Defending his decision to renege on his pledge to step down as army chief, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has claimed his leadership is freeing his country from the menace of extremism and that this national 'renaissance' might be lost if he steps down as army chief at the end of this year.

In an interview to the New York Times on Tuesday, Musharraf said he had succeeded in breaking up the network of a top Pakistani scientist who provided illicit nuclear technology to other countries, adding that full extent of that network was not yet known.

Of his promise to serve only as the country's civilian president after December 31, Musharraf said, "Yes, I did give my word that I would." The step has been viewed as fulfilling his larger promise to return Pakistan to democratic rule. "But the issue is now far greater than this," he added.

During his hour-long interview, Musharraf claimed Pakistan is making significant inroads into al Qaeda, arresting some 600 suspects, ending the terrorist network's illicit fund-raising in major cities and breaking up long established bases in remote border areas. This effort required 'continuity', he said.

"This was a culture, a society which was moving towards extremism and fundamentalism, and I am trying to reverse this trend and give voice to the vast majority of Pakistanis who are moderate," said Musharraf.

Speaking with regimental rigour, Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan since seizing power in a bloodless coup in 1999, claimed that Islamabad is already enjoying the fruits of democracy, with local elections, functioning legislatures, freedom of speech and an independent press and empowerment of women.

"I'm sorry, I don't want to boast about myself," Musharraf, who is in New York to attend the UN General Assembly annual session, told the Times. "But there is a renaissance, there is a big change we are trying to bring about."

During the interview, he asked pointedly, "How did General De Gaulle continue in uniform all through his period as president of France, and France is a democratic country?"

He said that he was certain that he had dismantled the network of disgraced nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atom bomb who was exposed this year as a major furnisher of illicit nuclear know-how and material to North Korea, Libya and Iran.

But Musharraf said he was not certain if the full extent of Khan's activities had been discovered.

American intelligence officials, the Times said, believe that the three countries may have accounted for less than 50 per cent of the network's customers.

"I'm 200 per cent sure that it has been shut down," Musharraf said of Khan's network. "But if you say whether I am sure over what he's provided in the past, no sir, I'm not, I can't say surely that he has honoured everything that he has done."

Musharraf rejected charges that his government had denied US investigators the chance to question Khan, whom he pardoned, saying the Americans never requested this.

Asked what would be response if they did ask, Musharraf said, "We wouldn't let them. That would show a lack of trust in ourselves. I mean, we must trust our own agencies."

In discussing al Qaeda, Musharraf said that among the 600 suspects detained were Uzbeks, Chechens, Yemenis and other Arabs, as well as people from Tanzania, South Africa and even China.

He said the recent seizure of computer disks in the eastern Pakistan city of Lahore had shown that al Qaeda was thinking of shifting to Somalia or Sudan. "I think that speaks volumes for the actions we have taken against them in our cities and in the mountains," he said.

A key ally of President George W Bush, who is scheduled to meet with him twice this week, Musharraf firmly
denied that any influence had been brought on Pakistan to produce a dramatic arrest before the November election. "This is absolutely untrue," he said.

He expressed intense irritation with critics of Pakistan's level of commitment to the campaign to capture the Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

"When I read about this issue of we are not doing enough and all that, I really don't like that at all for Pakistan," he said. "Who else is doing enough? Who else is doing anything, by the way? Only Pakistan is doing enough."

Pakistan's military ruler said his army was taking action to end the teaching of religious extremism and hatred of the West in the religious schools known as madrasas, but that given the remoteness, the inhospitable terrain and 2,500-mile length of the border where extremism most flourished, the job was difficult.

"We are squeezing the religious teachers who preach extremism, we are taking them to task and removing them, but it is a slow process because there are thousands of mosques, and you don't know who is saying what," he said. "The army is not omnipresent everywhere."

Musharraf cited similar difficulties in keeping resurgent forces of the Taliban, Afghanistan's former rulers, from using border areas for launching attacks on their homeland and attempting to disrupt elections there.

"We are trying to do our best not to let them do that," he told the Times. "Our resolve is to not allow them to interfere in the elections. But we cannot guarantee it. We do not have the capability to seal the border in a watertight manner."