President Bush’s senior national security advisers are debating whether to expand the authority of the CIA and the US military to conduct “far more aggressive covert operations” in the tribal areas of Pakistan, reports the New York Times on Sunday.
The current debate in the Bush administration is triggered by intelligence reports suggesting that Al Qaeda and the Taliban are intensifying their efforts to destabilise the Pakistani government. The newspaper discloses that Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney and top national security advisers met on Friday at the White House to discuss the proposal, which is part of a broad reassessment of American strategy after the murder of Benazir Bhutto. The meeting also discussed how to handle the period from now to the Feb. 18 elections, and the aftermath of those elections. Several of the participants in the meeting are said to have argued that the threat to the Musharraf government was now so grave that both he and PakistanÂ’s new military leadership were likely to give the United States more latitude. No decisions were made. The Bush administration continues to support President MusharrafÂ’s continuance in office although with Benazir BhuttoÂ’s departure from the scene, the original US script for Pakistan has come unravelled.
|