Musharraf

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said yesterday that the search for Osama bin Laden has gone completely cold, with no recent intelligence indicating where he and his top lieutenants are hiding.

More than three years after al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed almost 3,000 people, Musharraf insisted that Pakistani forces are still aggressively pursuing the world's most notorious terrorist. But he acknowledged that recent security force operations and interrogations have been able to determine only one fact -- that bin Laden is still alive.

"He is alive, but more than that, where he is, no, it'll be just a guess and it won't have much basis," Musharraf said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters. Pressed on whether the trail had gone cold, he said, "Yes, if you mean we don't know, from that point of view, we don't know where he is."

The United States shares major responsibility, Musharraf suggested, because the U.S.-led coalition does not have enough troops in Afghanistan, which has left "voids." The United States and its allies need to expedite the training and expansion of the new Afghan army as the only viable alternative, he said.

Challenges in Afghanistan would be better dealt with "if the Afghan national army is raised faster, in more strength, so that they can reach out to fill these voids that I am talking about, where U.S. forces or coalition forces are not there," he said.

(Just in case you were still wondering if maybe Iraq had interfered with capturing Osama, and the hunt for al Qaeda.)

After their White House talks, Bush yesterday defended Musharraf and said he was "very pleased" with Pakistan's efforts to fight al Qaeda.

I think "very pleased" is just one notch below "a superb job" in the list of Bush accolades.

Well, maybe it turns out that Osama could run and he could hide, but at least we're know we're promoting Democracy and Freedom in that region, right?

Musharraf, an army general who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999, signaled again that he may break his promise to surrender his position as head of the Pakistani military by the end of the year. Although he made the promise in an attempt to demonstrate his commitment to restoring full democracy to Pakistan, Musharraf said in the interview that he may retain his dual roles as civilian and military leader to guarantee "the sustainability of our policies."

But he grew testy at the suggestion that such a move would undermine his country's democratic development, saying he had taken many steps to empower women and minorities and guarantee a lively and free media. "The amount that I, in uniform, have done for democracy has never been done in the past in Pakistan," he said. "So let's not see democracy in the limited scope of [a] uniform. I don't believe that is the end-all of democracy." Under his rule, he added, "there is total democracy in Pakistan."

I believe "total democracy" means that everyone who wants to vote for him is able to vote for him. (Sort of like the way George "reaches out.)

Oh, and by the way, he considers any request to interview A. Q. Khan, father of the Pakistani bomb and known nuke proliferator, as a personal affront. "It shows a lack of trust," he says.