ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A controversial new US tactic
to mount counter-terrorist operations inside Pakistan has met with
fresh hostility, it emerged yesterday, as Pakistani tribesmen
representing half a million people vowed to switch sides and join the
Taliban if Washington does not stop cross-border attacks by its forces
from Afghanistan.
"Covert action is frequently a substitute for policy," was an aphorism first coined by the former director of the CIA Richard Helms. Its truth is exemplified by the decision of President Bush in July to secretly give orders that US special forces will in future carry out raids against ground targets inside Pakistan, without getting the approval of the Pakistani government.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Fourteen people were killed in the northwestern Pakistani region of North Waziristan on Friday in a missile attack by a pilotless U.S. aircraft on suspected militants near the Afghan border, security officials said.
The strike, near the town of Miranshah, was the first since a recent surge in tension between Pakistan and the United States over how to tackle the Taliban and al Qaeda on the Pakistani side of the border.
The United States has just invaded Cambodia. The name of Cambodia this time is Pakistan, but otherwise it's the same story as in Indochina in 1970.
An American army, deeply frustrated by its inability to defeat an anti-American insurgent movement despite years of struggle, decides that the key to victory lies in a neighboring country. In 1970, the problem was the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia. Today it is Taliban and al-Qaida bases inside Pakistan, which the United States has been attacking from the air for some time, with controversial "collateral damage."
A secret order issued by George Bush giving US special forces carte
blanche to mount counter-terrorist operations inside Pakistani
territory raised fears last night that escalating conflict was
spreading from Afghanistan to Pakistan and could ignite a region-wide
war.
The unprecedented executive order, signed by Bush in July
after an intense internal administration debate, comes amid western
concern that the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and its
al-Qaida backers based in "safe havens" in western Pakistan's tribal
belt is being lost.
If most Americans think Iran and Georgia are the two most volatile flashpoints in the world, one can hardly blame them. The possibility that the Bush administration might strike at Tehran's nuclear facilities has been hinted about for the past two years, and the White House's pronouncements on Russia seem like Cold War déjà vu.
ISLAMABAD-Gen. Ashfaq Kayani says Pakistan would not allow foreign troops to conduct operations on its soil, after a cross-border incursion by U.S. commandos.
Yesterday's strongly worded statement from Kayani, Pakistan's top military commander, coincided with comments by the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, that a "more comprehensive strategy" was being formed to combat the threat from the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the region.
The seventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities exposed fresh cracks in America's War on Terror today after it emerged that President Bush secretly authorised US special forces to conduct ground operations inside Pakistan without Islamabad's approval.
The news, in a report from The New York Times, was corroborated by Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has confirmed that he had ordered a new strategy for Afghanistan focusing on both sides of its border with Pakistan, including those tribal areas that have become a virtual safe haven for al-Qaeda.
WASHINGTON - The National Intelligence Council, the U.S. intelligence community's focal point for estimating future developments, warned the George W. Bush administration last month that a decision to launch commando raids by U.S. troops against al Qaeda-related targets in Pakistan's North-West Frontier region would carry a high risk of further destabilising the Pakistani military and government, according to sources familiar with the intelligence community's response to the issue.
