Just one month after taking office in 2001, United States President George Bush bluntly told Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to bring terror kingpin Osama bin Laden to justice, the official September 11 inquiry was told on Thursday.
Musharraf was also told to abandon support for the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan and close al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan, Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, told the independent inquiry into the deadly 2001 attacks in the US.
US and Afghan opposition forces eventually ousted the radical Taliban Islamic militia in late 2001 with the support of Musharraf.
Rice stoutly defended Bush’s pre-September 11 counterterrorism strategy and suggested that it failed largely due to Pakistan’s backing for the Taliban.
The hearing was also told that Washington had to change its longstanding policy on India as the US joined hands with Pakistan to weed out the extremist Taliban.
”Within a month of taking office, President Bush sent a strong, private message to President Musharraf urging him to use his influence with the Taliban to bring Bin Laden to justice and to close down al-Qaeda training camps,” Rice testified.
She said Secretary of State Colin Powell also ”actively urged the Pakistanis, including Musharraf himself, to abandon support for the Taliban”.
Rice met with the Pakistani foreign minister in her office three months before September 11 2001 and ”delivered a very tough message, which was met with a rote, expressionless response”.
She said integrating US counterterrorism and regional strategies ”was the most difficult and the most important aspect” of a new Bush strategy to effectively battle terrorism.
”Al-Qaeda was both client of and patron to the Taliban, which in turn was supported by Pakistan. Those relationships provided al-Qaeda with a powerful umbrella of protection, and we had to sever them. This was not easy.
”Not that we hadn’t tried,” Rice said, citing Bush’s strong message to Musharraf.
The White House anti-terror strategy has been slammed by Bush’s former counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, who said the president failed to consider the al-Qaeda network an urgent threat until September 11 attacks that killed about 3 000 people, nine months after he took office in January 2001.
With Bush portraying himself as a ”war president” who took a tough line on security after the attacks, Rice’s testimony is seen as crucial to the campaign for the November 2 presidential polls.
Recollecting the events before attacks, Rice said US policy against the al-Qaeda policy could not work because ”our Afghanistan policy wasn’t working”.
”And our Afghanistan policy wasn’t working because our Pakistan policy wasn’t working. We recognised that America’s counterterrorism policy had to be connected to our regional strategies and to our overall foreign policy.”
Rice said to address these problems, she involved key South Asia experts, including Afghanistan expert Zalmay Khalilzad, the current US envoy to Kabul, who had worked closely with the Afghan Mujahedeen to turn back the Soviet invasion in the 1980s.
She said the new approach to Pakistan combined the use of carrots and sticks to persuade Islamabad to drop its support for the Taliban.
”And we began to change our approach to India, to preserve stability on the subcontinent,” she added.
Both India and Pakistan are nuclear rivals.
Pakistan was an ally of the US during the Cold War, when India tilted to the Soviet Union but the September 11 attacks brought Washington increasingly close to New Delhi. — Sapa-AFP