Coverage of Pakistani troops' funerals fuel anger as calls grow to cut US ties
Pakistan sees widespread anti-US protests on day images of 24 coffins containing those killed in Nato strike dominate media
Saeed Shah in Karachi
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 November 2011 15.01 EST
Article history
Pakistanis burn Nato and US flags during a protest over the deadly airstrike on a checkpoint in which at least 24 soldiers died. Photograph: MK Chaudhry/EPA
Images of the funerals of the young soldiers killed in the Nato attack on their checkpost filled television screens across Pakistan on Sunday, as a country already bursting with anti-Americanism found another reason to hate the US.
Prayers were held at a military base in Peshawar, provincial capital of the north-west, in front of 24 coffins laid out on a lawn, each wrapped in a Pakistan flag. The head of the army, General Ashfaq Kayani, considered Pakistan's most powerful man, attended the funerals, as did the province's top civilian officials.
Each coffin was carried away by a guard of honour, to be buried in home towns and villages.
Casualties along the border with Afghanistan are usually from the paramilitary Frontier Corp, which recruits from Pakistan's tribal area, but these were regular soldiers from the heart of the country. Patriotic music, usually reserved for wartime propaganda, was played as wall-to-wall TV coverage repeatedly showed the funerals.
Kayani also visited the 13 injured, who were being treated at a military hospital in Peshawar, again with cameras trailing him.
Among the dead were two young young officers, Major Mujahid Ali and Captain Usman, whose life stories the media seized upon, helped by the military's public relations machine. Usman, 23, married last year and had a three-month-old daughter.
Reporters arrived at the tiny home of Ali, in the village of Naudero in the southern province of Sindh, to find a family in mourning.
His elderly mother, clutching a picture of her recently engaged son, said: "I'm proud that my son has achieved martyrdom. I'm grateful to God for it."
The city of Lahore, in the east of the country, saw protesters chant anti-American slogans. There was a bigger demonstration outside the US consulate in the port city of Karachi. The Lahore rally included members of Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the militant group blamed for the 2008 attacks on Mumbai in India.
Thousands of people gathered outside the heavily fortified American consulate in Karachi, with angry cries of "Death to America". An outbreak of sectarian violence elsewhere in the city probably prevented more from joining the protest.
In Mohmand, where the deadly strike on the checkpoint occurred, more than 1,000 tribal elders gathered in the district capital, demanding the Pakistan end its ties to the US.
"This was just simple murder," said Rasheed Ahmed, the senator for Mohmand. "America is the big evil. We are just a small mouthful in front of America. He said Islamabad had "missed the opportunity" to cut relations with Washington after the killing of Osama bin Laden in a raid in the garrison town of Abbottabad in May and the freeing in March of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor accused of killing two Pakistanis during a shootout in Lahore.
"If we waste another opportunity, America will keep doing things like this," said Ahmed.
Rustam Shah, a former Pakistani ambassador to the Afghanistan, said the Pakistani military would now face pressure from within its own ranks to end co-operation with the US.
"The military will have to cope with rising levels of anger within, which is very dangerous," he said.
Public opinion in Pakistan largely blames terrorist violence in the country on the presence of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan, and Islamabad's decision to ally with Washington.
Imran Khan, the former international cricketer turned politician, is riding a wave of rising popularity, with a campaign based on breaking the alliance with the US. "It is time for our rulers to get out of America's war," he told a political rally in the Shujabad area of Punjab over the weekend.