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Journalism of Courage
A former top Bush administration official, who once allegedly threatened to bomb Pakistan ‘back to the stone age’, has said if President Pervez Musharraf ‘does not live up to the word’ he gave post-9/11 attacks, the US would have to ‘hammer’ him.
“I, personally, have a high regard for President Musharraf and what he’s done, what he’s personally suffered, and, by the way, what his country has suffered in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — 800 or so killed, now 300 other soldiers captured and missing. So he’s sacrificed a good bit,” former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said at a Congressional hearing.
Armitage, who played a critical role in foreign and national security affairs in the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, said that “however, if he’s not able and we’re not able to make him live up to the word he gave us. We have to hammer him, I’m afraid.”
Armitage had once allegedly threatened to bomb Pakistan ‘back to the stone age’ if Musharraf did not cooperate in the US-led war on terror in the neighbouring Afghanistan.
“Now, I think there are two ways to do it. You can just stand up and make a declaratory policy, or you can say you think he (Musharraf) is wrong; he’s made a bad error; and we wish, as a friend, that he’d correct that error. And I think that’s the way to handle this initially. The accusation will be is that we’re weak and sort of a little weasel-worded. The stakes are too high in Pakistan for all of us, I think, to be too declaratory at this early a stage,” Armitage told lawmakers sitting on the House Sub Committee on National Security and Foreign Affairs holding a hearing on United States Security Strategy Post 9/11.
