Security During Bush's Visit to Pakistan?

Daily Times, March 14, 2006
‘Musharraf insisted Bush visit Pakistan’
Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: An article in the International Herald Tribune (IHT) tackled the question as to how US President George W Bush spent a night in Pakistan - the assumed haven of Osama Bin Laden and one of the one most dangerous countries in the world.

It surmised that Bush visited Pakistan on President General Pervez Musharraf insistence. And thereby presented the Secret Service with another security nightmare to deal with. The story began in January, when Bush met Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz in the Oval Office. The US president privately committed to an overnight stay in Pakistan, and announced that he would visit Pakistan and India in March.

White House officials left the dates for the Pakistan visit vague. IHT said the fuzziness was to keep terrorists guessing about the timing of motorcades and the arrival of Air Force One - basic precautions passed down from former US president Bill Clinton’s trip to Pakistan in 2000. Six years later, accounts of the trip from former Clinton administration officials are far more harrowing than was known at the time.

As Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, two counterterrorism directors on Clinton’s National Security Council staff, recount in their book ‘The Age of Sacred Terror’, the Secret Service argued strenuously against the trip.

“In the preparations for the 2000 visit, the service dug its heels in, repeatedly confronting the top NSC officials with horror scenarios,” write Benjamin and Simon, according to IHT. “There was danger to Air Force One from ground fire. No one trusted the Pakistani military to keep travel routes in the country secret or secure. The service said it could not perform its mission: It could not protect the president. In a meeting with Clinton, Larry Cockell, the head of the presidential detail, told him so.”

INT said that Clinton overruled the Secret Service, although he decided that his daughter, Chelsea, who was to accompany him to India on the same trip, should not make the stop in Pakistan. Clinton ended up slipping into Islamabad for less than six hours on a small military jet owned by the CIA while an Air Force One decoy flew in to draw a possible attack. It was a dramatic and, for Musharraf, embarrassing difference to the five previous days that Clinton had spent out in the relatively open in India.

For Bush’s trip, Pakistanis say, Musharraf was adamant that there would be less of a contrast with India, Pakistan’s archrival in the region. “Musharraf had to have the overnight stay, primarily to offset the snub that Clinton had given him,” said Hussain Haqqani, a former advisor to three Pakistani prime ministers and an associate professor of international relations at Boston University. “This had to be something better. If Bush stayed the night, it was a signal that he trusted Musharraf and Pakistan a lot more.” Bush, like Clinton, made the political calculation that he could not visit India without visiting Pakistan, and that it was critical to maintain good relations with a country, however problematic, that is at the center of the battle against terrorism. “It was the proper call and a gutsy one,” Strobe Talbott, who was Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, told IHT.

White House officials will not say whether Bush overruled the Secret Service in making the trip, or even if he was told not to go. But it is no secret that the service was in a state of anxiety during Bush’s time in Islamabad. Reporters were not told that Bush would be spending the night in Pakistan until 24 hours before, which was also the same day that a suicide bombing in Karachi killed a US diplomat.

In Islamabad, Air Force One arrived and departed in the dark, with its running lights off and shades drawn, so that it would be less of a target for a missile attack. Once the president was on the tarmac, it was impossible to tell whether he got into a waiting motorcade - or slipped into a Blackhawk helicopter for the trip to the fortress-like US Embassy, with the motorcade speeding below as a decoy. Either way, the route of the motorcade was the site of two of four assassination attempts on Musharraf, hardly a comfort to the Secret Service, said IHT.

Bush, on his way back to the Islamabad airport at the end of the trip, engaged in no motorcade feints - he and the first lady went by Blackhawk. A dozen Secret Service agents surrounded the helicopter as the couple disembarked and then climbed aboard Air Force One, which taxied out to the end of the runway and took off in complete darkness. As Steven Hadley, the national security advisor, put it to reporters in New Delhi on the eve of the Islamabad trip: “Pakistan is both an ally in the war on terror and, in some sense, a site where the war is being carried about.”