Musharraf's Inability to Control Pakistani Air Force is a Sign of Weakness

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

A new article on Adnkronos International by Syed Saleem Shahzad provides a glimpse of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf's weakness. After last week's bomb blasts in Islamabad and Peshawar, Musharraf asked Pakistan's air force to carry out a strike on Islamabad's largest madrassa. Two of the Pakistani Taliban's leading ideologues, Ghazi Abdul Rasheed and Maulana Abdul Aziz, are holed up there.

Shahzad reports:

[S]ources told AKI that Musharraf reportedly told a gathering of senior officials at a meeting in Rawalpindi: "I don’t want them in federal capital. If you are unable to arrest them . . . shoot them." Those attending reportedly disagreed categorically with the idea of an air strike in the capital city, and pointed out that the students of the influential clerics have already staged a powerful protest in the past few days against the demolition of two mosques in Islamabad and they are a force to be reckoned with.

In other words, Musharraf asked the air force to carry out a strike in Pakistan's capital city, and they refused to do so. According to a senior U.S. military intelligence source that I spoke with, the reason Musharraf asked the air force to carry out the strike is because Pakistan's army had already refused to raid the mosque. The source said that this further demonstrates the problem with Pakistan's security services: they are too close to the fundamentalists, such that Musharraf cannot exert full control over his military.

Which brings to mind a chilling thought: if Musharraf is unable to order an air strike in his own capital city, how can he control his nuclear arsenal?

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