US ground attacks reported in Pakistan

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US ground attacks reported in Pakistan
By Bill Van Auken
24 December 2009

Amid a deepening political crisis in Pakistan and growing popular
unrest over US missile strikes and mercenaries, it has been revealed
that over the past five years US special operations troops have
conducted a number of clandestine cross-border raids into the
country’s tribal areas.

These raids involved “helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across
the border at night, and were never declared to the Pakistani
government,” according to a “former NATO officer” cited in an article
published Monday by the British daily Guardian.

The only publicly acknowledged incursion by US forces took place on
September 3, 2008, when US Navy Seals were flown by helicopter into a
village in South Waziristan, where they raided three compounds and
slaughtered some 20 people. While Washington claimed those killed were
Al Qaeda fighters, the Pakistani government said that the victims were
all villagers and included six women and two children.

The incident provoked widespread outrage in Pakistan, with the
government denouncing the attack as a “grave provocation” and the
country’s parliament demanding that the military use force to repel
any further violations of the country’s sovereignty. Unnamed US
officials told the media that the Pakistani regime had acquiesced to
the raid, something Islamabad vehemently denied.

According to the Guardian account, however, the raid was the fourth
such incursion to take place between 2003 and 2008. Two of the
previous assaults had been similar assassination or “snatch and grab”
missions against alleged Al Qaeda members, while a third was launched
to recover a downed Predator drone, which the US military feared would
fall into the hands of the Afghan resistance.

It was reported following the 2008 raid that President George W. Bush
had issued a secret order allowing the US military to carry out
cross-border attacks into Pakistan on the theory that the country,
together with Afghanistan, were all part of the same theater in the
“global war on terrorism.”

This policy has apparently been continued by President Barack Obama
and is about to be intensified as part of the administration’s
military escalation, which is sending at least 30,000 more troops into
Afghanistan.

Since Obama took office, the CIA and US military have doubled the
number of missile attacks from pilotless Predator drones, killing
hundreds of Pakistani civilians. Now the US administration is
demanding that the Pakistani government acquiesce in a further
expansion of the drone campaign and that it undertake its own military
offensive against Afghan resistance forces operating out of northwest
Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, near the Afghanistan
border.

A steady stream of top US officials, including CIA Director Leon
Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, have
flown to Islamabad to pressure the government of President Asif Ali
Zardari and the Pakistani military to fall into line with the Obama
administration’s military escalation.

US officials have demanded that the Pakistani military launch an
attack against alleged sanctuaries of the so-called Haqqani network in
North Waziristan. The group is led by Sirajuddin Haqqani and his
father Jalaluddin. In the 1980s, the latter was one of the principal
recipients of US arms and money during the CIA-backed war against the
pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.

Washington is also pressing the Pakistani government to give it a
green light for expanding the drone missile strikes from the tribal
areas to Baluchistan, Pakistan’s largest province. Baluchistan borders
Helmand province in Afghanistan, where much of the US and British
counterinsurgency operation has been concentrated.

Press reports in both the US and Pakistan indicate that US officials
have gone so far as to propose drone attacks on Quetta, a crowded city
of nearly 600,000. The Pentagon and US intelligence agencies claim
that Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, the founder of the
movement, plan and direct military operations in Afghanistan from a
safe haven in the city.

The Pakistani daily Dawn reported Wednesday that “Diplomatic sources
say Pakistani leadership had been unequivocally cautioned by various
official visitors from the US that if Pakistan failed to act, the
Americans could take direct action, including expansion of drone
strikes in Baluchistan.”

Tensions have mounted between Islamabad and Washington. While the
Pakistani government and military have long done US imperialism’s
bidding in the region, the war in neighboring Afghanistan and the US
incursions into Pakistan are threatening to destabilize the entire
country. Out of self-preservation, the Pakistani ruling elite appears
to be balking at the latest US demands.

This was reflected in an appearance Tuesday by Foreign Minister Shah
Mahmood Qureshi before the foreign affairs committee of Pakistan’s
National Assembly, where he criticized the Obama administration’s
escalation strategy.

According to a statement issued by the Foreign Ministry, he told
legislators that the Zardari government would not allow either the
entry of US and NATO troops into Pakistan in so-called “hot pursuit”
or the expansion of the drone missile campaign.

“There are serious implications of the new US Afghanistan strategy for
Pakistan,” Qureshi was quoted as saying in the ministry statement. “As
a result of the military surge, there could be more violence in
Afghanistan which could, in turn, result in further influx of
militants and refugees from Afghanistan into Pakistan.”

The minister described the drone attacks as “counter-productive and
unhelpful.” This formal position of the Pakistani government is belied
by the fact that the CIA is launching these strikes from an airfield
in Baluchistan, with the evident knowledge and consent of Islamabad.

