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Walter Watts
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American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil
« on: 2008-09-04 01:20:07 » |
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Can you say "nuclear"?
--Walter
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The New York Times
September 4, 2008
American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil
By PIR ZUBAIR SHAH, ERIC SCHMITT and JANE PERLEZ
This article is by Pir Zubair Shah, Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez.
DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan — Helicopter-borne American Special Operations forces attacked Qaeda militants in a Pakistani village near the border with Afghanistan early Wednesday in the first publicly acknowledged case of United States forces conducting a ground raid on Pakistani soil, American officials said.
Until now, allied forces in Afghanistan have occasionally carried out airstrikes and artillery attacks in the border region of Pakistan against militants hiding there, and American forces in “hot pursuit” of militants have had some latitude to chase them across the border.
But the commando raid by the American forces signaled what top American officials said could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush’s war council.
It also seemed likely to complicate relations with Pakistan, where the already unstable political situation worsened after the resignation last month of President Pervez Musharraf, a longtime American ally.
“What you’re seeing is perhaps a stepping up of activity against militants in sanctuaries in the tribal areas that pose a direct threat to United States forces and Afghan forces in Afghanistan,” said one senior American official, who had been briefed on the attack and spoke on condition of anonymity because of the mission’s political sensitivity. “There’s potential to see more.”
While most American troops in Afghanistan operate under a NATO chain of command, the Special Operations forces who carried out this attack answer only to American commanders.
The Bush administration has criticized Pakistan in recent months for not doing enough to curb attacks by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, which keep bases inside the Pakistani tribal region and cross the border to attack American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The action by the American forces on Wednesday in the border village appeared to be an effort to stanch the raids by Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militants.
There were conflicting reports about civilian casualties in the operation. American officials said one child had been killed in the strike; a Pakistani military spokesman said the American troops had opened fire on villagers, killing seven people.
After the attack, Pakistan lodged a “strong protest” with the American government and reserved the right of “self-defense and retaliation,” said the Pakistani military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.
Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had weighed plans to kill or capture top leaders of Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, but Mr. Rumsfeld, for all his public bravado, wanted to tread cautiously in Pakistan for fear of undermining Mr. Musharraf. With Mr. Musharraf’s resignation, that issue is no longer a concern.
Many details of Wednesday’s attack remain unclear, including how many commandos and helicopters were involved, and whether the strike was planned earlier against the Qaeda targets or precipitated by militant attacks against allied forces in Afghanistan.
American military spokesmen at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., and the Pentagon declined to comment on the strike. The spokesmen did not deny that the attack had occurred.
Three other senior American officials provided some details of the attack, but only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding any aspect of the Joint Special Operations Command, whose “special mission units” carry out the military’s most secret counterterrorism missions.
In a telephone interview, General Abbas, the Pakistani military spokesman, said the soldiers from the International Security Assistance Force, which is made up of NATO and American forces, had created “new problems” for the Pakistani soldiers based along the border.
By killing civilians, General Abbas said, there was now a great risk of an uprising by the tribesmen who supported the Pakistani soldiers in the border area. The tribesmen, who oppose the Taliban and support the Pakistani forces, will now be extremely angry, he said.
“Such actions are completely counterproductive and can result in huge losses, because it gives the civilians a cause to rise against the Pakistani military,” he said.
The governor of North-West Frontier Province, Owais Ahmed Ghani, said the helicopter attack occurred about 3 a.m. and killed 20 people. Local residents said most of the dead were women and children, but this could not be confirmed.
One American official said that at least one child had been killed, and that several women who died in the attack were helping the Qaeda fighters.
The governor, the most powerful civilian leader in the province, which abuts South Waziristan, condemned the attacks and called for retaliation by Pakistan.
A senior Pakistani official called the commando raid a “cowboy action” and said it had failed to capture or kill any senior Qaeda or Taliban leaders.
“If they had gotten anyone big, they would be bragging about it,” he said.
The Pakistani official said that American military officers in the field had become increasingly vocal about the need for unilateral strikes inside the tribal areas, but that their intelligence about the location of militant leaders was no better than it had been in the past.
But in the past, the senior ranks of the Pakistani military have supported, in principle, these kinds of missions. The country’s civilian political leadership at a minimum may have to criticize such missions on the grounds of sovereignty and the risk of civilian casualties.
