U.S. attack in Pakistan widens Asian war

The U.S. military carried out a pre-dawn commando raid in Pakistan by helicopter-borne Special Operations ground forces on Sept. 3, the first admitted incursion into Pakistan by U.S. ground troops since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

The ground assault was on the village of Angor Adda in South Waziristan on the Afghan border. Pakistani officials said around 20 people were killed in the attack, which drew a furious response from the Pakistani government.

The Pakistani foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, told Parliament on Sept. 4 that the U.S. raid into South Waziristan violated Pakistan’s national sovereignty. He also said the raid failed to attack any so-called Taliban militants.

Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world, with over 172 million people, and has the second largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia.

Until this ground attack, NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan have carried out numerous air strikes and artillery attacks in the border region of Pakistan. The U.S. occupiers of Afghanistan claim that Al-Qaeda and pro-Taliban fighters live in sanctuaries in northwest Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal areas where they organize attacks in Afghanistan.

The Bush administration has criticized Pakistan recently for not doing enough to stop attacks against NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan from bases inside of Pakistan.

This raid could signal the beginning of a broader campaign by Special Operations inside Pakistan, a secret plan that U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has reportedly been advocating for months inside Bush’s war council.

Even though the U.S. troops in Afghanistan function under a NATO chain of command, the Special Operations forces that carried out this attack answer only to U.S. commanders.

In the days following the ground raid, several strikes from remotely piloted U.S. aircraft were carried out on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

According to Al Jazeera, on Sept. 4 four Taliban fighters were killed and five wounded in a missile attack in North Waziristan.

On Sept. 5 a missile strike from reconnaissance aircraft killed a dozen people in a group of houses in northern Afghanistan. Residents from the Pakistani village of Miran Shah said the strike hit two residential compounds in Al Must, less than a mile from the Pakistani border. According to Ahsan Dawar, a journalist in Miran Shah, among the dead were two women, three children and several men of Arab descent.

On Sept. 6 Asif Ali Zardari was elected president of Pakistan. Zardari is co-chair of the Pakistan People’s Party, formerly led by his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in December 2007.

Zardari will take charge of a country that has been used, disrupted and divided by the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Nearly 1,200 people in Pakistan have been killed in bombings and suicide attacks in the past year.

Reuters reported on Sept. 5 that health officials were seeing an outbreak of cholera in refugees in northwest Pakistan. An estimated 300,000 people have fled the fighting in the area, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“The most immediate need remains access to clean water and sanitation. No food, health care or shelter is going to be of any good if people get water-borne diseases,” said Pascal Cuttat, a Red Cross official reporting at a Sept. 5 news briefing.

During Saturday’s voting, the problem was underscored in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshwar when a suicide car-bomber rammed a police checkpoint, killing 16 people and wounding more than 80, according to Al Jazeera.

Zardari succeeds Pervez Musharraf, who resigned last month under threat of impeachment. Before that, Zardari spent 11 years in jail on corruption charges. Though these charges have never been proven, he grew rich while Benazir Bhutto was president and was given the nickname of “Mr. 10 percent,” implying he was taking a cut from many business deals.

A White House spokesperson said Sept. 6, “President Bush looks forward to working with him, Prime Minister Gilani and the government of Pakistan on issues important to both countries, including counter-terrorism and making sure Pakistan has a stable and secure economy.” (International Herald Tribune, Sept. 7)

On Sept. 8, five missiles hit a compound allegedly belonging to one of Pakistan’s most prominent Taliban leaders in North Waziristan. The missiles killed 23 people, including eight children, and injured 18. Reports say Srajuddin Haqqani, son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, ran the compound. Neither Haqqani was at the compound during the attack.

Washington accuses the elder Haqqani of organizing recent attacks against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. He is also accused of an assassination attempt against Afghan president Hamid Karzai. During the time Soviet Union troops were helping defend the revolutionary Afghan government in the 1980s, U.S.-armed fighters were allied with Haqqani. According to the recent book, “The Bin Ladens” by Steve Coll, at that time Haqqani aided and protected Osama bin Laden.

U.S. imperialist destruction in the region has inflicted terror in both Afghanistan and Pakistan where U.S. troops are supposedly fighting terrorism. The people of Afghanistan and Pakistan have already shown their hostility to Western occupation, and there is no reason to think this hostility will diminish as U.S. and NATO military incursions kill more Pakistani and Afghan civilians.