Pakistan Blasts US Raid, Says Only Civilians Killed

By Cernig

News of US ground forces conducting a raid inside Pakistan, and allegedly killing 20 militants had foreign policy bloggers sitting up and taking notice today, with even those like veteran Rock Richard at VetVoice saying that it was a good idea.

The Taliban have been living and breathing in Western Pakistan for a long time now. Its unfortunate that it has taken this long for American troops to start fighting them there, but its a welcomed development.

This is, however, a sensitive issue. It is assumable that the moderates within the Pakistani government want the Taliban removed from Southern Waziristan.  The problem is the more hardline elements of the Pakistani citizenry are sure to be unhappy about this. The unrest amongst the fundamentalists combined with the corrupt officials and Taliban sympathizers within the Pakistani government creates a unique situation that must be handled delicately. But this does not discount the need for military action in Southern Waziristan.

Part of the problem there, however, is that the "more hardline elements" enjoy widespread support. Nawaz Sharif, the political leader who recently pulled his party out of the coalition government, has been vocal in his opinion that Pakistan shouldn't be as publicly America's proxy as it has been in the past few years - and he has an 86% approval rating.

The other problem, however, comes as a report from Reuters:

Suspected U.S. commandos blamed for killing 20 people in Pakistan were acting on faulty intelligence that was never shared with Pakistani forces inside the country, a Pakistani official said on Wednesday.

Nadeem Kiani, spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, told Reuters the predawn raid near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan in South Waziristan was a violation of Pakistan's sovereign territory.

"The intelligence was not correct and the people who have been killed are unarmed civilians, not militants, and those include women and children," Kiani said in an interview.

Pakistani security officials in the region said they suspected the attack was mounted by U.S. soldiers backed by helicopter gunships in a region known as a sanctuary for al Qaeda and Taliban militants. The targeted village is across the border from a U.S. military base in Afghanistan's Paktika province.

Some residents said foreign troops involved in the raid also detained people and took them away.

"It was a violation of Pakistan's territory," Kiani said.

Hostility to this incursion has been echoed by the Pakistani military, their foreign ministry and the local provincial Governor too, while no-one at any military command or Bush administration department will talk about the raid or even confirm that it happened at all. When Richard said such matters had to be handled delicately, I don't think this is what he had in mind.

As blogger China Hand recently wrote in a must-read analysis of the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Pakistani media and international polling make it clear that Pakistan believes that unremitting American pressure on Pakistan to participate in a flawed, excessively militarized campaign against the burgeoning Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is turning a serious but manageable problem—ethnic and Islamist extremism in Pakistan's border regions—into an existential crisis that is ripping Pakistan apart.

... It is a message that Pakistan’s civilian, military, and intelligence leadership are ready to heed.

But it is a warning that America—including both its political and defense establishment and its two presidential candidates—are determined to disregard in the search for geopolitical advantage, multi-national military support, and votes.

China Hand points to one possible -even probable, given how popular a move it would be - outcome.

Pakistan’s army would be free to abandon the thankless project of cooperating with NATO forces in the bloody, border-straddling counter-insurgency campaign in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Instead, while Karzai floundered to his doom, the Pakistani army could do what it does best: deploying its divisions in a conventional order of battle in Pakistan’s east facing India and engage in the crowd-pleasing ritualized hostility that has secured the army’s place in the center of national esteem—and fattened its budget—for the last sixty years.

With Pakistan hostile and Russia perhaps alienated enough over Georgia to forbid resupply from the West, NATO's position in Afghanistan would be untenable. Yet that seems to be the course America has decided upon.

Comments

[BJ Bjornson]

Good post Cernig,

Just to add another complicating factor to the mix, McClatchy reported Sunday that the Pakistani military called off a major offensive in the tribal regions, possibly in part to soften Islamist opposition to Zardari’s presidential aspirations, though the official reason as given as the start of Ramadan..

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/world/story/51281.html

Elections are really a bad time to be mucking around with a country’s sovereignty, particularly one as unstable as Pakistan is right now.

[anderson]

its two presidential candidates—are determined to disregard in the search for geopolitical advantage...

You should make that "political advantage."

Because there is no geopolitical "advantage" to be gained in continued aggression against targets in Pakistan, especially when your "targets" repeatedly turn out to be civilians. And how much longer is the US military going to continue to ignore its own counterinsurgency manual? These operations are doomed, and amping up the fighting there is only being held up by Obama and McCain for domestic consumption -- it sounds so tough.

Americans generally have no idea what is going on there, other than they still hear on occasion that bin Laden is stumbling around the area ... somewhere. Increased militarism cannot improve geopolitical position but only worsen it. Even RAND has finally acknowledged that.