Then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage allegedly warned Pakistan's intelligence director that the U.S. would bomb Pakistan if it did not cooperate, according to Musharraf. "The intelligence director told me that Mr. Armitage said, 'Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,'" Musharraf told CBS News in a 2006 interview.

Critics at home questioned Musharraf's sudden U-turn against the Taliban. "The events of 9/11 solved questions of legitimacy and credibility for the commando general [Musharraf], and that was more than enough for him," said Imran Khan, Pakistan's opposition party leader.

As the U.S. and NATO bombers overflew Pakistan, Musharraf's decision to provide airspace faced strong disapproval from the public, opinion polls at the time showed. Musharraf largely ignored the vocal opposition to his decision to back U.S. President George W. Bush's war against terrorism.

Ironically, the Taliban's envoy in Islamabad, Mulla Zaeef, still enjoyed ambassadorial status and held daily press conferences in Islamabad until Kabul fell to NATO's forces.
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It didn't take long for the extensive extremist network based in Pakistan to retaliate against the government, targeting unarmed, innocent civilians, mostly vulnerable minorities, across the length and breadth of the country.

On October 28, 2001, a Protestant church in the southern Punjab city of Bahawalpur was attacked, killing 16. With the exception of a police officer who was kailled, the casualties were all Christian worshippers. Soon, churches and high-profile Christians came under increasingly frequent attack. Many have since fled.

In January 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted from the coastal metropolis of Karachi. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, one of the September 11 architects and then a senior leader of al-Qaeda's, later bragged to have personally beheaded the American journalist.

In the summer of 2004, extremists attempted to assassinate Lieutenant General Ahsan Saleem Hayat, Musharraf's most trusted colleague, killing six in the failed attack. The message to Musharraf and the military regime he led was clear: back off from aiding the foreign powers.

Seven months later, in December 2004, Musharraf barely survived three sophisticated attacks on his motorcade. The government admitted that low-level military personnel had been involved in planning and executing the attacks.
The U.S. response to September 11 led to a decade of war and conflict in Pakistan that has proven to be hugely destabilizing for the country, as Maleeha Lodhi, one of Pakistan's best-known journalists and the ambassador to United States from 2000 to 2004, told me in an interview. Islamabad has long advised Washington to work towards a diplomatic solution of the war in Afghanistan, she says, and to differentiate between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. "It took a decade of an unwinnable war in Afghanistan for the U.S. to seek a political settlement. But in between much has been lost, for the region and its stability, and for Pakistan."

According to figures presented to Parliament this year, terror-related deaths have soared past 35,000 over the past decade, including at least 3,500 military, paramilitary, police, and intelligence personnel.

"During the last 10 years, the direct and indirect cost of war on terror incurred by Pakistan amounted to $67.93 billion or [Rupees] 5,037 billion," according to the Economic Survey of Pakistan, published by the Ministry of Finance.

The study reports that Pakistan's investment-to-GDP "ratio nosedived from 22.5 percent in 2006-07 to 13.4 percent in 2010-11 with serious consequences for job creating ability of the economy."
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A decade after 9/11, Pakistan's problems seem to be getting worse. Since the killing of Osama bin Laden here on May 2 in a well-protected Abbotabad compound, the spat between Washington and Islamabad has become as bitter as it is public.

Senator John McCain, the former Republican candidate for presidency, publicly concluded that Pakistan's powerful military intelligence branch, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), maintains ties with Taliban as well as the even more violent Haqqani network. While most U.S. analysts have held this view for years, for an American political leader as prominent as McCain to say so reflects just how badly U.S.-Pakistan relations have soured over the ISI-Taliban relationship.

Recently, Pakistan rejected a U.S. proposal to open a consulate in the troubled province of Balochistan, which borders Afghanistan and is the only Pakistan province without a U.S. consulate.

U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter has met little success in his repeated pushes for Pakistan to launch a military operation in North Waziristan, where many of the militant groups fighting in Afghanistan are based. A push into North Waziristan, Munter reasons, would improve security in Afghanistan and accelerate the U.S. withdrawal there.

The military leadership, including influential Army Chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, have resisted U.S. pressure. But their reasons are often political.

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