics Contend

Bush Failed to See Musharraf’s Faults, Critics Contend


By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: November 18, 2007

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 — In the six years since Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, joined President Bush in the fight against Al Qaeda, it has been an unlikely partnership: a president intent on promoting democracy and a military commander who seized power in a bloodless coup.

Mr. Bush has repeatedly called Gen. Musharraf “a friend.” In 2003, the president invited the general to Camp David, a presidential perk reserved for the closest of allies. Last year, at the general’s insistence, Mr. Bush risked a trip to Pakistan, jangling the nerves of the Secret Service by spending the night in the country presumed to be home to Osama bin Laden.

But now that the general has defied the White House, suspending Pakistan’s Constitution and imposing emergency rule, old tensions are flaring anew. Mr. Bush is backing away from the leader he once called a man of “courage and vision,” and critics are asking whether the president misread his Pakistani counterpart.

They said Mr. Bush — an ardent believer in personal diplomacy, who once remarked that he had looked into the eyes of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and had gotten “a sense of his soul” — was taken in by the general, with his fluent English and his promises to hold elections and relinquish military power. They said Mr. Bush looked at General Musharraf and saw a democratic reformer when he should have seen a dictator instead.

“He didn’t ask the hard questions, and frankly, neither did the people working for him,” said Husain Haqqani, an expert on Pakistan at Boston University who has advised two previous Pakistani prime ministers, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. “They bought the P.R. image of Musharraf as the reasonable general. Bush bought the line — hook, line and sinker.”


White House aides said Mr. Bush is clear-eyed about his pact with the general, a pact that was sealed on a Saturday evening in November 2001, over an intimate dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. They had just met face-to-face for the first time, during a meeting of the United Nations, and, despite past tensions between their countries, an air of cozy familiarity filled the room.

“It was a lovely dinner, very sociable,” said Wendy J. Chamberlin, the former ambassador to Pakistan, who attended. “I wasn’t nervous, because I knew Musharraf and I knew how charming he is, and I could see that they would get along fine. And besides, the mood was exuberant. Musharraf was like a conquering hero, Musharraf had done the right thing. He was the man of the day.”

Today, the general is hardly the man of the day. On Saturday, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte — who was the host at the Waldorf dinner as the ambassador to the United Nations then — met with General Musharraf and pushed him to end Pakistan’s state of emergency. Back in Washington, Mr. Bush was close-mouthed, saying little about the man he once praised as “a courageous leader and friend of the United States.”

The two have spoken just once, on Nov. 7 by telephone, in the two weeks since General Musharraf imposed de facto military rule. Mr. Bush, who initiated the call, termed it “a very frank discussion” — Washington code for a pointed airing of differences.

“My message was very, very plain, very easy to understand,” the president said. “And that is: the United States wants you to have elections as scheduled and take your uniform off.”


The “Bush-Mush relationship,” as some American scholars call it, has always been complicated, more a bond of convenience than a genuine friendship, some experts said. When he was running for office in 2000, Mr. Bush didn’t even know General Musharraf’s name; he couldn’t identify the leader of Pakistan for a reporter’s pop quiz during an interview that was widely replayed on late-night television.

Relations between the nations had been tense over Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions even before Mr. Bush took office, and American aid to Pakistan had been all but cut off. But Sept. 11 threw the United States and Pakistan together. Mr. Bush demanded General Musharraf’s allegiance in pursuing Al Qaeda — and got it. General Musharraf demanded military aid that could help him maintain power — and got it.

Experts in United States-Pakistan relations said General Musharraf has played the union masterfully, by convincing Mr. Bush that he alone can keep Pakistan stable. Kamran Bokhari, an analyst for Stratfor, a private intelligence company, who met with General Musharraf in January, said the general viewed Mr. Bush with some condescension.

“Musharraf thinks that Bush has certain weaknesses that can be manipulated,” Mr. Bokhari said, adding, “I would say that President Musharraf doesn’t think highly of President Bush, but his interests force him to do business with the U.S. president.”

