Killing Pakistani Soldiers

[fatman17]

Weekend Edition December 2-4, 2011

America's Lost War

Killing Pakistani Soldiers

by BRIAN CLOUGHLEY


The killing of 24 Pakistan army soldiers in Mohmand Tribal Agency on November 26 by US air strikes is unforgivable. I was in Mohmand three weeks ago, visiting 77 Brigade, whose officers and soldiers were slaughtered by US aircraft, and I know exactly where Pakistan’s border posts are located. And so do American forces, because they have been informed of the precise coordinates of all them.

There can be no refutation of the statement to me that “No plans of any patrols or operations being conducted [at the time of the Mohmand airstrikes] were shared [with Pakistan, by US forces].” And nobody can deny that the posts are well inside Pakistan.

Those killed in the US attack on Pakistan included Captain Usman, whose six-month-old daughter will never see him again, and Major Mujahid who was to be married shortly. Well done, you gallant warriors of the skies. May you never sleep contented.

Here is a description of what went on, from a retired army officer who visited the casualties in the Military Hospital in Peshawar:

There were 14 wounded in the surgical ward suffering a variety of wounds . . . The crux of the account of the soldiers and officers was that at about 11pm . . . a light aircraft came from across the border, flew over the post and fired flares and returned. About half an hour later armed helicopters and [other] aircraft came. They again fired flares and began firing at the men. They remained in the area for about 5-6 hours. During this time, the helicopters [were] firing at individual personnel at will . . . [and fire was returned by their single 12.7 machine gun]. Every one of the men on the post was killed or wounded. They seemed to be in no hurry and going after each individual separately. Having finished the entire post, they peaceably went back without any casualty on their part.

The US assault is unpardonable. It was one of the only too frequent Cowboy Yippee Shoots, as we used to call them in Vietnam when I served there in the Australian army. Some things don’t change.

And on the subject of flying — it is ironical that my flight from Islamabad to Paris in early November was delayed because there was so much conflicting air traffic through Afghan airspace. The West’s war in Afghanistan, which is hideously costly in lives of foreign soldiers and Afghans (not that Afghan lives matter much to the so-called ‘coalition’ forces), and fantastically lucrative for corrupt Afghan politicians and officials – and lots of western commercial enterprises – involves staggering amounts of air movement. Much of it is by combat jet and helo jockeys, as well as countless drones, maneuvered by amoral, intellectually depraved video-game players in dinky little hi-tech parlors, blasting away with rockets, bombs and bullets at little figures on their screens.

The news keeps coming of errant air strikes, like the one in Kandahar on November 24 that killed six Afghan children, who were yet more victims of the West’s precision technology. And “NATO helicopters on Monday [November 28] fired four rockets into houses in Zhari district of Kandahar, killing three women and injuring two men, said Zalmai Ayoubi, the provincial governor’s spokesman.” Concurrently the website icasualties.org showed the names of three more young foreign soldiers killed in this cruel shambles. The British army’s Rifleman Sheldon Steel was 20, as was US Private Jackie Diener, whose countryman Corporal Zacharie Reiff was 22 when the three of them they gave their lives for — what? There were 25 foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan in November, but there is little in the war-supporting mainstream western media about this death toll. And there is nothing about the concurrent maiming, physically and mentally, of countless young men who will never again know normality in their entire lifetimes — unlike the slavering ghouls in politics who piously intone their mantra that “we must support our troops,” in order to justify their war. What rancid humbugs. Have any of them had a son or husband die in hideous agony or suffer appalling mutilation in any of the wars they so noisily support?

The website about casualties does not of course record the names of any of the Pakistan army soldiers who were killed in Mohmand by the US air strikes in the small hours of last Saturday. The US commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, General John R Allen, said he had offered his condolences to the family of “any” Pakistani soldiers who “may have been killed or injured,” which expression of halfhearted disquiet will undoubtedly go a long way to infuriate even more citizens of Pakistan. (Where do they get people like Allen? Are they programmed to say moronic things like this?)

