Pat Dollard | Young Americans

NYT:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20 — The scenes of carnage in Pakistan this week conjured what one senior administration official on Friday called “the nightmare scenario” for President Bush’s last 15 months in office: Political meltdown in the one country where Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and nuclear weapons are all in play.

White House officials insisted in interviews that they had confidence that their longtime ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, would maintain enough control to keep the country stable as he edged toward a power-sharing agreement with his main rival, Benazir Bhutto.

But other current and former officials cautioned that six years after the United States forced General Musharraf to choose sides in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, American leverage over Pakistan is now limited. Though General Musharraf seems likely to survive a multifront challenge to his authority, he is weakened.

His effort at conciliation in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Al Qaeda and the Taliban are, proved a failure, and his efforts to take them on militarily have so far proved ineffective and politically costly. Almost every major terror attack since 9/11 has been traced back to Pakistani territory, leading many who work in intelligence to believe that Pakistan, not Iraq, is the place Mr. Bush should consider the “central front” in the battle against terrorism. It was also the source of the greatest leakage of nuclear arms technology in modern times.

After years of compromises and trade-offs, there are questions inside and outside the administration about whether Mr. Bush has invested too heavily in a single Pakistani leader, an over-reliance that may have prevented the administration from examining longer-term strategic options dealing with a country Mr. Bush designated, somewhat optimistically, a “major non-NATO ally.”

“It never stitched together,” said Dan Markey, a State Department official who dealt with Pakistan until he left government earlier this year. “At every step, there was more risk aversion — because of the risk of rocking the boat seemed so high — than there was a real strategic vision.”

Even some senior administration officials said privately and in a series of recent intelligence assessments that American influence over events in Pakistan was feared to be ebbing fast.

Some officials worry aloud that a year of unrest, violence and political intrigue in Pakistan may undercut Mr. Bush’s last chance to root out Osama bin Laden from the lawless territory where Al Qaeda has regrouped. Likewise, they fear, the unrest could cripple a renewed administration effort to turn around the war against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

If serious divisions emerge in Pakistan’s army, they could also threaten the security of Pakistan’s potent nuclear arsenal, something that Bush administration officials worry about far more than they let on publicly.

Over the past year, the Musharraf government has quietly sent officials to Washington to assure Bush administration officials that even if the general were ousted or assassinated, the mechanisms for controlling both weapons and nuclear technology — which Pakistan acknowledges it has put together with aid from other countries — are now unbreakable.

Several officials who have left the administration recently, and were involved in discussions with Pakistan about nuclear security, say they are less sanguine.

“We have to remember that the U.S. doesn’t have very much capability to affect internal developments” in Pakistan, said Robert D. Blackwill, the former American ambassador to India and a senior official in the National Security Council during Mr. Bush’s first term.

“What I am struck by are the trends we see today: the North-West Province is ungovernable and a sanctuary for terrorists,” he said. “The politics are fractured and deeply unstable, Musharraf is weaker, and the army is uncertain which way it will go.”

This summer, White House officials were clearly worried that General Musharraf would adopt extreme measures to maintain power. In early August, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called General Musharraf twice in one day — once at 2 a.m. in Islamabad — to persuade him not to declare martial law.

A steady parade of American officials, including Ms. Rice’s deputy, John D. Negroponte, have been sent to Pakistan to persuade General Musharraf to make good on his pledge to give up his role as army chief, which now appears likely assuming the country’s Supreme Court validates his victory in a presidential election held Oct. 6.

A senior administration official, who could not speak for attribution because of the sensitivity of the issues, argued in an interview on Friday that these steps had worked. Instability and paralysis in Islamabad “is certainly one scenario, but hardly the only one,” he said.

After trying for a year, and failing, to let tribal leaders deal with Al Qaeda and to negotiate with Islamist forces, the official contended, General Musharraf “learned you can’t appease these people, and they have to go after them. So there is room to be hopeful.”

But critics of the American policy say both General Musharraf and the Bush administration were slow to sense the gathering of new threats. A frequently cited example was the administration’s delay in responding to evidence starting in 2003 that Al Qaeda and the Taliban were creating a new sanctuary in the tribal areas, on the Afghan border. At the time, Mr. Bush and General Musharraf were publicly declaring that Al Qaeda’s ranks had been greatly weakened, and that the Taliban was a spent force.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, began warning senior administration officials that Pakistan had become the new sanctuary in 2004, according to a senior administration official. But some administration officials warned against placing too much pressure on General Musharraf.

Part of the problem of fashioning a forceful policy, critics like Mr. Markey say, was that the American approach to Pakistan was never sewn together as a whole. “You had different parts of the U.S. government dealing with different problems,” said Mr. Markey, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The military and intelligence agencies focused on the hunt for Mr. bin Laden and his top associates. The C.I.A. was responsible for making sure that the nuclear black market set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, a man revered in Pakistan for helping make it a nuclear power, had been dismantled.

Meanwhile, the State Department was responsible for coaxing General Musharraf toward democracy, and starting up a $750 million program to bring schools and economic development to the areas where Al Qaeda and the Taliban have thrived.

Then there was the administration’s focus on General Musharraf, who many in the administration still view as the only moderate military leader who can control the country’s army. As long as the army remains united, most American officials say they believe the nuclear arsenal will remain under strict control.

But some experts say the focus on General Musharraf is a mistake. They argue that Pakistan’s army is overwhelmingly moderate and will remain so, even without General Musharraf. “I think our policy has been too much built around one person — and that is Musharraf,” said Teresita C. Schaffer, a Pakistan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The result was that we were seen more as Musharraf’s friends than Pakistan’s friends.”

That has been particularly true in the protracted battle against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the rugged territory where Mr. bin Laden is believed to be operating. A succession of American efforts to locate him have failed. While Mr. Bush only mentions Mr. bin Laden episodically, killing or capturing the man behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks is considered a major goal among officials seeking to create for Mr. Bush a legacy beyond Iraq.

But Pakistanis have never been as enthusiastic about that battle, and the Pakistani Army has taken hundreds of casualties there; a recent return to the region resulted in 250 dead and another 250 taken hostage. “It’s embarrassing to them,” a senior administration official acknowledges.

Local Pakistani officials have said that General Musharraf has been so focused on maintaining power that he has failed to mount a coherent strategy in the tribal areas. They say that the political infighting and paralysis in the government are allowing the militants to thrive.

Today, despite the administration’s heavy reliance on General Musharraf, the tribal areas are a base for a revitalized Qaeda, which has created a new command structure and is again planning international attacks, according to a National Intelligence Estimate issued in July, parts of which the administration published in an unclassified form.

The 2005 London subway bombings, the 2006 plot to blow up British airliners and a recent plot to set off explosives in Germany have all been traced back to the region. But General Musharraf continues to limit American operations there.

“We can conduct some covert operations, but there is a huge premium on not being seen in the area,” one senior administration official said. “And I don’t think that is going to change for the rest of the Bush presidency. You can imagine the frustration level.”