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Saturday, December 17, 2011
NATO attack: Pakistan makes its case in Washington* Amid an accelerating downward spiral in Pak-US ties, a presentation at Pak embassy in US on NATO attack serves as a portrait of mistrust
Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: Pakistan is offering a view of what happened in NATO’s deadly attack on a pair of the Pakistani Army border outposts last month that concludes that the operation could not have been a mistake – and that the shooting by helicopter gunships that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead continued for an hour after NATO forces said it would stop, write Howard LaFranchi in Christian Science Monitor and Pamela Constable in Washington Post.
Senior Pakistani officials made their presentation in Washington on Thursday amid a downward spiral in US-Pakistan relations that began early in the year but has accelerated while the two uneasy partners trade allegations in the aftermath of the November 26 attack.
On Wednesday the House of Representatives approved a freeze on $700 million in military aid to Pakistan. For its part, Pakistan has evicted the US from an airbase where drones were stationed, has closed its borders to the transfer of NATO supplies into Afghanistan – and is now proposing to charge NATO transit fees for using Pakistani supply routes if and when the borders reopen to NATO.
It was amid that heightened tension that the Pakistani Embassy in Washington summoned reporters on Thursday to hear the Pakistani view of the attack on the outposts. “We want to offer our view of the incident as we see it,” said acting Ambassador Iffat Gardezi. NATO is proceeding with its own inquiry into the incident, but Pakistan has refused to cooperate with that investigation. Ambassador Gardezi suggested that the Pakistani public would not tolerate any sign of their officials’ cooperation with NATO so soon after the deadly attack.
“This is the fourth incident [of NATO attacking Pakistani forces] in the recent past, there were joint inquiries before and nothing happened after that,” she said. “The entire population is against any cooperation at this time – they want an apology.” President Obama has offered condolences for those killed in the attack but not an official apology. The senior Pakistani officials who offered the presentation said the explanation of mistaken identity (NATO has said its forces thought they were firing on militants) could not be accepted for a list of reasons, ranging from the years of cooperation and the procedures put in place to prevent this kind of mistake, to the barrenness of the terrain where the simple stone outposts sat. The stark, treeless landscape meant the two outposts that were attacked stuck out and could not be mistaken for something else, the officials said.
Pakistan’s military had recently undertaken an anti-militant operation in the border area of Mohmand Agency where the two attacked outposts were located, but the senior officials acknowledged that parts of the Afghanistan side of the border were “infested” with what they called “terrorists.”
“We cleansed this area of all terrorist presence,” one senior official said, “As of September [there was] no terrorist presence in Mohmand which warrants such an operation” by NATO.
The officials also claimed a “coordination of measures over the last 10 years to avoid incidents of this nature,” but the details provided in the presentation served instead to illustrate the mistrust that exists between the NATO and Pakistani sides.
NATO and the Afghan and Pakistani militaries jointly man a number of Border Coordination Centres (BCCs) to enhance cooperation on border operations. Despite that, the Pakistanis say they had almost no advance warning of the November 26 operation. “No information was shared by [NATO] about an impending operation,” a Pakistani military official said. When the Pakistani officer at one BCC was provided coordinates of the attack’s location some 10 to 15 minutes before it commenced, they indicated an area six to eight miles north of where the attack actually took place.
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk