All quotes are from his autobiography.
Armitage’s threat:
When I was back in Islamabad the next day [September 12], our director general of Inter Services Intelligence, who happened to be in Washington, told me on the phone about his meeting with the U.S. deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage. In what has to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made, Armitage . . . told the director general not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but that if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age. This was a shockingly barefaced threat, but it was obvious that the United States had decided to hit back, and hit back hard.
Musharaff took the threat seriously. The first step in his analysis of the situation was to “war-game” the U.S. as an adversary:
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 was no, we could not, on three counts:
- First was our military weakness as compared with the strength of the United States. Our military forces would be destroyed.
- Second was our economic weakness. We had no oil, and we did not have the capacity to sustain our economy in the face of an attack by the United States.
- Third, and worst of all, was our social weakness. We lack the homogeneity to galvanize the entire nation into an active confrontation. We could not endure a military confrontation with the United States from any point of view.
Next, Musharaff considered Pakistan’s national interest. India weighed heavily in Musharaff’s decision to be with us:
First, India had already tried to step in by offering its bases to the United States. If we did not join the United States, it would accept India’s offer. What would happen then? India would gain a golden opportunity with regard to Kashmir. The Indians might be tempted to undertake a limited offensive there; or, more likely they would work with the United States and the United Nations to turn the present situation into a permanent status quo. The United States would certainly have obliged.
Second, the security of our strategic assets would be jeopardized. We did not want to lose or damage the military parity that we had achieved with India by becoming a nuclear weapons state . . . the Americans undoubtedly would have taken the opportunity of an invasion to destroy such weapons. And India . . . would have loved to assist the United States to the hilt.
The “ultimate question” he faced was whether it was worth courting national suicide over the Taliban:
The answer was a resounding no. It is true that we had assisted in the rise of the Taliban . . . We had hoped that the Taliban . . . would bring unity and peace to a devastated country. But they were fired by a misplaced messianic zeal . . . contrary to the moderate, tolerant, progressive spirit of Islam of the majority of the Pakistani people.
After the Taliban came to power, we lost much of the leverage we had had with them. The peace they brought to Afghanistan was the peace of the graveyard. Nevertheless, we still supported them for geostrategic reasons. If we had broken with them, that would have created . . . a vacuum of power into which might have stepped the Northern Alliance, comprising anti-Pakistan elements. The Northern Alliance was supported by Russia, India, and Iran. Now we were no longer constrained by these concerns. We had new, more deadly ones. Now we could detach from the Taliban.
Faced with a “shockingly barefaced threat” from the U.S., Musharaff saw the opportunity that aligning Pakistan with America provided:
. . . we would be able to eliminate extremism from our our society and flush out the foreign terrorists in our midst. We could not do this alone; we needed the technical and financial assistance of the United States to be able to find and defeat these terrorists.
Alas, this opportunity has yet to be realized.
