Border post attack a big loss for US war policy
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The US military and the administration of President Barack Obama
have been thrown into confusion by the attack on two Pakistani military posts
near the border with Afghanistan on Saturday morning, even as the attacks
provoked the Pakistani government and military leadership into much stronger
opposition to US policy in the region.
The decision to attack by helicopter gunships, which killed 24 Pakistani troops
and stoked a new level of anti-US sentiment in the country, has caught the
US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in a rare
defensive posture, because senior officials don't know what happened or why.
The unwillingness of ISAF, now commanded by US General John Allen, to comment
on the episode and the swift call for a full
investigation clearly reflect doubts on the part of the chain of command as to
the veracity of the account given by the unnamed commander of the US Special
Operations Forces (SOF) unit who ordered the operation across the border in
Pakistan.
That noncommittal posture is strikingly similar to the standard response to
charges by Afghan government officials of the killing of civilians by ISAF
forces, whether in air strikes or in SOF night raids.
Accounts of the sequence of events leading to the attack leaked to the news
media since Saturday by unnamed officials on behalf of the SOF unit in question
have portrayed it in stark terms as a provocation by the Pakistani military.
The account of the attack given to Reuters the day after said a combined
NATO-Afghan force seeking Taliban commanders in Kunar province near the
Pakistani border came under fire "from across the border", after which North
Atlantic Treaty Organization aircraft had attacked the Pakistani army post.
The story was attributed to both an unnamed "Western official" and a "senior
Afghan security official", suggesting the two had briefed Reuters together. The
Afghan official claimed that the combined force had been fired on from Pakistan
while descending from their helicopters, and that the helicopters had then
"returned fire".
That account seemed to suggest that the same helicopters that had delivered the
combined force to its target in Afghanistan had then crossed the border in
pursuit of the insurgents.
The insistence that the attack had come from across the border parallels the
rationale for a previous attack by helicopter gunships inside Pakistan on
September 29, 2010. That incident had begun with a pursuit of insurgents who
were said to have attacked an Afghan army base in Khost province from across
the border and killed two Pakistani soldiers after taking ground fire.
Although the normal practice in any cross-border pursuit of insurgents by US
forces is to inform the Pakistani military, last year's incursion avoided such
coordination based on an alleged "imminent danger to troops". It appears that
US and Afghan officials were constructing a similar rationale for a surprise
attack inside Pakistan in this latest case.
In subsequent accounts of the Saturday attack from both US and Afghan
officials, however, the initial claim that the forces were attacked from across
the border was dropped. The Associated Press, which said it had been given
"details of the raid", reported on Monday that the insurgent attack took place
inside Afghanistan.
The revised account given to AP portrayed the helicopters as having followed
the insurgents in the direction of the Pakistani border outposts and spotting
what they believed were insurgent encampments.
Afghan officials were continuing to insist that the insurgents were being
sheltered inside the Pakistani posts. A Washington Post story on Tuesday quoted
a "senior Afghan police official" as saying that after an initial gun battle,
the insurgents retreated into a Pakistani post and began firing from there. The
insurgents were "firing at the commandos", the Afghan official was quoted as
saying, "and they continued firing, so the air support had to come to their
defense".
The Los Angeles Times reported on Monday that "several officials" said it was
"unclear whether the fire came from insurgents sheltering near the Pakistani
posts or from the posts themselves".
The shifting accounts, the ambiguity about whether the helicopter personnel
were unaware that the posts belonged to the Pakistan military, and whether
insurgents were actually in the posts or not clearly bothered the ISAF command
and officials in Washington.
Meanwhile, the claim that the helicopter was firing on the posts in the
mistaken belief that they were insurgent camps has been refuted in detail by
the Pakistani military. Major-General Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general of
military operations, who was directly involved in dealing with the attack on
Saturday morning, said it was "impossible that they did not know these to be
our posts", according to the Pakistani daily The News.
Nadeem and military spokesman General Athar Abbas both pointed out that the
posts were located on the tops or ridges more than 300 meters from the Afghan
border and that they were permanent structures, which would not have been
occupied by insurgents. Furthermore, Nadeem said, NATO had been given the map
coordinates of those posts, called "Volcano" and "Boulder".
The head of Pakistani military operations also provided a detailed account of
the events indicating that the US military was aware of the fact that Pakistani
posts were being attacked from the beginning.
Just minutes before "Volcano" was first attacked, he recalled, a US sergeant
from the "Tactical Operations Center" in Afghanistan called a Pakistani major
on duty in Peshawar and told him US Special Forces had taken indirect fire in
an area called Gora Pahari about 14 kilometers from the army posts.
A few minutes later, the US sergeant called back and told the major, "Your
Volcano post has been hit," Nadeem said.
Nadeem said the Pakistani army informed NATO that their posts were being
attacked by ISAF forces, but the attack continued for 51 minutes, then breaking
off for 15 minutes, and resuming for about an hour.
US officials in Washington, meanwhile, still had no clear interpretation of
Saturday's events three days later. When asked by a former US official on
Tuesday whether the US military now understood any better what had happened, an
officer following the issue at the Pentagon replied, "We do not."
Senior officers in ISAF have long lobbied for a more aggressive approach to the
problem of insurgent safe havens in Pakistan, arguing that without such a
change, success in Afghanistan will be impossible.
But the cross-border attack on Pakistani border posts has had exactly the
opposite effect. It has united Pakistanis, both military and civilian, behind a
much more nationalistic policy toward the US military role in both Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
It has provoked the Pakistani government to threaten to stop NATO supplies from
crossing into Afghanistan permanently, order the United States to vacate its
drone base at Shamsi within 15 days, and boycott the upcoming international
conference on Afghanistan in protest.
Pakistan's minister of information, Dr Firdous Ashik Awan, described the
decision to boycott the Berlin conference as marking "a turning point in
Pakistan's foreign policy" that was supported by all parties represented in the
cabinet.
A cabinet meeting held in Lahore on Tuesday even discussed the expected US
cutoff of assistance to Pakistan and called for a detailed assessment of how
that cutoff would affect different sectors.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam,was
published in 2006.
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