[Mb-civic] Attacks Strain Efforts On Terror - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Attacks Strain Efforts On Terror
Alliance Is Tested By Incidents Along Afghan Frontier

By Griff Witte and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 23, 2006; A01

KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 22 -- Events along the ever-volatile 
Afghanistan-Pakistan border this month have exposed deep fault lines in 
the anti-terrorism alliance among the United States, Afghanistan and 
Pakistan, and officials on all sides say their joint efforts against 
militants in the region are now highly precarious.

The heightened tension comes as militant extremists and the United 
States have both become more aggressive in their tactics, with the 
Pakistani government caught in between.

Two incidents in particular, which each killed more than a dozen people, 
have revealed just how tenuous relations among the countries have become.

In the first, U.S. missiles struck a house in the Pakistani village of 
Damadola where Ayman Zawahiri, the deputy leader of al Qaeda, was 
thought to be having dinner. In the second, three days later in the 
Afghan town of Spin Boldak, a man drove a motorbike into a crowd 
gathered to watch a wrestling match and blew himself up.

Because the incidents took place on opposite sides of the border, they 
elicited responses with vastly different focuses. After the U.S. missile 
strike, thousands of Pakistanis took to the streets to condemn the 
United States. After the suicide bombing, thousands of Afghans took to 
the streets to condemn Pakistan.

The United States -- long frustrated because its soldiers are in 
Afghanistan while most of the militants they are hunting are believed to 
be in Pakistan -- has begun using unmanned aircraft known as Predators 
armed with Hellfire missiles to reach across the border. Pakistani 
officials are apparently notified in advance of such missions, and 
assist with intelligence. But the angry public response there to this 
month's attack raised questions about whether the government of Gen. 
Pervez Musharraf -- which has sought to cultivate ties to the West 
without alienating radical Islamic groups at home -- can handle the 
domestic political fallout.

Afghanistan, for its part, has applauded the more aggressive U.S. 
stance. Afghan officials say they want the United States to go even 
further to stop Pakistan-based militants, who are hitting hard at a time 
when international commitments to securing Afghanistan have come into doubt.

Meanwhile, along the border, tensions continue to rise.

"We have a lot of grief in our hearts," said Abdul Hakim Jan, an Afghan 
tribal leader who helped organize a protest beside a border crossing 
Wednesday following the deadliest suicide bombing in Afghanistan in the 
four years since the fall of Taliban rule. "All the terrorists and the 
enemies of Afghanistan are because of Pakistan. They are receiving their 
training there and they are being sent to Afghanistan for attacks."

Pakistani tribal leaders, for their part, look a few miles west for the 
source of their troubles: the American military presence in Afghanistan. 
Throughout the past week and continuing Sunday, tens of thousands of 
Pakistanis have participated in boisterous rallies at which protesters 
burned effigies of President Bush, chanted "Long live Osama!" and 
denounced the Pakistani government for cooperating with the United States.

"People are so angry that this could become a major movement against the 
American slaves who are ruling Pakistan these days," said Liaquat 
Baluch, a leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, the country's largest Islamic party.

Volatility in the border region is nothing new. For centuries, the 
rugged, mountainous area has been largely beyond the control of any 
government. Both sides of the border are populated by religiously 
conservative Pashtuns, who in recent decades have freely transported 
money, drugs and weapons back and forth across the porous boundary.

But since the United States invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban 
after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the border has taken on special 
significance. On the Afghan side, the United States has 19,000 troops 
who provide crucial support for the government and who enjoy a relative 
degree of popularity. On the Pakistani side, U.S. troops are officially 
forbidden from pursuing terrorists. As a consequence, many Islamic 
militants who found sanctuary in Afghanistan before Sept. 11 reportedly 
have taken refuge in the semiautonomous tribal areas where sympathies 
for al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, run high.

Until recently, the United States had been dependent on raids by 
Pakistani security forces to catch the fugitives, with mixed results. 
But in the predawn hours of Jan. 13, the United States used a different 
tactic, firing Hellfire missiles from drones in a bid to kill Zawahiri. 
Pakistani and U.S. intelligence sources have said they expected him to 
show up for dinner at a house in Damadola, but they now believe he was 
not there.

