By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : The United States would not say whether it persuaded Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to shelve his plans to declare an emergency, but has urged its embattled ally to hold free and fair elections.
“My focus in terms of the domestic scene there is that he have a free and fair election, and that’s what we’ve been talking to him about and hopeful they will,” President George Bush said at a White House press conference Thursday.
He too had seen the reports of an emergency declaration, but “I have seen no such evidence that he’s made that decision,” he said hours after officials confirmed that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had called Musharraf late Wednesday evening amid reports of an impending emergency.
Bush said he and Musharraf had discussed and agreed on the need to go after the militants. “I have made it clear to him that I would expect there to be full cooperation in sharing intelligence and I believe we’ve got good intelligence sharing.”
“I have reminded him that we share a common enemy – extremists and radicals who would like to do harm in our respective societies. In his case, they would like to kill him, and they’ve tried,” he said in his oft repeated defence of his ally.
“I have indicated to him that the American people would expect there to be swift action taken if there’s actionable intelligence on high-value targets inside his country,” Bush said further tempering his response to recent suggestions from officials that Washington may act unilaterally.
Asked what he meant when he said at Camp David ‘We’ll get the job done,’ Bush clarified, “I said I’m confident that we, both the Paks and the Americans, will be able to work up a plan based upon actionable intelligence. We’ll bring the top al Qaeda targets to justice, and I meant what I said.”
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack too later declined to say whether Rice’s call to Musharraf had played a role in his change of mind about imposition of an emergency in Pakistan.
Decisions about Pakistan’s political future had to be made by Pakistanis, he said, when asked whether he was concerned by the deteriorating security situation in Pakistan. “Clearly there is a lot of political discussion and political ferment within the Pakistani political system,” said McCormack.
Reports of an impending emergency came Wednesday as Musharraf at the last minute cancelled his participation at a Bush brokered peace ‘jirga’ in Kabul with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and tribal leaders from the two countries’ border region. The Aug 9 jirga to which Musharraf sent his Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz instead is aimed at strategising on how to fight the resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda militants.
Rice and Musharraf “talked about the ongoing and evolving political developments in Pakistan. They had a good conversation,” McCormack said without offering any details.
“I’ll leave it to Pakistani officials to describe President Musharraf’s thinking and how that thinking may have evolved,” he said when told that some Pakistani officials were saying that the talk with Rice had influenced President Musharraf not to declare a state of emergency.
In response to persistent questions about Rice’s role, McCormack parried with Pakistan information minister’s “revised and extended” comments that “there is no plan at this point, for a state of emergency and that they do plan to hold the elections on a schedule.”
“We have stated in the past we support those elections moving forward so that you do have free, fair, and credible elections in which the Pakistani people can express their will as to who will lead them and that those elections should reflect that will,” he said echoing Bush’s comments.
“We have an interest in a Pakistan, as we have said before, that is on the pathway to greater economic openness and freedom and reform, greater political openness and freedom and that’s the pathway that President Musharraf took starting in 2001. We fully support that effort,” he said when asked if a stable democratic Pakistan was in US interest.