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Be with us or be bombed

Is it any surprise that the Bush administration issued crude threats to Pakistan immediately after 9/11? In his 368-page memoir, In The Line of Fire, which is being launched today, President Pervez Musharraf narrates how, on September 12, 2001, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had him virtually summoned to the telephone from an "important meeting" in Karachi and said, "You are either with us or against us," which the General naturally construed as "a blatant ultimatum." Then it got worse. On September 13, the Director General of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) telephoned from Washington to say that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had warned him that "not only had we to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but if we chose the terrorists" — meaning, chose not to ally with the United States in the coming war against the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine — "we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age." While President George Bush claims to have been "taken aback" by the story, the burly Mr. Armitage, who is no longer in public service, has disputed, not very convincingly, the language attributed to him but has basically confirmed the authenticity of General Musharraf's revelation by admitting that he had delivered a "strong message." At that point, Islamabad seemed to believe, rather naively, that there was scope for negotiation to defuse the crisis and bale out a friendly, if not client, regime that had played host to the perpetrators of 9/11. Washington evidently had no compunctions about employing the language of force upfront, even if there might have been an element of bluff in it.

The Bush administration has made a habit of deploying bellicosity as its primary tool of international diplomacy and politics. When it encounters a country — be it Iran or North Korea or Syria — unwilling to do its bidding, its first reaction is to brandish the stick. No lessons whatever seem to have been learnt from the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the steadily deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. The Saddam regime will find few apologists anywhere but anyone other than the ideologically purblind can see what follows when state structures are dismantled through an invasion. A country in which religious extremists were not tolerated earlier has now become a breeding ground for sectarian fanatics and terrorists. There will certainly be relief round the world if, in November 2006, the American people vote in a Congress that can restrain an akratic President.

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