WASHINGTON: Recently retired American military officials and respected US defense analysts have accused the Pakistan government of supporting insurgents fighting NATO forces operating in Afghanistan.
This week, that accusation became official with the publication of a front-page story in Defense News — a respected daily newspaper that tracks Pentagon policies and doctrine — which an active-duty Marine Corps officer claims that Pakistani forces crossed the border into the Nangarhar Province to resupply weapons, fuel, ammunition, and other materiel to a “base camp occupied by Taleban, Al-Qaeda and the Hezb-e-Islami faction led by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”
LTC Chris Nash, the Marine who made the revelation, was serving as an embedded police trainer in eastern Afghanistan at the time of the Pakistani actions in June 2007.
He bases his conclusions on reports from multiple US and Afghan intelligence reports, and now includes this episode — and many others — in an official briefing to senior American national security decision-makers about unreliability of the Pakistan military in the global war on terror.
The Nash briefing was delivered last month to US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, and likely shaped Gates’ decision to express pessimism about the willingness of the Pakistani military, under the guidance of newly-elected President Asif Ali Zardari, to protect US forces operating in Afghanistan from attackers crossing the border from Pakistan.
“We will do what is necessary to protect our troops,” Gates told the US Senate on Tuesday regarding American cross-border raids on enemy raiders based in Pakistan.
“I don’t think (the Pakistani military) can do that...They don’t, in many respects, see the Taleban as their enemy.” Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, amplified Gates’ conclusions about military-to-military relations between Washington and Islamabad when he told senators that fighters flowing across the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan account for about 40 percent of attacks on American and other NATO forces.
Other briefers at the session on Capitol Hill explained that NATO forces operating in Afghanistan are dependent on their relationship with Pakistan, noting that 80 percent of the cargo and 40 percent of the fuel for US troops in Afghanistan flow across the Afghan-Pakistani border. In the written account of Nash’s observations, is was alleged that Pakistan’s helicopter resupply missions to the Taleban in Afghanistan are “just the tip of the iceberg.” Nash said Pakistani forces also offered the Afghan enemy “logistical support, training, and even direct and indirect fire (artillery and small arms).”
