Date: September 27, 2006 7:37:02 AM PDT
Subject: [SPY NEWS] Musharraf: U.S. created terror `monster'
Musharraf: U.S. created terror `monster'
Associated Press
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan's president said in his newly released memoir that he had no choice after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but to switch from supporting the Taliban to backing the U.S.-led war on terror groups or face an American "onslaught."
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in his book "In The Line of Fire," also criticizes the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, saying it has made the world "more dangerous."
Unusual in publishing a memoir while still in power, Musharraf said Pakistan, the United States and Saudi Arabia created an extremist "monster" by supporting Islamic groups fighting the Soviet Union's 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan.
"We had assisted in the rise of the Taliban after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, which was then callously abandoned by the United States," Musharraf says.
It was within this vacuum that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terror network strengthened, thanks to the support of the Taliban's leader, Mullah Omar, he adds.
Pakistan saw the Taliban as a means to end years of chaos in Afghanistan, which peaked during the 1992-96 civil war, said Musharraf, who came to power in a 1999 coup. He says Islamabad also saw the Taliban as a counter to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, which favored Pakistan's rival, India.
But after the Sept. 11 attacks, Musharraf said, he realized continuing to support the Taliban and having ties with militant groups would set Pakistan on a collision course with the United States.
"America was sure to react violently, like a wounded bear," Musharraf writes. "If the perpetrator turned out to be al-Qaida, then that wounded bear would come charging straight toward us."
The day after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Musharraf said, Secretary of State Colin Powell telephoned with an ultimatum: "You are either with us or against us."
The next day, he said, Powell's then deputy, Richard Armitage, telephoned the chief of Pakistan's top spy agency, the Directorate of Inter Services Intelligence, with an even sterner warning.
"In what has to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made, Armitage . . . told the director general not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but that if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age," Musharraf writes.
Armitage last week denied threatening to bomb Pakistan, but acknowledged delivering a stern warning.
Musharraf says he weighed Pakistan's options, including the possibility of militarily countering any U.S. actions.
"I war-gamed the United States as an adversary," he writes, but concluded Pakistan's military, economic and social weaknesses made it impossible to confront America.
He also worried about nuclear-armed India, with which Pakistan has fought three wars since their 1947 independence from Britain, including two over the disputed Himalayan region of now divided Kashmir.
"The Indians might have been tempted to undertake a limited offensive there (Kashmir); or more likely they would work with the United States and the United Nations to turn the present situation into a permanent status quo," Musharraf writes. "The United States would certainly have obliged."
He adds: "It is no secret that the United States has never been comfortable with a Muslim country acquiring nuclear weapons and the Americans undoubtedly would have taken the opportunity of an invasion to destroy such weapons."
Musharraf says he thus cut Pakistan's support for the Taliban, despite a possible backlash from radical Islamic groups in his country.
"Why should we put our national interest on the line for a primitive regime that would be defeated?" he asks. "Self-interest and self-preservation were the basis of this decision."
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