Back when I was reviewing a series of propagandistic posts on Long War Journal about an artillery strike into Pakistan (see here, for example, and here), I raised the problem of sovereignty. Very smart people raised the proper objection to the argument, which is that Pakistan doesn’t exactly exercise traditional sovereignty over the border tribal regions.
Only they had begun to—the halting negotiations with the tribes, which normally take months to years to complete, is underway. Rather, it was.
Pakistan is accusing U.S.-led coalition forces of killing 11 Pakistani soldiers in an air strike on the country’s Afghanistan border. The U.S. military has not commented. The strike occurred late Tuesday after a clash between Afghan forces and Taliban militants. News of Pakistan’s accusation hit major U.S. media Web sites mid-morning on Wednesday.
From the many sources there, is appears a regiment of Frontier Scouts was caught up in a firefight on the wrong side of the Afghan border, and in the ensuing mêlée eleven of the scouts were killed by precision-guided U.S. bombs. It is unclear whether the Scouts knew who they were fighting, if the local Taliban group was involved in any way, or why the U.S. was apparently launching strikes into Pakistani territory once the Scouts had retreated.
The context here matters a great deal, and for once I mean the contemporary context. The Pentagon just funded a RAND study that concludes certain officers within the Pakistani Army and ISI have been actively colluding with the Pakistani Taliban groups. While this isn’t too surprising, given the funding and the general likelihood of such a collaboration, the timing of this report, along with the continued strikes within Pakistan, lend the impression that the U.S. is engaging in a secret or small scale war against Pakistani territory… without the permission of the new civilian Pakistani government.
Naturally, Pakistani officials deny any such collusion, however meaningless those denials may be. The bigger issue here is the right of pursuit—Coalition Forces absolutely need it to pursue fighters in a similar situation involving only militants; the terms of such a deal, however, carry steep political costs in Pakistan, where George W. Bush finishes a distant second to Osama bin Laden in popularity contests. It must be constructed in such a way that the U.S. cannot carry out punitive strikes against militants, but it can pursue them if they are spotted crossing the border or actively attacking Afghan or Coalition forces (preferably in such a way that we can avoid temptations to repeat the Gulf of Tonkin). The civilian government would fall if they negotiated such a deal, however.
Despite the high number of reported civilian casualties—how many of those will be given full names and hometowns by the CJTF media people or Western journalists?—this still might be salvageable. If the proper balance can be struck between secretly sanctioned strikes on certain tribal areas—limited to, say, Kurram, Bajaur, and the Waziristans—and the government’s ability to credibly yell “fowl” each time it happens, both sides might get to keep their cake and eat it too.
I do not, however, place that much faith in either our high-level diplomacy, especially when our primary diplomatic contacts are through our militaries and theirs just got thrown out of power, or in their willingness to budge even a little bit to get us to relent. So we’re left with technically illegal bombings on Pakistani territory that apparently results in dozens of innocent deaths. But at least take comfort in this: while the DOD can’t be bothered to count the number of civilians it kills pursuing these high-value hydra heads, at least it has an exact count of the number of insurgents it kills. So they’re at least counting something useful.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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There is obviously some merit in the argument that these attacks don’t technically violate the sovereignty of Pakistan. The problem is that they are seen as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty by everyone in FATA and the rest of Pakistan and as a result they always seem to weaken the authority of the Pakistani government and strengthen the position of the militants. I’m not saying that these negative consequences may not be outweighed by the benefits of carrying out the strikes, just that it doesn’t make sense to think that they can be willed away by arguing that Pakistan’s sovereignty isn’t actually being violated. How can an argument be relevant if no one that counts is convinced by it?