WASHINGTON, Sept 17: President Gen Pervez Musharraf has claimed that "a vast majority of the Pakistani people want me in uniform". In an interview with the Washington Post, appearing in the internet edition of the daily on Thursday , the president said "conditions in the country have changed" since Dec 24 last.
"It's primarily the security of Pakistan, the internal conditions," he said in the interview given at the Army House in Rawalpindi. "There's too much happening around," he said, citing terrorist threats.
The president said he had not made a final decision and noted that he had until the end of the year to make up his mind. He said that if "perceptions change that I have been weakened" as a consequence of giving up the post of army chief, "may be it won't be good for Pakistan".
OSAMA WHEREABOUTS: He said Pakistan had no idea where Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was. "There is a perception that we have Osama hidden somewhere and we'll bring him out close to the American elections," the president told Time magazine in its issue due to hit news-stands on Sept 20.
"We can't. We don't have any idea where Osama is." The magazine wrote that in Musharraf's deadly bout with Al Qaeda, the latest round has decisively been his. But a victory bell isn't expected soon. Pakistan has arrested more than 550 Al Qaeda suspects and delivered most to US investigators.
The president expressed his determination to root out terrorism from Pakistan. "We have to root out terrorism and I'm prepared to make any sacrifice for Pakistan to do this," he told the magazine.
When he met the magazine correspondents in his Islamabad office recently, he had a memo with the names of 30 Al Qaeda suspects whom Pakistan has helped to nab over the past two months.
This, said President Musharraf, was Osama bin Laden's 'second string' of terrorists: "We know who is whom and who is where. We've broken their backs." He claimed that a load of Al Qaeda computer disks captured in July showed that the group's leaders have contingency plans to shift operations away from the hinterlands of Pakistan to Somalia and Sudan.
And just last week, Pakistan's military said it launched an air and ground attack against a suspected Al Qaeda training camp in the tribal area of Waziristan, killing more than 60 recruits and their Uzbek and Chechen trainers.
Musharraf himself is a religious moderate, and so, he insists, are most Pakistanis, writes the magazine. The president's aides say that Musharraf's tougher tack on home grown extremists is, if anything, a sign of his own convictions, not a response to Washington. -APP
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