It is not too much to say that the author of Cables from Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, the brilliant British diplomat who was ambassador in that besieged capital for three action-packed years, feels that the Afghan War is fruitless. He writes that “it is unarguable that the West got into Afghanistan in October 2001 without a clear idea either of what it was getting into or of how it was going to get out.” Cowper-Coles (we’ll call him C-C) brought extensive experience and skill to Afghanistan, and it isn’t too much to suggest that if his notions and prescriptions had been accepted the place wouldn’t be in the terminal shambles that now exists. He obviously empathized with the Afghan people, and one can imagine him, translated to a century ago, being a benign interlocutor with Emir Nasrullah Khan and arguing persuasively about the Treaty of Gandamak.

But C-C’s modern arguments were of a different sort. His intercession concerning the slaughter of ninety Afghan villagers by a US Specter gunship – a truly hellish death-machine – was instrumental in extracting the final admission by the then US commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, General McKiernan, that his troops – his army – his country – had lied. McKiernan acknowledged, after “the Americans were at first in denial”, that a US strike had killed the civilians — a “big gesture by a big man” writes C-C. And perhaps it was. But of course big gestures don’t bring back dead children to their mothers, be that in Afghanistan or the US or Pakistan or Britain or anywhere else. And the lies continue, with the Washington Post and the New York Times doing their best to spread the word, from un-named “Afghan security officials” that the slaughter of the Pakistan army soldiers on November 26 was their own fault. Here’s the Post:

After the coalition unit came under fire from the Pakistani side of the border, the troops responded by calling in an airstrike, which resulted in the Pakistani casualties, the officials said. “They did come under fire from across the border first, before reacting,” said a senior Afghan official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue . . .

One senior Afghan police official said that after an initial gunbattle, the insurgents retreated into a Pakistani post and began firing from there. “They started firing at the commandos, and they continued firing so the air support had to come to their defense,” the official said.

One wonders how C-C would have reacted to this, in his official position (probably with civilized disdain), but in 2009 he had to pay attention to the bigger picture, and when he was offered the opportunity to become his foreign minister’s Special Representative to Afghanistan, standing down from being ambassador, he accepted the poison chalice because he thought “it was a real chance to help the Obama Administration deliver the political strategy capable of bringing sustainable success.” In this he was vastly over-optimistic, even being warned by the late Richard Holbrooke that “not everyone” in the US administration saw things as did the British. C-C “pointed to the need for a process of national reconciliation to complement the military campaign” but although there may have been lip-service to that estimable objective, there was no evidence of serious application. Nor is there now, two years later.

In early November Major General Peter Fuller, the US deputy commander of Nato’s training mission in Afghanistan, was sacked for saying publicly that President Karzai was “isolated from reality” and that Afghans “don’t understand the sacrifices that America is making to provide for their security.” He had to be fired, of course, for making a fool of himself (where do they get them from?), but it is apparent that his sentiments are widely supported by the Pentagon’s decision-makers who blame everyone but themselves for the fact that their war is going catastrophically in what they insultingly call “AfPak.”

The “sacrifices that America is making” in Afghanistan, in what is ludicrously called ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, are entirely self-inflicted. But Pakistan’s sacrifices are inflicted by America, which is losing yet another war and again blames another country for its failure. Just like it did in the disasters in Vietnam and Somalia and Iraq.

In the past fifty years, what nation has trusted America and come out of the deal with dignity, honor and prosperity? Pakistan is far from a perfect country. Its government is corrupt and appallingly inefficient. But it could do without Washington’s imperial insolence. At the moment Islamabad is desperate to find some means of registering the country’s contempt and loathing for the United States, and there are very few options available to it. But it could reflect on what Washington’s retaliation would have been if Pakistani aircraft had gone on a yippee shoot and killed 24 American soldiers inside Afghanistan.

Brian Cloughley’s website is www.beecluff.com

does it get any 'clearer' than this!!!

 

[my name is arya]

is it an incident or pr planned usa policy

dont you guys think usa do some action before leaving afganistan .

pakistan is on now usa list

 

[53fd]

An excellent read. I was just about to post it.

 

[fatman17]

December 01, 2011

"It was impossible they did not know these to be our posts."

Pak Border Post Attack a Big Loss for U.S. War Policy

by GARETH PORTER

The U.S. military and the Barack Obama administration have been thrown into confusion by the attack on two Pakistani military posts near the border with Afghanistan Saturday morning, even as the attacks provoked the Pakistani government and military leadership into much stronger opposition to U.S. policy in the region.

The decision to attack by helicopter gunships, which killed 24 Pakistani troops and stoked a new level of anti-U.S. sentiment feeling in the country, has caught the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in a rare defense posture, because senior officials don’t know what happened and why.

