WASHINGTON, July 11: A day after troops carried out an operation against Lal Masjid in Islamabad President Gen Pervez Musharraf received a pat on the back from no less a person than US President George W. Bush for being a “strong ally” in the war against terror.

“Musharraf is a strong ally in the war against these extremists. I like him and I appreciate him,” Mr Bush said, while giving his unqualified support to the Pakistani leader on Tuesday in Cleveland, Ohio.

Although Mr Bush’s visit to the city was aimed to promote alternative energy, he availed a question from a Pakistani-American to convey his unqualified support for Gen Musharraf.

He started by saying that Pakistan was a strong ally in the war against terror but stopped half-way through his sentence and replaced it with ‘Musharraf,’ calling him “a valuable ally in rejecting extremists”.

Mr Bush said it’s important for the United States to ‘cultivate’ allies like him.

The US leader, however, also remembered his pledge to promote democracy in the Islamic world while expressing his support for Gen Musharraf.

“I'm of course, constantly working with him to make sure that democracy continues to advance in Pakistan. He's been a valuable ally in rejecting extremists. And that's important, to cultivate those allies,” he said.

At the State Department, Spokesman Sean McCormack refused to compare the storming of the Red Mosque with the raiding of the Golden Temple in Amritsar by Indian security forces in 1984.

“I'm not going to try to make any linkage between these two events. I think you have to deal with them in their own right and their own unique circumstances,” he said.

“The Pakistani security forces have gone in there after exercising a great deal of patience and restraint in offering every possible opportunity for innocents … in the mosque to leave”.

The Pakistani forces, he said, also offered the militants who “threatened to use violence, an opportunity to resolve the situation peacefully”.

The militants, he noted, used children as human shields, rejecting “any number of opportunities” Pakistani authorities offered to them to end the stalemate without violence.

Mr McCormack also denied US playing any role in the Pakistani operation to flush out the militants.