NEW YORK (Reuters) - President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said that after the September 11 attacks the United States threatened to bomb his country if it did not cooperate with America’s campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Musharraf, in an interview with CBS news magazine show “60 Minutes” that will air Sunday, said the threat came from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and was given 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 was not immediately available to comment, and U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey declined comment on the remarks by Musharraf, who is now in Washington and is due to meet President George Bush in the White House on Friday.
The Pakistani leader, whose remarks were distributed to the media by CBS, said he reacted to the threat in a responsible way. “One has to think and take actions in the interest of the nation, and that’s what I did,” Musharraf said.
Before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, Pakistan was one of the only countries in the world to maintain relations with the Taliban, which was harboring al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and many Pakistanis were sympathetic with the neighboring Islamic state.
But within days of the attacks Musharraf cut his government’s ties to the Taliban regime and cooperated with U.S. efforts to track and capture Al-Qaeda and Taliban forces that sought refuge in Pakistan.
The official 9/11 Commission report on the attacks and their aftermath, based largely on government documents, said U.S. national security officials focused immediately on securing Pakistani cooperation as they planned a response.
Documents showed Armitage met the Pakistani ambassador and the visiting head of Pakistan’s military intelligence service in Washington on September 13 and asked Pakistan to take seven steps.
SUPPORT FOR BIN LADEN
They included ending logistical support for bin Laden and giving the United States blanket overflight and landing rights for military and intelligence flights.
The report did not discuss any threat the United States may have made, but it said Musharraf agreed to all seven U.S. requests the same day.
Musharraf said in the CBS interview he was irked by U.S. demands that Pakistan turn over its border posts and bases for the U.S. military to use.
He said some demands were “ludicrous,” including one insisting he suppress domestic expression of support for terrorism against the United States. “If somebody’s expressing views, we cannot curb the expression of views,” Musharraf said.
With Taliban fighters still fighting in Afghanistan and statements by the Afghan government that Pakistan must do more to crack down on militants in its rugged border area, the issue is again a sensitive one between Islamabad and Washington.
Musharraf reacted with displeasure to comments by Bush on Wednesday that if he had firm intelligence bin Laden was in Pakistan, he would issue the order to go into that country.
“We wouldn’t like to allow that. We’d like to do that ourselves,” Musharraf told a news conference.
In the CBS interview, Musharraf also spoke about the embarrassment he felt when informed by then- CIA Director George Tenet at the United Nations in 2003 that Pakistani nuclear weapon technology had been passed to Iran and North Korea.
“It was the most embarrassing moment,” Musharraf said, denying that anyone in the government or military necessarily knew of the transport of a total amount of more than 18 tons of secret material from Pakistan’s nuclear facilities.
Musharraf’s comments were days ahead of the publication by New York-based Free Press of his memoir “In the Line of Fire.” Advance copies of the memoir have not been released to the media for review before its September 25 publication.
