Islamabad, October 27
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has said that the US-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan should be “as short as possible” and has advocated a switchover to a “political strategy” if the military action does not render the desired results.

The bombing campaign should be “as short as possible,” but if it did not succeed “within a certain duration, which I can’t identify, we need to switch over to a political strategy which could attain the same objectives,” Gen Musharraf said in an interview with foreign journalists yesterday.

Gen Musharraf said Pakistan would “go along” with the military campaign “until its objectives are achieved,” but made it clear that he was concerned about the ever-lengthening time frame of the attacks and the chaos and bloodshed that could follow if no cohesive political force was ready to take over.

He said in any case a “political strategy” for Afghanistan was urgently needed to prevent “anarchy and atrocity” if the Taliban movement falls to US-led military attacks in the coming weeks.

“There is concern not only in the Islamic world, but the entire world, in the West and in the USA, at all the civilian casualties and the miseries that the civilians are being put through in Afghanistan,” Gen Musharraf said.

The best chance the USA had of achieving its primary goal — capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and uprooting his Al-Qaida terrorist network — rested with Pakistani-backed efforts to create a successor government that would include the “moderate” Taliban, he claimed.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell had endorsed the inclusion of “moderate Taliban during his visit to Islamabad earlier, which was, however, rejected off hand a few days later by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Without naming Putin, Gen Musharraf implied that the Russian leader was badly out of touch with the events since Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989, leaving a power vacuum that was eventually filled by the Taliban.

Stating that any future Afghan government should be “home-grown,” and that it should “not be imposed, only facilitated” by foreign governments such as Pakistan and the USA, Gen Musharraf said “we cannot ignore reality, if we want to bring peace and unity, all sections of society must be represented, and the Taliban happen to be one important section at the moment”.

Gen Musharraf even suggested the composition of a future Afghan government — moderate Taliban; tribal elders and religious leaders from other ethnic Pashtoon groups; former Afghan King Mohammad Zahir Shah; and the ethnic Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara groups that make up the Northern Alliance.

It was Gen Musharraf’s first interview with foreign mediamen since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the USA and came on a day of large public demonstrations throughout this country of 140 million Muslims.

The group beat rival Boeing Corporation on the basis of strengths, weaknesses and degrees of risks in the programme, Mr Roche said, adding that the decision was taken together with the UK. AFP