(c)2006 Site Meter
Bush secretly approved US raids into Pakistan
September 11, 2008: US President George W. Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials cited by the International Herald Tribune. However, another report by Inter Press Service says that this decision went against the advice of the US National Intelligence Council (NIC).
"The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants' increasingly secure base in Pakistan's tribal areas.
The IHT report said that US officials say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission.
The IHT report added that the US Central Intelligence Agency has for several years fired missiles at militants inside Pakistan from remotely piloted Predator aircraft. But the new orders for the military's Special Operations forces relax firm restrictions on conducting raids on the soil of an important ally without its permission.
Pakistan's top army officer says that his forces will not tolerate American incursions like the one that took place last week, the report added. He said the army would defend the country's sovereignty "at all costs."
The report argues that it is unclear what legal authorities the US has invoked to conduct even limited ground raids in a friendly country though one senior American official told IHT that the Pakistani government had privately assented to the general concept of limited ground assaults by Special Operations forces against significant militant targets, but that it did not approve each mission.
The new orders were issued after months of debate inside the Bush administration about whether to authorize a ground campaign inside Pakistan. The debate, first reported by The New York Times in late June, at times pitted some officials at the State Department against parts of the Pentagon that advocated aggressive action against Qaeda and Taliban targets inside the tribal areas.
"Unilateral action by the American forces does not help the war against terror because it only enrages public opinion," said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington. "In this particular incident, nothing was gained by the action of the troops."
NIC warned against raid
Further IPS reported that the National Intelligence Council, the US intelligence community's focal point for estimating future developments, warned the Bush administration last month that a decision to launch commando raids by US troops against al Qaeda-related targets in Pakistan's North-West Frontier region would "carry a high risk of further destabilising the Pakistani military and government".
"That blunt warning was conveyed to the White House in an oral briefing by a top official of the NIC two or three weeks ago, according to Philip Giraldi, former operations officer and counter-terrorist specialist in the CIA Directorate of Operations, who maintains contacts with the intelligence community.
"Another source, who has been briefed by NIC officials on the issue, confirms that the NIC message, representing a consensus in the intelligence community, was conveyed to the Bush administration in August, just as an intense debate over whether to carry out commando raids against al Qaeda and Taliban targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan was still under way.
"The source, who asked not to be identified because of the confidentiality of his contacts with the NIC, said the White House was warned that if U.S. commando raids continued over a longer period of time, the NIC believes they could threaten the unity of the Pakistani military."
Source: IHT, IPS