Britain Breaks With U.S. Over Pakistan

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WASHINGTON — Britain is voicing reservations about the Pentagon’s new military push into northeast Pakistan, claiming publicly that its troops in Afghanistan are not participating in the cross-border raids into the territory believed to host Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants that have become near daily occurrences.

On a stop in Islamabad yesterday, the British justice minister and former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said the American incursions into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas did not represent the policy of his country. “The United Kingdom position is very clear: We respect the territorial integrity of sovereign states, we always have done, and so far as United Kingdom forces are concerned within Afghanistan, they operate strictly according to the United Nations Security Council mandate and the agreement of the government of Afghanistan, and they operate within the borders of Afghanistan,” he told the BBC.

Those words do not describe what American special forces are doing now in the tribal provinces in Pakistan that border Afghanistan. As The New York Sun first reported on September 9, President Bush in July gave Central Command the green light to launch raids into the Pakistani territory, a move that has led to an increase in unmanned drone attacks on suspected terrorist targets there.

The public statements from Mr. Straw echo concerns in Britain and its former colony, Pakistan, about the aggressive new American war policy. A spokesman for Pakistan’s military, Major General Athar Abbas, told the Associated Press yesterday that Pakistani forces now have orders to attack American troops who enter Pakistani territory.

That threat may be hollow, however. The Pakistani military relies on America for advanced arms shipments such as F-16 fighter planes, and has worked off and on since 2001 with the American military and CIA to battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who have sought refuge in the tribal border provinces. The Pakistani campaign largely ground to a halt in 2006, when President Musharraf, who resigned last month, signed a series of cease-fire agreements giving the terrorist groups the equivalent of home rule.

Since then, Al Qaeda and the Taliban have strengthened their grip on Pakistan’s border provinces and are now making a push toward expansion. Over the weekend, Taliban forces seized a government office on the outskirts of Peshawar, a former British colonial outpost teeming with more than 7 million inhabitants.

Nonetheless, General Abbas’s words caught the attention of members of Congress. At a hearing in the House, Rep. Gary Ackerman, a Democrat of New York, challenged the Bush administration’s decision to move forward with a new shipment of the F-16s, first promised to Mr. Musharraf in exchange for his cooperation against Al Qaeda.

Yesterday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, arrived in Pakistan, in part to calm tensions with the country’s military and civilian leadership over the American operations.

Incidents such as the weekend Taliban raid and last year’s standoff in Islamabad at the site of the Red Mosque have led some analysts in the American intelligence community to conclude that Pakistan is near civil war, according to one intelligence official. This judgment is likely to be a source of contention inside the National Intelligence Council as it prepares a National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan in the final months of the Bush administration, the official said.

A former State Department official and scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, Daniel Markey, said that when he spoke recently with a member of the Pakistani security services, he would not acknowledge the existence of an insurgency in his country. “They call them miscreants,” Mr. Markey relayed. “To go to the next step of a civil war is beyond what they would accept. You have to have, presumably, parties who are vying for control over the actual state. You can have a secessionist movement or faction, but that is not civil war.”

For now, it appears that Britain, a country that has nearly 1 million citizens and guests of Pakistani origin, will be sitting out the border raids into Pakistan. “I think everybody is alive, including the American government, to the fact that if incursions take place, that there isn’t consent and there are also then gratuitous civilian casualties — innocent men, women, and children get killed — then that will simply reduce the level of consent for what has to be a major and nationwide struggle against terrorism on both sides of the border, and I think that lesson is very clear to everybody,” Mr. Straw told the BBC.

President Zardari was in Britain yesterday and met with Prime Minister Brown, though the two did not mention the cross-border incursions in their public joint statement following the meeting.

A spokesman for the State Department declined to comment for this article.


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