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US Apologizes to Pakistan For Salala Attack

It is same as saying that OBL was found in pakistan so pakistan was hiding him. But there is a difference between suspicion and concrete proof, which u don't have any. Moreover, terrorism in afghanistan is harmful for India.

That is totally different thing & have no proof, even US admit that they are unable to find out that if any Pakistani official knew about it. On the other hand indian embassies/consulates along Pak-Afghan border are the proof that they want destabilization of Pakistan. Tell me whywould a country need soo many consulates when there is not even a long queue of ppl waiting to get visa's for each other countries(talking abt Afghanistan & india).
 
That site is not qouting any prominent Pakistani official like Forign minsitor or PM, or President etc demanding 5000$. Also Pakistan had not closed the route on demand of money, it was to express anger over their (mistaken?) raid which killed Pakistani soliders and their earlier unilateral raid of ÒBL. In order to keep the route blocked, if they had to make that excuse for the time being say they want $5000 per truck, whats wrong with that? They already give billions of dollers of aid, military equipment starting from cannons to gunship helicopters, parts, subsides planes.. Why should Pakistan hagle about this peanuts money. And after all this is not about money, it about war on terror and defeating terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan that is taking lives of innocent people daily.

If that makes laugh so hard that you have to roll on ground, again i suggest to get yourself help from a professional.


Answer is in your reply itself, They have asked for 5000 dollars and they did'nt get it.
 
Answer is in your reply itself, They have asked for 5000 dollars and they did'nt get it.

It is an unconfirmed news that they demanded for it. Maybe it was, maybe it wasnt. Thats why I am saying qoute a credible source to back up your claim. Credible source means, any renowned news paper qouting a NAMED high level Pakistani official.

For example, like in 2008 Indian foreign minister demanded 30 men to be handed over to India from Pakistan,, they made similar demand in 2002 as well saying otherwise they will attack Pakistan. But at the end neither Pakistan gave them anybody nor they attacked. That was a laughing point for everybody.
 
Why the **** aren't they charging US???
F***ing Zardari got his 10% again!
 
Why the **** aren't they charging US???
F***ing Zardari got his 10% again!

He would take his 10% regardless of whether Pakistan charged NATO transit fees or not - the money goes into the hands of the GoP either way does it not?

On the subject of why the transit fee option might have been dropped, I would argue PR and compromise. On the US side, offering an apology while also having to pay Pakistan higher fees was politically too hard to sell. On the Pakistani side, had Pakistan imposed the fees, the domestic politics in the US would have guaranteed negative publicity for Pakistan, along with a refusal to provide CSF reimbursements.

IMO, Pakistan chose to make a statement of 'we are choosing to waive the transit fee proposal' because it would end up getting the same amount of money regardless (through the CSF reimbursements), and this looks slightly better from a PR perspective for both the Obama Administration (on offering the apology) as well as for Pakistan (in not applying transit fees to help the NATO mission to stabilize Afghanistan).
 
Sounds more like offering condolences rather than showing regret. In anycase I suppose it helps both sides to get out of this sticky situation..
 
Also Pakistan had not closed the route on demand of money, it was to express anger over their (mistaken?) raid which killed Pakistani soliders and their earlier unilateral raid of ÒBL. In order to keep the route blocked, if they had to make that excuse for the time being say they want $5000 per truck, whats wrong with that?

They already give billions of dollers of aid, military equipment starting from cannons to gunship helicopters, parts, subsides planes.. Why should Pakistan hagle about this peanuts money. And after all this is not about money, it about war on terror and defeating terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan that is taking lives of innocent people daily.

Correct.
This has been a diplomatic See-saw since the Raymond Davis episode. Before that, as well all know, there is a long history of 'carrots' like making Pakistan MNNA as well as threats-aplenty to 'do more'. RD episode gave Pakistan a brief upper hand. OBL raid and and its orchestrated-defaming-of-Pakistan gave America the upper hand. Then the Salala epipose--which gave Pakistan the upper hand. What next? I can't predict. I am hoping that J. Allen-Kayani meeting sorted out some major issues sinch RD and perhaps before that.
That was for the psy-ops angle.
As far as the money angle is concerned, you are spot on. These bean-counting Pakistanis here are a bit too low on facts and a bit too high on nationalism. I won't even bring up the subject of trade/commerce to highlight how much is pumped into Pakistani economy because of LACK of American-inspired Western sanctions.
 
