Despite the occasional slip, the Bush-Musharraf pact is stronger than ever, writes Graham Usher in Islamabad With typical candour, Pakistan's General-President Pervez Musharraf last week revealed what helped persuade him, post-9/ 11, to effect a 180-degree turn in Pakistan's relations with the Taliban. Pakistan's "intelligence director told me that (then United States deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage) said, 'be prepared to be bombed, be prepared to go back to the stone age,'" Musharraf told CBS "60 minutes" news programme. "I think it was a very rude remark," he added. So apparently does Armitage. "Never did I threaten to use any military force; I wasn't authorised to," he told CNN on 22 September. What he did tell Pakistan's intelligence head, however, casts as much light on how Washington defines a proper relationship with those it deems its suborns, especially after it has been attacked. "I told him that -- for Americans -- this was black or white, that Pakistan was either with us fully or not... He started telling me about the history of Pakistan-Afghan relations. I cut him off and said, 'history starts today, general'." The general got the drift. Within hours he severed all ties with the Taliban, opened up Pakistan's ground and airspace to American forces and became one of the principal executors in the hunt for Al-Qaeda "in the interests of the nation", as he put it on CBS. And history began anew. Having been the illegal military dictator of a rogue state, Musharraf is today seen by the White House as "a strong defender of freedom" in the "war on terrorism", including by Armitage. The most favoured status was on display in Washington on 22 September when, for the second time this year, Musharraf met George Bush. By all accounts it was an "excellent" meeting, with each man showering superlatives on the other. "We trust each other," said Musharraf. "He has been a strong and forceful leader with courage," said Bush. But there was an edge to the camaraderie. In 2001 Musharraf embraced Bush out of absolute weakness. Last week it was as though the roles had been reversed. In a flying visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan in June, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was apparently outraged by a ceasefire Musharraf wanted to bring about with pro-Taliban tribesmen in Pakistan's restive North Waziristan region, bordering Afghanistan. So far from crushing the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda supporters, she saw the deal as empowering them, with nothing but verbal guarantees that militant infiltration into Afghanistan would be stopped. On 5 September an agreement along precisely these lines was initialled by the governor of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province and "the tribal elders of North Waziristan, local mujahideen, Tulaba (religious students or Taliban) and Ulema of the Utmanzai tribes". Yet this was how Bush apprised the agreement on 22 September. "When President [Musharraf] looks me in the eye and says the tribal deal is intended to reject the Talibanisation of the people and there won't be a Taliban and there won't be Al-Qaeda, I believe him... and we'll let the tactics speak for themselves," he said. What brought the change? One reason is Washington's belated recognition of the depth of the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan and the fact that the writ of Hamad Karzai's government does not run much beyond Kabul. "Plainly spooked" (according to one observer) by what she heard in June, Rice vowed, "we are not going to leave", threw her weight behind NATO's enlarged troop deployments and reversed earlier decisions to cut the numbers of US soldiers in Afghanistan, at least until the beginning of next year. It may have also brought the realisation that Pakistan's exclusively military campaigns against the Taliban in Waziristan had failed and that Musharraf's advocacy of a more political approach should be tried. The second recognition was of what Musharraf says is the gravest threat to his rule, which is neither Al-Qaeda nor the Taliban, but the Talibanisation of Pakistan's tribal agencies bordering Afghanistan. South Waziristan is already under the thrall of a dozen or so Islamist-jihadi outfits, including the local Pakistan Taliban and foreigner Al-Qaeda, "who openly recruit, rescue the wounded and dispatch fighters to Afghanistan," according to one local. There were fears that North Waziristan was going the same way. Unlike the south, the local Taliban are united under the leadership of Mullah Omar, who reportedly approved the 5 September "ceasefire on the grounds that his people should save themselves for the 'jihad' in Afghanistan rather than in operations against the Pakistan army", says the source. He sees the agreement as Musharraf's attempt to restore some of the authority of his governor and the traditional, pro-government elders in North Waziristan. "It's difficult to see what alternative he had," he shrugs. Washington would seem to agree, without being convinced that the agreement is anything more than temporary reprieve. Rather, the more Iraq and Afghanistan implode, the more Washington sees Pakistan, Musharraf and the military regime he heads as "key pivots" in the war against "global terrorism", says Pakistan security analyst Nasim Zehra. This is perhaps why Bush spent such a long time lauding Musharraf's "courage", such a short time on the hope "that there would be free and fair elections in Pakistan in 2007" and no time at all on whether the Pakistan general-president would be obliged to shed his general's uniform in order to contest them.
