The three American soldiers who died in a Taliban suicide attack on Wednesday were "among at least 60 to 100 members of a Special Operations team that trains Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps in counterinsurgency techniques, including intelligence gathering and development assistance," assigned to a Special Operations command in Pakistan but not commandos from the elite Delta Force or Special Forces, the New York Times reported Thursday in its lead story.[1] -- "The United States has about 200 military service members in Pakistan," Jane Perlez said. -- The incident "lifted the veil on United States military assistance to Pakistan that the authorities here would like to keep quiet and the Americans, as the donors, chafe at not receiving credit for." -- "[T]hese were the first [American soldiers] killed as part of the Special Operations training, which has been under way for 18 months." -- A regional expert said they "were probably made targets as a result of the drone strikes" conducted by the CIA in Pakistan that have increased markedly in recent weeks and months. -- When they died, "the American soldiers were dressed in traditional Pakistani garb of baggy trousers and long tunic, known as shalwar kameez," they "also wore local caps that helped cover their hair," and they were traveling in a protective cordon, raising the question of whether their identity had been betrayed from within the Frontier Corps. -- Médecins Sans Frontières reported that its doctors helped treat some 126 people, including children, wounded by the blast, which took place outside a school.[2] -- On Thursday, Pakistan's International News cited also "the possible death of Hakimullah Mehsud" as a cause of the attack, called attention to the fact that Americans were first reported to be "foreign journalists," and asked "why 'U.S. army trainers' were present at the inaugural ceremony of a girls' school that had apparently been built by our own armed forces after the previous school had been demolished. It may also be wondered how the terrorists were able to place their IED -- reportedly of 70kg, a very large device -- in an area that had reportedly been 'cleared' and moreover plant it on such a high-profile target that should have been guarded as closely as possible given that 'foreign visitors' were on their way. Nobody noticed a 70kg bomb being buried in the road?"[3] -- On Thursday the Christian Science Monitor seemed eater to report that "a backlash [against the revelation of U.S. forces working inside Paksitan] has failed to materialize."[4] -- Ahmed said that "Some analysts had predicted that the bombing . . . would be blamed on the presence of the U.S. troops . . . But so far that hasn’t happened." -- COMMENT: This is odd, as the International News piece just cited does blame the presence of the U.S. troops for the bombing. -- And in any case, how is it possible to judge hours after such an event whether it has produced a backlash? ...
1.
World
Asia Pacific
SOLDIER DEATHS DRAW FOCUS TO U.S. IN PAKISTAN
By Jane Perlez
New York Times
February 4, 2010 (posted Feb. 3)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/world/asia/04pstan.html
[PHOTO CAPTION: Security officials walked past the crater of a bombing in front of a destroyed school in Timergara, the main town in the Lower Dir district in Pakistan’s restive North West Frontier Province, on Wednesday.]
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The deaths of three American soldiers in a Taliban suicide attack on Wednesday lifted the veil on United States military assistance to Pakistan that the authorities here would like to keep quiet and the Americans, as the donors, chafe at not receiving credit for.
The soldiers were among at least 60 to 100 members of a Special Operations team that trains Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps in counterinsurgency techniques, including intelligence gathering and development assistance. The American service members are from the Special Operations Command of Adm. Eric T. Olson.
At least 12 other American service members have been killed in Pakistan since Sept. 11, 2001, in hotel bombings and a plane crash, according to the United States Central Command, but these were the first killed as part of the Special Operations training, which has been under way for 18 months.
That training has been acknowledged only gingerly by both the Americans and the Pakistanis, but has deliberately been kept low-key so as not to trespass onto Pakistani sensitivities about sovereignty, and not to further inflame high anti-American sentiment.
Even though the United States calls Pakistan an ally, the country, unlike Afghanistan and Iraq, has not allowed American combat forces to operate here, a point that is stressed by the Pentagon and the Pakistani Army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan.
Instead, the Central Intelligence Agency operates what has become the main American weapon in Pakistan, the drones armed with missiles that have struck with increasing intensity against militants with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the lawless tribal areas.
The American soldiers were probably made targets as a result of the drone strikes, said Syed Rifaat Hussain, professor of international relations at Islamabad University. “The attack seems a payback for the mounting frequency of the drone attacks,” Professor Hussain said.
If the American soldiers were the targets, the attack raised the question of whether the Taliban had received intelligence or cooperation from within the Frontier Corps.
The three soldiers were killed, and two other service members wounded, in the region of Lower Dir, which is close to the tribal areas. According to police officials in the region, the armored vehicle in which they were traveling was hit by a suicide bomber driving a car. Earlier reports from Pakistani security officials said the soldiers had been killed by a roadside explosive device.
To disguise themselves in a way that is common for Western men in Pakistan, the American soldiers were dressed in traditional Pakistani garb of baggy trousers and long tunic, known as shalwar kameez, according to a Frontier Corps officer. They also wore local caps that helped cover their hair, he said.
Their armored vehicle was equipped with electronic jammers sufficient to block remotely controlled devices and mines, the officer said. Vehicles driven by the Frontier Corps were placed in front and behind the Americans as protection, he said.
