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Musharaff Gives Go-Ahead for U.S. Military Operations in Pakistan
Thursday, May 9, 2002
By Vilani Peiris & Sarath Kumara
World Socialist Web Site

US pressure for Musharraf to act intensified after a hand grenade attack on a Protestant church in Islamabad in March, which killed five people, including two Americans.

Under intense pressure from Washington, Pakistan’s military strongman General Pervez Musharraf has given the green light for US troops to operate inside the country alongside local army forces in pursuing so-called Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects.

The first operation on April 26 was a joint raid on a religious school in Darpa Khel village in northwestern Pakistan near the Afghan border. According to Pakistani officials, 24 US Special Forces soldiers, backed by Apache attack helicopters, joined some 200 paramilitary troops in storming a seminary founded by the Taliban’s former Tribal Affairs Minister, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani. Five people were detained for “suspected links” to the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

The raid provoked an angry response from local tribesmen who have close links with ethnic Pashtuns in the south and east of Afghanistan. A group of several hundred demonstrated in front of a government office to protest the military operation. A local cleric Maulvi Abdul Hafeez told Associated Press: “In order to prevent these kinds of raids in future, we have started consulting other tribal elders and clerics. We will not let the American forces operate in our areas.”

The Pentagon did not officially confirm the US military activity inside Pakistan. Nevertheless, the raid coincided with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s trip to the region and came one day after he warned that the US would not allow Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters to flee across Afghanistan’s borders. The day after the raid he told a group of US and allied soldiers at the Bagram air base north of Kabul that he regarded Afghanistan as “a proving ground” for the US military. “The Afghanistan theatre has been the first one, but it won’t be the last,” he said.

The US administration had been pushing for more than a month for American forces to be permitted to operate in Pakistan. Major General Franklin Hagenbeck, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, publicly called for US troops to have the right of “hot pursuit” across the Pakistani border. He was speaking in March in the aftermath of Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan, during which hundreds of alleged Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, along with a number of civilians, were killed.

Hagenbeck’s proposal immediately provoked protests from the tribal areas in Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan. Not only are there strong ethnic ties with Afghan tribesmen across the border but these regions have previously enjoyed a degree of political autonomy. The Federally Administered Tribal Area consists of seven tribal agencies with their own councils, courts and law to administer an estimated five million people. Pakistani troops were only permitted into the areas last December through a mixture of bribes and bullying.
(More: WSWS.org News Source)
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