U.S. forces acknowledged carrying out a cross-border missile strike Thursday that reportedly killed four civilians in Pakistan, while a suicide bomber targeting U.S. troops instead killed six Afghan civilians.
The civilian deaths on both sides of the border came days before a new Pakistani government is due to be sworn in — one that may prove a less pliant ally in the U.S.-led fight against Islamic militants than President Pervez Musharraf has been.
Pakistan sharply protested the cross-border strike, which it said killed four civilians early Wednesday in the tribal area of North Waziristan. A U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan said the strike, which was carried out with precision-guided munitions, had been aimed at Taliban militants.
The U.S. spokesman, Maj. Chris Belcher, said Pakistani authorities had been informed of the strike, but only after the fact. The target was a compound about 1 mile inside Pakistan where senior aides to Siraj Haqqani, a prominent Taliban commander, were believed to be sheltering.
Fighters often slip back and forth across the rugged frontier, and Pakistan’s tribal areas have become a haven for militant groups.
The NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan said this week that it considers Haqqani the most dangerous Taliban commander in the Afghan war. He is blamed for orchestrating scores of suicide bombings and other attacks, including one last week that killed two NATO soldiers and injured more than a dozen Afghan civilians.
Breach of sovereignty?
Thursday’s U.S. strike also highlighted a highly sensitive issue in the two nations’ relations. Many Pakistanis consider the strikes a violation of national sovereignty, but Musharraf’s government is thought to have given tacit assent for some missile strikes aimed at senior Taliban and Al Qaeda figures, usually carried out with aerial drones. One such strike in North Waziristan at the end of January killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior associate of Osama bin Laden.
But strikes that kill civilians invariably spark a public outcry. Belcher, the military spokesman, said it had been carried out on the basis of “reliable intelligence” placing Haqqani associates in the walled compound that was hit.
In Tangrai, a village of about 40 houses surrounded by fields and mountains, residents led an Associated Press reporter to the rubble of the house hit in the attack.
Only one of its four walls was standing amid a tangle of mud bricks, bedding and cooking pots.
“We are innocent. We have nothing to do with such things,” said Noor Khan, a greengrocer who said the house was his family home.
He said six of his relatives — four women and two boys — died in the attack.
“We are poor people just trying to earn a living,” he said.
Pakistan’s chief military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, said the dead were two women and two children.
Pakistan’s two main opposition parties, which won last month’s elections and are now forming a coalition government, have said the strategy against Islamic militants needs retooling, perhaps to include negotiations with the insurgents.
Taliban claims strike
Thursday’s attack in Kabul, near its international airport, was aimed at a two-vehicle U.S. military convoy. In addition to at least six civilians killed, more than a dozen others were wounded.
Western news agencies reported that the Taliban claimed responsibility.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai called the bombing a cowardly attack, one of many he said was meant to harm innocent civilians. However, public anger over such attacks by militants often rebounds against Karzai’s government and the presence of more than 50,000 foreign troops.
Fighting between insurgents and NATO-led forces has mainly been concentrated in the country’s south and east. Afghan officials said Thursday that at least 41 militants had been killed by U.S. and Afghan forces in clashes a day earlier in the southwestern province of Nimruz.
