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ON CLAIMS HE LIVES IN FEAR: "Nonsense! Absolute nonsense! I go to hotels, restaurants. I wish you could come with me once and you'll see what happens there. People come and want photographs with me. They cheer me. You must come with me once. Maybe I will take you to a restaurant." -- PHOTO: AP
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IN RAWALPINDI - MR PERVEZ Musharraf, Pakistan's embattled president, warned that any unilateral intervention in his country by coalition forces fighting in Afghanistan would be treated as an invasion.
Unless agreed to by Pakistan, any entry by the United States or coalition forces into Pakistan's tribal areas would be resisted as a breach of Pakistan's sovereignty, Mr Musharraf told The Straits Times in his first interview with a newspaper since the assassination of Ms Benazir Bhutto on Dec 27.
Four American politicians, all Democrats contending for the party's nomination for the race to the White House, have called for US forces now in neighbouring Afghanistan to join the Pakistan Army's counter-insurgency campaign and to hunt down Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan's tribal areas.
President Musharraf slammed the 'perception in the United States (that) what our army cannot do, they can do'.
Added the president: 'I challenge anybody coming into our mountains. They would regret that day.'
Mr Musharraf also took issue with US Senator Hillary Clinton's proposal, made on the eve of her New Hampshire primary victory, to place Pakistan's nuclear weapons under supervision by the US and the UK. Her statement, the president said, was 'an intrusion into our privacy, into our sensitivity... She doesn't seem to understand how well-guarded these assets are'.
The interview took place in an elegant red-brick building that dates to the British Raj in Rawalpindi's presidential compound. Sentries in the red livery and towering, starched turbans of the Azad Kashmir (or Free Kashmir) regiment - a unit first raised among 'freedom-fighters' of the 1947-48 war with India - formed a fierce-looking guard.
During the interview, President Musharraf also said he would resign if a government that emerged from the coming election sought his impeachment.
Most observers expect a sympathy vote to trigger a landslide for the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), the political movement led by the Bhutto family.
A PPP-only government or a coalition between the PPP and the Pakistan Muslim League-N (for Nawaz group, headed by Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister deposed by then army chief Musharraf in 1999), could conceivably command the two-thirds majority that the constitution requires for an impeachment process.
In the interview, President Musharraf repeated his advice to Afghan President Hamid Karzai to negotiate with the Taleban.
Not all Taleban wanted to behave barbarously, he said, and military action could not, by itself, provide an ultimate solution. A solution would come by moving simultaneously on the socio-economic, political and military fronts.
The road would be long, and in Afghanistan, coalition forces - the US, Nato, Australia and others - would have to have the stamina to persist.
If coalition forces depart without some stable government in place that is strong enough to defend itself, that would 'affect the stability of the whole region and the world', he said.
In these efforts to counter subversion, India had not been helpful, he told The Straits Times - sending weapons, intelligence and money through Afghanistan to elements in Balochistan, and 'training terrorists'.
But he had praise for China and other East Asian nations, 'even Japan'.
These countries, unlike many Western media, understood Pakistan's problems, he said. The Western media 'want to impose their understanding of democracy and human rights on our developing countries, while China and other eastern countries don't'.
Added President Musharraf: 'We have to insure that Pakistan is secure. Everything else is secondary.'
anthonypaul@asiahand.com
REVIEW: TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH MUSHARRAF
SUICIDE BOMBER STRIKES IN LAHORE: 22 DEAD
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