The missiles killed at least 13 others. After the attack, local 
officials said that only villagers were killed, among them women and 
children, who were buried nearby. But Pakistani intelligence sources 
have since asserted, without offering proof, that a handful of foreign 
al Qaeda militants also died, possibly including its chief explosives 
expert, a son-in-law of Zawahiri and an operational leader in Pakistan 
and Afghanistan.

The Pakistani government's response has been as conflicted as the 
reports. Some officials joined with the protesters in vehemently 
denouncing the attack, while others acknowledged that militants operate 
in the area. Even as the Foreign Ministry lodged a formal objection with 
the U.S. Embassy, Musharraf stayed silent in public, except to warn his 
countrymen not to harbor terrorists.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri acknowledged in an 
interview that the strike has put stress on the government, which since 
2001 has walked a fine line of assisting the U.S. anti-terrorism 
campaign -- and receiving billions of dollars in aid in return -- while 
also trying to appease radical Islamic constituencies at home.

"Such an action creates immense internal problems for us as the 
perception grows that the U.S. has no respect for our sovereignty," 
Kasuri said.

U.S. officials, however, say Pakistan's objections amount to posturing. 
According to American military and intelligence sources who spoke on 
condition of anonymity, Pakistan had signed off on this month's strike 
beforehand and had even assisted with gathering pre-attack intelligence.

The use of Predator drones to strike targets in Pakistan is relatively 
new, and several security officials said it could not happen without the 
consent of the Pakistani government. There have been at least three such 
attacks since last May; one in December reportedly succeeded in killing 
a senior al Qaeda commander, Hamza Rabia.

But now, it remains unclear whether Predator attacks will be allowed to 
continue.

On Saturday, in a meeting with U.S. Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas 
Burns, Musharraf said attacks such as the one aimed at Zawahiri "should 
not be repeated," according to Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman 
Tasneem Aslam.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, who on Sunday denied that 
Pakistan had received prior notice of this month's attack, is expected 
to raise the issue with Bush when they meet at the White House this week.

A senior Pakistani intelligence official, however, said nothing was 
likely to change in terms of actual U.S. and Pakistani efforts at 
hunting militants.

"Proper protest has been made, but this will not alter the ground rules 
and intelligence cooperation with the U.S. It will continue as usual," 
the official said.

The latest U.S. missile strike came as suicide attacks by militants have 
been on the rise in Afghanistan, particularly in southern and eastern 
areas bordering Pakistan. In a country where such attacks have 
traditionally been rare, Afghan officials blame foreigners.

"It is difficult for me to imagine how it can happen without some kind 
of support from outside Afghanistan," said Foreign Minister Abdullah 
Abdullah.

Others direct blame squarely at Pakistan, which they believe is trying 
to gain more influence in Afghanistan by sowing instability.

"We were using Pakistan as a base during the resistance times," said 
Hakim Taniwal, governor of Paktia province, referring to the U.S.-funded 
guerrilla war against Soviet occupation troops during the 1980s. "Now al 
Qaeda and Taliban are also using the Pakistani side to attack in 
Afghanistan."

Afghan government officials are feeling especially vulnerable now 
because the United States announced late last year that it would reduce 
its troop strength from 19,000 to 16,500. NATO soldiers are supposed to 
fill the gap by taking over some operations in the south, but the 
Netherlands, seen as pivotal to that transition, has wavered over 
whether it will send troops.

Meanwhile, the Taliban, al Qaeda and other groups that are trying to 
destabilize the nascent Afghan government appear to be taking advantage 
of the uncertainty.

"At the strategic level of war, this is a defensive insurgency," said 
Chris Mason, a retired U.S. diplomat who served in Afghanistan and is 
now a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in 
Washington. "They're inserting just enough insurgents to shut down 
meaningful reconstruction in the south and keep the population on the 
fence."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/22/AR2006012200759.html?referrer=email
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