His former ISI chief, General Mahmood Ahmed, the book says, knew about the transfer of $1,00,000 from a Pakistani militant to Mahammed Atta, who flew the first plane into New York’s World Trade Centre.

No less convincingly, the book reveals how successive US governments have knowingly turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s illegal import and export of nuclear weapons technology. Washington justified this first on the ground that Pakistan was an indispensable US ally in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Since 9/11, it is doing the same on the plea that Pakistan under Musharraf is a frontline state in the US-led war on Al Qaeda and Islamist militants, the very elements that have penetrated the Pakistani army that Musharraf heads. All this shows how Musharraf, obsessed only with personal power, has been fooling America, and the latter, with its muddled and self-serving thinking on terrorism, has allowed itself to be fooled by him.

These fears are echoed by the American scholar, Jonathan Schell (author of a new book, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, on a similar theme), in a recent article: “If the Bush Doctrine laid claim to the values of democracy, its man Musharraf now has the distinction, rare even among dictators, of mounting a second military coup to maintain the results of his first one. In a crowning irony, his present crackdown is on democracy activists, not the Taliban, armed Islamic extremists, or Al Qaeda supporters who have established positions in the Swat valley only 150 miles from Islamabad. Most important, the collapsed doctrine has stoked the nuclear fires it was meant to quench. The dangers of nuclear terrorism, of proliferation, and even of nuclear war — with India, which is dismayed by developments in Pakistan as well as the weak Bush administration response to them — are all on the rise.”

... contd.