NEW YORK, July 22: The options facing US President George Bush regarding action against `Al Qaeda havens in Pakistan’ are as unpalatable as those that confronted former president Bill Clinton, the New York Times said in its Sunday edition.

Even as they speak publicly about throwing their support behind President Musharraf’s efforts against radicals, the newspaper said, administration officials in private find themselves re-enacting those Clinton-era debates about how to dismantle a terrorist haven inside a sovereign country.

One of the options, according to the NYT, would be to initiate aggressive campaigns of `deniable covert action’ in Pakistan to capture or kill Al Qaeda operatives, and pray that American special forces or CIA officials do not get caught.

Another would be to use air strikes against ‘known terrorist compounds’ in the tribal areas.

A third would involve carrying out a large-scale ground offensive across the border from Afghanistan — sending troops to rumble through villages in the hunt for the world’s most wanted men, the article said.

That last option seems, for all intents and purposes, off the table. Sending thousands of heavily armed American soldiers on a cave-to-cave search of North Waziristan, is, in the view of most military experts, the least likely means of dismantling `Al Qaeda’s Pakistan base of operations’.

Besides, a decision to allow an American invasion across Pakistan’s western border could very well doom a government the Bush administration considers its best bet, the columnist writes.

“As for unilateral air strike, military and intelligence officials think information on the whereabouts of top terrorists is rarely precise enough to justify bombings that could result in significant civilian casualties, and a failed air strike could shut the door to future American operations in the region.”

The New York Times quoted one Bush administration official as saying: “You could do a hit-and-run really quick. But that better be one damn good strike, because there ain’t going to be another.”

When asked how the United States would respond if Al Qaeda were to plot a successful attack on the United States from Pakistan’s tribal areas, the answer from one intelligence official was direct: “We’d go in and flatten it.”

LAL MASJID OPERATION: The paper said that in the aftermath of the Lal Masjid episode and subsequent attacks on the Pakistan army by militants is an opportunity for President Musharraf to ‘begin an aggressive campaign’ against Al Qaeda and the Taliban’.