NEW YORK, Sept 21: The United States threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” unless it cooperated in the US-led war on terror, President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview released on Thursday.

Gen Musharraf, whose support for the US-led invasion of Afghanistan was instrumental in the fall of the hardline Taliban regime after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, said the threat came from former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage.

“The intelligence director told me that (Armitage) said, ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age’,” Musharraf said in the interview with the ‘60 minutes’ investigative news programme to be broadcast on Sunday.

Musharraf says the threat was delivered to his intelligence director, according to selected transcripts of the interview released by the CBS television network.

“I think it was a very rude remark,” Musharraf says in the interview. “One has to think and take actions in the interests of the nation, and that’s what I did.”

Shortly after the Sept 11 attacks, Pakistan abandoned its support for the Taliban and became a front-line ally in the US-led “war on terror.”

Pakistan has arrested several senior Al Qaeda members including Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 2001 attacks.

The South Asian country has also deployed around 80,000 troops at the rugged frontier with Afghanistan to hunt pro-Taliban and Al Qaeda linked militants who sneaked into the area after fleeing the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

The alleged threat also demanded that Pakistan turn over border posts and bases for the US military to use in the war against the Taliban, which ended with the hardline regime’s collapse in late 2001.

Other “ludicrous” demands required Pakistan to suppress domestic expressions of support for militant attacks on US targets, according to CBS.

“If somebody’s expressing views, we cannot curb the expression of views,” it quoted Musharraf as saying.—AFP