NATO and/or U.S. forces apparently killed a couple dozen Pakistani soldiers at an outpost on the Afghan border. The details are murky at this point: The Guardian reports that coalition forces say they came under fire and returned fire.
Pakistan has announced that it will cut off supply deliveries to coalition forces which pass through Pakistan, and has ordered the closing of the air base in Pakistan from which U.S. drones are launched.
This has all the makings of a serious crisis. I’ll post updates as more information becomes available.
Updates:
- WaPo: “The White House says senior U.S. civilian and military officials have extended condolences to their Pakistani counterparts following a NATO airstrike that Pakistan says killed 24 of its troops along a frontier area that serves as a haven for militants.”
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Comments
boy if I were looking for a false flag setup to kick the us out of pakistan this would be it.
this will be huge.
It certainly is about as serious as anthing that has occurred between the US and Pakistan. Whatever the cause (which range from a tragic friendly fire accident to a Machievelian plot by elements of the ISI or Taliban or both to draw NATO fire onto the Pakistani outpost to provoke a rift), it will be very hard to overcome.
For those whose (understandably) would prefer Pakistan to buzz off, two things to remember:
— It is impossible — not difficult, impossible — for the US and NATO to maintain a large modern military establishment and support an Afghan army of hundreds of thousands withouf transit through Pakistani ports.
— Pakistan is an Islamic country with a dozen radical groups, a long history of spawning terrorism, a weak government that can only exist with army backing — and 20 or so nuclear weapons.
Approximately the same thing happened last year [about same time???], with pass closed 11 days. Large number of fuel tankers sat around and were picked off by locals during that period. Sounds like round II. Better turn those tankers around. Obviously orchestrated by ?????
Have no fear, Captain Awesome will send them a bunch of dvds and an ipod of his greatest hit speeches and they’ll be putty in his hands. I’m so glad the smart kids are running the show now.
On a serious note, I said at the time that W helping to give Musharraf the boot was a huge, huge, mistake. Whatever his shortcomings, which I’m prepared to believe were Legion, he understood the stakes of the game, and the eventual, inevitable, outcome for Pakistan if they didn’t stick close and tight to the US and one of their pet projects in Afghanistan pulled off a really big attack in the US. (hint: it involves a mushroom cloud.) And he acted accordingly.
However distasteful we find it, sometimes you’ve got to support a tyrannical SOB for simple reason that anyone picked by the populace will be a whole lot worse. As will happen in Libya and Egypt in the near future. Democracy requires social and cultural maturity. Not much of that to be found in certain regional neighborhoods.
You’re right about Musharraf. It was a huge mistake to dump him and promote the cult of Saint Benazir; about as huge as Carter’s decision to dump Somoza and the Shah (though Carter also deserves huge kudos for his subsequent decision to shelter the Shah). Stabbing Muzorewa in the back was also a bad decision, not just strategically but morally; but at least he hadn’t previously been an ally.
Yada, yada, yada….. hey what was Obama’s golf score this weekend? Not that I care, it is just that reporters for AP and the New York Times have a deadline and need front page material.
The U.S. has spent almost $21 Billion in aid to Pakistan over the past decade. The big lesson is that you cannot buy friendship. Time for us to pick up our ball and go home. With friends like these Muslims, we get more enemies.
While we are at it, we should extract our troops from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and let them provide for their own common defense. If we are leaving Iraq , we should leave the region.
The last time we turned our backs on Afghanistan you know how that turned out.
Professor and fellow visitors:
Be sure to include The Long War Journal as a resource in keeping up with the wars. Bill is insightful and informative about this matter and much more.
http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2011/11/pakistan_orders_key.php
It’s high time to quit the Pakistan charade. Time to pack up and leave but monitor very closely all of Pakistan’s nuke sites just in case we have to take them out to prevent them from falling into (even more) radical hands.
Don’t expect any such movement from the anointed one who is clueless as to the function of the big picture.
Hopefully, January 20, 2013 will see the beginning of the restoration of America…
Lets be realistic. Pakistan will make this as large as they can for a short time in order to manipulate us with sympathy and guilt trips, but they won’t go as far as to cause enough of a rift that will stop the flow of our (bribes) “foreign aid”.
The Pakistani’s are essentially money whores and after they play this up to high heaven, they’ll take the money and things will return to “normal”.
For one thing, the Pakistanis ought to expect that if they break with us we will immediately sign an alliance pact with India. They need to be told this forcefully.
I do believe it would take about twenty or thirty nukes to calm Islam down for the next 200 years.
“I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
since the Pakistani government support the Taliban, perhaps we should stop supporting the Pakistani government. End all “foreign aid” and military support. They wanna play hard ball, so can we…and as the country destabilizes even more, we sieze their nukes. After all, they did shelter Bin Laden for nearly 10 years.
Here comes World War III, courtesy of the Paki-Afghani alliance. Hopefully it will start in Feb. 2013 so we can, as one poster put it, rid ourselves of Islam for the next 200 years.