The United States military has decided that no service members will face disciplinary charges for their involvement in a NATO airstrike in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, an accident that plunged relations between the two countries to new depths and has greatly complicated the allied mission in Afghanistan.
An American investigation in December found fault with both American and Pakistani troops for the deadly exchange of fire, but noted that the Pakistanis fired first from two border posts that were not on coalition maps, and that they kept firing even after the Americans tried to warn them that they were shooting at allied troops.
Pakistan has rejected these conclusions and ascribed most of the blame to the American forces. The American findings set up a second inquiry to determine whether any American military personnel should be punished. That recently completed review said no, three senior military officials said, explaining that the Americans fired in self-defence. Other mistakes that contributed to the fatal cross-border strike were the regrettable result of battlefield confusion, they said.
“We found nothing criminally negligent on the part of any individual in our investigations of the incident,” said one senior American military official involved in the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the results of the review had not been made public, a New York Times report said on Sunday.
The military’s decision is expected to anger Pakistani officials at a time when the two countries are gingerly trying to patch up a security relationship left in tatters over the past year from a series of episodes, including the shooting of two Pakistanis in Lahore by a CIA contractor, the Navy SEALs raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden and the deadly airstrike in November. Pakistan’s parliament is scheduled to resume debate on Monday on a major review of relations with the United States, a debate that the Obama administration hopes will bring a resumption of full diplomatic relations and the reopening of NATO supply lines into Afghanistan through Pakistan.
As part of that debate, Pakistani legislators have demanded an unconditional formal apology from the United States for the fatal airstrike. In the highest-level parley of leaders of the two countries since the accident, President Obama is to meet Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani on Tuesday in Seoul after a nuclear security conference to discuss Afghanistan and other security issues. But Obama is not expected to go beyond the regrets he conveyed to Pakistan soon after the airstrike on November 25.
Some administration aides said at the time that they worried that if Obama formally apologized to Pakistan, it could provide ammunition for his Republican opponents in the presidential race.
By contrast, Obama offered a personal apology last month to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan for the burning of Holy Qurans by American soldiers there, as well as regrets about the massacre of Afghan civilians in which an Army staff sergeant has been charged. Gen James N Mattis, the head of the military’s Central Command, is scheduled to hold long-delayed meetings this week in Islamabad with Gen Ashfaq Kayani, the Pakistan Army chief of staff, to discuss the airstrike investigation, as well as new border coordination procedures to prevent a recurrence of the episode.
General Mattis will also discuss opportunities for training, arms sales and improving border coordination centers, military officials said. Other senior American officials, like Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R Nides, and Marc Grossman, the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, are also expected to meet soon with senior Pakistani officials to begin mending relations.
Pakistan’s generals are likely to be privately angered by the latest American decision, although in public the military is deferring to the parliamentary process, the NYT report said.
“A full investigation was done by our military, and the conclusions were sent to the parliamentary committee,” said Maj Gen Athar Abbas, the military’s spokesman. “Now the government should communicate to the US whatever they want.” Armed with the information from the first inquiry, the American chain of command in Afghanistan and at the Central Command set out to determine any culpability.
They found none that warranted criminal charges, military officials said, nor significant discipline like fines or demotions. It is possible, the officials said, that at some level of the chain of command a soldier could receive an administrative reprimand, but those matters are held privately within the unit or command. American military legal experts said that the episode illustrated the difficulties of assigning blame when an unintended chain of events results in tragedy. “The absence of disciplinary action in a specific case doesn’t mean that there was a cover-up or anything like that,” said Charles J Dunlap Jr, a retired Air Force major general who served as deputy judge advocate general and is now executive director of the Duke University Law School’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security. “Rather, it may well simply indicate that a tragic accident occurred, and the fog and friction of war make the facts such that assigning criminal responsibility is just not the right thing to do.”
