Clinton, with daughter Chelsea and wife Hillary, in New York to celebrate the publication of his book on Monday. (AP)

Washington, June 22: President Bill Clinton told Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on July 4, 1999, that unless Sharif did more to help the US to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, “I would have to announce that Pakistan was in effect supporting terrorism in Afghanistan”.

Sharif agreed to let the Americans train 60 Pakistani troops as commandos to secretly go into Afghanistan and get bin Laden. Three months and eight days later, Sharif was overthrown in a military coup which brought General Pervez Musharraf to power.

“Musharraf’s ascendancy,” writes Clinton in My Life, his autobiography published today, “had one immediate consequence: the programme to send Pakistani commandos into Afghanistan to catch or kill Osama bin Laden was cancelled”.

Clinton says he was sceptical about the proposed commando operation from the start. “Even if Sharif wanted to help, the Pakistani military was full of Taliban and al Qaida sympathisers. But I thought we had nothing to lose by exploring every option”.

Clinton’s revelations mark the first confirmation that the Americans ever considered declaring Pakistan a terrorist state, although successive Indian governments from that of P.V. Narasimha Rao to the one led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee have publicly harboured the hope for a decade that Washington would call the spade in Islamabad a spade.

Clinton writes that prior to his blunt warning on July 4, 1999, that Pakistan would be named as a state backing terrorism, he asked Sharif on three different occasions for help in apprehending bin Laden: when the two leaders met in December of the previous year, during the funeral of King Hussein of Jordan in February 1999 and in a phone conversation a month before Sharif made his desperate journey to Washington to get help from Clinton in ending the Kargil conflict. That phone call was followed up with a letter.

On the day he met Sharif in Washington to discuss Kargil, Clinton signed an executive order imposing economic sanctions on the Taliban, freezing its assets and prohibiting commercial exchanges. The noose was tightening around Pakistan, which was the sponsor of then the ruling Islamic militia in Afghanistan.

After their meeting on July 4, Clinton concluded that “Sharif had come (to Washington) in order to use pressure from the US to provide himself cover for ordering his military to defuse the conflict (with India). I knew he was on shaky ground at home, and I hoped he would survive, because I needed his cooperation in the fight against terrorism”.

Clinton writes of his March 2000 visit to South Asia that the US secret service was strongly opposed to his going to Pakistan or Bangladesh because of terrorist threats to attack the presidential party and wanted the trip to be confined to India alone.

“I felt I had to go (to Pakistan) because of the adverse consequences to American interests of going only to India and because I didn’t want to give in to a terrorist threat…I believe it was the only request the secret service ever made that I refused”.

The book gives graphic details of the precautions that were taken on the visit to Islamabad, including the decoy presidential air force plane and a white-painted, camouflaged aircraft in which Clinton secretly flew out of India.

“Our motorcade travelled an empty highway to the presidential palace for a meeting with General Musharraf and his cabinet and a televised address to the people of Pakistan”.

In words that may appear prophetic in retrospect, Clinton writes about Musharraf: “If he chose to pursue a peaceful, progressive path, I thought he had a fair chance to succeed, but I told him I thought terrorism would eventually destroy Pakistan from within if he didn’t move against it…He was clearly intelligent, strong and sophisticated”.

In another prophetic observation, Clinton writes that “I got on well with (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee and hoped he would have an opportunity to re-engage Pakistan before he left office”.

Clinton recalls his meeting with Sonia Gandhi during that trip. “Her husband and mother-in-law, the grandson and daughter of Nehru, were both victims of political assassination. Sonia, an Italian by birth, had bravely remained in public life”.