The recent scenes of carnage in Pakistan conjured what one senior administration official called “the nightmare scenario” for President George W. 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, General Pervez Musharraf, 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 Musharraf to choose sides in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, American leverage over Pakistan is now limited. Although 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 plot and train, proved a failure. His efforts to take them on militarily have so far proved ineffective and politically costly. Almost every major terror attack since Sept. 11 has been traced back to Pakistani territory, leading many who work in intelligence to believe that Pakistan, not Iraq, is the place Bush should consider the “central front” in the battle against terrorism.
Pakistan 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 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 in dealing with a country Bush designated, somewhat optimistically, a “major non-NATO ally.”
“It never stitched together,” Daniel Markey, a State Department official who dealt with Pakistan until he left government this year, said on Friday. “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, echoing views contained in recent intelligence assessments, that U.S. influence over events in Pakistan may be ebbing fast.
Some officials worry aloud that a year of unrest, violence and political intrigue in Pakistan may undercut Bush’s last chance to root out Osama bin Laden from the lawless territory where Al Qaeda has regrouped, and could cripple a renewed administration effort to turn around the war against Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.
If serious divisions emerge in Pakistan’s military, they could also threaten the security of the country’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 – safeguards that Pakistan acknowledges it has put together with aid from other countries – are unbreakable.
Several officials who have left the administration say they are less than sanguine about the prospect that Pakistan’s troubles will just settle down.
“We have to remember that the U.S. doesn’t have very much capability to affect internal developments” in Pakistan, said Robert Blackwill, a former U.S. ambassador to India and a senior official in the National Security Council during 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.”
A senior administration official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issues, argued in an interview on Friday that U.S. steps to coax Musharraf toward democracy had worked. Instability and paralysis in Islamabad “is certainly one scenario, but hardly the only one,” he said.