THE PARLOUS Washington-Islamabad relationship is stumbling from bad to worse. The political fallout from a weekend US bombing raid launched from Afghanistan which killed some 24 Pakistani soldiers on Pakistani soil has sharply aggravated tension between the two states.
These were already badly damaged by a series of recent incidents which have fuelled strong public anti-US sentiment. Anti-US demonstrations have erupted in major cities across the country. Over the last year, as the US ramped up public attacks on Islamabad’s failure to root out links between its ISI intelligence agency and the Afghan Taliban, a clash over the arrest of CIA officer Raymond Davis, and the killing of Osama bin Laden in May, without notifying the authorities, added fuel to the flames. Now Pakistan has closed supply routes to Afghanistan that Nato relies on, and ordered the CIA to vacate a base it has used to launch drone strikes.
What happened in the attack in Mohmand region, just north of the Khyber Pass, is hotly disputed. The US says local commanders responded to sustained attacks across the border by calling in airstrikes against what they believed were Taliban militants. Pakistan insists that there was no firing from its side of the border and that the US was aware of the location of its base. Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen called it a “tragic unintended accident.”
Whatever the truth – and incompetent targeting rather than deliberate provocation appears more likely – the seriousness of the latest of what have become regular military violations of Pakistani sovereignty, clearly sanctioned at a high level, puts in an impossible position those in the country who favour an improving relationship. It is a deeply counterproductive tactic.
Pakistan foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar warned US secretary of state Hillary Clinton that the attack “negates the progress made by the two countries on improving relations and forces Pakistan to revisit the terms of engagement.” Most worrying, because of its valued influence, is the fear that Pakistan may now refuse to engage in attempts to draw the Taliban into peace talks, specifically by boycotting a conference in Bonn on Afghanistan’s security and development scheduled for early December. Kabul has pleaded with Pakistan not to make Afghanistan and its chance for peace pay for the actions of Nato, and reiterated its determination not to be used as a base for attacks on neighbours. It’s a plea that may unfortunately fall on deaf ears.