Pakistani Is Already Calling on U.S. to End Airstrikes Quickly
"In effect, Pakistan seemed to be signaling through General Musharraf's
cautions that Washington and London could not rely on Pakistan to
indefinitely support a war that, at least potentially, has grave political
implications for Pakistan."
ISLAMABAD
October 9, 2001
From The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 8 —
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan
made clear today that he wanted the allied
military campaign in neighboring Afghanistan
to be brief and warned the United States not
to press political change so fast that the
Islamic clerics of the Taliban give way to a
new goverment in Kabul that is unfriendly to
Pakistan.
In making these points in a news conference,
the military leader appeared to place himself
at odds with the plans and objectives for the
war in Afghanistan that have been outlined in
Washington.
He said that the air war should end in "one
or two days" if possible, and that there
should be as little harm to civilians, or their
property, as possible.
Several hours after General Pervez made his
remarks, officers close to him said he had
not intended to be taken literally when
speaking of the airstrikes ending so quickly.
Rather, they said, what he meant was that
"the visible" part of United States and British
strikes over Afghan cities, where live
television coverage of explosions in the night
sky are relayed around the world, should be
concluded quickly, in any event no longer
than a week or 10 days, while other
"invisible" air operations to disrupt hideouts and strongholds of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda continued.
"I have got definite assurances that this operation will be short," the general
said, referring to the intense consultations that flowed between Washington,
London and Islamabad after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and
Washington. The United States and Britain, however, have referred to the
war on terrorism as a long one.
In his strongest challenge to Washington, General Musharraf said the
opposition Afghan forces of the Northern Alliance should not be allowed to
"take advantage" of the allied airstrikes against Taliban positions by
advancing from positions that were as little as 35 miles from Kabul. As the
airstrikes continued tonight, Northern Alliance forces, mutually hostile to
Pakistan, were held back pending political negotiations for a post-Taliban
government acceptable to Pakistan.
"I have conveyed to President Bush and Prime Minister Blair that the
Northern Alliance must not draw mileage out of this action," said General
Musharraf, who has much to fear from the possibility of a Northern
Alliance-based government after Pakistan spent years aiding the Taliban.
In its contacts with Washington, Pakistan has demanded that the Northern
Alliance, composed mostly of groups representing Afghanistan's Tajik,
Uzbek and Hazara minorities, be subsumed in a broad coalition under the
overall leadership of Afghanistan's Pashtun majority, which shares strong
tribal ties with Pakistan's Pashtuns.
At his news conference, General Musharraf noted pointedly that the
Pashstun represent "50 to 60 percent" of Afghanistan's population of about
20 million, against no more than 40 percent for the minority groups clustered
under the Northern Alliance banner.
But in a gesture to Washington, he also said publicly for the first time that
Pakistan would accept the exiled Afghan king, Muhammad Zahir Shah, a
Pashtun, as head of the new government. Before he was overthrown in
1973, Zahir Shah, now 86 and living in Rome, had alienated Pakistan by
forging close ties with the Soviet Union, then an ally of Pakistan's archrival,
India. Pakistan vowed then never to accept an Afghan government linked to
its enemies, as the Northern Alliance is now, with its close ties to India and
Russia. General Musharraf said however, that time had erased old enmities
with Zahir Shah.
The general's demands were set out in the context of genial assurances that
he felt entirely at home with the way the first round of attacks on targets in
Afghanistan had gone.
"I am reasonably sure that the action going on is targeted at terrorists camps"
in Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Mazar-i- Sharif, the general said. "This
operation is not against the people of Afghanistan but against terrorism,
terrorists, their sanctuaries and supporters."
Still, the general's attempts to constrain the allied military operations at so
early a stage gave a hint of how fragile the coalition behind the airstrikes
could be if it failed to achieve rapid success. In effect, the general appeared
to be applying a brake on the action even before the first signs of the Taliban
government collapsing or of any terrorists of Osama bin Laden's Qaeda
organization being captured or killed.
The general has also completed a shuffling of the Pakistani Army that isolated
senior officers who had wavered in their support for American and British
military operations in Afghanistan.
In effect, Pakistan seemed to be signaling through General Musharraf's
cautions that Washington and London could not rely on Pakistan to
indefinitely support a war that, at least potentially, has grave political
implications for Pakistan.
Those implications seemed clear today in the growing clamor on Pakistan's
streets, where thousands of protesters marched in several cities behind the
banners of Islamic militant groups with close ties to the Taliban and to Mr.
bin Laden.
In Quetta, across the border from Kandahar, rioters set fire to a movie
theater and cars, looted shops and fought pitched battles with the police that
caused foreigners in the city's main hotel to be locked inside for several
hours.
At his news conference this morning, General Musharraf seemed unaware of
the rising scale of the protests when he repeated assurances he has given
Pakistanis nervous over his commitment to the United States.
"A vast majority of Pakistan is with us," he said, although "there are some
extremists who are trying to have an agitation. I am very sure this will be very
controllable and we will meet the situation as it comes."
The general's own shaky confidence, evident in several hesitant and even
apologetic defenses of his pro-American policy since Sept. 11, appeared to
have been buoyed considerably by the army reorganization he pulled off, to
the surprise of even his own most loyal generals, in the past 48 hours. He
bounced into the news conference, breezily saluting hundreds of journalists
from around the world and describing himself, in a crisply pressed uniform
decorated with paratrooper's wings, as first and foremost a military man. "I
am a soldier," he said.
One retired general described the reorganization privately as a second coup,
following on the first one that the army carried out on Oct. 12 1999. Then,
General Musharraf, as army chief, more or less inherited the results of a
military takeover that occurred as he flew home from a visit abroad. Three
powerful generals who carried out the coup stepped into the political
shadows as General Musharraf adopted the modest title of "chief executive,"
but retained an effective veto on policy.
In the last 48 hours, General Musharraf had finally overcome any lingering
inhibitions of being the nominee of a fellow generals' cabal. All three officers
who engineered the 1999 takeover were moved aside in the shuffle.
The effect of the changes, according to retired military officers close to
General Musharraf, was to make the army more pro-Western and less
inclined than at any time in 20 years to sympathize with Islamic militancy of
the kind that has led to the turmoil in Afghanistan. It was, these officers said,
a change that General Musharraf had favored for a long time, but was unable
to make until the crisis over the Sept. 11 attacks caused a hardening of lines
within the army that made it possible.
The last, critical move in the reorganization came today, with the retirement
of Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, director general of the powerful but shadowy
Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, that has been the conduit for
support to Islamic militants in Afghanistan for two decades.
These moves, and others that put Musharraf loyalists into the newly vacated
corps commanders' jobs in the strategic cities of Lahore, Peshawar and
Quetta became possible, senior officers said, when General Musharraf
persuaded other top officers to extend his own three-year appointment as
army chief, which expired at midnight on Sunday. Internal wrangling over the
crisis in Afghanistan, and the degree of support Pakistan should give the
United States, continued almost up to the last minute, the officers said,
leaving General Musharraf uncertain not only about being able to keep his
pledge to Washington but even about his own job.
Now, with all the top army posts in the hands of officers loyal to General
Musharraf and committed to supporting the American military operations in
Afghanistan, the general's position, and that of Pakistan's support for the
United States, seem more secure.
But other officers cautioned that doubts over the commitment to Washington
could quickly surface if the air campaign went on too long, if errant bombs or
missiles struck civilian targets, if there were signs that the Northern Alliance
was moving to fill the vacuum left by collapsing Taliban power, or if street
protests in Pakistan built to the point where the army and the police had
trouble containing them.
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