In his autobiography, “In the Line of Fire,” General Musharraf writes glowingly of the trust Mr. Bush placed in him. But he passed up a chance to praise Mr. Bush on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” where he was promoting the book. Mr. Stewart asked who would win a hypothetical contest for mayor of Karachi, Mr. Bush or Mr. bin Laden.

“I think they’ll both lose miserably,” the general replied.

Mr. Bush, by contrast, was “favorably impressed” with General Musharraf, according to Ari Fleischer, the president’s former press secretary. Mr. Fleischer recounted one session where the general had been warned in advance not to ask the president for F-16 fighter jets, because the answer would be no. “Musharraf brought it up anyway,” Mr. Fleischer said, “and Bush told him the answer is no. But I think Bush liked the fact that he does what he wants to do, and says what’s on his mind.”

Their ties have not always helped General Musharraf; critics in Pakistan have accused him of being a tool of the United States, and derisively call him “Busharraf.” In Washington, Mr. Bush has faced criticism as well, from those who say he should have been tougher on General Musharraf, especially with top Al Qaeda operatives like Osama bin Laden still on the loose.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, said one of Mr. Bush’s biggest mistakes was not pressing General Musharraf to turn over A. Q. Khan, the former chief of Pakistan’s nuclear program, to American interrogators.

“I don’t see that the Bush administration was wrong in 2001 to put its chips on Musharraf, who promised democracy and who promised to take off his uniform, but something has gone very badly wrong,” Mr. Holbrooke said, adding, “The question is, is this because Bush was soft on Musharraf the way he was soft on Putin?”

As the state of emergency drags on, the administration has begun thinking about alternatives to General Musharraf, and is reaching out to generals who might replace him. Mr. Haqqani, the Boston University professor, and Ms. Chamberlin, the former ambassador, said the effort was long overdue. Mr. Haqqani has been cautioning the administration for years not to “personalize this relationship,” while Ms. Chamberlin said it is a mistake to view General Musharraf as indispensable. “Our relationship with the army and with the people of Pakistan is indispensable,” she said, “but it is not based on one man.”

Yet, having declared General Musharraf a friend and an ally, Mr. Bush is not ready to give up on him. The president places a high premium on loyalty; when top aides like Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, and Alberto R. Gonzales, the former attorney general, disappointed him, he was reluctant to cut them loose. So it is with General Musharraf.

“President Musharraf made a decision the president didn’t agree with,” said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary. “We are disappointed with it, but the president doesn’t want to pre-emptively throw up his hands. He wants to help him get back on track.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/wa...html?th&emc=th
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Arrow Musharraf Refuses to Say When Emergency Will End

Musharraf Refuses to Say When Emergency Will End


By DAVID ROHDE
Published: November 18, 2007

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Sunday, Nov. 18 — Continuing to defy the United States, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, declined to tell a senior American envoy on Saturday when he would lift a two-week-old state of emergency, Pakistani and Western officials said.

In a two-hour meeting, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte urged the president to end the emergency. But General Musharraf said he would do so when security improved in the country, the officials said. Mr. Negroponte is the United States’ second highest ranking diplomat.

“The president said, ‘I have noted your concerns and I think I will address all of these,’ ” a close aide to General Musharraf said.

In a news conference before he left Pakistan on Sunday, Mr. Negroponte said it would take time to determine whether the American message had an impact.

“In diplomacy, as you know, we don’t get instant replies,” he said. “I’m sure the president is seriously considering the exchange we had.”


The state of emergency remains a major embarrassment for the Bush administration, which has given more than $10 billion in aid to General Musharraf’s government since 2001 and declared him a valued ally. Ten days ago, President Bush personally telephoned General Musharraf and asked him to end the state of emergency, with no result.

The Bush administration has also pushed for General Musharraf, who is army chief as well as president, to resign from his military post. The general has said he will, but not until the Supreme Court certifies his re-election last month to a five-year term as president, which opposition groups say was illegal.


In addition to meeting with General Musharraf, Mr. Negroponte met twice with Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the deputy commander of Pakistan’s army and General Musharraf’s designated successor to head the army. The time and attention paid to General Kayani, a pro-Western moderate, seemed to signal American support for him. Mr. Negroponte met with General Kayani for an hour on Saturday morning. Then, Mr. Negroponte had a two-hour dinner with General Kayani and Tariq Aziz, a close aide to General Musharraf. General Kayani is widely believed to want to remove the military from politics and to focus on securing the country.

