Blame game
October 28, 2011
Pakistan has rejected US accusations that Pakistani armed forces allow insurgents to fire on American troops across the border in Afghanistan. "I completely reject this, it is wrong and baseless," military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas told the AFP news agency.
According to US officials there has been a sharp rise in cross-border attacks against US soldiers in eastern Afghanistan since the killing of Osama bin Laden by US special forces and the subsequent deterioration of US-Pakistan relations.
The deputy US commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Curtis Scaparrotti, said on Thursday that rocket and mortar fire attacks seemed to come from within sight of Pakistani military posts. He also said officials were trying to re-establish military communications along the border, particularly between Afghan and Pakistani units facing each other because they were still not consistent with what the US wanted after they collapsed in the wake of the raid on bin Laden.
Denial of Taliban links
Pakistani officials on Thursday also denied a BBC report alleging that the Pakistani military and the ISI have been supplying and protecting the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda. In a BBC documentary series, some middle-ranking Taliban commanders gave details of extensive Pakistani support.
However, at a press conference in London, Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik criticized the programme, saying that the Taliban were trying to create a wedge between their adversaries with such allegations. "We are facing daily these suicide bombers," he said. "If they had been trained by us, we should not be getting ourselves killed."
Outreach is 'futile'
The blame game came a day after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to explain US efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as US lawmakers become increasingly skeptical about the Obama administration’s operations in the region and requests for US taxpayer dollars to aid Pakistan.
Clinton bluntly described the outreach to gauge the Taliban-linked Haqqani network's interest in peace talks after more than 10 years of war as futile. "This was done in part because I think the Pakistanis hope to be able to move the Haqqani network toward some kind of peace negotiation and the answer was an attack on our embassy," she told the committee members.
She re-confirmed that Pakistan’s intelligence agency had asked US officials to meet with a representative of the Haqqani network. Last month, Admiral Mike Mullen, who was joint chiefs of staff chairman at the time, told Congress that the network acted as the "veritable arm" of Pakistan’s intelligence agency. He also said it was responsible for the attack on the US embassy in Kabul and NATO headquarters there on 13 September.
'Fight and talk'
When asked whether the US wanted to fight the Haqqani network or crack down on it as Pakistan has been urged to do, Clinton responded: "We want to fight, talk and build all at the same time. Part of the reason for that is to test whether these organizations have any willingness to negotiate in good faith."
She said the US was sticking to the plans to bring most forces home by 2015 but there would be a civilian US presence in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of troops.
Author: Anne Thomas (AP, Reuters, AFP)
Editor: Manasi Gopalakrishnan