US used Saudis to make Pakistan abandon Taliban: Berger
By Anwar Iqbal
WASHINGTON, March 26: The United States had Saudi Arabia lean on Pakistan "very, very heavily" to make Islamabad abandon the Taliban regime but failed, a US panel was told.
Samuel Berger, the Clinton administration's national security adviser, told the commission probing the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on Thursday that despite all this pressure the Pakistani administration remained faithful to the Taliban.
"We put as much pressure on Pakistan to put pressure on the Taliban, as we possibly could, through every means available to us (but) we did not have any sticks," said Mr Berger.
The sanctions imposed on Pakistan before and after the May 1998 nuclear tests prevented the United States from taking any practical step to push Pakistan to abandon the Taliban, he said.
"There was nothing we could say, we'll take this away from you, because we weren't giving them anything. But we leaned on them very heavily. We had the Saudis lean on them very, very heavily," said Mr Berger. He said the only thing that the US administration could have done but did not was to cut off Pakistan's access to IMF loans.
Severing Pakistan's access to these loans, he said, "would have collapsed Pakistan, and we would have had a failed nuclear state in South Asia, which probably would not have been the best thing for the United States."
Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism adviser to the Bush administration who is not testifying before the commission against the administration, said in 1998 the US government kept submarines off the coast of Pakistan, loaded with cruise missiles, for the purpose of launching a follow-on attack when US sources could locate Osama bin Laden.
But the intelligence that US forces had on the Al Qaeda chief was very poor and that's why there never was any follow-on attack, he said. Richard Armitage, the current deputy secretary of state, told the commission that even before the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush had ordered the administration to improve relations with Pakistan, "so that we can have a better chance of uprooting Taliban, et cetera."
"That's a pretty simple statement and it doesn't look like much, but if you peel back the onion, what you see in Pakistan's case is we'd had over 10 years of divorce from their military.
We had no inroads there. We had very limited intelligence work. We had no political relationship worth a damn with them. We had stopped all the World Bank or international financial institutions. We didn't have many places of purchase," said Mr Armitage.
Without the 9-11 terrorist attacks, the United States would have had a very difficult time in getting Pakistan's support against the Taliban, he said. Mr Armitage said after 9-11, the United States gave Pakistan "a very black and white choice... and gave them one day to think about it."
To make Pakistan join the war on terror, President Bush communicated at least twice with President Musharraf and so did Secretary of State Colin Powell, who also spoke with the then Pakistani foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, said Mr Armitage.
He said Mr Bush had also assured Pakistan that "we would stick with them this time" and this assurance helped convince Pakistan to join the war against terror.
"One of their major gripes was that we used them and pitched them as soon as the Soviet war was over. And they don't want to be a Dixie cup. And so I think that to a certain extent, that seven or eight months of diplomacy that went into Pakistan made it easier for them to say yes with conditions," said Mr Armitage.
