Bin Laden plays his big hand here...

But by taking away Musharraf's remaining wiggle room, he has just created, where none existed before, an implacable and extremely motivated enemy.

-- ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Pakistan's military vowed Thursday to eliminate terrorism, undeterred by a call from al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden for a rebellion against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

In a new audiotape released Thursday, bin Laden said the Pakistan army's bloody siege of militants holed up in Islamabad's Red Mosque made Musharraf an infidel.

To date, Musharraf has been walking a knife edge trying to accommodate both the West and the hardline religious parties.

This video was obviously meant to cut Musharraf's feet out from under him domestically, but by declaring him an infidel... Bin Laden has left the President only one option here... and that is eliminating Osama.

Unless there is a coup, or a popular uprising in the next little while, which is always a possibility... this threat will have been for naught. It will, in fact, have been extremely counter-productive.

Musharraf, at this point in time, now has absolutely no reason not to greenlight the massive "special forces" operation that the Americans have been advocating for the last six years.

The longer Bin Laden remains in circulation, the more he can agitate for an Islamic coup directed at Musharraf... and let's remember, an extremely motivated George Bush would like nothing better than Osama's head on a pike as an end-of-term party favour.

Cooler heads within the fundamentalist movement already realise that this was a tactical error and are frantically backpedaling away from the video threat.

But a prominent lawmaker from a hard-line Islamic coalition strongly opposed to Musharraf's alliance with Washington said he thought the video was fake. He offered no evidence to back up his assertion.

"This is an attempt to turn people's sympathies in favor of Gen. Pervez Musharraf but such tactics are not going to work," said Liaquat Baluch, from the Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal.

"I am sure that the video is a fake and made in America," he said.

Osama, you fucked up here... and I think it's gonna cost you bigtime.

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RELATED: Getting his ducks in a row

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has made a series of top-level changes in the military high command ahead of next month's presidential elections.

Most important, the chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate has been changed and a new commander of the Rawalpindi corps appointed on Friday.

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