WASHINGTON, Aug 12: Hard-line officials in the Bush administration are seeking unilateral military action inside Pakistan to take out the extremists, a media report said on Sunday.

For weeks, Pentagon officials had been debating the current policy of not violating Pakistani sovereignty, coming down in favour of restraint, Newsweek reported.

“But some officers in Joint Special Operations Command are pawing the ground to go into Waziristan,” the report said quoting a Pentagon consultant.

President George W. Bush, however, does not want to take steps that could destabilise President Perez Musharraf because he feels that instability in a nuclear-armed state could cause nuclear weapons to end up in the wrong hands.

Even short of that doomsday scenario, senior US officials -- active and retired -- told the magazine that without more decisive action Al Qaeda would grow, if not flourish, in the tribal areas. And someday the US homeland will likely be attacked from there, just as Al Qaeda once used Afghanistan as a base from where it plotted the 9/11 attacks.

The magazine quoted Hank Crumpton, who retired last year as the State Department’s counter-terrorism coordinator, as saying Washington needed to do more than rely on the Pakistani military and intelligence services.

“I’d go in there (tribal areas) with a hard-core counter-insurgency effort,” Mr Crumpton said. He would seek Pakistan’s consent “but I wouldn’t pretend that this is sovereign territory. It is not.”

Another recently retired senior CIA official, Bruce Riedel, is quoted as saying that Pakistan remains ‘fatally conflicted’ about cracking down on Islamic extremists. That’s even though Al Qaeda No.2 Ayman Al Zawahiri has tried to assassinate Gen Musharraf at least twice.

As eager as Gen. Musharraf may be to get Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri, his enthusiasm is not necessarily shared by the Pakistan intelligence. “It has no desire to either take on its Frankenstein or to see its Frankenstein removed,” Mr Riedel said.The magazine described Gen Musharraf as a ‘dubious ally’ in President Bush’s war on terror, “the kind of guy you avert your eyes from while patting him on the back”.

“It’s not that Bush doubts the Pakistani leader’s sincerity – it’s just that Musharraf is never going to make it into Bush’s democracy club,” the magazine commented.

It claimed that Gen Musharraf’s ability to stop his nation’s Islamist radicalism from spilling over into terrorism had always been limited, adding that Mr Musharraf had succeeded in keeping Washington on his side by regularly handing over second-tier Al Qaeda suspects and by keeping tenuous control over his ‘increasingly Islamicised’ country.

“But now Musharraf may be losing his grip on power amid rising concerns by senior US officials that a new safe haven for Al Qaeda has emerged in Pakistan’s rocky, ungoverned tribal regions, especially Waziristan.”

According to the magazine, for the United States the No.1 concern is figuring out a way to crush the resurgence of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Waziristan and Bajaur, without doing fatal damage to Gen Musharraf.

The magazine quoted some US officials as saying that the Pakistani military was simply not up to the job, but then no one else might be, either.

“This is a part of the country that has not been effectively governed since Alexander the Great was there,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of State John Gastright said.

Pakistani officials, however, disagree with this assessment, pointing to the successes they have had in their cities in arresting Al Qaeda bigwigs like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

“There are no safe havens,” Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US, told the magazine.