On Nov. 3, General Musharraf declared emergency rule, blacked out independent news stations and began a crackdown that led to the arrest of an estimated 2,500 opposition politicians, lawyers and human rights activists. The move, which General Musharraf has said is an effort to curb terrorism, is widely seen by Pakistanis as an effort by the increasingly unpopular ruler to cling to power.

Mr. Negroponte said he had urged the Pakistani leader to end the emergency, release all political prisoners, resign from his post as army chief and hold free and fair elections in January.

“Emergency rule is not compatible with free and fair elections,” Mr. Negroponte said at the news conference. “The people of Pakistan deserve the opportunity to choose their leaders.”

In a sign of General Musharraf’s growing isolation, the secretary general of the main political party backing him called Saturday for an end to the emergency. The leader, Mushahid Hussain, said that ending the state of emergency would cause “less tension, less political conflict and less polarization.”

“The national interest would be better served,” Mr. Hussain said in an interview with Dawn News, a Pakistani television channel. “The emergency has been having a very negative impact, both at home and abroad.”

A poll in late August and early September by the International Republican Institute, a Washington-based group that conducts democratic training programs overseas, found that 70 percent of Pakistanis supported General Musharraf”s immediate resignation. His popularity is believed to have decreased further since the declaration on Nov. 3.

Western diplomats say they believe that Pakistan’s army still supports General Musharraf, but that there is unease with his leadership. With the army facing a growing insurgency from Islamic militants in the northwest, generals are eager to have an army chief who is focused solely on military matters, they said.

Twice in Pakistan’s history, senior generals have asked military rulers to resign when their conduct was deemed damaging to the army. So far, no signs have emerged that General Kayani or other leaders have asked General Musharraf to step aside.

Mr. Negroponte held a series of meetings that seemed intended to revive an alliance between General Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto, an opposition politician and former prime minister.

On Friday, Mr. Negroponte telephoned Ms. Bhutto. He then met Mr. Aziz, the Musharraf aide who served as a back-channel negotiator in an effort to broker a deal between the president and Ms. Bhutto.

American officials hoped that Ms. Bhutto’s presumed popularity in Pakistan would bolster General Musharraf’s low standing. The state of emergency decree seems to have scuttled any deal, for now.

European diplomats and Pakistani analysts have long questioned the viability of an American-engineered Bhutto-Musharraf alliance. Any government they form would be viewed as a United States puppet, they said, and be unpopular.

In the September opinion survey, only 28 percent of Pakistanis polled named Ms. Bhutto as the best person to handle the problems facing Pakistan, out of seven choices. Seventeen percent named General Musharraf. Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister who is in exile in Saudi Arabia and refuses to negotiate with General Musharraf, received the highest marks, with 36 percent support.

The poll of about 4,000 Pakistanis had a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

Also on Saturday, hundreds of Pakistani journalists in three cities protested the president’s continuing crackdown on the media.

In the days before Mr. Negroponte’s arrival, the government allowed several independent news stations to resume broadcasting on cable television, but they operate under a strict new law that carries a sentence of up to three years in jail for journalists who “ridicule” the president.
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Arrow U.S. Secretly Aids Pakistan in Guarding Nuclear Arms

U.S. Secretly Aids Pakistan in Guarding Nuclear Arms


By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: November 18, 2007

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 — Over the past six years, the Bush administration has spent almost $100 million on a highly classified program to help Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, secure his country’s nuclear weapons, according to current and former senior administration officials.

But with the future of that country’s leadership in doubt, debate is intensifying about whether Washington has done enough to help protect the warheads and laboratories, and whether Pakistan’s reluctance to reveal critical details about its arsenal has undercut the effectiveness of the continuing security effort.

The aid, buried in secret portions of the federal budget, paid for the training of Pakistani personnel in the United States and the construction of a nuclear security training center in Pakistan, a facility that American officials say is nowhere near completion, even though it was supposed to be in operation this year.

