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Bush wants ‘free and fair’ elections in Pakistan

By admin | August 10, 2007

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US President George W. Bush said he expected full cooperation from Pakistan against extremists and that he was “hopeful” President Pervez Musharraf would hold “a free and fair election.”

“I have made it clear to him that I expect that there be full cooperation in sharing intelligence” and “swift action” against Al-Qaeda inside Pakistan if solid intelligence emerges about their whereabouts, Bush said.

Bush was also careful to express respect for Pakistan’s sovereignty, following Islamabad’s publicly expressed anger over calls for unilateral US action to target Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

The president, in a White House news conference before heading off on his annual working vacation, also paid tribute to Musharraf’s cooperation with the United States in battling terrorism.

“We spend a lot of time with the leadership in Pakistan talking about what we will do with actionable intelligence.”

Bush also noted that he had called on Musharraf to move towards democracy.

“My focus in terms of the domestic scene is they have a free and fair election. That is what we have been talking about, and hopefully, they will.”

Bush’s comments came after Musharraf decided against the advice of aides worried about instability to impose a state of emergency, a move that could have delayed looming elections.

Those polls are due by early 2008, and will be the first since late 2002. Army chief Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999.

The United States has consistently pushed for the polls, seeing them as a way of enhancing the legitimacy of the government of Musharraf, a vital anti-terror partner.

Earlier, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke to Musharraf, by telephone, amid rumblings about emergency rule and Musharraf’s decision, announced Wednesday, to pull out of a key three-day tribal council in Kabul which began Thursday, aimed at ending Taliban and Al-Qaeda-sponsored terrorism.

According to US intelligence reports Al-Qaeda leaders are sheltering in lawless Pakistani tribal regions near the Afghan border.

Islamabad has been angered in recent weeks by what it called “irresponsible and dangerous” warnings by US officials on the supposed Al-Qaeda haven in the tribal belt.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama weighed in last week, saying that if he was elected president he would order US forces to hit extremist targets in Pakistan if Musharraf failed to act. Islamabad called his comment “sheer ignorance.”

Senior US State Department troubleshooter Nicholas Burns said last month that Washington would retain the option of targeting Al-Qaeda in the Pakistan-Afghan border areas in some circumstances.

A few days earlier the White House’s top counter-terrorism official Frances Townsend caused a stir by refusing to rule out a similar military incursion.

Topics: Pakistan News |