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Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf says in his "In the Line of Fire" memoir that his forces captured hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters and turned them over to the CIA to earn millions of dollars in "prize money". Musharraf writes that Pakistani forces captured 689 members of Al Qaeda and turned over 369 of them to the US to earn "prize money" for his government from the CIA. This is a "tidbid" that Pakistani daily The News International carried, based on what has appeared in the American media. That Pakistan was selective in capturing Al Qaeda fighters and also in handing them over to the US's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been published before. Islamabad was also known to hand over Al Qaeda fighters it captured in exchange for serving and retired Pakistani military personnel manning some key posts in the Taliban military formations. The Pakistani media has taken note of the fact that a number of Indian publications have got hold of the book, to be released by Musharraf in New York Monday, while it had to be satisfied with a news agency report from Mumbai and other outside sources. The News International says that Musharraf has taken all of half a page in his allegation that Richard Armitage, a key man in the Bush administration in 2001, had hurled a threat that if Pakistan did not cooperate, it would be "bombed back to the stone age". Hinting that Musharraf repeated the allegation, since denied, during his CBS interview last week as part of the book's promotion, the newspaper notes that CBS's parent company Viacom also owns the publishing firm, Simon and Schuster. Viacom also owns CBS News. The popular "60 Minutes" programme of CBS carried the president's interview in which he mentioned the provocative remark by Armitage. There is no mention so far in the Pakistani media of any views expressed by Musharraf about Pakistan's domestic situation or his likely entry into politics, or his seeking a second term in the presidency. Just as the Indian media has shown interest in what has been said in the book about the 1999 Kargil incursion and the July 2001 Agra summit, the Pakistani media has been interested on why and how Musharraf did a 180-degree turn on the Taliban in Afghanistan. "I war-gamed the United States as an adversary," the president has written. "There would be a violent and angry reaction if we didn't support the United States. Thus the question was: if we do not join them, can we confront them and withstand the onslaught? The answer is no, we could not." According to the president, he first sought to negotiate "a surrender or extradition" of Osama bin Laden, but dealing with the hot-headed Taliban leader Mulla Muhammad Omar "was like banging one's head against a wall". Referring again to Omar, he writes: "Omar thinks that death and destruction are inconsequential details in a just war." Regarding the Al Qaeda leadership's methods of communicating with each other, Musharraf had this to say in the book: "Bin Laden communicates with his followers through a 'very well-established' four-tiered network of couriers. Top leaders of Al Qaeda try not to pass messages in writing.... Normally, the leaders make their best, most trusted, diehard couriers memorise messages to Al Qaeda's operational hierarchy, and then convey them verbatim."
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