A raft of equipment — from helicopters to night-vision goggles to nuclear detection equipment — was given to Pakistan to help secure its nuclear material, its warheads, and the laboratories that were the site of the worst known case of nuclear proliferation in the atomic age.

While American officials say that they believe the arsenal is safe at the moment, and that they take at face value Pakistani assurances that security is vastly improved, in many cases the Pakistani government has been reluctant to show American officials how or where the gear is actually used.

That is because the Pakistanis do not want to reveal the locations of their weapons or the amount or type of new bomb-grade fuel the country is now producing.

The American program was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration debated whether to share with Pakistan one of the crown jewels of American nuclear protection technology, known as “permissive action links,” or PALS, a system used to keep a weapon from detonating without proper codes and authorizations.

In the end, despite past federal aid to France and Russia on delicate points of nuclear security, the administration decided that it could not share the system with the Pakistanis because of legal restrictions.

In addition, the Pakistanis were suspicious that any American-made technology in their warheads could include a secret “kill switch,” enabling the Americans to turn off their weapons.

While many nuclear experts in the federal government favored offering the PALS system because they considered Pakistan’s arsenal among the world’s most vulnerable to terrorist groups, some administration officials feared that sharing the technology would teach Pakistan too much about American weaponry. The same concern kept the Clinton administration from sharing the technology with China in the early 1990s.

The New York Times has known details of the secret program for more than three years, based on interviews with a range of American officials and nuclear experts, some of whom were concerned that Pakistan’s arsenal remained vulnerable. The newspaper agreed to delay publication of the article after considering a request from the Bush administration, which argued that premature disclosure could hurt the effort to secure the weapons.

Since then, some elements of the program have been discussed in the Pakistani news media and in a presentation late last year by the leader of Pakistan’s nuclear safety effort, Lt. Gen. Khalid Kidwai, who acknowledged receiving “international” help as he sought to assure Washington that all of the holes in Pakistan’s nuclear security infrastructure had been sealed.

The Times told the administration last week that it was reopening its examination of the program in light of those disclosures and the current instability in Pakistan. Early this week, the White House withdrew its request that publication be withheld, though it was unwilling to discuss details of the program.

In recent days, American officials have expressed confidence that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is well secured. “I don’t see any indication right now that security of those weapons is in jeopardy, but clearly we are very watchful, as we should be,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference on Thursday.

Admiral Mullen’s carefully chosen words, a senior administration official said, were based on two separate intelligence assessments issued this month that had been summarized in briefings to Mr. Bush. Both concluded that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was safe under current conditions, and one also looked at laboratories and came to the same conclusion.

Still, the Pakistani government’s reluctance to provide access has limited efforts to assess the situation. In particular, some American experts say they have less ability to look into the nuclear laboratories where highly enriched uranium is produced — including the laboratory named for Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man who sold Pakistan’s nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

The secret program was designed by the Energy Department and the State Department, and it drew heavily from the effort over the past decade to secure nuclear weapons, stockpiles and materials in Russia and other former Soviet states. Much of the money for Pakistan was spent on physical security, like fencing and surveillance systems, and equipment for tracking nuclear material if it left secure areas.

But while Pakistan is formally considered a “major non-NATO ally,” the program has been hindered by a deep suspicion among Pakistan’s military that the secret goal of the United States was to gather intelligence about how to locate and, if necessary, disable Pakistan’s arsenal, which is the pride of the country.

“Everything has taken far longer than it should,” a former official involved in the program said in a recent interview, “and you are never sure what you really accomplished.”

So far, the amount the United States has spent on the classified nuclear security program, less than $100 million, amounts to slightly less than one percent of the roughly $10 billion in known American aid to Pakistan since the Sept. 11 attacks. Most of that money has gone for assistance in counterterrorism activities against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The debate over sharing nuclear security technology began just before then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was sent to Islamabad after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the United States was preparing to invade Afghanistan.

“There were a lot of people who feared that once we headed into Afghanistan, the Taliban would be looking for these weapons,” said a senior official who was involved. But a legal analysis found that aiding Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program — even if it was just with protective gear — would violate both international and American law.

