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Pakistan official denies OK given for NATO air strike

A Pakistani official on Friday denied a Wall Street Journal reportthat Pakistani officials gave the go-ahead to a NATO air strike that killed 24 troops, unaware that their own forces were in the area.

Last weekend’s cross-border attack has caused public outrage in Pakistan, the government has pulled out of next week’s international conference on Afghanistan and threatened to end  support for the US-led war there if its sovereignty is violated again.

A Pakistani military official categorically denied the Journal’s account, saying the aircraft had already engaged when Pakistan was contacted.

“Wrong information about the area of operation was provided to Pakistani officials a few minutes before the strike,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak to the media.

“Without getting clearance from the Pakistan side, the post had already been engaged by US helicopters and fighter jets. Pakistan did not have any prior information about any operation in the area.”

The US officials, giving their first detailed explanation of the worst friendly-fire incident of the 10-year-old war, told the Wall Street Journal an Afghan-led assault force that included US commandos was hunting Taliban militants when it came under fire from an encampment along the border with Pakistan.

The commandos thought they were being fired on by militants but they turned out to be Pakistani military personnel who had established a temporary campsite, they were quoted as saying.

According to the initial US account from the field, the commandos requested air strikes against the encampment, prompting the team to contact a joint border-control centre to determine whether Pakistani forces were in the area, a US official said.

The border-control centre is manned by US, Afghan and Pakistani representatives. But the US and Afghan forces conducting the November 26 commando operation had not notified the centre in advance that they planned to strike Taliban insurgents near that part of the border, the official said.

When called, the Pakistani representatives at the centre said there were no Pakistani military forces in the area identified by the commandos, clearing the way for the air strikes, the US officials said.

Washington has called it a tragic accident and offered its condolences, promising a full investigation. It has not apologised.

“There were lots of mistakes made,” the newspaper quoted an official as saying.

The Journal said US officials have in the past expressed reservations about notifying the Pakistanis about operations, concerned the missions’ details could leak out.

It added that the officials cautioned that the preliminary  account was based mainly on interviews with members of the commando team and could change as more information is gathered.

A formal report on the incident is due to be completed by US military investigators by December 23.

In an analysis of Pakistan’s ‘Memogate,’ Mansoor Ijaz, a key player in the controversy, offers his interpretation of the actions of Islamabad’s erstwhile ambassador in Washington—actions that led to an uproar in Pakistan and the envoy’s ouster.

“This FT op-ed of yours is a disaster,” read a BlackBerry message to me on the night of Oct. 10. The sender, Husain Haqqani, was still Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington at the time. Earlier in the evening, the Financial Times had posted my column—“Time to Take On Pakistan’s Jihadist Spies”—on its website, unleashing a political firestorm in Pakistan over my disclosure of a memorandum Haqqani had asked me to help him prepare and deliver to Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the memorandum, Haqqani asked the admiral for help in calming Pakistan’s restive Army chief as fears of an alleged coup whipped through Islamabad in the tense days that followed Osama bin Laden’s death in a Pakistani garrison town. In return, he offered the United States nothing short of a wholesale paradigm shift in Pakistani governance that would transfer essential powers from the Army to civilian leaders, giving Pakistan the veneer of civilian legitimacy that has eluded it since partition from India.

I have a history of involvement in back-channel diplomacy, particularly between the governments of Pakistan and India on the subject of Kashmir and nuclear proliferation, but it is still important to ask why, in this instance, Haqqani chose to come to me. Perhaps because he had tried other interlocutors to deliver the same message and had been refused. Perhaps because the basis of his request—an alleged coup plot—was only a concocted threat and he needed someone who couldn’t verify the postulation in the short time frame required by the ambassador for action. What I am certain of is that Haqqani believed I was the most plausibly deniable back channel he could use. He knew I was disliked by many in Islamabad’s power circles for my strong anti-establishment views. Haqqani also knew I had the connections to get the message quickly and quietly to Mullen. He knew I maintained friendships with former CIA director James Woolsey, former U.S. national-security adviser Gen. James L. Jones, Reagan “Star Wars” commander Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, and others.

Before I had a chance to read and reply to his BlackBerry message, the ambassador called—“Is there anyone else in Isloo [slang for Islamabad] you know who is a ‘senior Pakistani diplomat’?” he asked hurriedly. This was the phrase I’d used in the op-ed to describe the author of the memo to Mullen. Not wanting to be “outed” as the memo’s author, Haqqani insisted that without another name—any name—that might put Pakistan’s press hounds on another diplomat’s scent, all trails emanating from the memorandum would soon lead back to him—or, worse, to his boss, President Asif Ali Zardari.

