President’s Book
Ruffles Feathers in US
Washington,
DC: President Pervez Musharraf’s book, ‘In the
Line of Fire’, breaks sharply with the political tradition
of not publishing a memoir while still in power and has
ruffled many feathers, particularly in the United States.
The tell-all memoir exposes how the US made Pakistan fall
in line after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, paid bounties
for capturing Al-Qaeda terrorists and gives an account of
the 1999 Kargil conflict that has angered India.
The first reaction to the claims made in the book came from
the former US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage
who said he had never threatened that Pakistan would be
bombed.
Commenting on the book, Walter Andersen, a former top South
Asia specialist at the State Department who now teaches
at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School
of Advanced International Studies, told Washington Times:
“It’s a highly unusual thing for a sitting head
of state to do, but it isn’t totally out of character
for Mr Musharraf.”
“He’s cultivated a reputation for blunt talk,
for being a military man who’s not afraid to be frank,”
said Mr Andersen. “I’m sure his publishers love
it, although I imagine there are some people in his own
foreign ministry and intelligence service who are staying
up late these days.”
Mr Andersen said the book’s contents would probably
prove ‘irritating’ for the governments involved,
including Pakistan itself, but said it was unlikely to have
a major impact on the Musharraf government’s relations
with its key partners, including the US, India and Afghanistan.
Some US newspapers pointed out that it also earned a unique
televised endorsement from President Bush. Mr Bush made
his semi-serious endorsement at a press briefing in which
Gen Musharraf deflected reporters’ questions by saying
he was pledged to New York publisher Simon & Schuster
not to reveal details of the manuscript before official
release date. “In other words, ‘buy the book’
is what he’s saying,” Mr Bush quipped.
“Musharraf courts fame, controversy with memoir,”
says a report published in The Washington Post.
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