General Musharraf, in his memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” published last year, did not discuss any equipment, training or technology offered then, but wrote: “We were put under immense pressure by the United States regarding our nuclear and missile arsenal. The Americans’ concerns were based on two grounds. First, at this time they were not very sure of my job security, and they dreaded the possibility that an extremist successor government might get its hands on our strategic nuclear arsenal. Second, they doubted our ability to safeguard our assets.”

General Musharraf was more specific in an interview two years ago for a Times documentary, “Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?” Asked about the equipment and training provided by Washington, he said, “Frankly, I really don’t know the details.” But he added: “This is an extremely sensitive matter in Pakistan. We don’t allow any foreign intrusion in our facilities. But, at the same time, we guarantee that the custodial arrangements that we brought about and implemented are already the best in the world.”

Now that concern about General Musharraf’s ability to remain in power has been rekindled, so has the debate inside and outside the Bush administration about how much the program accomplished, and what it left unaccomplished. A second phase of the program, which would provide more equipment, helicopters and safety devices, is already being discussed in the administration, but its dimensions have not been determined
.


Harold M. Agnew, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory, which designed most of the United States’ nuclear arms, argued that recent federal reluctance to share warhead security technology was making the world more dangerous.

“Lawyers say it’s classified,” Dr. Agnew said in an interview. “That’s nonsense. We should share this technology. Anybody who joins the club should be helped to get this.”

“Whether it’s India or Pakistan or China or Iran,” he added, “the most important thing is that you want to make sure there is no unauthorized use. You want to make sure that the guys who have their hands on the weapons can’t use them without proper authorization.”

In the past, officials say, the United States has shared ideas — but not technologies — about how to make the safeguards that lie at the heart of American weapons security. The system hinges on what is essentially a switch in the firing circuit that requires the would-be user to enter a numeric code that starts a timer for the weapon’s arming and detonation.

Most switches disable themselves if the sequence of numbers entered turns out to be incorrect in a fixed number of tries, much like a bank ATM does. In some cases, the disabled link sets off a small explosion in the warhead to render it useless. Delicate design details involve how to bury the link deep inside a weapon to keep terrorists or enemies from disabling the safeguard.


The most famous case of nuclear idea sharing involves France. Starting in the early 1970s, the United States government began a series of highly secretive discussions with French scientists to help them improve the country’s warheads.

A potential impediment to such sharing was the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bars cooperation between nations on weapons technology.

To get around such legal prohibitions, Washington came up with a system of “negative guidance,” sometimes called “20 questions,” as detailed in a 1989 article in Foreign Policy. The system let United States scientists listen to French descriptions of warhead approaches and give guidance about whether the French were on the right track.

Nuclear experts say sharing also took place after the cold war when the United States worried about the security of Russian nuclear arms and facilities. In that case, both countries declassified warhead information to expedite the transfer of safety and security information, according to federal nuclear scientists.

But in the case of China, which has possessed nuclear weapons since the 1960s and is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Clinton administration decided that sharing PALS would be too risky. Experts inside the administration feared the technology would improve the Chinese warheads, and could give the Chinese insights into how American systems worked.

Officials said Washington debated sharing security techniques with Pakistan on at least two occasions — right after it detonated its first nuclear arms in 1998, and after the terrorist attack on the United States in 2001.

The debates pitted atomic scientists who favored technical sharing against federal officials at such places as the State Department who ruled that the transfers were illegal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and under United States law.

In the 1998 case, the Clinton administration still hoped it could roll back Pakistan’s nuclear program, forcing it to give up the weapons it had developed. That hope, never seen as very realistic, has been entirely given up by the Bush administration.

The nuclear proliferation conducted by Mr. Khan, the Pakistani metallurgist who built a huge network to spread Pakistani technology, convinced the Pakistanis that they needed better protections.

“Among the places in the world that we have to make sure we have done the maximum we can do, Pakistan is at the top of the list,” said John E. McLaughlin, who served as deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, and played a crucial role in the intelligence collection that led to Mr. Khan’s downfall.


“I am confident of two things,” he added. “That the Pakistanis are very serious about securing this material, but also that someone in Pakistan is very intent on getting their hands on it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/wa...html?th&emc=th
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