NATO attack has raised serious questions: FM Khar

In an interv­iew to NPR, Khar said that terms of engage­ment were not clearl­y unders­tood, not clearl­y respec­ted.

LAHORE/WASHINGTON: Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said on Tuesday that the NATO attack on the Mohmand checkpost was not an isolated incident and had raised much bigger questions than whether Islamabad will join an investigation on the event.

Khar, in an interview to National Public Radio (NPR) in Lahore on Tuesday, was underscoring the importance Pakistan attaches to respect for its sovereignty in the fight against terrorists along the Afghan border.

“The question of sovereignty is an extremely important one and this is not the first time. You can have a space for mistakes once. You can have it twice, but you cannot have it, you know, for eight times. These types of engagement are not acceptable to the Pakistani public. They will certainly not be acceptable to the parliament of Pakistan and to the government of Pakistan.”

The foreign minister, pressing her point, also pointed out the May 2 unilateral raid on Abbottabad and the questions that it raised about the red lines that Pakistan has put in place, while cooperating with the international community in the anti-terror fight.

“I think the questions raised in Pakistan are much larger than whether we will participate in the investigation or not. I want to emphasise on the fact that this is not an isolated incident,” she told NPR in the wake of the November 26 Nato strike that resulted in deaths of 24 Pakistani soldiers.

“If the terms of engagement are not clearly understood, are not clearly respected, that gives each of the parties the right to go back and reassess the situation that I think Pakistan is, today, just exercising that right.” Following the deadly attack, Khar said, Islamabad has to do “some serious introspection to see what we make of the role that we play within the international efforts in Afghanistan.

“As to the question of sovereignty of Pakistan, this question of territorial integrity of Pakistan, and really, the questions are being asked that - is it too much of a cost that Pakistan has paid?”

Khar said that Pakistan feels its role in the decade-old fight against terror has been “misinterpreted, has not been recognised and has not been appreciated enough.”

“And, on top of that, to have an incident in which we feel, at best, giving the benefit of doubt, our soldiers lost their lives to an extremely callous attitude. This episode has obviously created a lot of rage in Pakistan because this is not the first time that Pakistan has lost its soldiers to NATO fire,”  the foreign minister added.

While Pakistan would like to wait for a detailed investigation, the current briefings “seem to be pointing towards a direction which is not a happy case to be in,” the Khar elaborated in an answer to a question whether the NATO strike was deliberate.

“If it is a deliberate attempt, then the questions that I referred to would obviously be much, much, much more serious,” the foreign minister remarked.

“I’m not going to run to any conclusion and I hope that is not true, but the fact of the matter is that even if it is a mistake, it iss certainly a callous mistake because this did not happen over five minutes. This was into hours, for sure, and that leaves many, many unanswered questions,” she responded to another question.

She disagreed with the proposition that US assistance for Pakistan limits her country’s leverage in responding to such incidents and termed the notion of Pakistan’s dependence on US assistance as exaggeration.

“I would hope not because I think, you know, I like to call it the dependency syndrome. It’s over-exaggerated. I think we have to really get grips on what this relationship is really about.  And for Pakistan, this relationship is not about aid and assistance.  I think there are far too many much more important strategic goals and objectives that we wish to achieve,” Khar said.