Vol. 75/No. 45      December 12, 2011

Washington launched the attack on two border posts in the middle of the night, continuing the assault even after Pakistani officials asked that it be halted. “Military officials say the posts were attacked without warning at 2 a.m. while most of the around 50 soldiers were sleeping,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “and that NATO helicopters and jets even attacked Pakistani military forces sent in as back-up during the two-hour assault.”

In an interview with the London Daily Telegraph, Amirzeb Khan, 23, who was wounded in the assault, said, “Initially, we thought that the attackers were Taliban and we took positions to retaliate but then saw that at least four helicopters were shelling from above.”

This assault occurs as Washington has stepped up incursions of U.S. special operations forces into Pakistani territory—which included the assassination of Osama bin Laden by U.S. Navy SEALs in May—alongside unremitting strikes by aerial drones.

In Pakistan, in response to the killing of the troops, protesters rallied Nov. 26 in Islamabad and Karachi, where thousands gathered outside the U.S. consulate condemning the assault, reported the Telegraph. Rallies continued over the next several days.

An unnamed Pakistani official told the Washington Post that anger within the ranks of Pakistan’s army had “reached an alarming level and the military leadership was very worried about it.”

The Pakistani government has indefinitely closed its border crossing for trucks that bring almost half of the supplies used by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. A similar move was undertaken for 11 days in September-October last year until Washington apologized for an attack that killed two Pakistani troops.

In a further effort to placate popular anger, Islamabad gave Washington two weeks to pull out of the Shamsi Air Base in southwestern Pakistan from where U.S. drone attacks are launched. A similar demand was made in June, which Pakistani authorities subsequently dropped.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan’s southern province of Kandahar, three days before the U.S.-led attack in Pakistan, a NATO airstrike killed six children, another civilian, and injured two girls, according to a spokesman for the governor.

The New York Times reported that Abdul Samad, an uncle of four of the children who were killed, “said his relatives were working in fields near their village when they were attacked without warning by an aircraft.”
 
 
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