'US threatened to bomb Pakistan'

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf visits the White House on Friday (local time) after jarring the key anti-terror alliance by publicly critiquing US strategy.

The United States threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the Stone Age" after the September 11, 2001 attacks unless it supported the war on terror, President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview released on Thursday.

Musharraf, whose support for the US-led war in Afghanistan after the attacks was instrumental in the fall of the Taliban, said former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage made the threat to Pakistan's head of intelligence.

"The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,'" Musharraf said in the interview with the "60 Minutes" investigative news programme, according to selected excepts.

"I think it was a very rude remark," Musharraf says in the interview, due to be broadcast on Sunday. "One has to think and take actions in the interests of the nation, and that's what I did."

Shortly after the September 11 attacks became a front-line ally in the US-led war against the Taliban which was sheltering al-Qaida leaders.

Pakistan has since arrested several senior al-Qaida members including Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 2001 attacks.

The South Asian country has also deployed around 80,000 troops on the rugged border with Afghanistan to hunt pro-Taliban and al-Qaida linked militants who sneaked into the area after fleeing the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

The White House declined to comment on Musharraf's comments, with a US official saying on condition of anonymity only that Pakistan had made "a strategic choice" to help after the September 11 attacks.

Armitage's alleged threat also demanded that Pakistan turn over border posts and bases for the US military to use in the war in Afghanistan, which ended with the Taliban's collapse in late 2001.

Other demands required Pakistan to suppress domestic expressions of support for militant attacks on US targets, according to the CBS network, which produces "60 Minutes."

"If somebody's expressing views, we cannot curb the expression of views," it quoted Musharraf as saying.

However, Armitage told CNN on Thursday that he never threatened to bomb Pakistan, would not have said such a thing and did not have the authority to do it. Armitage said he did have a tough message for Pakistan, telling the Muslim nation that it was either "with us or against us," according to CNN. Armitage said he did not know how his message was recounted so differently to Musharraf.

"This isn't about pointing fingers at one another," US State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said on Thursday. "What this is about is finding ways that we can all work together to be able to achieve our common objectives, which is a free, secure and independent Afghanistan; a secure Pakistan border area as well."

In the interview, Musharraf also reveals an embarrassing episode in which former CIA Director George Tenet confronted him in 2003 with proof that the father of Pakistan's nuclear programme was passing secrets to other countries.

Abdul Qadeer Khan, regarded as a hero in Pakistan for helping to make the country a nuclear power, admitted giving away nuclear secrets in a televised confession in February 2004, exposing a global black market in nuclear technology.

"He (Tenet) took his briefcase out, passed me some papers. It was a centrifuge design with all its numbers and signatures of Pakistan. It was the most embarrassing moment," Musharraf says.

Musharraf said that anyone in the government or military was aware of the leak.

He pardoned Khan the same month, but the ailing scientist has since lived under virtual house arrest in a leafy diplomatic sector in Islamabad and makes no public appearances.

Source: China Daily