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We were forced to join the US, Pakistani leader says

Pakistan's president says in his memoir released this week that he had no choice after the Sept. 11 attacks but to switch from supporting the Taliban to backing the US-led war on terror groups or face a US "onslaught."

General Pervez Musharraf, in his book In The Line of Fire, also criticizes the US-led invasion of Iraq, saying it has made the world "more dangerous."

Musharraf wrote that Pakistan, the US and Saudi Arabia created an extremist "monster" by supporting Islamic groups fighting the Soviet Union's 1979-89 occupation of Afghanistan.

"We had assisted in the rise of the Taliban after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, which was then callously abandoned by the United States," Musharraf says.

It was within this vacuum that the al-Qaeda terror network strengthened, he adds. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Musharraf says, he realized continuing to support the Taliban would set Pakistan on a collision course with Washington.

"America was sure to react violently, like a wounded bear," Musharraf writes. "If the perpetrator turned out to be al-Qaeda, then that wounded bear would come charging straight toward us."

On Sept. 12, 2001, Musharraf says, then Secretary of State Colin Powell phoned with an ultimatum: "You are either with us or against us."

The next day, he says, Powell's then deputy, Richard Armitage, telephoned the chief of Pakistan's top spy agency with an even sterner warning.

"In what has to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made, Armitage ... told the director general not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but that if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age," Musharraf writes.
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