Still, the Taliban bomber was able to penetrate their cordon. In all 131 people were wounded, most of them girls who were students at a high school adjacent to the site of the suicide attack, the Lower Dir police said.
The soldiers were en route to the opening of a girls school that had been rebuilt with American money, the United States Embassy said in a statement. The school was destroyed by the Taliban last year as they swept through Lower Dir and the nearby Swat Valley, where a battle raged for months between the Pakistani Army and the Taliban.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban called reporters hours after the attack against the Americans and claimed that his group was responsible.
The Pakistani Army currently occupies Swat, and in an effort to strengthen the civilian institutions there and in Dir, some of the American service members on the Special Operations team have been quietly working on development projects, an American official said.
The presence of the American military members in an area known to be threaded with Taliban militants would also raise questions, said Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat and Dir.
Mr. Aziz said it was odd that American soldiers would go to such a volatile area where Taliban militants were known to be prevalent even though the Pakistani security forces insisted that they had been flushed out.
The usual practice for development work in Dir and Swat called for Pakistani aid workers or paramilitary soldiers to visit the sites, he said.
The Americans’ involvement in training Frontier Corps recruits in development assistance was little known until Wednesday’s attack.
“People are going to be very suspicious,” said Mr. Aziz, who is now involved in American assistance projects elsewhere. “There is going to be big blowback in the media.”
An American development official said that encouraging the Frontier Corps to become expert in humanitarian aid was an important part of the trainers’ counterinsurgency curriculum.
Last summer, for example, the American military trainers helped distribute food and water in camps for the more than one million people displaced from the Swat Valley by the fighting, the official said. But that American assistance, too, was kept quiet.
The 500,000-strong Pakistani Army led by Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the standard-bearer of Pakistan’s strong sense of nationalism, is resistant to the appearance of overt military assistance, least of all from the unpopular Americans, that would make the army look less than self-reliant on the battlefield.
Over the last several years, as the Qaeda-backed insurgents increased their hold on Pakistan’s tribal areas and used their base to attack American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, the United States military asked for permission for combat soldiers to operate in the tribal zone, according to American officials. Pakistan rebuffed the requests, they said.
Whether American soldiers are based in Pakistan is often raised by Pakistani politicians, students and average Pakistanis, many of them suspicious of American motives.
The question of the presence of American soldiers in Pakistan is also prompted by the fact that the American military provides important equipment to the Pakistani Army, including F-16 fighter jets, Cobra attack helicopters and howitzers.
Capt. Jack Hanzlik, a spokesman for the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., said 12 other service members had been killed in Pakistan since Sept. 11, 2001. The three soldiers who died Wednesday had been assigned to a Special Operations command in Pakistan. But he said they were not commandos from the elite Delta Force or Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets. The United States has about 200 military service members in Pakistan, Captain Hanzlik said.
The three names of the soldiers killed were not released Wednesday because United States military officials were still notifying the next of kin.
Reporting was contributed by Ismail Khan from Peshawar, Pakistan; Pir Zubair Shah from Islamabad; and Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
2.
Field news
PAKISTAN: MSF TEAMS TREAT WOUNDED AFTER EXPLOSTION IN LOWER DIR
Médecins Sans Frontières
February 3, 2010
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/article.cfm?id=4254&cat=field-news
Following the explosion in Lower Dir district, North West Frontier Province, Pakistan, on Wednesday, February 3, Ministry of Health and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams working in the emergency room in Timurgara district hospital received 126 wounded people, including children. “Most of the wounded have shrapnel related injuries all over their bodies, on the face, abdomen and feet,” explained Dr. Ashraf Alam, medical officer for MSF in Timurgara. “We received 12 people in severe life-threatening condition. Five of them have already undergone immediate surgery. It was a heavy blast and quite close to a school where children were going out for break time,” adds Dr. Alam.
In Lower Dir, MSF supports the district referral hospital in Timurgara. Some 1,100 patients are treated each week at the hospital’s emergency room, both by Ministry of Health and MSF medical teams, who take care of the patients most at risk and support the management of mass casualty response. MSF has set up a new operating theater, a post operating unit, and put in place a sterilization and waste management system for the hospital.
Since 1998, MSF has been providing free-of-charge medical assistance to Pakistani nationals and Afghan refugees suffering from the effects of armed conflicts, poor access to health care and natural disasters in NWFP, FATA, Balochistan, and Kashmir. MSF is an independent medical organization that chooses to rely solely on private donation for its work in Pakistan and does not accept funding from any government.
3.
