Probe Reveals Depth of US-Pak Mistrust

On paper, the relationship between the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force and the government of Pakistan is, if nothing else, polite.

Pakistani military officers are invited to joint border operations centers. Top American commanders make regular visits to Pakistan to meet and greet their high-ranking counterparts. The Defense Department's top leaders in Washington praise what they've described as the service and sacrifice of Pakistani troops in what they call a common effort to stamp out insurgents.

But Thursday's DoD report, about the Nov. 25 incident in which American air strikes mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani border troops, shows just how deep the mistrust and dysfunction actually runs between the two sides.

Far from a battlefield rapport between comrades in different uniforms, the Pentagon's briefing revealed that ISAF is rife with suspicion about Pakistan, down to the level of operational officers and soldiers. The top investigator of the Nov. 25 attack, Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark, said skepticism about Pakistan was a fact of life for nearly everyone at ISAF.

"Because of the evolving lack of trust … from what is believed and indicated to us, [there is] a perception from ISAF that the Pakistanis are unwilling to give . . . full disclosure on all their border locations, for one, and two, [ISAF is] under the impression that when they have shared specifics, that some of their operations have been compromised.  That was out of the scope of this investigation, so we neither examined that deeply nor can validate that, but it is a perception that is out there and it is real for the people involved."

That caginess -- commanders' unwillingness to reveal all the cards in their hand -- was the seed that grew into the mistakes and miscommunications that led to the Nov. 25 air strike, Clark said.

Clark's report concluded that Pakistani troops, stationed at border posts ISAF didn't know about, opened fire on American and Afghan special operators on an unrelated mission on the Afghan side of the border. The ISAF troops called for American warplanes to make a nonlethal "show of force" for the Pakistanis, and when it didn't stop the attacks, U.S. commanders ordered the aircraft to attack for real.

But among the many other problems on the night in question, American disregard for Pakistan was in evidence before the special operators hit the ground.

ISAF had developed a practice of alerting Pakistan in general terms when its forces would be operating near the international border, though never with details. But Clark said on Nov. 25, ISAF didn't even follow its own guideline and tell Pakistan that American and Afghan special operators would be flying into the mountainous area where the cross-border incident later took place.

"That is normally supposed to be transmitted to them, and it gives a general location," Clark said. "In this case, that, too . . . failed to be transmitted to them in advance."
Clark said American officials felt justified in keeping Pakistan in the dark after bitter lessons from previous cases in which Pakistan had been read in on ISAF's plans. Clark tried to sidestep dealing with the ISAF-Pakistan mistrust as much as possible, but he returned to it to give an example of why the Americans were so suspicious.

"That was not the scope of the investigation, so that was told to us as part of the atmospherics within the ISAF headquarters on down. We did not dig into that; we did not validate it.  That was just indicated to us.  In fact, there was an operation on 5 October in the same region where, when they went to [insert] the helicopters, they were hit with RPG fire, so that lends to their mindset as well -- ISAF operations being compromised by sharing that information."

It was a continuation of the same dynamic that first badly soured U.S.-Pakistani relations in May, when American commanders did not alert Pakistan that SEAL special operators were going to raid the Abbottabad compound where Osama bin Laden was holed up.

Clark's anecdote also fleshed out the account of former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, who used a congressional appearance just before retirement to accuse Pakistan of effectively waging a proxy war against the U.S. Pakistani military and intelligence officials have direct operational control over insurgents in their own country and Afghanistan, Mullen said, fighters who have attacked Americans and their allies.

Pakistani leaders denied it.

So long as each side keeps the other at arm's length, Washington and Islamabad may never be able to bridge the impasse that now yawns between them, American officials say. Still, Pentagon Press Secretary George Little said Thursday that the report on the Nov. 25 air strike could be a first step in that direction -- now that the U.S. has acknowledged mistakes, maybe both sides can start to move forward.

"Our focus now is to learn from these mistakes and take whatever corrective measures are required to ensure an incident like this is not repeated," Little said. "More critically, we must work to improve the level of trust between our two countries.  We cannot operate effectively on the border or in other parts of our relationship without addressing the fundamental trust still lacking between us.  We earnestly hope the Pakistani military will join us in bridging that gap."