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Bonhomie ignited long before war on terror

The Bush administration’s chumminess with Pervez Musharraf did not start after the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington and the imperatives it created for a revived alliance between the US and Pakistan as generally believed.

Early in 2001, soon after President George W. Bush took office, the White House sent a confidential letter to Musharraf “that contained many encouraging signals about the future of the US-Pakistan alliance”, which included debt relief, sanction waivers and security cooperation.

That letter was in response to a three-page confidential memo delivered by Musharraf to Bush outlining common ground between Islamabad and Washington and pressing for closer ties.

That memo was the result of alarm in Islamabad over advocacy within the Republican party for a “strategic shift towards India” by Robert Blackwill, then a foreign policy adviser to the incoming President, and others in the Bush election team.

This and several other startling revelations about the recent twists and turns in America’s ties with Pakistan are contained in a book by Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post, published here last week. Coll was earlier the paper’s correspondent in New Delhi.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, published by Penguin, also offers the first clue to why Ashraf Jehangir Qazi was posted as Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington after Delhi asked Islamabad to pull him out as high commissioner in Delhi.

Source: The Telegraph - Calcutta : Nation