'Pakistanis Know I Can Be Tough’

Since Benazir Bhutto's assassination weeks ago, Pakistan has been plunged into one of the worst crises in its history. President Pervez Musharraf, having recently given up control of the nation's army, remains firmly in charge and as reluctant as ever to share power, despite a rising tide of criticism. He spoke to NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria from his camp office in Rawalpindi. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What do you make of reports that the United States is thinking about launching CIA operations in Pakistan with or without Pakistan's approval?
Pervez Musharraf: We are totally in cooperation on the intelligence side. But we are totally against [a military operation]. We are a sovereign country. We will ask for assistance from outsiders. They won't impose their will on us.

How do you take Hillary Clinton's suggestion that the United States and Britain help Pakistan secure its nuclear weapons?
Does she know how secure [the weapons] are and what we are doing to keep them so? They are very secure. We will ask if we need assistance. Nobody should tell us what to do. And I'd ask anyone who says such things, do you know how our strategic assets are handled, stored and developed—do you know it?

Have you told the American government that?
No, why should we? We have said we are totally under control.

Graham Allison of Harvard says that these weapons must be disbursed for them to have survivability, which means that they could also fall into the wrong hands, because there might be a local command structure that is weak.
He doesn't know anything—how disbursed they are, and he shouldn't think that we don't know these things. We are from the military, we understand how to handle things, whether they need to be disbursed or concentrated.

But you understand that due to past episodes there is concern.
Yes, the past has [caused] some concern, but we must understand the difference between past and now. Before we were a declared and overt nuclear state, we had to hide everything. Everything was covert. Only the scientists and the president of Pakistan knew what was going on. Now there is a national command authority. It is the top body, headed by the president and the prime minister, and there are members from the military and the civilian side. And there's a huge strategic planning division, a full secretariat headed by now-retired [Lt. General Khalid] Kidwai. He is in charge of this Strategic Planning Division that is the secretarial arm of the National Command, responsible for development and employment. Then we have army, navy, air force, the strategic force command. If anything happens, indeed it's a failure of everyone from myself to SPD to the Army Strategic Force Command.