The Associated Press, meanwhile, cited an unnamed “senior US diplomat”
as stating that “more US action is expected against the Haqqani
network,” and that it “would come with Pakistani support.”

Thus far, the Pakistani military has rejected US demands that it
launch a new offensive in North Waziristan to go after Haqqani’s
forces. It has maintained that its troops are already committed to an
offensive in South Waziristan and that it cannot carry out the two
campaigns simultaneously.

“We cannot fight on so many fronts,” a Pakistani security official
told the Times of London.

This approach has angered Washington, which maintains that the
Pakistani government is willing to use force against Pakistani Taliban
militants carrying out attacks within its borders, but not against
elements using Pakistan to launch attacks on US occupation forces in
neighboring Afghanistan.

Underlying the Pakistani position, according to many analysts, are the
longstanding ties between the Haqqanis and the Pakistan military
intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

Pakistan’s influence over the Taliban and resistance elements allied
with it is seen as a means of securing Pakistani interests in
Afghanistan once the US is forced to withdraw from the country.
Islamabad is particularly fearful of a growing Indian presence in
Afghanistan.

“If America walks away, Pakistan is very worried that it will have
India on its eastern border and India on its western border in
Afghanistan,” Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US,
told the New York Times.

Contributing to the growing US-Pakistani tensions is the political
crisis of the Pakistani regime, which has been shaken by a high court
ruling striking down an amnesty brokered by the Bush administration
with the country’s former military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf.
The deal protected politicians of Zardari’s Pakistani People’s Party
(PPP) from corruption charges.

Now, Defense Minister Ahmed Muktar and Interior Minister Rehman Malik,
two of the key figures in coordinating military policy with
Washington, are facing criminal indictments and have been barred from
leaving the country. The opposition parties have demanded that the
government resign.

The Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, commented on what he called “the major
political drama unfolding in Islamabad” in an appearance on the US
Public Broadcasting System interview program hosted by Charlie Rose.

“How it’s going to come out remains to be seen,” said Holbrooke,
adding, “It’s something that we are watching very carefully.”

In the same interview, Holbrooke described as a “dilemma” that “the
leadership of both Al Qaeda and Taliban are in a neighboring country
where our troops cannot fight.” He said that the US would “have to
find other means” to deal with the issue. He defended the US drone
missile attacks, described by human rights agencies as extra-judicial
executions. “Some of the most dangerous people in the world…are not
alive today,” because of the strikes, he said.

But the missile strikes, combined with the growing US presence in
Pakistan, are provoking mounting popular opposition.

This has taken the form in recent weeks of demonstrations in several
Pakistani cities against the reported presence in the country of US
mercenaries from the infamous military contracting firm, Blackwater-Xe.

Thousands of people attended an anti-Blackwater rally Sunday in
Rawalpindi, Pakistan’s fourth-largest city and the headquarters of its
military. Called by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s largest Islamist
party, under the slogan “Go America, Go,” the rally’s speakers
denounced Blackwater as “US terrorists” and charged that Washington
was undermining Pakistan’s sovereignty and deliberately seeking to
destabilize the country in order to seize control of its nuclear weapons.

Last weekend, hundreds of lawyers from the Islamabad Bar Association
staged another anti-Blackwater rally outside the Police Training
College in Sihala, demanding that the government expel foreign
instructors, who, the demonstrators charged, were Blackwater
operatives. The lawyers and others have also charged that the training
operation is being used as a cover for US spying on Pakistan’s nearby
Kahuta nuclear facility. Following the protest, the Pakistani
government announced that it was moving the training college to a
police headquarters in Islamabad.

Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services because of the company’s
gruesome reputation following a 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians by
its gunmen.

Both Washington and Blackwater executives deny that any of its
personnel are deployed in Pakistan. Multiple press reports in both the
US and Britain, however, have cited current and former US officials as
saying that the mercenary outfit is indeed active in Pakistan.

Jeremy Scahill, author of the book Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s
Most Powerful Mercenary Army, reported in the Nation magazine last
month that Blackwater is playing a leading role in gathering
intelligence for and executing the drone attacks, and that it is “at
the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted
assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives.”

The drone attacks, the cross-border raids by Special Operations troops
and the use of American mercenaries, combined with the escalating
pressure from Washington for an expansion of Pakistani military
offensives in the Afghanistan border region, are all contributing to
the political destabilization of this nuclear-armed country of 180
million people.

Carried out in secret and behind the backs of the American people,
this crucial element of the Obama administration’s military escalation
threatens to unleash a far wider war.

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/paki-d24.shtml

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