Bush administration has been forced to respond to the subject after top Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama said last week that his administration will hit Al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan if President Pervez Musharraf [Images] did not act.

That scenario was posed to at least three Republican candidates at an ABC-news sponsored debate in Iowa on Sunday. "...that is an option that should remain open. I believe the senator didn't express it the right way. I think the senator, if he could just say it over again, might want to say that we would encourage Musharraf to allow us to do it if we thought he couldn't accomplish it," Giuliani, Republican frontrunner and former New York Mayor, said.

"I would take that action if I thought there was no other way to crush Al Qaeda, no other way to crush the Taliban, and no other way to be able to capture bin Laden."

"I think Pakistan has, unfortunately, not been making the efforts they should be making," Giuliani said.

"We should encourage them to do it, we should put the pressure on them to do it, and we should seek their permission of we ever had to take action there as we were able to get their permission -- Undersecretary or Deputy Secretary Armitage was very effective in getting Musharraf's permission for us to act in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 and 2002."

But Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts, disagreed with both Senator Obama and Giuliani, going on to make the point that a President should not be discussing options publicly.

"I think Barack Obama is confused as to who are our friends and who are our enemies. In his first year, he wants to meet with Castro and Chavez and Assad, Ahmadinejad. Those are our enemies... and then he says he wants to unilaterally go in and potentially bomb a nation, which is our friend.

"We're trying to strengthen Musharraf. We're trying to strengthen the foundations of democracy and freedom in that country so that they will be able to reject the extremists."

"It's wrong for a person running for the president of the United States to get on TV and say, 'We're going to go into your country unilaterally'. Of course, America always maintains our option to do whatever we think is in the best interests of America," Romney said.

"We keep our options quiet. We do not go out and say to a nation which is working with us... that we intend to go in there and potentially bring out a unilateral attack," he said. But a Republican Congressman, who sits in the House Armed Services Committee, threw his weight behind the administration point of view that Islamabad is an ally in the war on terror that is involved in operations in the sensitive areas.

"There are now 100,000 Pakistani troops who have been moved to the border... You right now have operations that are being taken in cooperation with American forces in Afghanistan," Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter said.