Author: Karen Deyoung & Joby Warrick
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 6, 2007
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/208756.html
Last September, when Pakistani President Pervez
Musharraf visited the White House to tout a controversial plan for driving
al-Qaeda from his country, President Bush responded at a joint news conference
with a trademark profession of faith. When Musharraf "looks me in the
eye" and says there "won't be a Taliban and there won't be an al-Qaeda,
I believe him," Bush said.
Ten months later, the administration's top
terrorism official gave reporters a starkly different view of that plan, declaring
that al-Qaeda had established a safe haven inside the very country that Bush
had hailed as a "strong partner" in the war on terrorism. Musharraf's
anti-terrorism plan "hasn't worked for Pakistan. It hasn't worked for
the United States," Frances Fragos Townsend, White House homeland security
adviser, said in late July.
The change in the administration's public
tone came after months of internal US discussion and quiet diplomacy to pressure
a key ally into taking direct action against what analysts say was a newly
assertive al-Qaeda rebuilding a stronghold to plan attacks against Western
targets - a disconcerting replay of the period before September 11, 2001.
As classified reports throughout the past
year showed al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters opening new training camps and moving
operatives and money across the Afghan border, the White House dispatched
a stream of high-powered officials to Islamabad to pressure a reluctant Musharraf
into changing course.
When the diplomatic campaign finally failed,
the administration took a more dramatic step. After years of professing uncertainty
about the whereabouts of al-Qaeda's commanders, it publicly declared in excerpts
of a new National Intelligence Estimate what analysts had long believed: The
terrorist group had ensconced itself in a remote mountain enclave ostensibly
under Pakistani control. In late spring, drafts of that document were deliberately
altered to reveal this conclusion, a move
that "changed the complexion" of the nearly finished report, a senior
intelligence official familiar with the revisions said.