The unwillingness of ISAF, now commanded by Gen. John Allen, to comment on the episode and the swift call for a full investigation clearly reflect doubts on the part of the chain of command as to the veracity of the account given by the unnamed commander of the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) unit who ordered the operation across the border in Pakistan.

That non-committal posture is strikingly similar to the standard ISAF response to charges by Afghan government officials of the killing of civilians by ISAF forces, whether in air strikes or in SOF night raids.

Accounts of the sequence of events leading to the attack leaked to the news media since Saturday by unnamed officials on behalf of the SOF unit in question have portrayed it in stark terms as a provocation by the Pakistani military.

The account of the attack given to Reuters the day after said a combined NATO-Afghan force seeking Taliban commanders in Kunar province near the Pakistani border came under fire “from across the border”, after which NATO aircraft had attacked the Pakistani army post.

The story was attributed to both an unnamed “Western official” and a “senior Afghan security official”, suggesting the two had briefed Reuters together. The Afghan official claimed that the combined force had been fired on from Pakistan while descending from their helicopters, and that the helicopters had then “returned fire”.

That account seemed to suggest that the same helicopters that had delivered the combined force to its target in Afghanistan had then crossed the border in pursuit of the insurgents.

The insistence that the attack had come from across the border parallels the rationale for a previous attack by helicopter gunships inside Pakistan Sep. 29, 2010. That attack had begun in pursuit of insurgents who were said to have attacked an Afghan army base in Khost province from across the border and killed two Pakistani soldiers after taking ground fire.

Although the normal practice in any cross-border pursuit of insurgents by U.S. forces is to inform the Pakistani military, last year’s incursion avoided such coordination based on an alleged “imminent danger to troops”. It appears that U.S. and Afghan officials were constructing a similar rationale for a surprise attack inside Pakistan in this case.

In subsequent accounts of the Saturday attack from both U.S. and Afghan officials, however, the initial claim that the forces were attacked from across the border was dropped. Associated Press, which said it had been given “details of raid”, reported Monday that the insurgent attack took place inside Afghanistan.

The revised account given to Associated Press portrayed the helicopters as having followed the insurgents in the direction of the Pakistani border outposts and spotting what they believed were insurgent encampments.

Afghan officials were continuing to insist that the insurgents were being sheltered inside the Pakistani posts. A Washington Post story Tuesday quoted a “senior Afghan police official” as saying that, after an initial gun battle, the insurgents retreated into a Pakistani post and began firing from there.” The insurgents were “firing at the commandos,” the Afghan official was quoted as saying, “and they continued firing so the air support had to come to their defense.”

The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that “several officials” said it was “unclear whether the fire came from insurgents sheltering near the Pakistani posts or from the posts themselves.”

The shifting accounts, the ambiguity about whether the helicopter was unaware that the posts belonged to the Pakistan military, and whether insurgents were actually in the posts or not all clearly bothered the ISAF command and officials in Washington.

Meanwhile, the claim that the helicopter was firing on the posts in the mistaken belief that they were insurgent camps has been refuted in detail by the Pakistani military. Maj. Gen. Ashfaq Nadeem, the director general of military operations, who was directly involved in dealing with attack Saturday morning, said it was “impossible that they did not know these to be our posts”, according to the Pakistani daily The News.

Nadeem and military spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas both pointed out the posts were located on the tops or ridges more than 300 meters from the Afghan border and that they were permanent structures, which would not have been occupied by insurgents. Furthemore, Nadeem said, NATO had been given the map coordinates of those posts, called “Volcano” and “Boulder”.

The head of Pakistani military operations also provided a detailed account of the events indicating that the U.S. military was aware of the fact that Pakistani posts were being attacked from the beginning.

Just minutes before “Volcano” was first attacked, he recalled, a U.S. sergeant from the “Tactical Operations Center” in Afghanistan called a Pakistani major on duty in Peshawar and told him U.S. Special Forces had taken indirect fire in an area called Gora Pahari about nine miles from the army posts.

A few minutes later, the U.S. sergeant called back and told the major, “Your Volcano post has been hit,” Nadeem said.

Nadeem said the Pakistani army informed NATO that their posts were being attacked by ISAF forces, but the attack continued for 51 minutes, then breaking off for 15 minutes, and resuming for about an hour.