The cover-up had begun.

Haqqani would orchestrate denials by Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry and President’s House in the days after the FT column was published. When those didn’t douse the flames, he had the gall to warn me that he was about to orchestrate a U.S. denial as well—“Are you sure your side won’t deny?” he wrote by BlackBerry to me at 10:38 p.m. on Nov. 1, a week before Admiral Mullen’s unwitting spokesman issued a confused denial that was later retracted. At 10:39, he all but confirmed his complicity when he wrote, “Is it not the nature of a private mission that officials deny it?”

In Islamabad, he was telling Zardari that he had it all under control and that the memo flap would disappear in a few days once all the denials were in place. If the acceptance of multiple petitions by the Supreme Court of Pakistan on Dec. 1 is any indication of the seriousness with which Pakistan’s entire governmental infrastructure takes this issue, the memorandum is not going away anytime soon. Certainly not until the full truth comes out.

A few days before the Mullen denial was posted on Foreign Policy’s blog, The Cable, Haqqani changed his BlackBerry handset for the third time since May. Maybe he hoped that changing PINs would erase his damning conversations from my handset. Unfortunately for him, they remain preserved—now in a bank vault—in exactly their original form on my original device as he and I exchanged them. The constant changing of handsets raised the disturbing specter that Haqqani had persuaded his friends in the U.S. intelligence community to assist him in “scrubbing” his BlackBerry records because my disclosures were not just about to lose him his job, but could potentially uncover sensitive matters of U.S. national interest as well. After all, I was not the only entry on Haqqani’s BlackBerry contact list. Other BlackBerry chats could prove highly embarrassing or prove complicity and culpability if they were made public by Supreme Court action in Pakistan.

NATO troops ordered not to approach Af-Pak zone

WASHINGTON: US led NATO troops in Afghanistan have been ordered not to approach the buffer zone on the Af-Pak border in order to avoid recurrence of last week's air strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

An order in this regard has been issued by Gen John Allen, the Commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the November 26 air strike, pending the detailed investigation into the incident announced by US Central Command (CENTCOM), Ivo Daalder, US Permanent Representative to NATO, said on Friday.

The real facts of the incident, he said, would be known only after the investigation is over.

"The most important thing we have already learnt is that Gen Allen has ordered the troops not to approach the created buffer zone at the border in order to reduce the chances that something like this would happen in the future," Daalder said in a breakfast meeting with the Defence Writers Group here. The real facts of the incident, he said, would be known only after the investigation is over.

Giving his brief of the incident that has plunged the US-Pak relationship to an all-time low, the US Ambassador said the most basic fact is that there was a strike that killed 24 Pakistani border guards.

"What we don't know the sequence of events that led to that and we have conflicting stories. Our side of the story is still being investigated in great detail. General Allen took the responsibility immediately not only to investigate the incident but also to bring in US, Afghan, NATO and asked Pakistan to participate in the investigation," he said.

The Pentagon on Friday said that Pakistan has declined to participate in the investigation.

"I don't know the sequence of events. There may be people, who know, but so far they haven't come to any conclusions and I think the best thing to do is to let the fact speaks for itself.

"However these facts would come out, we would learn about the incident," Daalder said, adding that one of the lessons learnt has already been implemented by NATO in the order that has been issued by Gen Allen with regard to not to approach the created buffer zone on the border.

"But we would have to look at exactly what happened, and what lessons we learn from it about communications need... and that would take some time," the American diplomat said conceding that the relationship between the two nations have reached an all-time low.

"It is clear that relationship with Pakistan has not improved. The relationship has been on the US level difficult for some time, we had the arrest of (CIA contractor) Raymond Davis (in Lahore), we had the Osama bin Laden raid (in Abbottabad) and others and finally this incident just escalates a set of differences that are real," he said.

The US is trying to work together with NATO as well as other countries, understanding that this is a major problem for it, Daalder said.

"We need to find ways to continue cooperative effort with Pakistan. We have no choice but to cooperate with Pakistan given that the terrorists are a threat to all three of our countries (US, Pakistan and Afghanistan).

"As such an effective cooperation would remain essential which is why, we talked at the highest level ... to try to find ways to get cooperation," he said.