Musharraf , Pelosi

Washington, Jan. 28: Five years and four months after Pervez Musharraf abandoned the Taliban and tricked the Americans into enlisting him as a partner in the fight against terrorism, the wily general’s day of reckoning in Washington may be around the corner.

The new Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives has passed a bill which requires America’s President to certify that “the government of Pakistan is making all possible efforts to prevent the Taliban from operating in areas under its sovereign control”. Failure to do so will stop all US aid, including military assistance. The House wants the restriction to take effect from the 2008-09 financial year.

Yesterday, Musharraf protested against the new legislation at a meeting in Islamabad with the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, the chairman of the House committee on foreign affairs, Tom Lantos, and five other powerful Congressmen, including the chairmen of the House armed services committee and permanent select committee on intelligence.

The bill is now before the Senate. If this chamber, too, passes the legislation, Pakistanis fear that it may have the same effect as the “Pressler Amendment”, which was used by George Herbert Walker Bush, the present President’s father, in the 1990s to suspend military aid to Islamabad because of its nuclear programme.

The new rift between Pakistan and the US has been serious enough for a visiting American official to call an emergency news conference in Islamabad to distance the Bush administration from the Congressional initiative.

John Gastright, deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, on Friday attempted to whitewash the bill arguing that it was more about Pakistan’s education system and poverty reduction and that the portion about a suspected nexus between Musharraf and the Taliban was minor.

About presidential certification to continue US aid to Pakistan, Gastright said: “The President can certify that. The issue is, he shouldn’t have to.… We will want to work with her (speaker Pelosi) so that she realises that that provision is not necessary.”

There are several significant elements to the new US bill on Pakistan versus the Taliban and the rift it has caused between Washington and Islamabad.

First, the bill was part of the Democrats’ “first 100 hours” agenda after they retook both Houses of the Congress, underlining the urgency US lawmakers attach to challenging the Bush administration’s policy of treating Musharraf with kid gloves even as the ISI rearms and gives the Taliban a new lease of life.

Second, the bill has been sponsored by the new chairman of the powerful house committee on homeland security, Democrat Bennie Thompson. It has a whopping 205 co-sponsors representing all shades of opinion on Capitol Hill from both Democrats and Republicans.

Third, the bill is making its way through Congress even as divisions within the Bush administration on how to handle Musharraf in the face of a Taliban revival are deepening.

At the same time that Gastright was praising Musharraf’s fight against terrorism on Friday, the US under-secretary of state for political affairs, Nicholas Burns, was underlining a more balanced American policy.

“The Taliban increased its insurgency in 2006. It is a real problem. There is a problem of forces coming from Pakistan into Afghanistan to attack and then to return to Pakistan to seek refuge and refitting.

“We, of course, are working very closely with President Musharraf and with the Pakistan military and the Pakistan intelligence services to see that Pakistan will do more and make a concerted effort to strike at those terrorist training camps in north and south Waziristan and in Balochistan.”

A fortnight earlier, America’s outgoing intelligence czar John Negroponte said in his annual “threat assessment” to the US Congress that “the Taliban and al-Qaeda maintain critical sanctuaries” inside Pakistan.

The bill passed by the House makes specific mention of Taliban activities inside Pakistan, “in the cities of Quetta and Chaman and in the Northwest Frontier Province and the federally administered tribal Areas.

“The bill allows Bush to waive its provisions in the “national security interest” of the US, but it remains to be seen if the President, already under fire for his Iraq policy, will invite more fire by doing so with Pakistan.