DEATH & CONFUSION
International News (Pakistan)
Feburary 4, 2010
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=222327
The bomb blast that has killed at least nine people in Lower Dir and injured perhaps 100 others -- most of them schoolgirls -- could be the first in what some security experts have warned may be retaliatory action following the possible death of Hakimullah Mehsud. Three foreign nationals were reported killed. Initially they were said to be 'foreign journalists' then they became aid workers perhaps working with USAID but by mid-afternoon they had become 'U.S. army personnel' and by late afternoon as per statement by the U.S. embassy in Islamabad they were 'trainers' working with the Frontier Corps. Tragic as the loss of young life is, we wonder why 'U.S. army trainers' were present at the inaugural ceremony of a girls' school that had apparently been built by our own armed forces after the previous school had been demolished. It may also be wondered how the terrorists were able to place their IED -- reportedly of 70kg, a very large device -- in an area that had reportedly been 'cleared' and moreover plant it on such a high-profile target that should have been guarded as closely as possible given that 'foreign visitors' were on their way. Nobody noticed a 70kg bomb being buried in the road?
It is obvious that the terrorists have no scruples about attacking schools or other soft targets even though they are aware that it is civilians who will die. What is disturbing are the indications that despite the fierce military operation we have seen in South Waziristan, Bajaur, Malakand, and other places, the terrorists remain capable of planning and staging major attacks. It would seem that despite our best efforts their operational infrastructure remains intact. Apart from the question of why 'American trainers' were present for the opening of a girls' school, the other question uppermost is why, having cleared the area, we were not able to hold it, and hold it 'secure.' Continued bombings detract from the confidence of the public at large that the Taliban can be overcome. For the sake of public morale, it is important that a signal be sent out that our security apparatus is indeed succeeding in tracking down the killers and having caught or killed them ensuring that there is a civil administration in place capable of ensuring the security of the populace. And do 'U.S. army trainers' really have a role to play when it comes to opening girls' schools?
4.
World
Asia: South & Central
U.S. TROOP PRESENCE IN PAKISTAN MEETS SURPRISINGLY MUTED RESPONSE
By Issam Ahmed
** One day after three US soldiers were killed in the north, the widely anticipated backlash at US troops operating on Pakistani soil has yet to erupt. **
Christian Science Monitor
February 4, 2010
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0204/US-troop-presence-in-Pakistan-meets-surprisingly-muted-response
LAHORE, Pakistan -- A suicide attack Wednesday on a Pakistani paramilitary convoy that killed three American soldiers and five others near a girls’ school in the north was a reminder of the increasing U.S. military commitment to the country.
The dead soldiers were among roughly 70 U.S. special forces troops currently training Pakistani soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics as part of a $700 million military aid program in the current fiscal year. They were the first casualties of the training program. U.S. involvement is set to rise, with President Barack Obama proposing $1.2 billion in military aid for Pakistan in the 2011 budget.
But while the U.S. military presence in Pakistan is deeply unpopular with the public at large -- a poll conducted last October by the U.S.-based International Republican Institute found that 80 percent of Pakistanis oppose cooperating with the U.S. in the so-called war on terror -- the response to the attack has been muted.
While some analysts had predicted the incident would crystallize Pakistani resistance to the U.S. presence here, since Pakistani children were among the victims, a backlash has failed to materialize.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed credit for the bombing in Lower Dir, insisting that the Americans killed were members of Blackwater, the private security contractor now known as Xe. The militant group accuses the firm of carrying out bomb blasts in Peshawar and other cities in the country, a conspiracy theory that has been floated in Pakistan since last year.
Pakistani authorities on Thursday arrested 35 people suspected in the bombing in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).
Some analysts had predicted that the bombing, which also killed three schoolgirls and a Pakistani soldier and injured more than 100 others, would be blamed on the presence of the U.S. troops. As a valuable target for the Taliban, they might have been accused of unnecessarily exposing others to an attack, those analysts theorized.
But so far that hasn’t happened, perhaps because attacks on Pakistani military convoys when US forces aren't present are already common. Last October, 35 civilians and 6 Pakistani soldiers were killed in an attack on a convoy passing through a crowded market area in Shangla, not far from the latest attack.
The Pakistan Army had also made it very clear that the US soldiers were present at its invitation, a fact reiterated Wednesday in a statement by the US Embassy in Islamabad.
Pakistani media have traditionally shown more deference to the military than to its civilian leadership. The Army is by far the country’s most powerful institution and a widely respected one.
Quatrina Hosain, a news show host on the private TV channel Express 24/7, initially voiced criticism on her evening show: “This is very disturbing. This attack was at a school. What were soldiers doing there in the first place?” She later appeared to temper her comments, however, with begrudging acceptance of the Americans’ role in providing training to Pakistani forces in dire need of counterinsurgency expertise to fight the Taliban.
The fact that the attack took place the same day as the news that MIT-trained neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui had been convicted in a New York court of the attempted murder of US troops in Afghanistan, may have also drawn attention away from the attack in Lower Dir. Ms. Siddiqui’s case has enraged many Pakistanis, who view her as the victim of an international conspiracy.
Pakistan Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said that the agreement between the US and Pakistani militaries, which he stressed is an “open understanding” between the two, has been productive. There is no reason why the project, which is entering its second phase, should be affected by Wednesday’s killings, he said.
The attack also highlights the security concerns facing USAID development projects, which are set to ramp up with the influx of $1.5 billion of annual aid money over the next five years.
According to reports, the convoy had been on its way to inaugurate a school that had been rebuilt with the help of USAID after it was blown up by the Taliban.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
