By KATHY GANNON
The Associated Press
Sunday, December 2, 2007; 3:59 PM
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.
"At the time when Nawaz Sharif was uncertain whether to respond to the Indian nuclear test, she had famously challenged him to test Pakistan's bomb by taking off her bangles and throwing them into the assembled crowd _ suggesting that he was not man enough for the job," recalled a Pakistani analyst, Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a vocal secularist and anti-nuclear campaigner.
And after Sharif's nuclear declaration last week, Bhutto quickly countered that it was her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, also a former premier, who defiantly vowed in 1974 to develop nuclear weapons even if his countrymen had to eat grass to accomplish it.
It is Bhutto whom the Bush administration has reportedly been pushing to ally with Musharraf, who has been America's strongest ally against a resurgent Taliban and al-Qaida.
Since returning, Sharif has been a standard-bearer for Musharraf's opponents. He refuses to deal with the newly retired army general, calls his presidency illegal, and demands the reinstatement of Supreme Court judges fired because Musharraf couldn't be sure how they would rule in a crucial court case that could have stripped him of the presidency.
Sharif has said he will boycott the January parliamentary elections unless Musharraf restores the Supreme Court bench that existed before emergency rule was imposed Nov. 3.
"We don't want to boycott the elections. If there is free and fair elections we can win. But there is no point in Musharraf taking off his uniform, or lifting emergency rule unless the judiciary is reinstated with dignity and honor," Sharif said.
Musharraf filled the Supreme Court bench with loyalists, jailed hundreds of human rights workers, civil society activists and lawyers while saying it was rising religious extremism that forced him to impose emergency rule. He has promised to lift the emergency Dec. 16, roughly three weeks before Jan. 8 ballot.
Sharif is an unlikely champion of the judiciary, having fired a Supreme Court chief justice himself back in 1997 and defending his party members storming the Supreme Court.
Washington wants to know if Sharif will be an ally in the war on terrorism.
"We've had a good record of working with the Musharraf government in routing out al-Qaida and capturing or killing al-Qaida," President Bush said in an interview with AP on Tuesday. "And I would be concerned about any leader who didn't understand the urgency of dealing with radicals and extremists who want to attack the United States and/or any other nation."
Lisa Curtis, senior research fellow in the Asia Studies program at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Sharif would carry on Musharraf's focus on the war on terror notwithstanding his close relationship with religious parties.
"Sharif is seen as closer to the religious parties, but if he came to power he'd understand the importance of cooperating with the U.S.," said Curtis. "Sharif doesn't want to set up a theological government."
Bruce Reidel, a National Security Council specialist on Mideast and South Asia affairs under both Bush and President Clinton, said the U.S. is wrong to brand Sharif as the enemy.
"There has been a mischaracterization of Nawaz Sharif. If his is an Islamist party, it is an Islamist party along the scale of the Islamist party of Turkey," he said in a telephone interview with AP. "They are very moderate, mainstream Muslims. We had a perfectly good relationship with Nawaz Sharif when he was prime minister."
The 1990s were turbulent years for Pakistan, during which both Sharif and Bhutto served two terms as prime minister. In that decade, the Taliban was born and found a sponsor in Pakistan. Terrorist training camps flourished before the Taliban and during their repressive regime, aided by Pakistan's military and intelligence service.
Reidel, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, said the key to defeating militant Islam in Pakistan is not to be found in a debate of Bhutto vs. Sharif.
He said it lies in settling the decades-old dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, a mostly Muslim former princely state in the Himalayas that was divided between the two countries at independence from Britain. Both nations claim a united Kashmir as their own.
Until that happens, Reidel said, the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence agency will continue to help Islamic militants they see as freedom fighters _ despite also working with the United States to hunt down others in the war on terrorism.
"For the military and the ISI, there are good terrorists and bad terrorists, but for us they are all bad terrorists," Reidel said.
Reidel portrayed both Sharif and Bhutto as subservient to a powerful military and the intelligence agency. He said the two are politicians and both would align themselves with anyone to get power or stay in power.
Reidel said Sharif was ready to rein in the Taliban toward the end of his rule but couldn't force the change on his security forces.
"I think the fair thing to say is that he never was able to get control over the army and the ISI, and never able to break the relationship between the ISI and its various clients: whether the Kashmiris, or the Taliban, and indirectly through the Taliban with al-Qaida," said Reidel.
Sharif may also have been the first Pakistani leader to offer the United States use of Pakistani territory to hunt down Osama bin Laden. Reidel said Sharif made that offer in 1999, but the Clinton administration didn't think he had enough clout with his own military to get them to deliver.
Sharif told AP that he also offered to rein in the Taliban but Musharraf, then commander of Pakistan's military, rejected the idea of cracking down on the militants, whom Pakistan saw as key regional allies.
"Musharraf told me at the time, 'Oh, prime minister, you know these people are our first line of defense.' I was amazed and I was stunned," Sharif said in the Friday interview.
Reidel was there July 4, 1999, when Sharif met with Clinton at the White House and immediately afterward ordered Pakistani soldiers out of India's Kargil territory averting an escalation of a bloody battle that had the world worrying about a nuclear confrontation.
It was Musharraf who staged the Kargil operation. Soon after, the general ousted Sharif and made himself president while also retaining his post as military chief _ a role he reluctantly relinquished Wednesday.
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Associated Press Writers Carley Petesch and Lily Hindy contributed to this story from New York.
(This version CORRECTS that Sharif said Musharraf rejected idea of cracking on the Taliban, instead of that Musharraf rejected idea of hunting bin Laden.)