The pat on the back President
Musharraf received from President Bush on Saturday is
a “continuation of the White House’s strategy
of using visits like this to bolster Musharraf’s
leadership and to play down the tensions between the US
and Pakistan,”.
Analysist said that “those
tensions have grown more acute, despite public pronouncements.
White House and intelligence agency officials have complained
that the flow of information from Pakistan about the nuclear
smuggling network built by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former
head of Pakistan’s nuclear program, has slowed to
a trickle. Mr. Musharraf has refused to allow the United
States or the International Atomic Energy Agency, the
United Nations’ nuclear monitoring body to interview
Dr. Khan directly, insisting that the questions be passed
through Pakistani officials. Many American officials believe
that is a way of filtering both the questions and the
answers, perhaps to make sure that no current government
or military officials are implicated in an investigation
into the network’s role in arming Iran, North Korea
and Libya.
‘Everyone knows that this reaches
well into the Pakistani leadership,’ a European
diplomat involved in the investigation said this week,
‘and the Pakistanis are being very careful.’
But a senior administration official said Saturday that
Mr. Bush had raised the issue only obliquely, asking Mr.
Musharraf to assure that there is continued cooperation.
The official said Mr. Musharraf ‘didn’t seem
aware that there was any problem,’ and promised
to look into it. According to the report, “there
was apparently no direct discussion of Mr. Musharraf’s
decision not to give up his role as leader of the Pakistani
military, as he had promised more than a year ago. Mr.
Bush used the visit, in fact, to praise the expansion
of democracy in the country.
‘There are some in the world who
do not believe that a Muslim society can self-govern,’
Mr. Bush said. ‘Some believe that the only solution
for government in parts of the world is for there to be
tyranny or despotism. I don’t believe that. The
Pakistan people have proven that those cynics are wrong.’
Mr. Musharraf, according to a senior administration official
who sat in on the meeting in the Oval Office, brought
his commerce minister, and Mr. Bush made plain that the
Pakistanis had complaints about the relationship with
the United States, mostly involving trade restrictions.
Mr. Bush also made no announcement of any impending American
agreement to sell surveillance airplanes, antitank missiles
and other weapons to Pakistan. The senior official declined
to answer any questions about the American position on
those sales, which include F-16 fighter jets, saying,
‘It came up, as it has in past meetings, and probably
will in future meetings.’”