According to an earlier description of the military action on Wednesday given by a Taliban commander and local residents, the attack was aimed at three houses in the village of Jalal Khel, also known locally as Moosa Nika, in the Angoor Adda area of South Waziristan, near a stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and less than a mile from the border with Afghanistan.
The Taliban commander, known by the nom de guerre Commander Malang, said the attack took place close to a Pakistani military position on the border and killed 15 people. But the Pakistani military took no action, he said.
According to Commander Malang, three helicopters flew into the Pakistani side of the border and one of them, carrying soldiers, landed. Soldiers who came out of the helicopter opened fire on people in the village, he said, while the other two helicopters hovered overhead.
The commander, who is based in the town of Wana, said he was not at the scene. He received the description via radio, he said. The soldiers “killed innocent people” in the village adjacent to a security post of the Pakistani Frontier Corps. There was no immediate way to independently confirm the account of the Taliban leader.
General Abbas, the Pakistani military spokesman, said the American commandos spilling from the helicopter had opened fire on villagers, killing seven people.
Any incursion by American or NATO aircraft into Pakistan in so-called hot pursuit of Taliban militants is a contentious issue for Pakistan.
Publicly, the Pakistani authorities say their country’s sovereignty must be respected, and they always condemn such raids.
At the same time, Washington has become more vocal about increased attacks by Taliban and Qaeda forces crossing into Afghanistan from Pakistan to fight coalition forces.
Last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met secretly with the Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, on an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea to discuss how to combat the escalating violence along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Officials briefed on the meeting said a wider campaign by American Special Operations forces in the tribal areas was not discussed, although there had been growing expectations among Pakistanis that American units would respond by attacking more forcefully into Pakistani territory.
The Angoor Adda area is on the border with Afghanistan, and its mud-walled compounds are known as a center of Taliban and Qaeda strength.
Sher Khan, a phone company employee in Angoor Adda, said in a telephone interview that 19 people were killed in the raid. He said most of the dead were women and children.
A Pakistani intelligence official in South Waziristan said in a telephone interview that a group of Taliban had crossed the border into Afghanistan before an attack late Tuesday. In response, the Afghan National Army called for air support, the intelligence official said, speaking in return for customary anonymity.
The helicopters chased the Taliban militants across the border back into South Waziristan, according to the intelligence official’s account.
But the Taliban militants escaped, the official said.
Pir Zubair Shah reported from Dera Ismail Khan, Jane Perlez from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Mark Mazzetti contributed from Orlando, Fla.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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Walter Watts
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Fritz
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Re:American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil
« Reply #1 on: 2008-09-07 01:07:09 » |
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Quote from: Walter Watts on 2008-09-04 01:20:07
Can you say "nuclear"?
--Walter
------------------------------
The New York Times
September 4, 2008
American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil |
Well 'Kaboom' would seem to be at least one possible out come if this continues.
Cheers
Fritz
PS:There are numerous embedded URLs in the source
Source: Antiwar News
Author: Jason Ditz
Date: September 5, 2008
Updated 9/6/08 at 9:00 PM EST
In a move seen by some as the latest fallout from Wednesday morning’s US attack on South Waziristan, the Pakistani government has ordered that supply lines to NATO troops in Afghanistan be immediately severed for an indefinite period of time.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik later denied the report, insisting that the interruption was not retaliatory but only a temporary response to security reports, and that the link had already been restored. Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar, however, said the move was intended to show how serious Pakistan was about its territorial integrity, saying “we have stopped the supply of oil and this will tell how serious we are”.
The move comes as thousands of protesters marched through South Waziristan’s capital of Wana chanting “death to America”. Pakistani media cited unnamed sources who said the move came as the government feared retaliation from South Waziristan tribesmen for the US attack.
The strike, which was the first confirmed use of US ground forces in Pakistan since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, killed 20 civilians and received widespread condemnation in Pakistan’s government. American officials have suggested that the attack is just the first of many cross-border missions to be expected in the coming months, as the US has expressed growing discontent with Pakistan’s inability to control its long and mountainous border with Afghanistan. The Defense Minister of key NATO ally Germany was also critical of the US attack during his visit to Pakistan, and warned that “Pakistan’s territorial integrity has to be respected”.
