Pakistan's Sharif Says He's No Extremist

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, left, speaks as his brother Shahbaz Sharif looks on at a press conference at his home in Lahore, Pakistan Monday Nov. 26, 2007. Pakistan's election commission on Saturday Dec. 1, 2007, rejected the candidacy of Shahbaz Sharif for the upcoming election, saying Shahbaz had defaulted on a bank loan and was allegedly involved in a murder case in 1998 while chief minister of Punjab province. (AP Photo/Greg Baker) (Greg Baker - AP)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Soon after he returned from eight years in exile, Nawaz Sharif reminded his followers that he was the prime minister who made Pakistan a nuclear power.

That popular move among Pakistanis, together with Sharif's reputation for fostering close ties with Islamic militants, raised the specter in a jittery West of a nuclear-armed Pakistan with religious ideologues at the helm.

But former U.S. officials who know Sharif and analysts who follow Pakistan's politics portray a savvy politician who is far from the religious extremist he's sometimes made out to be. And Sharif himself says he shuns extremism.

"Let me be clear I have been condemning all sorts of terrorism, whether in Pakistan or outside Pakistan," Sharif said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We are moderates, we follow moderation and nothing except moderation.

"Remarks are made by other countries without taking (into consideration) our cooperation that we have extended in the past. To me this is unreasonable and I am disappointed."

Much has been made of Sharif's past association with Afghanistan's repressive Taliban regime, and his supporters in his Pakistan Muslim League have capitalized on a strong anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. However, Sharif, who was ousted as prime minister in a 1999 coup led by current President Pervez Musharraf, is more complicated.

Speaking from atop a truck that carried him triumphantly through the streets of Lahore after his return to Pakistan on Nov. 25, Sharif made the point that "I never took dictation" from the United States and that it was he who "made the country a nuclear power." It is Musharraf who follows the dictates of the Bush administration, Sharif charged.

Thomas Simons, who was U.S. ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the 1998 nuclear explosions and the man who offered Sharif a package of U.S. incentives to "just say no" to a nuclear test, tells of a Sharif who was reluctant to carry it out.

"Most Pakistanis at that time thought they had to respond in kind to the Indian (atomic test) explosion," said Simons, who was ambassador to Pakistan in 1996-98. "I was with him a lot during those days. He did not want to explode that bomb.

"His own intentions were not bellicose. ... Not to have done that would have cost him his job. It wasn't to thumb his nose at the Americans."

Robert Oakley, another former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, said it would have been difficult for any Pakistani leader on that May day in 1998, just two weeks after India set off a nuclear bomb, to refuse to follow suit and make Pakistan a nuclear power.

In fact, opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, a Harvard-educated former prime minister viewed positively by key figures in both the Bush administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress, made clear she wouldn't have hesitated.