Border War Afghanistan - Walking on Tiptoes
Jonathan Burns
efreedomnews.com
January 6, 2002
"A basic rule of counterinsurgency is to deny the insurgent a sanctuary."
David H. Hackworth About Face
In June, 2002 Arnaud de Borchgrave reported in the Washington Times:
In Pakistan, al Qaida's Pakistan network is expanding rapidly with full intelligence and private financial support, according to a prominent tribal leader in NWFP who claims that Osama bin Laden has been living in Peshawar since the second week in December [2001] "where he is among friends and admirers and protected by several thousand Pakistani sympathizers." More than 80 percent of Pakistanis, according to a public opinion poll last fall, believe that bin Laden is a "freedom fighter," and not a "terrorist."
For Pakistani extremists, the loss of Afghanistan was no more than the destruction of an outpost in a global battlefield. Pakistan has now taken Afghanistan's place. Al Qaida's underground in Pakistan emerged unscathed from Operation Enduring Freedom across the 1,300-mile border.
Since then, al Qaida has moved back across the border into Afghanistan.
From the New York Times, September 11, 2002:
In the remote region that straddles Pakistan's 2,250-kilometer, or 1,400-mile, border with Afghanistan, the government of Pakistan has exerted only a nominal presence. Pakistanis interviewed recently in the tribal areas recounted how hundreds of Qaeda men had streamed out of Afghanistan in the months after the Taliban's collapse. Local mullahs helped many to travel on to Pakistani cities or across the parched sands of Baluchistan and into Iran. Others were said to be hiding in refugee camps or in any number of the 10,000 private Islamic schools in Pakistan.
"A few months ago, I would have said that the new center of gravity of Al Qaeda was in Pakistan,' a senior American intelligence official said. "Today, I don't think you can say that. I think you can see concentrations in both Pakistan and Afghanistan."
Beyond, a diaspora of al Qaida has taken root across southeast Asia and the middle east. But in Afghanistan, slowly, in small groups, al Qaida has been infiltrating across the Pakistani border into Afghanistan to conduct raids against the Karzai government. Al Qaida has been busy with direct assassination attempts against Karzai, instigating internecine battles between Afghani warlords, and attacking US forces based in Afghanistan.
On December 21, 2002, an American patrol from the 504th Infantry engaged nine insurgents in a firefight near the village of Shkin, 60 km south of Gardez. The paratroopers were on a mounted patrol at about 12:30 a.m. local time when they observed several people moving toward the firebase. When the patrol approached the individuals, the unknown men started running away and opened small-arms fire on the soldiers. One American, Sgt. Steven Checo, was killed. Major Stephen Clutter, Army spokesman at Bagram Air Base, said the suspected al Qaida fled across the eastern border into Pakistan. U.S. forces killed one enemy and injured another. AFIS announced the same individuals were responsible for a series of rocket attacks at Shkin later that morning. Six rockets were launched toward the base between 9:30 and 10:10 a.m. None of them caused any injuries. Troops later found six alarm clocks in the area, leading officials to believe the rockets were on a time delay.
"They were armed. They ran from U.S. forces. They headed back across the Pakistani border" firing their weapons as they fled, said Army Sgt. Maj. Lewis Matson, a spokesman at the Tampa, Florida-based US Central Command.
American military officials said the United States and Pakistan have agreed that American soldiers can cross the border when in "hot pursuit" of enemy fighters. The US policy has been to do so only as a last resort and with the consent of Pakistani authorities. ''We do reserve the right to go after them and pursue them and that is something that Pakistan is aware of,'' said Maj. Clutter. ''In hot pursuit, we're going to chase down the bad guys. 'It is a long-standing policy that if we are pursuing enemy forces, we're not just going to tiptoe and stop right at the border.'' But Clutter said that U.S. forces had yet to cross into Pakistan in any hot pursuit operation.
Mixed responses came from the Pakistani government:
Pakistan's interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, said in a television interview Friday that no such agreement exists. Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Aziz Ahmad Khan said his country was looking into the American military's statement, but had no immediate comment.
On Sunday, December 29, 2002, a US soldier was wounded by a Pakistani Border Guard. In the incident, again near Shkin, U.S. soldiers were observing Pakistani border guards destroy inert missiles found in the area. AFIS reported:
Officials said one of the border guards approached the U.S. patrol. The American soldiers asked him to go back to his side of the boundary. As he walked back, the border guard turned, dropped to one knee, and fired on the Americans. The U.S. soldier was wounded at this time. American officials said the other Pakistani border guards in the area helped the U.S. forces.
The border guard ran into a nearby abandoned madrassa, or local religious school. He was the only person observed entering the structure, but U.S. soldiers said they took more fire from the building and called in close-air support. An AV-8B dropped a 500-pound precision-guided bomb on the building. The structure is inside the recognized borders of Afghanistan.
Other reports said the bombing was carried out by an F-16 [BBC]; a blatantly anti-American headline, a Malaysian site misreported the airstrike was from a B-52 [Utusan Online: US bombs Pakistan border patrol after shooting in Afghanistan]. Yet other reports put the abandoned school inside Pakistan.
"Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell...telephoned President Musharraf and both agreed that the incident of December 29 may have occurred due to some misunderstanding at the operational level on the ground," Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri said.
"They reiterated the need to further strengthen coordination to ensure that such incidents do not happen in future."
The clash was seized upon by hardline Islamic politicians as a case of Pakistan ceding its sovereignty to Washington in the wake of Musharraf's decision to back the U.S. war on terror.Thousands of Pakistanis rallied against the U.S. military presence in the region and a possible attack on Iraq on Friday.
But Kasuri underlined Pakistan's ongoing support for the "global coalition against terrorism."
"Pakistan's role and contribution in the fight against terrorism are significant and highly appreciated," he said.
This is all political doubletalk.
Let us all understand the difficulties of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. He sits on top of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal - eagerly sought by the Islamic fundamentalists who control the Afghan border regions.
Prior to 9/11, Musharraf estimated that Pakistan harbored about 1.4 million extremists -- or one percent of the population -- who were holding the rest of the population hostage. Since 9/11, Musharraf conceded that 10 percent to 15 percent of the population was opposed to his pro-American foreign policy. That would be 10 million to 14 million people whose sympathies are with America's enemies. [Washington Times]
Al Qaida cannot be allowed to remain safely protected in the frontier. But the real need for US troops in Afghanistan is to protect the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. Walking on tiptoes at the border is actually what we are doing, balancing the need to interdict al Qaida in their sanctuary tempered by the need to win the political will of the frontier populace. Of course we have the firepower to destroy and then hold the frontier - but for how long and to what end? This could easily become a repeat of the ill-fated US/ARVN invasion of Cambodia in 1970 with the Pakistani forces playing the role of ARVN. For now, the hot side of this border war is on hold.
Professor Bernard Fall taught us the primary definitive dictum of revolutionary warfare: To win, "the people and the military must emerge on the same side." [Bernard Fall Street Without Joy Stackpole 1961 p.375]