With Pakistan’s sole ground link to Afghanistan closed to them, NATO would be more reliant than ever on Russia for the transportation of non-military supplies to the war-torn country at a time when US-Russian relations are at a post-Cold War low. And while Russia has promised not to block NATO’s overland transport, President Bush’s threat to “punish” Moscow over the recent war with Georgia may put the route in further jeopardy.
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Blunderov
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Re:American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil
« Reply #2 on: 2008-09-07 05:18:36 » |
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[Blunderov] Seems the "militants" turned out to be sleeping women and children. America, it appears, is still winning hearts and minds in its usual charming way. "Gosh, dang and paint my barn red if them pesky varmints wuzn't where our intelligence* said they would be! Sorry 'bout these collaterals podner."
This time, though, they have managed to do it whilst simultaneously violating the territorial integrity of their rather reluctant and extremely volatile ally. Presumably somebody thought this game would be worth the candle. Somebody very deluded perhaps. Or somebody who doesn't really care about what sort of mess the Democrats may have clear up. Whom, one wonders, might THAT have been...?
*If necessary this point can be amplified with a riff we have heard before. "Everybody had the same intel that we did. Therefore any reasonable(!) person would also have done what we did. Right? Right...
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Hermit
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Re:American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil
« Reply #3 on: 2008-09-07 11:06:52 » |
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Anyone who imagines that the "Democrats" (who are anything but) plan to "clean-up" hasn't been paying attention. From Obama's idea that we should be concentrating more forces in Afghanistan and promising AIPAC that Israel's interests come first and always with him; to his running mate's lifetime of demonstrating endless support for Israel, no matter what they do to the Palestinians (who are now denied any possibility of anything but a far worse than Bantustan situation and the victims of 50 years of American supported genocide by Israel); to Pelosi and her crew of spineless, civil-liberty infringing, war and Republican enabling, industrial-military-media collaborators, a Democrat victory is quite likely to be worse for the world than a Republican victory. The latter will at least bear the potential of bringing the tragic farce of the end of the "grand experiment" to a swifter conclusion*.
Ralph Nader's current 6 to 7% support looks increasingly like a viable protest vote to those who cannot sufficiently suppress their gag reflex to bring themselves to actually vote for either of the two faces of the non-stop military-industrial-media party.
Kindest Regards
Hermit
*Full credit to Blunderov for first proposing that the non-hypocritical would vote Republican to ensure the collapse of the US empire. Fortunately, it looks as if this conclusion is likely even if the non-hypocrites simply abstain from participating in the farce.
PS I don't for a moment suggest that the Republicans are not significantly more likely to support Israeli ethnic cleansing and genocide against the 4 million Palestinians squeezed into less than 7% of their country and socially disenfranchised to a far worse than apartheid level outside that 7% and the further 4 million Palestinian spread throughout the Middle East and somehow robbed of their American mandated "right-to-return" (which prevented them from being assimilated as refugees) by the ongoing conspiracy between Israel and wealthy American religiofascism (a much more accurate neologism than the non-existent "Islamofascism," so beloved of the neoconartists). Its just that the USA's ability to intervene in foreign conflicts is much more likely to be further reduced under a economically naive Republican administration than under the smarter but no less delusional-incompetent Democrats.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil
« Reply #4 on: 2008-09-09 02:13:13 » |
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[Blunderov] This appended piece relates to Afghanistan and not Pakistan but the theme of indiscriminate slaughter by American fascists, wherever they may be, is a staple news item. Maybe not on FAUX TV though.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2008/09/vigilant-reporting.html
Monday, September 08, 2008
Vigilant reporting
posted by lenin
"The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel."
[Bl.] 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article4699077.ece
From The TimesSeptember 8, 2008
<video on site>
Harrowing video film backs Afghan villagers' claims of carnage caused by US troopsTom Coghlan in Kabul
As the doctor walks between rows of bodies, people lift funeral shrouds to reveal the faces of children and babies, some with severe head injuries.
<video on site>
Women are heard wailing in the background. “Oh God, this is just a child,” shouts one villager. Another cries: “My mother, my mother.”
The grainy video eight-minute footage, seen exclusively by The Times, is the most compelling evidence to emerge of what may be the biggest loss of civilian life during the Afghanistan war.
