Posted on 09/28/2003 8:22:43 AM PDT by Brian S
U.S. must quell hatred of the west through positive action, not invasion
Mike Blanchfield The Ottawa Citizen
The Muslim world is so full of hatred for the United States that President George W. Bush must do something positive in the region, such as capturing fugitive terrorist Osama bin Laden or restoring order to Afghanistan, warns Pakistan's president.
"There's so much hate, so much anti-western, anti-U.S. feelings, we have to show a positive," Gen. Pervez Musharraf told the Citizen in an interview.
"If we show one more negative, in the form of a military operation against another Muslim country, I think it's going to be disastrous."
Gen. Musharraf is Mr. Bush's No. 1 Muslim ally in the war on terror, and the on-going effort to capture Mr. bin Laden, the man held responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
In a candid and expansive interview with the Citizen, Gen. Musharraf said the U.S. used up whatever good standing it had in the Muslim world by invading Iraq.
Now the Bush administration must do a good deed in the region to diffuse the hatred that has built up following the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Gen. Musharraf said that's a message he has delivered to Bush personally.
"President Bush is trying his best. He knows what to do. The problem is, how to do it."
Gen. Musharraf said the U.S. must think again before it considers taking action against a second Muslim target such as Iran.
Mr. Bush has labelled Iran as part of the "axis of evil," and his administration has deep concerns about the country's ambitions to develop nuclear weapons.
Gen. Musharraf, whose country sparked outrage when it entered the nuclear age in 1998, said he has no proof Iran has nuclear weapons.
If the U.S. took pre-emptive military action against Iran -- the way it justified attacking Iraq to rid it of weapons of mass destruction -- it would lead to a backlash in the Muslim world, Gen. Musharraf warned.
"The Muslim world is in turmoil. There's a lot of opposition to the West and the United States in the Muslim mind because all the political disputes after the Cold War have involved Muslims. Muslims feel that maybe they are being targeted."
Mr. Bush could score a major public relations victory by capturing Mr. bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who has inspired a generation of downtrodden Islamic youth to hate and fight the West, said Gen. Musharraf.
The longer Mr. bin Laden remains at large, the more his followers will be emboldened, he said.
Western intelligence has been certain for months that the al-Qaeda leader is hiding in Pakistan's tribal belt, a mountainous, lawless and largely backward region that borders Afghanistan.
Gen. Musharraf said the intelligence he has seen does not dissuade him from believing his country is host to the most wanted man in the United States.
The new intelligence has persuaded Gen. Musharraf that he was mistaken when he once said he believed that Mr. bin Laden had died of kidney failure.
Capturing Mr. bin Laden would create an initial backlash among Islamic extremists, but that would pass in the long term, said Gen. Musharraf.
Gen. Musharraf described in detail the difficulties in finding Mr. bin Laden and the limitations of the U.S. satellite technology in the mountainous region.
"We are using electronic means, high technology ... monitoring mobile telephones, internet," he said.
"You can see them walking, sitting, vehicles moving, people getting out. But you don't see their faces. You don't know if it's Mr. Osama bin Laden ... so you can only guess through activity if it's an important man.
"So how do you react? You react with force, of course."
And that, said Gen. Musharraf, is where the complication arises.
Too many innocent lives would be imperiled if the U.S. started firing rockets at every group of people it thought might contain Mr. bin Laden, he said.
Gen. Musharraf said he believes stability can be restored to Central Asia in the next 10 years.
Evoking his region's golden era of Silk Route trading, he spoke in glowing terms about how the reconstruction of Afghanistan could herald a new era of economic prosperity in Central Asia.
But the key, he said, is stabilizing Afghanistan.
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan's northwestern neighbour, is keen to run a gas pipeline across the unstable country to Pakistan, Gen. Musharraf said.
But that won't happen unless international peacekeepers expand their area of control outside Kabul, the capital.
Gen. Musharraf became emotional when asked about Pakistan's continued exclusion from the Commonwealth, a result of his seizure of power four years ago in a bloodless coup.
He said he has "a total disappointment with the Commonwealth" because of Pakistan's continued exclusion while dictators such as Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe are allowed access to the club.
Canada, he said, has been supportive of Pakistan's attempts to rejoin the Commonwealth, but Gen. Musharraf said he isn't losing any sleep over the issue.
He blamed India, who he labelled as an enemy of his country, for sowing opposition towards Pakistan.
"Why should I bother about the Commonwealth?" he asked.
Hey, jerkoff... That's what we're trying to do!
If this guy falls out of line, the real center of Islamist terrorism is Pakistan...
I think Musharraf's right on Afghanistan. That war was entirely justified and should be the focus of our efforts. Iraq is, IMHO, a fool's errand which wasn't justified in the first place.
If he does, he is smoking crack. He is in a distinctly uncomfortable position. The new Afghan government are not fans of Pakistan, since Pakistan created the Taliban (it is not a coincidence the Afghanis were chanting 'Death to Pakistan' when Kabul was taken). On the other side, he has India, a giant antagonist that would not tolerate instability in Pakistan, and would surely invade if the control of nuclear weapons was in doubt. He can't even count on Iran for support, because the Shiites in Iran are not fans of the fanatical Sunni Islam practiced in Pakistan.
Musharraf should be on his knees begging the US for help in propping up his regime and preventing the rise to power of fundamentalists. Because preventing that rise is the only thing keeping the artificially created and utter failure of a nation-state, Pakistan, from being erased from the world map.
BS. Muslims hate us because we have brefiended and aided litle Israel in it's 55-year war against fanatical mulsim terrorists. Fanatical muslims believe the ME and all the other lands once conquered by Islam are sacred to Allah and his followers, and the hated Jews are an intolerable abomination on "Allah's land."
This problem isn't going away in our lifetime, and we had better learn how to deal with it. And politically correct false "solutions" that try to please every liberal Democrat in congress and every gang of thugs in the UN won't get that done.
Deathly, destructive, unspeakable things, coutesy of the pieceful religion
In the end, only one will remain standing...America or Islam. The clue to who it will be...who wants it more.
You're missing the point: Musharraf isn't the only Muslim leader for whom weakness is a strength. If the ship starts sinking, he stands a fairly good chance of catching a plane to Saudi Arabia before the s*** hits the fan. On the other hand he knows that we, the US, will then be left with a security problem orders of magnitude greater than that in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In any case, erasing Pakistan from the map won't be a simple matter. Their military is the one instutiion that's been fairly effective at uniting the otherwise fractious nation, and should Pakistan face foreign invasion its people might rally around their common flag to an extent not possible in peacetime. That will be particularly true if the aggressor is the US-Israel-India axis. And don't forget, they have nukes and the means to deliver them, courtesy of the Chinese. It's a win-win situation for Beijing: India and Pakistan blasting each other to the Stone Age, de-facto Chinese domination of South Asia, a US leadership faced with eternal hostility from the region's large Muslim population.
Triggering event? Timeframe?
Click on the title for more information.Report: Mossad, IAF have plan for Iran nuke sites
The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported Saturday that Israel has prepared plans for a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities in order to halt Iran's progress towards attaining nuclear weapons.
So how's it feel?
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