After the Salala probe report

The much-awaited report on the Salala attack by a Nato-Isaf airborne force on November 26 is out and it will not satisfy the Pakistan Army and the Pakistani nation at large. It accepts some blame but links the incident to lack of trust, lack of coordination and ‘first fire’ from the Pakistani side. The report, however, acknowledges that ‘efforts to determine who was firing on the US troops and whether there were friendly Pakistani forces in the area failed because US forces used inaccurate maps, were unaware of Pakistani border post locations and mistakenly provided the wrong location for the troops’. Pakistan did not cooperate with the Pentagon inquiry.

Pentagon’s Brigadier-General Stephen Clark, who led the investigation, however, made it clear that ‘US forces were fired on first and acted in self-defence’. The biggest flaw in the probe is that while it claims that the US forces reacted in self-defence, it is not sure who really fired the first shot. Additionally, ‘US officials gave Pakistan liaison officers the wrong location of the firefight and were told again that no Pakistani troops were in that region’ and ‘US troops did not know that two relatively new and spare Pakistani outposts, reportedly called Volcano and Boulder, were just over the border from the village that was the target of the operation’.

This means that the US will not apologise, Pakistan will get no satisfaction, and the Nato supply line through Pakistan will remain blocked. As it is, Pakistan has almost given its final verdict on the issue saying it will not take a simple apology, although some quarters hoped that some such gesture from Washington would soften the stance of the Pakistan Army and the supplies would be resumed. The reaction to November 26 in Pakistan was intense and consensual, which means that anger rather than realism would propel any further development. The Pakistan Army has been backed by parliament in Islamabad, by the sitting PPP government, the media and the man in the street. This additionally means that any gesture of conciliation towards the US will arouse ghairat (sense of national honour), which is never fulfilled unless it is accompanied by honourable self-damage.

Politicians and clerics have united behind the army’s decision to confront America. The clerics have actually given a call to jihad in Lahore’s Minar-e-Pakistan, warning the government that if the Nato supply line is reopened, their non-state actors will attack the Nato trucks and set them on fire. The national consensus has thus been joined by the non-state actors, who not long ago were seen attacking innocent Pakistanis ‘to teach Pakistan a lesson for allying itself with America’. The escalation of ‘ghairat’ this time is more intense because of the shame felt at the way the affair of CIA agent Raymond Davis was handled by the government in February-March. After having announced that Davis would be hanged for killing two Pakistanis, the government had buckled and let him off the hook on a blood-money (diyat) payoff.

Unless the GHQ in Rawalpindi relents, the spiral of escalation of hatred will continue and lead to more incidents. TV anchors note that since Pakistan started acting tough, the Americans have backed off from their drone attacks, giving Pakistan the longest reprieve so far. More ominously, they take account of the fact that after Pakistan began taking on America, al Qaeda and its affiliates have stopped their suicide bombings against innocent Pakistanis. This kind of thinking is dangerous since it presumes that the army, finding itself either unwilling or unable to respond to the challenge of al Qaeda’s terrorism, has succumbed to the organisation’s strategy of causing a rift between Pakistan and the US.

According to the latest State Bank midterm report, the national economy is facing a meltdown. This means that, in the coming months, a tsunami of unemployed and hungry people will hit the roads and paralyse the country, making even minimal governance impossible. The non-state actors now backed by the state are actually working for al Qaeda and will be harmful to Pakistan after they have ‘defeated’ the US as they did the late Soviet Union. They tried to kill General Musharraf three times and have attacked the GHQ once.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 24^th, 2011.