Making friends all over

[Guest guest]

Washington - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has said that the

United States threatened in 2001 to bomb Pakistan if he did not

cooperate in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan after the

September 11 terrorist attacks.

 

In an interview scheduled to air Sunday on television network CBS,

Musharraf said that Richard Armitage, then US deputy secretary of

state, issued the threat to Musharraf's intelligence director.

 

'The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared

to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,'' Musharraf

said. 'I think it was a very rude remark.'

 

Armitage has questioned the terminology but did not deny that his

message was strong, CBS reported.

 

Pakistan was one of only a few countries that had given diplomatic

recognition to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the United States

declared shortly after the 9/11 attacks that there would be

consequences for Taliban supporters.

 

'One has to think and take actions in the interests of the nation, and

that's what I did,' said Musharraf, who dropped recognition of the

Taliban and has become a close US ally in the war on terrorism.

 

After Musharraf's government began cooperating with Washington, the

Bush administration dropped sanctions imposed after Pakistan's first

nuclear bomb test in 1998.

 

Musharraf was in New York to attend the opening of the UN General

Assembly and was to meet Friday with US President George W Bush. He is

scheduled to participate Wednesday in a trilateral meeting with Bush

and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

 

Bush said Wednesday that he would be 'absolutely' willing to send US

troops into Pakistan to snatch or kill Osama bin Laden if the US had

solid intelligence identifying the al-Qaeda leader's location.

 

Musharraf said he would not approve such a mission on Pakistani soil.

 

 

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances,

there's a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged, and it is in

such twilight that we must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest

we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

William O. Douglas