NEW YORK, March 13: US President Bush stayed overnight in Pakistan during his recent trip to South Asia because of President Musharraf’s insistence and to reward an ally despite assumed caveats of the US secret service, the New York Times said on Monday.
Although President Bush has been back from the subcontinent for more than a week now, the Times said one big question from his trip remained: How did it happen that the president spent a night in Pakistan, the assumed haven of Osama Bin Laden and one of the most dangerous countries in the world?
“Pakistan is both an ally in the war on terror and, in some sense, a site where the war is being carried about,” said Steven J. Hadley, the national security adviser, in response to reporters’ questions in New Delhi on the eve of the Islamabad trip.
Mr Hadley added that ‘at this point, people are comfortable that the necessary precautions are in place’ but, nonetheless, ‘this is not a risk-free undertaking’.
The newspaper reflected that Mr Bush, like former president Clinton, made the political calculation that he could not visit India without visiting Pakistan, particularly if he was going to make a nuclear deal with India, as he did in New Delhi without offering the same to Mr Musharraf.
Beyond that, it was critical to maintain good relations with a country, however problematic, that is at the centre of the battle against terrorism. “It was the proper call and a gutsy one,” said Strobe Talbott, who was Mr Clinton’s deputy secretary of state.
White House officials will not say whether Mr Bush overruled the secret service in making the trip, or even if he was told not to go. But it is no secret that the service was in a state of anxiety during his time in Islamabad, the newspaper said.
The newspaper noted that for Mr Bush, who also kept the secret service busy with a stop in Kabul, the story began in January, when he met Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in the Oval Office. It was then, an administration official said, that Mr Bush privately committed to the overnight stay in Pakistan. After the meeting, Mr Bush announced that he would be visiting Pakistan and India in March, but White House officials left the dates for Pakistan vague. They repeatedly refused to say when, or for how long, Mr Bush would be in the country.
It observed that the fuzziness was to keep terrorists guessing about the timing of motorcades and the arrival of Air Force One, basic precautions passed down from a cloak-and-dagger trip that Mr Clinton made to Pakistan in 2000 that had the secret service in an uproar.
Six years later, accounts of the trip from former Clinton administration officials are far more harrowing than was known at the time.
It said that Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, two counter-terrorism directors on Mr Clinton’s National Security Council staff, recount in their book, The Age of Sacred Terror, the secret service argued strenuously against the trip.
“In the preparations for the 2000 visit, the service dug its heels in, repeatedly confronting the top NSC officials with horror scenarios,”
Mr Benjamin and Mr Simon write. “There was danger to Air Force One from ground fire. No one trusted the Pakistani military to keep travel routes in the country secret or secure. The service said it could not perform its mission: it could not protect the president. In a meeting with Clinton, Larry Cockell, the head of the presidential detail, told him so.”
Mr Clinton overruled the secret service, although he decided that his daughter, Chelsea, who was to accompany him to India, should not make the stop in Pakistan.
Mr Clinton ended up slipping into Islamabad for less than six hours on a small military jet owned by the CIA while an Air Force One decoy flew in to draw a possible attack. It was a dramatic and, for Mr Musharraf, embarrassing difference to the five previous days that Mr Clinton had spent out in the relative open in India, the newspaper said.
Mr Bush, on his way back to the Islamabad airport at the end of the trip, engaged in no motorcade feints — he and the first lady went by Blackhawk. A dozen secret service agents surrounded the helicopter as the couple disembarked and then climbed aboard Air Force One, which taxied to the end of the runway and took off in complete darkness.