Pakistan Army rejected on Thursday the findings of a US enquiry into the NATO air strikes against two border outposts in Momhand Agency in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed.
In a late night response to the US military enquiry’s findings, which were announced earlier in the day by the US Defence Department, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) said: “Pakistan Army does not agree with the findings of the US/NATO enquiry as being reported in the media.”
“The enquiry report is short on facts. Detailed response will be given as and when the formal report is received,” it said in a brief statement.
Earlier, the army had refrained from formally reacting to investigation’s findings.
The US enquiry report states that both sides were to blame after a chain of misunderstandings led to a tragic result.
In his brief comments earlier, ISPR Director General Major General Athar Abbas said Islamabad would not respond to the findings until it received a copy of the report. Foreign Office Spokesman Abdul Basit had said: “I would not like to speculate. Let the investigation report come out. We will look at the findings very carefully and then articulate our response.”
Answering a question about the resumption of NATO’s supply line and also whether there is a timeframe in this regard, he said: “I will not pre-empt the parliament and it is their prerogative how they would like to look at the entire process. It is for them to decide about the timeline. It is not for this Ministry to pre-empt here or comment on how they (parliament) conduct their business.”
As the US came up with its enquiry into the NATO air strike, American Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter called on Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar to share the details of the enquiry’s findings with her and also to repeat the request for resumption of NATO supplies.
A Pakistani diplomat seeking anonymity said that the White House or the State Department was likely to come up with an apology for their share of the blame in the NATO air strike and Ambassador Munter’s meeting was aimed at sensing the mood in Pakistani ruling circles whether there would be resumption of NATO supplies if the apology came with an assurance of no such strikes in future.
Khar later on called on Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to inform him about the details of her discussions with the American ambassador.
A key finding of the enquiry suggests that Pakistani troops fired first and it was not the NATO troops which initiated the assault, which is likely to lead to further anguish here among Pakistani authorities, according to the Pakistani diplomat.
A statement from the Pentagon blamed the incident on poor coordination between Pakistani troops, a joint US-Afghan special forces unit targeting a Taliban training camp and the NATO personnel who called in the air strikes. “Mapping errors compounded the mistakes,” the Pentagon spokesman said.
The US insisted its forces were fired on first and had “acted in self defense and with appropriate force”. Results of the US military probe maintained there was “no intentional effort to target persons or places known to be part of the Pakistani military,” according to the Pentagon statement. There was also no effort to “deliberately provide inaccurate location information to Pakistani officials” amid the strike, it said. This is against the Pakistani officials’ version of what happened during the NATO air strikes, as they said that their posts were deliberately attacked and it was impossible that they were mistaken for insurgents.
A separate NATO investigation also released on Thursday found that both the alliance and Pakistani forces made mistakes in the incident, and that forces were unable “to properly coordinate their locations and actions, both before the operation and during the resulting engagement”.
The Pentagon probe said that “inadequate coordination” by both US and Pakistani military officers in the wake of US and Afghan troops “being fired upon” led to the strikes. “Gaps in information about the activities and placement of units from both sides, contributed to the tragic result,” said the Pentagon.
The NATO investigation said Afghan and NATO-led forces “legitimately responded in self-defense” after being initially fired upon by “unidentified forces” that were not believed to be Pakistani military at the time, the alliance said. “The combined force did not knowingly fire at the Pakistani forces,” the alliance said.
US authorities cited a lack of trust as a key problem for effectively securing the border region. The Pentagon said the allied forces “cannot operate effectively on the border – or in other parts of our relationship – without addressing the fundamental trust still lacking between us. We earnestly hope the Pakistani military will join us in bridging that gap”.
