Authorising covert cross-border raids by US special forces from Afghanistan into Pakistan, without informing the military and political command there, may seem like tactical boldness on the part of the American president. The US commanders say that they cannot trust the Pakistan military and the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) agency. In the past, say the Americans, local Pakistan army and ISI officers have given warnings to Taliban leaders that the Americans on search and destroy raids on alleged Taliban and al-Qaida sanctuaries.
On September 3 a team of US Navy Seals was dropped by helicopter in the area of Angoor Adda in South Waziristan, believed to be home turf of a senior Taliban, Jalalaluddibn Haqqani. It was followed by an air strike which killed two of Haqqani's wives, and some of his grandchildren. The Pakistan military said four young Taliban recruits had been killed and more than a dozen "civilians", women and children among them.
The raids were the first by US Special Operations Command since Bush signed a secret operational order in July authorising cross-border raids into Pakistan without prior notification to the authorities there. Interestingly, the first raid took place just as Asif Ali Zardari was about to be elected Pakistan's first civilian president for nine years.
Whatever the tactical gains the American commanders think they are getting from such methods, they are likely to be outweighed by the strategic crassness of these escapades. Under current international law, they could be conceived as acts of aggression and a violation of the UN Charter. At a practical level, they stand to be a powerful recruiting sergeant for the Taliban – and the millions of hitherto uncommitted Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
The Pakistan army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, said there had been, now could there be, any secret agreement to allow US covert operations in northern Pakistan. He told US forces to keep out, and said the new civilian government needed "to keep its distance" from Washington. A regional divisional commander said his forces would oppose the Americans.
On the northern side of the Pakistan border, one must wonder how much the Americans informed their other allies about precisely what they're up to in their secret ops. Not much, if American attitudes to their European Nato allies elsewhere, Britain included, are anything to go by.
Contempt for the British is overt following what the Americans believe is the British defeat by Shiite militias in Basra. Their narrative now is that it took the Americans, plus nearly 30,000 troops of the Iraqi army, to restore order to the streets of Basra this spring, where the militias had been running amok.
To a certain extent, it is true that the Iraqi army, plus the Americans, plus belatedly some British forces, have got the militias off the streets in Iraq's southern oil capital through their Charge of the Knights offensive. But last year, when the British troops were bearing the brunt of the Shiite attacks, the Iraqi army was neither willing nor able to tackle the militias.
The triumphalist line of the Americans and the Iraqis having the skill and will to defeat finally the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr is already coming apart at the seams. A British intelligence analyst said this week, "to claim the Sadrists have been smashed is nonsense. They are still a force." Worse, she said, the operation had driven Moqtada al-Sadr into the arms of Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran.
Hitherto, he had avoided getting too close to the regime in Teheran, in his aim to guarantee the independence of Iraq, and the Shiite community within it, from Iran. Once more, there are mutterings about the CIA mounting an operation to "take out" Sadr.
It isn't only the Brits and the Pakistanis who fear that the American regime is misplaying, or overplaying, its hand. Two days before President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia ordered his troops onto the offensive in South Ossetia on August 7, the Israeli military advisory team to the Georgians quit Tbilisi. Israel has since suspended military assistance to Georgia, where it been involved in modernising the forces in partnership with the US military mission.
The most prominent Nato ally in the region, and the only one with a border with Georgia, Turkey, has appeared anxious, too, to distance itself from Washington. It has not been involved in the charge to press for Georgia and Ukraine to become members of Nato. Nor do many European Nato members want this to happen – not least because opinion polls suggest that the majority of the population in Ukraine don't want to join Nato.
Meanwhile, the candidates in the US presidential race seem to be finding it hard to get their heads round the reduced circumstances of America's strategic place in the world compared with eight years ago, let alone tackle the growing divergence between the US and Europe, old and new. When Obama suggested on the stump that American forces might have to raid into Afghanistan unannounced, he was howled down. When asked in her ABC interview about the problems of border operations against Taliban/al-Qaida bases, Governor Sarah Palin seemed at a loss.
This week, both the senior US commanders involved in Iraq and Afghan operations, Admiral Mike Mullen and General David Petraeus, have warned that the coalition is not winning in Afghanistan. Far from a winning tactic, they may find that their new plan of covert raids is a short route to self-defeat.
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