Reports Say Pakistan Soldiers 'Confront' US Raid
By Cernig
There are reports today that Pakistani soldiers at a border base fired into the air to deter another US cross-border raid.
The latest confrontation began at around midnight, local people say.
They say seven US helicopter gunships and two troop-carrying Chinook helicopters landed in the Afghan province of Paktika near the Zohba mountain range.
US troops from the Chinooks then tried to cross the border. As they did so, Pakistani paramilitary soldiers at a checkpoint opened fire into the air and the US troops decided not to continue forward, local Pakistani officials say.
Reports say the firing lasted for several hours. Local people evacuated their homes and tribesmen took up defensive positions in the mountains.
The incident happened close to the town of Angoor Adda, some 30km (20 miles) from Wana, the main town of South Waziristan.
A Pakistani military spokesman in Islamabad confirmed that there was firing but denied that Pakistani troops were involved.
The Pakistan military says only local tribesmen held the US raid back. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman denied the reports, saying they were "spurious", "(I) cannot find any mission that correlates to the report I saw out of Pakistan. I can't find any (military) report of helicopters being fired upon," Whitman said. But local authorities in Pakistan say differently, according to Reuters:
One official told Reuters by telephone that "the troops stationed at BP-27 post fired at the choppers and they turned away."
Two Chinook helicopters appeared set to land when troops began shooting, alerting tribesmen who also opened fire on the intruders, said a senior government official in Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province.
A resident described the tension in the village through the night. "We saw helicopters flying all over the area. We stayed awake the whole night after the incident," he said.
I suspect that this raid will turn out to be exactly as "spurious" as the recent denied Afghan massacre - that denial was turned on its head when mobile phone footage of casualties, including women and children, surfaced.
Recent reports have it that Bush himself ordered this new belligerence on the part of US forces along the Afghnaistan/Pakistan border - over the objections of his entire intelligence community who said it would destabilize Pakistan's political balance, possibly fatally. Since then, both President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani have both endorsed the stance made by Pakistan's army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, who has stated that Pakistan would not allow foreign troops on its soil and Pakistan's sovereignty and territorial integrity would be defended "at all costs".
Afghanistan, India and NATO allies alike have said for a long time that the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, controls and directs Islamist extremist groups including the Taliban and groups carrying out attacks inside India. It is also said to have close ties with Al Qaeda. But for domestic political reasons American politicians and pundits have previously tended to ignore those ties. Only recently, following officially orchestrated "leaks" from the Bush administration, have the American establishment media began to suggest the truth - that the Bush administration has been thoroughly played by Pakistan throughout the "war on terror".
... even some Pakistanis said the U.S. government was naive to think that Musharraf or his generals would do much to find bin Laden. They noted that Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency had cultivated ties with the al-Qaeda leader for two decades and that many officers remained sympathetic to his cause.
Afrasiab Khattak, a Pashtun politician based here in the northwestern city of Peshawar, said Pakistani forces would occasionally help the CIA capture second-string al-Qaeda figures, but only to keep the aid money flowing from Washington.
"The Bush administration deceived itself," he said. "From the very beginning, the Pakistani generals were playing a double game. It was an open secret."
Khattak said he has warned U.S. officials since 2000 of bin Laden's close relations with Pakistan's spymasters, adding that he tried to alert Washington after 2002 that al-Qaeda was rebuilding in the tribal areas.
"We kept telling the Americans, 'They are here.' They said: 'No, no. This cannot be true. General Musharraf is very committed, he's with us,' " recalled Khattak, president of the Awami National Party in North-West Frontier Province.
Khattack was also president of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan for several years and a lawyer at Pakistan's Supreme Court.
The aim of these new raids, and recent strikes by Predator drones, is to strike at Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaida leadership. But if a strike is to kill Bin Laden, or the Taliban's leader Mullah Omar, it will likely do so at a safe house owned by the ISI, which would cause an anti-American explosion in Pakistan's military and convulsions in Pakistani society which would certainly oust anyone willing to back the US. Several former senior intelligence officers went on the record for the Washington Post recently to say that the risks of this new policy outweigh the benefits and former officials from both NATO allies and Pakistan agreed:
"This has become incredibly complicated and messy," said a former senior British intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "The Americans have been talking about inserting themselves militarily into the tribal areas since 2005, at least. But I think it would just complicate the whole issue by a very significant factor."
... "We thought, and we still think so, that the American strategy should have been to stabilize the area rather than look for a needle in a haystack," said Mahmood Shah, a retired civilian security chief for the tribal regions.
"If you find him now, the problem still won't be resolved," he said of bin Laden. "Maybe you'll get the fish, but you'll poison the pond around him."
Several supporters of Barack Obama have recently noted that Bush's new policy of cross-border raids echoes one part of Obama's stated policy for Pakistan - the part John McCain attacked him for. But on this occasion both Obama and Bush are wrong. Obama would do far better to concentrate on the second part of his Pakistan plan - the part where he stresses non-military aid - stop listening to the ZBig faction of generic hawks and begin listening to those former and current officials who say a purely aggressive policy is counter-productive.
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