Pervez Musharraf was, by his own admission, a naughty child. His discovery that an unfiltered cigarette made an efficient time fuse led him and some friends to construct firecracker bombs that exploded deafeningly in rubbish bins and mail boxes outside the houses of school staff. “There was utter confusion,” he recalled with satisfaction.

Old habits die hard, it seems. Last week the president of Pakistan fired up a string of incendiary revelations that embarrassed the White House, upset Downing Street and goaded President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan into a hissy fit. For good measure, he appeared on an American chat show and traded jokes about President George W Bush.

Musharraf was promoting his memoirs, a task usually left to retirement, but like most dictators, the 63-year-old army chief of staff shows little enthusiasm for leaving the stage. And just as his schoolboy prank went unpunished, he can count himself fireproof as one of the main beneficiaries of 9/11. Once a pariah whose links with terrorists accounted for President Bill Clinton’s refusal to be photographed shaking his hand, he is now feted by western leaders as a key figure in the global war against terror.

His first thunderflash last week was a stunner. Musharraf claimed the US had threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if it did not co-operate with America after the September 11 attacks.

A shaken Bush said he was “taken aback” by the claim and Richard Armitage, the former US deputy secretary of state accused of making the threat, insisted he had merely said “you are either with us or against us”.

Musharraf’s next firecracker was the disclosure that the US had secretly paid millions of dollars in bounties to Pakistan for the capture of wanted Al-Qaeda figures. In the gratifying furore over the illegality of such payments, Musharraf quietly mentioned that the money went to individuals, not to his government.

Then there was the entertaining spectacle of Musharraf and Karzai going into deep sulks when they joined Bush in the White House Rose Garden. Each blames the other for the Taliban’s revival. Karzai has accused Musharraf of giving the Taliban a haven. Musharraf called Karzai “an ostrich” with his head in the sand.

Musharraf was just getting started. His book seemed to exonerate Omar Sheikh, a Briton facing execution for the murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. The general also put British intelligence on the spot by claiming that details of terror suspects had been kept back from Pakistan as it was “a backward country”.

Angered by a leaked British document calling for the dismantling of Pakistan’s intelligence service because of its links with terrorists, Musharraf retorted that the Ministry of Defence was a better candidate for abolition. That may not have gone down well with Tony Blair, whom he met in Downing Street last week.

In an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, he accused Britain of amnesia over Al-Qaeda, who were in effect the mujaheddin assembled by the West to overthrow the Russians in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he claimed, was abandoned to face the consequences.

“We fought for you for 10 years,” he said. “Then we were left high and dry.”

So what accounts for this outpouring of bile? Musharraf is that rare creature, a comparatively liberal dictator who has gone some way to reversing the injustices and corruption that existed under his predecessors. Committed to the “irreversible process of the empowerment of women”, he created 60 reserved seats for women in the national assembly in 2002. However, his efforts to reform Islamic laws that discriminate against women have been dismissed by many as sops to the West.

He has calmed relations with India since the two countries’ nuclear stand-off over Kashmir, although he pardoned Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of Pakistan’s bomb” who gave nuclear weapons technology to rogue states, including Iran and Libya. On the debit side, Amnesty International has accused Pakistan of widespread human rights violations in support of America’s war on terror.