PESHAWAR, Pakistan, 22 January 2006 — Pakistan’s president told a senior US official yesterday that the airstrike on a Pakistani village last week cannot be repeated, as details emerged that Al-Qaeda’s No. 2 had been to the hamlet before. The Pakistani government has condemned the Jan. 13 attack, which killed 13 villagers in the tribal region of Bajaur near the Afghan border, but President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has avoided publicly criticizing the US strike.
Yesterday, Musharraf told US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns that “what happened in Bajaur must not be repeated,” a Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
But Musharraf also pledged to continue helping the United States in the war on terror, the official said. Pakistan is one of the top US allies in the effort, though the recent attack has fueled resentment in a country where many oppose the ties.
Foreign Minister Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri told Burns later that Pakistan was committed to fighting militancy but called for more coordination between the two countries to avoid any repetition of last week’s US airstrike.
“While reaffirming Pakistan’s commitment to counterterrorism, the foreign minister underlined the need for the two countries to work in a manner that precludes recent incidents like Bajaur,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “He (Kasuri) highlighted the prevailing public sentiment and stressed that such incidents were counterproductive,” it added without elaborating.
The statement did not say what was Burns’ response.
Pakistani intelligence officials meanwhile said that Al-Qaeda’s second-in-command met his deputy last year at the house hit in the attack, in which at least four of the terror network’s operatives are believed to have been killed.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the apparent target of the attack, met his deputy, Abu Farraj Al-Libbi, in the same village, Damadola, early last year, a security official said on condition of anonymity. He added that that Libyan-born Al-Libbi told Pakistani interrogators of the meeting after his capture in Pakistan in May 2005.
“His statement was later verified, and we were able to confirm that Zawahiri visited Damadola,” the official said. “We have intelligence reports that Zawahiri visited the house of one Bakhtpur Khan months before what happened last week.”
Al-Libbi, once Al-Qaeda’s No. 3 leader, is accused of masterminding two attempts to assassinate Musharraf. After his arrest, he was turned over to Washington for further investigations.
Khan’s house was among three destroyed in the predawn airstrike, and Khan is listed among the 13 villagers who died.
On a trip to the United States, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said Friday that Pakistan will not rush into a deal for a natural gas pipeline from Iran to India via Pakistani while the United Nations has Iran’s nuclear program under scrutiny.
Aziz, at the United Nations before visiting Washington next week, said the proposed $7 billion pipeline project with Iran would help his country’s economy keep growing at a fast clip while fostering better relations with India after years of brinkmanship between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.
But “I think it would be fair to wait to see how these things unfold,” he said when asked whether Pakistan was determined to see a pipeline deal go through, regardless of what might happen to Iran at the United Nations.
“We will take any decision which we have to in our national interest,” Aziz said. “Once the environment changes, naturally we will see what these regulations or resolutions are, and create or follow a strategy accordingly.”
The prime minister said the Iran pipeline proposal was one of three possible alternatives Pakistan had been looking at for natural gas.