U.S. officials in Washington, meanwhile, still had no clear interpretation of Saturday’s events three days later. When asked by a former U.S. official Tuesday whether the U.S. military now understood any better what had happened, an officer following the issue at the Pentagon replied, “We do not.”

Senior officers in ISAF have long lobbied for a more aggressive approach to the problem of insurgent safe havens in Pakistan, arguing that without such a change, success in Afghanistan will be impossible.

But the cross-border attack on Pakistani border posts has had exactly the opposite effect. It has united Pakistanis, both military and civilian, behind a much more nationalistic policy toward the U.S. military role in both Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

It has provoked the Pakistani government to threaten to stop NATO supplies from crossing into Afghanistan permanently, order the United States to vacate its drone base at Shamsi within 15 days, and boycott the upcoming international conference on Afghanistan in protest.

Pakistan’s minister of information, Dr. Firdous Aashik Awan, described the decision to boycott the Berlin conference as marking “a turning point in Pakistan’s foreign policy” that was supported by all parties represented in the cabinet.

A cabinet meeting held in Lahore Tuesday even discussed the expected U.S. cutoff of assistance to Pakistan and called for a detailed assessment of how that cutoff would affect different sectors.

GARETH PORTER is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006.

 

[Devil Soul]

Very well written, thanks for sharing.....

 

[JonAsad]

Nice-
Well put-

 

[Adnan Faruqi]

I think this news belongs to this sticky section:

http://www.defence.pk/forums/pakist...gave-wrong-location-get-attack-clearance.html

 

[fatman17]

Report By Harris Bin Munawar

Unfriendly fire

US troops have been using the base for the war in Afghanistan for 10 years, but Pakistani acknowledgements have been conflicting


What happens at Shamsi airfield?



Pakistan has asked the US to vacate its Shamsi airfield in Balochistan by December 11. The move came after volatile mutual ties between the two allies in the war on terror were worsened by a fatal NATO attack on a Pakistani border post in Mohmand Agency.

The airbase is located near Washki town of Balochistan, about 320 kilometres southwest of Quetta. It has reportedly been used by US forces since the Afghan war began in 2001, including for drone strikes on Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan tribal areas.

"We will take over the Shamsi base on December 11, in any case and no drone will be allowed to fly from here after the deadline," Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar told reporters earlier this week.

Pakistan has earlier denied that the airfield was being used by the CIA for predator drone attacks in Pakistan.

Newspaper reports say the base has been used by US Special Forces fighting in Afghanistan from 2001 and 2006. In January 2002, seven members of a Marine Corps KC-130 were killed when the aircraft crashed on approach to Shamsi.

Google Earth images from 2006 published in several newspapers including The Times In 2009 showed three MQ1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles parked in the hangars of the Shamsi airfield. "US Special Forces used the airbase during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but the Pakistani Government said in 2006 that the Americans had left," The Times said in its report.

Pakistan's The News said the aircraft were Global Hawks - a model used generally for reconnaissance. Responding to the development, Pakistan Army spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas admitted Shamsi and Jacobabad airbases were being used by the US, "for logistics".

In October that year, a New York Times report said Blackwater employees had worked at Shamsi airbase "where they loaded missiles and bombs onto drones used to strike Taliban and Qaeda militants". An unnamed Pakistani official said the "operation of the drones at Shamsi had been shifted by the Americans to Afghanistan this year".

After the May 2 US raid in Abbottabad to kill Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan Air Force was reported to have told the Pakistani parliament during a secret briefing that the base had been leased to the UAE. The base had originally been built by the Arabs for falconry trips.

A month later, in June, Pakistan publicly told the US to vacate the base. A Washington Post report in July that Pakistani and US officials had said drone operations from the base had ceased in April 2011, "weeks before the bin Laden raid, after a dispute over a CIA contractor who fatally shot two Pakistani citizens in Lahore in January". But "US personnel and Predator drones remain at the facility... with security provided by the Pakistani military."

Earlier this week, Interior Minister Rehman Malik told reporters he had sent FIA men to the airbase to "fulfil the immigration requirements for the foreigners" who are leaving.

 

[IceCold]

Bottom line is we lost 24 brave men in the line of duty and our military and civilian leadership is too bagharat to do anything about it other then to register empty and hollow protests.

 

[alimukhtar]

Speech less and mind blowing article.......... Thnx for sharing sir