'Fighting US would have been suicidal'

ISLAMABAD: In a memoir released on Monday, President Pervez Musharraf recounted how he decided it would have been suicidal to confront a US attack after being threatened by Washington a day after al Qaeda’s strikes on September 11, ’01.

With the US demanding Pakistan’s help to launch attacks on al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, Musharraf recalled how the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell had telephoned him with an ultimatum: “You are either with us and against us.”

He also wrote that Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage warned Lieutenant-General Mehmood Ahmad, the director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence, that if Pakistan chose the terrorist’s side “then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age.”

Armitage, who like Powell has left the government, on Monday denied using such a threat, after Musharraf first described the exchanges during an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” last week.

Musharraf’s autobiography “In the Line of Fire” was due to be released in New York on Monday, but some bookshops in Islamabad were already selling copies.