WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush secretly approved US military raids inside Pakistan against alleged terrorist targets, according to a former intelligence official with access to the Bush administration’s debate about how to fight Al-Qaeda and the Taleban inside the lawless tribal border area.
Another senior US military official last week also confirmed that a special forces attack had taken place about a mile across Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
The former official told The Associated Press that Bush signed an order over the summer giving new authority to US special operations forces to target suspected terrorists in the dangerous area along the Afghan border. More recently, the administration secretly gave conventional ground troops new authority to pursue militants across the Afghan border into Pakistan, the official said.
The Pakistani government is not told about the targets in advance because of concerns that the Pakistani intelligence service and military are infiltrated by Al-Qaeda and Taleban supporters who would leak the information, the former official said.
The arrangement is deliberately ambiguous. While the Pakistan government is left in the dark, it also does not want the United States government announcing that operations were undertaken without Islamabad’s approval.
Bush’s decision leaves new Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari with a major foreign policy challenge. Zardari and other politicians have called the cross-border attacks unacceptable and a violation of their country’s sovereignty.
Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the army leader, took things a step further Wednesday, when he said Pakistan’s territorial integrity would be “defended at all cost.” “Reckless actions” that kill civilians “only help the militants and further fuel the militancy in the area,” Kayani said, reflecting the views of many Pakistanis.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he would press Pakistan to allow US and NATO troops in Afghanistan to take a new approach to hunting Taleban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants who slip back and forth between the neighboring nations.
Brown told a London news conference that he would talk with Zardari within days to draw up a revised strategy on halting the flow of fighters across the border. NATO, which leads a force of 53,000 troops in Afghanistan, said it would not take part in any raid into Pakistan. “The NATO policy, that is our mandate, ends at the border,” spokesman James Appathurai told a regular news briefing in Brussels.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai backed the new US strategy. “Change of strategy is essential,” Karzai told a news conference in Kabul. “It means that we go to those areas which are the training bases and havens of terrorists and we jointly go there and remove and destroy them.”
Pakistani security forces, meanwhile, killed up to 100 Al-Qaeda-linked militants in fierce clashes near the Afghan border yesterday, a security official said. “Eighty to 100 militants were killed in Bajaur today. Most of them are foreigners,” the official said, referring to the tribal region.
