ISLAMABAD, 18 January 2006 — Friday’s US airstrike on a Pakistani village has disrupted America’s efforts to improve its image in this country, one of its most important Muslim allies, and has turned glaring publicity on a part of the “global war on terror” that the United States and Pakistan have tried to keep hidden. In both ways, it has weakened one of Washington’s main backers in the Muslim world, President Pervez Musharraf.
Since October’s earthquake here, both governments have played up the role of US troops and helicopters in rushing relief supplies to millions of homeless villagers in the mountains of Kashmir. That imagery has helped counter a three-year wave of public relations disasters for the United States in Pakistan and the Muslim world, including the US invasion of Iraq and the abuse and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other military prisons abroad.
But since Saturday, positive images of American relief work have been swept aside here by pictures and stories about the US missile attack that killed between 13 and 18 Pakistanis in an attempt to hit Al-Qaeda leaders in a village near the border with Afghanistan.
“American soldiers have been acting as brothers to Pakistanis, and we are all happy about this,” said Hussain Javed, a Pakistani businessman who was taking a flight Sunday at Islamabad’s airport. “But now they are killing us, too, and so maybe they are our enemies instead.”
Thousands of Pakistanis marched Sunday in protest of the attack, and militant leaders vowed Monday to keep the demonstrations going. While Pakistani political analysts do not suggest the protests are likely to threaten Musharraf’s control, Javed and others say a recent string of US border incursions strengthens a popular image of him as a lapdog of the unpopular US superpower.
While the CIA has played a major role in the 4-year-old manhunt for Al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan’s unruly tribal borderlands with Afghanistan, Washington and Islamabad have kept that fact as quiet as possible to protect Musharraf from popular disapproval, US and Pakistani officials have said. Musharraf’s government has insisted that, as a sovereign nation, Pakistan is conducting the chase with its own troops and only technical assistance from US intelligence.
Since November that claim has been eroded by four US air raids on Pakistani villages that have been increasingly difficult to conceal from the public.
Not that Pakistan’s government didn’t try.
On the night of Nov. 30, explosions demolished a home in Asoray, a village in North Waziristan, killing a senior Al-Qaeda figure, Hamza Rabia.
Residents told Pakistani journalists of hearing aircraft overhead and several explosions, and they displayed rocket fragments with US markings. US news agencies quoted unnamed American intelligence officials in Washington as saying the CIA had gotten Rabia with a missile strike.
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley sidestepped the question of the CIA’s role, saying, “Musharraf has been very aggressive in dealing with Al-Qaeda and the Taleban,” and “we have helped him in terms of providing intelligence and cooperating with his forces.”
Pakistani officials denied that any attack had taken place, saying Rabia and his colleagues had accidentally exploded a bomb in the house. A local journalist, Hayatullah Khan, challenged the official version. A few days later, he was abducted by masked gunmen and has not been heard of since.
Officials in Northern Waziristan offered the same explanation — an explosion of a bomb under construction — for another blast that destroyed a house Rabia had been staying in two weeks earlier.
On Jan. 7, missiles destroyed the home of a militant cleric in the Pakistani border village of Sedgai, and accounts of US involvement were clear enough that Pakistan formally protested to Washington.
The attack Friday on the village of Damadola received immediate, worldwide publicity because US officials in Washington leaked the news to American TV networks with the victorious claim, still unsubstantiated, that the CIA had killed Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
