August 10, 2008	Sunday	Sha’aban 7, 1429

WASHINGTON, Aug 9: A top US military official met President Pervez Musharraf on Nov 2 to persuade him not to impose a state of emergency but failed to prevent him from doing so, says a book published recently.

In his book, ‘The Way of the World’, Ron Suskind argues that the US attempt to prevent President Musharraf from declaring a state of emergency was “full of bark but without the bite to match it” and that’s why it failed.

The author claims that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got wind of the possibility and called President Musharraf, saying the US would frown on any extra constitutional moves. “But, once again, Musharraf knew the US was bluffing.” On Nov 2, a day before Mr Musharraf imposed emergency, Admiral William Fallon, the then US military chief for Central Asia and the Middle East, visited the Pakistani leader and asked him not to do so.

“If the US really wanted to give Musharraf pause, Fallon would have been carrying a list of sanctions: specifics about the withdrawal of US aid in the event that martial law was declared. He had nothing in his hand,” says the author, explaining why the US move failed.

Mr Suskind, a Pulitzer winning journalist, says that by Oct 29, Mr Musharraf was convinced that the Supreme Court ruling on the legitimacy of the Oct 6 vote would go against him and decided to declare a state of emergency.

The author noted that by the time President Musharraf made his move, Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry had already “become a vessel for Pakistan’s growing impatience with dictatorship, especially among the country’s burgeoning middle and professional classes.”

Explaining why the US and Pakistani administration felt uncomfortable with Justice Chaudhry, the author notes that it’s his decision to take up the cases of the missing persons that made him unpopular with the two establishments.

“The intelligence agencies would pick up people, say they were terrorists, and then make them disappear. Justice Chaudhry took up the issue. The Supreme Court simply asked the government lawyers: ‘What are the allegations against many of these people?’ They could not even say what the charges were, much less offer evidence.”

The author claims that former prime minister Benzair Bhutto also saw the lawyers’ movement, especially Justice Chaudhry, as a problem. “They owned the ‘high ground’ of principle, which had only been augmented by the previous week’s showdown and arrests. While she was pouting democratic rhetoric, she was caught in the deal room – a position in which she came close to mirroring the ‘say one thing but do another’ behaviour of the Unites States .”

Mr Suskind reveals that while trying to promote a deal between Ms Bhutto and President Musharraf, US intelligence agencies were also tapping phone calls, prior to her arrival in Pakistan, in a bid to “play under-the-table, cut-throat games more effectively.”

According to these tapped conversations, President Musharraf once told Ms Bhutto: “You should understand something; your security is based on the state of our relationship.”

The author claims that while the US State Department backed the Bush administration’s decision to facilitate Ms Bhutto’s return to Pakistan. Vice-President Dick Cheney strongly opposed it because he considered Ms Bhutto “complicated and unpredictable.”

Mr Suskind says that Ms Bhutto often regretted that Vice-President Cheney never called Mr Musharraf asking him to “behave” and, instead, kept her pressing for coming to terms with him.

The book reveals that whenever Ms Bhutto was too critical of Mr Musharraf, the US ambassador in Islamabad advised her to “tone down any criticism of Musharraf”.

A telephone conversation between Ms Bhutto and Mr Musharraf shows the president telling Ms Bhutto that he cannot revoke the provision that bars her from becoming prime minister for the third time. Ms Bhutto says: “What you can give me (then)? May be some real reform in election commission?”

Mr Musharraf replies: “You should not be hoping for much there (reforms), either.”

US intelligence agencies once also intercepted Ms Bhutto’s conversation with her son, Bilawal. “They’ve been listening to her calls for months, including an earlier call she made to her son.”

In that call, the book said, she shares with Bilawal details about the secret bank accounts that hold the family’s fortunes that investigators have long suspected are ill-gotten.

When Ms Bhutto once floated the idea of freezing foreign accounts of “key people around Musharraf”, a US official let her understand that the United States could, if need be, “constrain her assets” just as she was now suggesting they do to Mr Musharraf.