Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf warned that, more than 10 months after the US military launched operations to crush Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda and its Taleban hosts, Al-Qaeda might be on the verge of a revival in Afghanistan. In Musharraf's opinion, the failure of US-led forces and the Kabul regime to establish control outside the capital despite the massive military campaign created conditions enabling Al-Qaeda and the Taleban to revive. Concerning the transitional government of President Hamid Karzai, Musharraf said: "The writ of this Afghan government is not spreading all over Afghanistan, as it should have. This is tribal country, tribal environment, warlords reigning supreme in various pockets, so the same Taleban-cum-Al-Qaeda groups may be regrouping again."

Reviewing the campaign since the launch of US aerial bombardments last October, Musharraf described the early phase as a "success". But he questioned the effectiveness of the operations of the by now 10,000-strong coalition force and of Afghan administrations nominally in power since the Taleban was routed in December 2001. He said that when the Taleban government fell, the Al-Qaeda fell. But now Al-Qaeda fighters "are running between the borders, maybe coming over to the Pakistan side." Musharraf played a lynchpin role in the US-led coalition campaign, executing a U-turn in his country's policy after backing the Taleban for nearly five years.

Musharraf accepted that bin Laden and the Taleban's spiritual leader Mullah Omar might be hiding in Pakistan's western border tribal belt. He said it was more likely they were hiding in Afghanistan, but sympathizers in the tribal belt just beyond the Afghan border were helping them. Yet he insisted that bin Laden (if he survived the US offensives in south-eastern Afghanistan's Tora Bora region in December 2001 and in the Shahi Kot Valley in March 2002) would have trouble hiding in Pakistan. "He is not an ordinary man. He must be moving with 100 to 200 people around him to protect him, and such a large group would not be able to hide in Pakistan."