For sure the USA will always have upper hand on Pakistan because of $$$$ cuz we lost our ghairat and Emaan for $$$$.I guess we shold not blame US all the times but ourselves.The problem is totally inside us....:smokin:
 
No More Bullying Pakistan

By Vali Nasr Jul 5, 2012 4:52 PM ET

It took eight months, but the U.S. has finally apologized for killing 24 Pakistani soldiers in a firefight on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

With that, the U.S. military is again able to use routes through Pakistan to supply its forces in Afghanistan without paying exorbitant fees. Plus the threat that Pakistan will bar U.S. drone strikes is for now moot.

However, the main implication of the apology, a triumph of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over both the White House and the Pentagon, is that it ends the experiment of the U.S. trying to bully Pakistan into submission.

The clash in November between U.S. and Pakistani forces was a mess, with miscommunication on both sides but fatalities on only one. Pakistan, still seething over the U.S. breach of its sovereignty in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, closed U.S. military supply routes to Afghanistan when the U.S. initially refused to apologize. The U.S., in turn, froze $700 million in military assistance and shut down all engagement on economic and development issues. In a further deterioration of ties, the Pakistani Parliament voted to ban all U.S. drone attacks from or on Pakistani territory.

No Sympathy
The Pakistanis held firm in their insistence on an apology. Officials at the Pentagon thought the case didn’t merit one. Many had no sympathy for the Pakistanis, whom they regarded as double-dealers for stoking the insurgency in Afghanistan and providing haven to the notorious extremists of the Haqqani Network. The White House feared that an apology would invite Republican criticism. Throughout the crisis, Clinton and her senior staff argued that the U.S. should apologize. She supported re-engaging with Pakistan to protect a critical relationship while also holding Pakistan accountable for fighting the Taliban and other extremists, a point she has raised in each of her conversations with Pakistani leaders.

Clinton’s recommendations were contrary to the policy the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency put in place in early 2011. Relations had soured when the Pakistanis held CIA operative Raymond Davis after he shot two Pakistanis. Frustrated with Pakistan’s foot-dragging on counterterrorism, the two agencies successfully lobbied for a strategy to reduce high-level contacts with Pakistan, shame Pakistan in the news media, and threaten more military and intelligence operations on Pakistani soil like the bin Laden assassination. It was a policy of direct confrontation on all fronts, aimed at bending Pakistan’s will.

It failed. Pakistan stood its ground. Far from changing course, Pakistan reduced cooperation with the U.S. and began to apply its own pressure by threatening to end the drone program, one of the Obama administration’s proudest achievements.


Months of behind-the-scenes wrangling failed to resolve the apology issue. A high-level U.S. visit to Islamabad on the eve of the May 20-21 NATO Summit in Chicago proved a fiasco. Pakistan informed the Americans that after an apology, it would charge a much higher fee to let NATO supplies into Afghanistan. (That has not come to pass.) President Barack Obama refused to meet Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari at the summit unless the supply routes reopened, but that did not break the impasse.

Finally, Washington tallied the costs of confrontation with Pakistan. Supplying troops through other routes was costing an additional $100 million a month. Without Pakistani roads, the U.S. military wouldn’t be able to get its heavy equipment out of Afghanistan on time or on budget once it begins to withdraw from the country in earnest. If Pakistan remained off-limits, the U.S. would have to rethink its entire exit strategy from Afghanistan.

Open Airspace
What’s more, if Pakistan truly shut down the drone program, it would cripple the administration’s most successful terrorism- fighting tool. Pakistan might also close its airspace to U.S. planes flying between the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan. Americans were understandably angry that bin Laden was found hiding in a Pakistani city, but few knew that the plane that transported his body from an Afghan base to a U.S. Navy ship for a sea burial had to fly over Pakistani territory.

