Musharraf to Karzai: Wake Up and Smell the Poppies

Sept. 27, 2006 — -- When Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf sit down for dinner tonight at the White House, the conversation may prove to be more heated than the food.

For the last week, Musharraf has responded politely to very public criticism leveled at him by Karzai, who said Musharraf had not done enough to fight the Taliban.

Karzai complained that Taliban-led insurgents were launching attacks on his country from bases inside Pakistan.

In an interview with "Nightline" co-anchor Cynthia McFadden, however, Musharraf came out swinging.

He said that Karzai was "not seeing reality," and that he might regret his initial support for Karzai if the Afghan leader continued to blame Pakistan for Afghanistan's homegrown terrorists.

"President Karzai is purposely overlooking this reality, and he will land us in trouble -- land the whole world in trouble," Musharraf said.

The Taliban Insurgency

The reality, according to Musharraf, is that while some of the leadership of the Taliban is based in Pakistan, it is also firmly entrenched in Afghanistan.

He cited a U.N. Security Council report, dated Sept. 11, 2006, which identifies the leadership centers of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

"What President Karzai is very cleverly hiding is the fact that all this is happening in Afghanistan, in the southern provinces of Afghanistan," Musharraf said.

Terrorist Leads or Useless Information?

Musharraf's comments come in response to remarks Karzai first made last week on "Nightline," alleging that he had several times provided specific, actionable information about terrorist leaders -- their hideouts, their places of training, and where they live -- and that Musharraf had failed to follow up on the tips.

Musharraf, however, dismissed the information as useless and out of date.

He recalled telling Karzai that his intelligence was useless when the Afghan president visited him in Pakistan.

"Right in front of him, I told him. I ticked him off," Musharraf said. "I said, 'Is this your sense of intelligence -- that you are waiting for a presidential visit to hand over this?' Intelligence means immediate action, immediate -- pick up the telephone, immediately send information."

Where's Osama bin Laden?

Most intelligence officials and experts agree that the senior leaders of the Taliban and al Qaeda reside in the areas along the rugged Pakistan-Afghanistan border, a region considered to be, in many ways, the epicenter of the global war on terrorism.

Today, nearly 5,000 U.S. troops patrol the border in Afghanistan, and even Musharraf believes that Osama bin Laden is still living somewhere in the tribal area in northeast Pakistan, slipping back and forth across the Afghanistan border.

When asked by McFadden whether the trail for bin Laden had grown cold, Musharraf said that the last good intelligence they had on the al Qaeda leader's location was in 2003.

The Drug Mafia

But Musharraf said the biggest threat to the region today wasn't al Qaeda, but the Taliban.

Their terrorist attacks, he said, are being financed by the drug mafia inside Afghanistan.

"All the drugs, all narcotics is in Afghanistan, and that is the money, which is used for all this," Musharraf said. "If President Karzai thinks elsewhere, he will keep living in a fool's paradise, and he will bring disaster to the whole area and to his country."

Blocking the Border

Musharraf has a solution for the porous border region that has been an enduring problem.

"I have been all along saying, 'Let's mine the border,'" Musharraf said, arguing that the strategy would be one sure way to silence critics.

"Let's nail these people like President Karzai, who think [the Taliban insurgents] are coming from Pakistan."

He also suggested building fences along the border, similar to those built by India along the Kashmir border.

"I know how effective they are," Musharraf said. "Every 100 meters there is a searchlight, and every 100 meters there is a post, which is manned and armed."

President Bush has joked that he will study the body language of Karzai and Musharraf at the dinner table tonight to see how strained their relationship has become.

But he has also pointed out that both of them can agree that they have common goals -- combating terrorism and finding bin Laden.

"It's in President Karzai's interest to see bin Laden brought to justice," Bush said Tuesday. "It is in PresidentMusharraf's interest to see bin Laden brought to justice. Our interests coincide. It will be interesting for me to watch the body language of these two leaders to determine how tense things are."