Thanks USA!!!
Salala deadlock
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Why did Nato forces kill two dozen Pakistani soldiers in an air raid on a border post in the Mohmandregion late last November?
Islamabad and Washington continue to trade claims and counter-claims over the incident and in its latest statement Pakistan has called the attack unprovoked and declared it unacceptable that responsibility for the attack be affixed on Pakistan. This comes in response to the report coming out of an investigation conducted by Brigadier-General Stephen Clark, released on Dec 22.
Pakistan had refused to be a part of that investigation, not least because it found it problematic for the accused party to be leading an investigation into its own actions. Clark’s report alleges that Pakistani troops first opened fire, provoking a US response. A series of mistakes by both Isaf and Pakistani troops as well as mutual distrust between the parties led to the deadly firefight, goes the US version.
On the Pakistani side
(ISPR Report), the army has categorically called Clark’s report “factually not correct” and said the fundamental cause of the attack was the failure of Nato and Isaf to share their near-border operation with Pakistan at any level and their violation of “all mutually agreed procedures” for such operations. “Sustained aggression which continued for as long as 90 minutes despite the US and Isaf being informed about the incident at multiple levels within minutes of initiation of US-Isaf fire belies the ‘self defence’ and ‘proportional use of force’ contention (in Clark’s report),” the army concludes.
Importantly, the US has yet to share with the Pakistani side the full and classified version of Clark’s report, something the army has reiterated in its latest statement. As expected, the Pentagon has said it stands by the US military report and that the “statement that this was an unprovoked attack by American forces is simply false.”
So where do we go from here? There is no doubt that Washington and Islamabad need to work together so that the troubled relationship can be sensibly refashioned.
However, as things stand at the moment, the onus is on the US to decide which way it wants the relationship to go.
There is much documented evidence to suggest that the US can make, and indeed has made, deadly mistakes in the past and, for all its technical mastery and tremendous military capability, does not have perfect intelligence on the ground. A US Air Force investigation into the killing of 23 civilians in Uruzgan province in Feb 2010 concluded that it was a tragic mistake. In the same month Nato admitted killing 12 civilians in Helmand; it was followed by another admission of killing five civilians in Zhari district of Kandahar. Just a week before the deadly attack in Mohmand agency, Nato killed seven civilians, most of them children, in the same district. The fog of war often leads to fatal errors. But the biggest error the US is making now is adding insult to injury by refusing to acknowledge the full extent of its mistake and hence turning what many thought would be a temporary impasse into a permanent deadlock.
Salala deadlock
