In early 2003 Pakistan claimed that the Al Qaeda didn’t exist any more. Anything which if ever had existed had been smashed and the remnants were on the run. I was there in Moscow on the day when President Musharraf made this claim while talking to the Russian press in January 2003. Next, in August 2004 while interviewing President Musharraf for Dawn I asked: What is the position on Al Qaeda.? Are you winning or losing this war on terror or the verdict is still out? His answer was: They are on the run.

Then all of a sudden it was announced in 2005 that 80,000 Pakistani troops have been dispatched to the Afghan borders to join what was then called a hammer and anvil strategy with Pakistani troops making up the hammer and the Nato troops inside Afghanistan serving as the anvil to smash the Al Qaeda to smithereens. Pakistani army was to be paid $80 million a month for the job directly by the Pentagon.

But then in 2006 one saw all those peace agreements between the government and the tribal militants which were virtually documents of surrender on the part of the former. This was followed by a sudden jump in infiltration across the Durand Line and escalation in bloody encounters with the Nato forces inside Afghanistan. And in March-April 2007 one heard the good news that the Pakistani Pushtun tribal population itself had taken up arms against the Arab Al Qaeda and was flushing them out from a number of their sanctuaries after bloody fights in which Pakistani army also played an important part.

However, according to latest disclosures by a senior British counter terrorism official the Al Qaeda has survived the six-year long “war on terror” and Pakistan has become a popular training ground for camps to equip British-born people to learn the skills and methods to carry out attacks on their own soil.

These disclosures which should cause a great deal of concern for Pakistan and worry to President Pervez Musharraf were made here early this week by the head of Scotland Yard’s counter terrorism command, Peter Clarke, who is also the Deputy Commissioner

He said that Al Qaeda had survived the six-year long “war on terror” launched by President George Bush and Tony Blair ( in the company of President general Pervez Musharraf), and its central leadership had retained the ability to order devastating attacks on Britain.

He warned that terrorists “have momentum” and were on an “inexorable trend to more ambitious and more destructive attack planning”.

He said Al Qaeda had weathered the assault launched against it after the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001. In his assessment of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network, Mr Clarke offered a picture of a formidable organisation. “It is global in origin, reach and ambition. The networks are large, fluid, mobile and incredibly resilient,” he said.

“We have seen how Al Qaeda has been able to survive a prolonged multinational assault on its structures, personnel and logistics. It has certainly retained its ability to deliver centrally directed attacks here in the UK.

“In case after case, the hand of core Al Qaeda can be clearly seen. Arrested leaders or key players are quickly replaced, and disrupted networks will re-form quickly.

“There is no evidence of looking to restrict casualties. There are no warnings given and the evidence suggests that on the contrary, the intention is frequently to kill as many people as possible.”

He contrasted Al Qaeda with Irish terrorism, saying that Republicans had a political agenda that made exploring a negotiated settlement possible, which was not the case with Islamist extremists: “Although perhaps this is not for me to judge, there has not been an obvious political agenda around which meaningful negotiations can be built.”

Is this the assessment of the CIA as well? And if so then the pressures now being put on Pakistan by the US and its allies to ‘do more’ can perhaps be explained.

The heat on President Musharraf on this score appears to have forced him to declare: If you do not trust me then let us stop the cooperation. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz preceded him by saying if the US had any complaints against Islamabad it should convey its messages quietly rather than using the media and saying what it is saying in the glare of world-wide publicity. And the former Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan went to the extent of challenging the US and its allies to stop their aid flows and claimed Pakistan can survive and its economy can sustain such a stoppage.It appears as if the chickens are coming back to roost. For reasons of his own President Pervez Musharraf appears to have preferred all through the last five years not to involve the nation at large, through the mainstream political parties in the war against terrorism. He has all along promoted this war as his personal war. He was so focused on this notion that either he genuinely missed the creeping Talibanisation now having crossed the NWFP has now reached even fortress Islamabad or perhaps he willingly allowed this process to progress in his own personal political interest, thinking perhaps that he can put the genii back into the bottle any time he wanted, after having used them to permanently marginalise the mainstream political parties which he thinks pose the most serious threat to his uniformed rule.

And for his own purposes perhaps the president has also been selling the notion that Taliban and Al Qaeda are two distinct and different movements — one is a purely Pushtun ideology and the other that of the Arab fighters hiding in the Pakistan-Afghan border sanctuaries. He seem to want to wage a war of attrition against the Arab Al Qaeda while he wants to come to some kind of political understanding with the Pushtun Taliban persuading them to accept the writ of Islamabad.

In this again he is either deluding himself or wants to divert the attention of the international community from his own political designs to further tighten the grip of military and mullah on Pakistan and ward off for all times to come the threat to this dispensation from the people of Pakistan at large.

The threat to Pakistan from Taliban is no different from that of Al Qaeda. In fact the menace is one with two different names. And the threat of this menace can only be met successfully through a democratic process and bringing to an end for all times to come the system of GHQ rule.