In the Line of Fire, President Pervez Musharraf

Tidbits from In the Line of Fire By Rahimullah Yusufzai PESHAWAR: In his book, In the Line of Fire, President Pervez Musharraf writes that Pakistani forces captured 689 members of al-Qaeda and turned over 369 of them to the US to earn millions of dollars in “prize money” for his government from the CIA. This and other interesting tidbits have appeared in a section of the US media before the launch of the keenly awaited book. The book would be launched today in New York. The president chose not to disclose contents of his book before its launch because he said he was honour-bound to his publisher. At the joint press conference with President George W Bush at the White House, he declined to answer questions regarding his earlier disclosure in a television interview with CBS News that top US official Richard Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if it didn’t cooperate with Washington in the war against terror after 9/11. Referring to President Musharraf’s refusal to answer questions on the subject, Paul D Colford writing in the Daily News newspaper in the US had this to say about the episode: “That was a first. A dictator was told what to do - by his publisher.” His story was titled, Talk to my publisher, he says. The newspaper said it independently obtained a copy of the book. Excerpts from the book have also appeared in the Indian daily, The Hindu. The Indian media in particular was interested in President Musharraf’s version of events during the Kargil war and the Agra summit. On both occasions, Atal Behari Vajpayee was prime minister of India. According to newspaper reports, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also got hold of an advance copy of the book. It is interesting to note that the parent company of the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, is Viacom, which also owns the CBS News. The popular “60 Minutes” programme of CBS carried the president’s interview in which he mentioned the provocative remark by Armitage. The reference to Armitage, who has denied having hurled the threat to the then ISI head Lt-Gen Mahmood during a meeting after 9/11 in the US, would surely boost the sale of the book and benefit not only President Musharraf but also the publisher. According to the story in the American newspaper Daily News, the alleged threat to bomb Pakistan back into the Stone Age took less than a page in the 337-page volume. It states that President Musharraf wrote in the book that it was easy for him to conclude that Pakistan was in no position to resist US demands after 9/11. “I war-gamed the United States as an adversary,” the president wrote. “There would be a violent and angry reaction if we didn’t support the United States. Thus the question was: if we do not join them, can we confront them and withstand the onslaught? The answer is no, we could not.” According to the president, he first sought to negotiate “a surrender or extradition” of Osama bin Laden, but dealing with the hot-headed Omar “was like banging one’s head against a wall.” Referring again to the Taliban leader Mulla Muhammad Omar, he wrote: “Omar thinks that death and destruction are inconsequential details in a just war.” Regarding al-Qaeda leadership’s methods of communicating with each other, President Musharraf had this to say in the book: “Bin Laden communicates with his followers through a ‘very well-established’ four-tiered network of couriers. Top leaders of al-Qaeda try not to pass messages in writing .... Normally, the leaders make their best, most trusted, diehard couriers memorize messages to al-Qaeda’s operational hierarchy, and then convey them verbatim.”