Pakistan Refuses to Help as U.S. Sorts Out a Fatal Attack

[alp227]

Source: NYT

The American airstrikes that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers last week were called in during a skirmish in which both sides thought they were under attack by the Taliban, American officials said Friday. But efforts to sort out precisely what happened — and in the process ease the latest crisis to strain the tenuous alliance between the United States and Pakistan — are being hindered by Pakistan’s refusal to cooperate with the American-led military investigation into the attack, the officials said.

A week after the raid on two Pakistani outposts, American and Pakistani officials are offering competing narratives of what went wrong during a tightly planned operation by Afghan and American Special Forces against a Taliban training camp on the remote, cedar-studded mountain slopes along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Even the most basic facts are in dispute. The Americans say they were fired on first and cleared the strikes with the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis say that NATO gave the wrong coordinates for the proposed airstrikes and that their forces fired only after the attacks began.

Previous cross-border strikes were investigated jointly and the fallout quickly contained, like the dispute that followed the American helicopter attacks on Pakistani forces in September 2010. But a year of crises that began with an American contractor shooting two Pakistanis to death on a street in Lahore and included the Navy Seal raid northwest of Islamabad that killed Osama bin Laden, now risks ending with the breach of an alliance that has been the cornerstone of American national security policy for the past decade, American officials and analysts said.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/world/asia/pakistan-refuses-to-help-as-us-sorts-out-fatal-airstrikes.html

[FirstLight]

1. maybe if

they weren't using drones, there's be a fucking eyewitness account or two...instead of someone on a remote playing a fucking video game version...

[wtmusic]

2. Thank you.

Drones make it possible for Americans to kill with no risk to themselves. As if that's a good thing.

[No Elephants]

3. Good point. I would rephrase ever so slightly, though.

"Drones make it possible for some Americans to kill other Americans and citizens of other nations with no risk to themselves. Ask if that's a good thing."

Tough question to answer, if you assume the only other alternative is thousands of troops risking their lives overseas (or in the U.S.). I don't assume that, but I have no easy answers to my own question, either.

Big help, I know, but it as food for thought, albeit perhaps indigestible.

[ArcticFox]

5. The absence of risk is a very bad thing

Risk invites care in planing and carrying out operations, and causes us to consider the consequences of our actions.

Launching an attack without putting our people at risk demonstrates to the world that we are cowards. It says we value the lives of others so little that we won't even risk our own injury to take them.

Imposing such overwhelming and indefensible force on a foreign people terrorizes them all. It gives them no military target to attack either to defend themselves or in retaliation.

And we "wonder" why they turn to"terrorism." It's not in response to "our freedoms," just our belief that we are free to kill any person without warning (and often without cause) anywhere in the world.

[hack89]

9. This was not a drone attack - there were troops on the ground. nt

[Leontius]

7. Maybe if you read the article

you'd know that they weren't drones used in the attack, manned Ac-130's and manned Apache attack helicopters aren't drones.

[hack89]

8. There are plenty of eyewitness

US forces were operating on the Afgan side of the border and took fire from the Pakistani side. The attacks were carried out by manned aircraft.

[sarcasmo]

4. Is the United States still sending Pakistan millions of dollars per month?

[Muskypundit]

6. Try hundreds of millions

And of course

[cosmicone]

10. Of course Pakistan won't help...

then it would come out that these Pakistani soldiers were shooting at NATO troops, shoulder-to-shoulder with the so called Taliban (which is composed of active duty Pakistani military and ISI anyway.)

[quakerboy]

11. Wouldnt it just be crazy if

we stopped sending them millions of dollars to buy military equipment to use against us, and then stopped sending multimillion dollar drones and missiles to blow up that same equipment?