The scenes of carnage in Pakistan last week conjured what one senior administration official Friday called the “nightmare scenario” for President Bush’s past 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, Pakistani President 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 the administration had invested so much in Musharraf’s success that its leverage is now limited. Similarly, they and Pakistan experts said that a series of policy miscalculations had left the administration with few good options.
Limping reactions
They contended that the administration was surprised by how quickly domestic support for Musharraf eroded and that it was slow to act on warnings dating to 2004 that the administration had built too much of its policy around a single Pakistani leader. That over-reliance meant that a more coherent policy was never fully fashioned.
“You had different parts of the U.S. government dealing with different problems,” said Dan Markey, a former State Department official who dealt with Pakistan.
“It never stitched together,” said Markey, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “At every step, there was more risk aversion — because 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 fear that a year of unrest, violence and political intrigue in Pakistan could 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 Afghanistan.
If serious divisions emerge in the country’s army, it could also rekindle fears about the security of a potent nuclear arsenal 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 the Bush administration that even if Musharraf, who also heads the military, 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.
Little maneuvering room
“We have to remember that the U.S. doesn’t have very much capability to affect internal developments” in Pakistan, said Robert Blackwill, the former U.S. ambassador to India and on the National Security Council during Bush’s first term.
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“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 Musharraf would adopt extreme measures to maintain power. In early August, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Musharraf twice in one day to persuade him not to declare martial law.
A steady parade of U.S. officials, including Rice’s deputy, John Negroponte, have been sent to Pakistan to persuade Musharraf to make good on his pledge to give up his role as army chief, which now appears likely if the country’s Supreme Court validates his victory in a presidential election held Oct. 6.
A senior administration official argued in an interview Friday that these steps have worked. Instability and paralysis in Islamabad are “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, 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 U.S. policy say both 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, at a time when Bush and Musharraf were publicly declaring that Al Qaeda and the Taliban had been greatly weakened.
On Saturday, Pakistani police questioned three people over the bombing of Bhutto’s caravan, which killed at least 136 people, The Associated Press reported. The men, arrested in Punjab province, were linked to a vehicle that police believe was used by one of the assailants in the suicide attack last week.