'Overly candid' Musharraf memoir tough on neighbours

UNITED STATES: Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said on Monday he went against the advice of aides to write a memoir that could rile neighbors India and Afghanistan and accuses the United States of threatening to bomb his country "back to the Stone Age."

Musharraf's autobiography, "In the Line of Fire," has already drawn denials from President George W. Bush and raised eyebrows in India. But Musharraf said sensitive security matters were the only topics he shied away from.

"Most of the people in fact were against my writing this book at this moment, but like a good military leader, I took the decision against the major part of their advice," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

"I have been chastised by associates for being forthright and overly candid, and this is reflected, I think, even in my writing style," he said at the launch of his 335-page memoir.

Musharraf's book recounts how he decided it would have been suicidal for Pakistan to go to war against the United States after being threatened by Washington a day after al Qaeda's strikes on Sept. 11.

With the United States demanding Pakistan's help to launch attacks on al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, Musharraf recalled how the then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had telephoned him with an ultimatum: "You are either with us or against us."

He also wrote that Powell's deputy, Richard Armitage, warned Lieutenant-General Mehmood Ahmad, the director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence, that if Pakistan chose the terrorists' side "then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age."

Armitage, who like Powell has left government, on Monday denied using such a threat, after Musharraf first described the exchanges during an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" last week.

Musharraf's book says he conducted a war game to weigh the option of fighting the United States and found that Pakistan's military would have been wiped out, its economy couldn't be sustained, and the nation lacked the unity needed for such a confrontation.

In New York on Monday, the combative Musharraf echoed his book in dismissing as "ridiculous" frequent allegations from Afghanistan that Taliban leaders are running an insurgency from the city of Quetta in southwest Pakistan.

Two days before a key three-way meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Bush, Musharraf chided Karzai, saying he was failing to wean ethnic Pushtuns away from the Islamic militants.

"The sooner Mr. President Karzai understands his own country's environment, the easier it will be for him," said Musharraf.

He added: "I have always been saying that I believe President Karzai to be the right person to be president of Afghanistan."

Musharraf wrote that his best guess is that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is hiding somewhere in Afghanistan's eastern province of Kunar and that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was most likely to be near his original base in southern Afghanistan.

The book, published just over a week after Musharraf agreed with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to resume a stalled peace process, described the Pakistani's fears that the Indian leader had fallen under the influence of New Delhi's old guard. "I think the Indian establishment the bureaucrats, diplomats, intelligence agencies, and perhaps even the military has gotten the better of him," Musharraf added in a passage he said was written in June.

The nuclear armed rivals have fought two of their three wars over mostly Muslim Kashmir since independence in 1947, and the Himalayan region remains divided by a cease-fire line.

New York, Tuesday, Reuters