The conclusion: Open conflict with Pakistan was not an option. It was time to roll back the pressure.

The apology is just a first step in repairing ties deeply bruised by the past year’s confrontations. The U.S. should adopt a long-term strategy that would balance U.S. security requirements with Pakistan’s development needs. Managing relations with Pakistan requires a deft policy -- neither the blind coddling of the George W. Bush era nor the blunt pressure of the past year, but a careful balance between pressure and positive engagement. This was Clinton’s strategy from 2009 to 2011, when U.S. security demands were paired with a strategic dialogue that Pakistan coveted. That is still the best strategy for dealing with this prickly ally.

(Vali Nasr is a Bloomberg View contributor, dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article: Vali Nasr at vnasr@jhu.edu.

No More Bullying Pakistan - Bloomberg
 
There were people on TV previously saying the initially US goverment was ready for an apology but GoP asked them to delay it until a parlimentry commitee asks for it to get the credit to the Politicians. But after that Afghanistan incident happened and Obama had to apologize for that so consecuitive apologies were a bit of embarrasment for Obama Administration locally in the US so it got delayed. Then probably GoP and Pakistani parties started polticizing this issue and maybe asking for more money so it got prolonged.

IMO, It is actually failure of leadership, to admit on Pakistani side as well. This failure could be blamed on current mistrust and lack of ability to follow a agreed, coordinated policy by the military and the civillian govt, inability to deal with complex issue by civilian govt and maybe current military leadership also, Opposition parties politicizing such issues while disregarding national interest merely sake of getting some cheap popularity,,, or probably a combination all of these reasons.


Escalating this issue further would have disasterous for everybody. Nato, Pakistan, US, Afghanistan. To punish Pakistan Nato, US have a lot of options even just in the economic and diplomatic battle field, especially at a time when Pakistan was getting isolated politically isolated and its economic condition is fragile. And after all from Pakistani perspective there is/was no real justifiable reason to get an enemity with the US, Nato. Both face a challenge from terrorists and Pakistan should not be on the wrong side becoming a pariah state.
 
Good to see both nations are going forward once again......

And i'll be more glad if Pakistanis dont charge any extra fee on trucks as of now.... Because the blockade was not for the money it was for the apology.


BTW i would like a status report from all of the members as it seems like some members had heart attack after teh news....:lol:

Sounds more like offering condolences rather than showing regret. In anycase I suppose it helps both sides to get out of this sticky situation..

I think the apology was on the phone not in the press briefing.

Long road ahead in U.S.-Pakistan ties after NATO deal - Yahoo! News

After U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized in a phone call to Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan permitted trucks carrying NATO supplies to cross into Afghanistan for the first time in more than seven months.
 
Good to see both nations are going forward once again......

And i'll be more glad if Pakistanis dont charge any extra fee on trucks as of now.... Because the blockade was not for the money it was for the apology.


BTW i would like a status report from all of the members as it seems like some members had heart attack after teh news....:lol:



I think the apology was on the phone not in the press briefing.

Long road ahead in U.S.-Pakistan ties after NATO deal - Yahoo! News

Its on papers too, wait a bit our ISI chief is due in washington many things will be decided there, including newframe work of drones!
 
apology is meaningless if Americans dont stop TTP from using Afghanistan.
while their entire efforts are on Drone strikes but the Taliban freely roam in Kunar, Pakatia & Nooristan etc.
 
apology is meaningless if Americans dont stop TTP from using Afghanistan.
while their entire efforts are on Drone strikes but the Taliban freely roam in Kunar, Pakatia & Nooristan etc.

Thats due to mistrust and sticking to own priorities.. since TTP doesnt attack them, so their major operations are not against any TTP group inside Afghanistan. In drone attacks I think they do consider requests from Pakistan, like they took out Baitullah Mehsud, in a mentionable incident.

Same as Pakistan hasnt acted so far decisively against Haqqani Computer Networks (oohh Sorry, Haqqani Network,, dont know why they are called with Network though). Although their taking shelter in Pakistan do causes the US, Nato more casualities.
 

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