Carrot, stick policy forced Pakistan to change stand: September 11 testimony
By Our Correspondent
WASHINGTON, April 8: US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday that the United States used the carrot and stick approach to persuade Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban.
Ms Rice said that even before the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, the US administration had realized that the lack of cooperation from Pakistan had prevented them from uprooting the Al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.
She told an independent commission investigating the causes of the Sept 11 incident that the need to enlist Pakistan in the fight against Al Qaeda stemmed from the realization that no move against the network would succeed without Islamabad's support.
Our new approach was to persuade Pakistan to drop its support for the Taliban, she said. More importantly, she said, the administration recognized that no counter-terrorism strategy could succeed in isolation and that was why it decided to redesign its policies in South Asia.
The new approach, she said, revolved around the strategy of building close friendly relations with both India and Pakistan "and we began to change our approach towards India to preserve stability on the Subcontinent," she added. "Our (new) counter-terrorism strategy was part of a broader package of strategies that addressed the complexities of the region."
Ms Rice, however, admitted that integrating counter-terrorism and regional strategies was the most difficult and the most important aspect of the new strategy to get right.
Explaining this new approach, she said: "Al Qaeda was both client of and patron to the Taliban, which in turn was supported by Pakistan. Those relationships provided Al Qaeda with a powerful umbrella of protection, and we had to sever them. This was not easy."
Ms Rice said that within a month of taking office, President George W. Bush had tried to persuade Pakistan to sever its ties with the Taliban and sent a strong, private message to President Pervez Musharraf to achieve this objective.
Mr Bush had urged Mr Musharraf to use his influence on the Taliban to bring Osama bin Laden to justice and to close down Al Qaeda training camps, she said. Secretary of State Colin Powell actively urged Pakistanis, including President Musharraf, to abandon support for the Taliban. "I met with Pakistan's foreign minister in my office in June of 2001. I delivered a very tough message which was met with rote, expressionless response."
Ms Rice told the panel: "America's Al Qaeda policy wasn't working because our Afghanistan policy wasn't working. And our Afghanistan policy wasn't working because our Pakistan's policy wasn't working. We recognized that America's counter-terrorism policy had to be connected to our regional strategies and to our overall foreign policy."
She said that one of the immediate steps she took to address these problems was to bring in Zalmay Khalilzad, an expert on Afghanistan, who, as a senior diplomat in the 1980s, had worked closely with the Afghan Mujahedeen. He is now Washington's ambassador to Kabul.
She said she also realized the need for involving Pakhtuns in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Instead of the intense focus on the Northern Alliance, we emphasized the importance of the south, the social and political heartland of the country, she added.
Ms Rice said the success of the US policy could be gauged from the fact that the terrorists had lost a home base and training camps in Afghanistan and the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia now pursued them with energy and force.
