Musharraf to sign secret, anti-Iran pact with US
21 June 2003: America's planned offensive against Iran will take precedence over the Kashmir dispute and India-Pakistan relations when General Pervez Musharraf meets US president George W.Bush at Camp David next week.
Diplomats said that Musharraf will have to agree to tough US conditions to facilitate action against Iran from Pakistan before he gets to have a friendly lunch with Bush, and the tough new conditions will be incorporated in a secret treaty with America that the Pakistan president has to sign at Camp David.
Among the conditions include "desirable access" to strategic Pakistani military bases like at Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Multan, overflight rights on Baluchistan and Sind in addition to NWFP and Punjab, "friendly" reception of Iranian refugees in Pakistan, and full intelligence-sharing, in return for a $1.5-billion aid, debt relaxation by the World Bank and IMF, and Washington's praise for Musharraf's commitment against terrorism.
The United States will press upon Musharraf to exempt Iranian refugees from the recent pact with Iran to deport infiltrators, while America will also seek an agreement to set up sophisticated elint facilities against Iran to be exclusively manned by US servicemen.
Existing spying facilities have Pakistani crew as well, while the US controls the strategic Jacobabad airbase.
Diplomats said that while Bush could set a time-frame for resolving the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, the dispute itself and Pakistan's relations with India would lose their priority to the planned American action against Iran, in which Pakistan is being inducted as a frontline state.
In the first session at Camp David, Musharraf will be quizzed and grilled by twelve tough-talking US officials, only two of them drawn from the state department, while the rest will be from Pentagon and the intelligence community, and if the general passes muster with them, and agrees to the conditions of alliance against Iran, he will have a "good" lunch with Bush, or return empty-handed.
Bush is also expected to convey America's concerns about the growth and Talibanism of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal in the two provinces it rules, and Musharraf will be pointedly told to curb the MMA's membership drive among Pakistan army officers and civil servants, which the US feels will strengthen the Islamists, who have already held nearly two hundred anti-West demonstrations in NWFP and Baluchistan.
But diplomats are more engaged about Musharraf's "surrender" on the Iran issue, saying he signed a secret pact with America on Afghanistan which is still not public.
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