These are the images that have forced the Pentagon into a rare U-turn. Until yesterday the US military had insisted that only seven civilians were killed in Nawabad on the night of August 21.
Last night the Pentagon announced that it was reopening the investigation in the light of “emerging evidence” and was sending an officer to Nawabad to review its previous inquiry. Villagers and the UN insist that 92 were killed, including as many as 60 children. Locals say that the US and Afghan troops who came into the village looking for a Taleban commander, with US air support, used excessive force.
In the video scores of bodies are seen laid out in a building that villagers say is used as a mosque; the people were killed apparently during a combined operation by US special forces and Afghan army commandos in western Afghanistan. The film was shot on a mobile phone by an Afghan doctor who arrived the next morning.
Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship.
However, US commanders and Pentagon officials have said repeatedly that seven civilians died alongside 35 Taleban militants during a legitimate combat operation, the target of which was a meeting of Taleban leaders.
The villagers’ accounts have been supported by separate investigations conducted by the UN, by Afghanistan’s leading human rights organisation and by an Afghan government delegation. Two Afghan army officers involved in the operation have been dismissed.
The Pentagon’s original investigation concluded last week that US forces used close air support after coming under heavy fire during a mission to seize a Taleban commander named Mullah Sadiq. They allege that he died in the operation.
The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.
Sources close to one of the investigations said that a video film was shot by Afghan officials the morning after the attack. It corroborates the doctor’s footage but has not been made public.
In a statement released on Saturday, the commander of Nato forces, General David McKiernan, appeared to back away from previous US accounts. He said: “Following the recent operation in Azizabad, Shindand district, we realise there is a large discrepancy between the number of civilian casualties reported by soldiers and local villagers. I remain responsible to continue to try and account for this disparity in numbers, but above all I want to express our heartfelt sorrow to all families that lost loved ones in this firefight.”
A Human Rights Watch report due to be published today is highly critical of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan for the number of civilians killed in airstrikes. It gives warning that repeated instances of Western forces killing Afghan civilians have led to a collapse in popular support for the international presence.
Taking what it says are the most conservative figures available, Human Rights Watch has calculated that civilian deaths as a result of Western airstrikes tripled between 2006 and 2007 to 321. In the first seven months of this year the figure was 119. In the same period, 367 civilian deaths were attributed to Taleban attacks. It accuses US officials of routinely denying reports of civilian deaths.
Maulavi Gul Ahmad, an Afghan MP who was part of a government delegation that investigated the Nawabad attack, told The Times: “We are not only blaming America – this is destroying the reputation of the international community and undermining their presence in Afghanistan.”
Other Afghan investigators alleged that US forces had been duped into attacking the village by tribal figures involved in a local feud.
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan
December 2001
US aircraft attack a convoy taking tribal leaders to the inauguration of new Afghan Government. About 60 killed; US claims al-Qaeda leaders among them
July 2002
46 die, many from same family, when a wedding party in Uruzgan province is bombed in error
October 26, 2006
Between 40 and 85 civilians are killed in airstrikes and mortar bombardments around the settlement of Zangawat in Kandahar province
March 2007
19 people are killed and 50 wounded when US Marine Special Forces fire on civilians after a suicide attack in Shinwar, eastern Afghanistan. The US military apologises and pays compensation to the families
July 6, 2008
47 civilians, including 39 women and children attending a wedding party, are killed by a US airstrike in Nangarhar province, an Afghan government investigating team claims
Sources: Times archive, agencies
[Bl.] A selection of comments from the site:
...Anyone who remembers the Iran Contra affair must find it insane that anyone would use Oliver North to provide reliable evidence of anything at all. If this is the standard of Fox's journalistic respectability and US military honesty then we should all pay much more attention to Al Jazeera.
richard, horley, uk...
...It's a shame there aren't a few more video phones being used in south Afghanistan. These kinds of bombardments are going on almost every week, but are in areas so remote and dangerous that they don't get reported in the media.
Jane, Kabul, Afghanistan...
...Ollie North "corroborating" something? Surely you jest. Ollie North whose secretary sneaked incriminating documents out of his office in her undergarments? Does the US military have any idea how RIDICULOUS it is to use Ollie North as a reference? (Maybe they hoped they could conceal his identity.)
Arik Silferman, Milwaukee, USA...
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