Islamabad warns that deadly Nato border attack could derail US plans to negotiate with Taliban and to withdraw its troops in 2014
Pakistan has asked Britain to mediate in its dispute with the US over the killing of 24 of its soldiers on the Afghan border, and has warned that the fallout could derail mooted peace talks with the Taliban and Barack Obama's timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by 2014.
Islamabad also said on Tuesday that it will boycott next Monday's conference in Bonn on Afghanistan's future, confirming prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's vow not to carry on with "business as usual".
Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's high commissioner to Britain, said: "We are appealing to Britain to use its undoubted influence with the Americans to force them to review their policy towards Pakistan and change tack before it is too late.
"This is an opportunity for the UK to show that it has a very different attitude to Pakistan and it is not trying to hide behind the US. We are asking David Cameron to tell Obama to think again about how the US treats Pakistan."
In a sign of public anger at the border strike, Pakistani cable operators announced they were stopping carrying foreign television channels, complaining their reporting was unsympathetic to Pakistan. The operators, addressing a press conference, singled out the BBC for broadcasting the "Secret Pakistan" series, which details the support of Pakistan's spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, for the Afghan Taliban. The BBC was not available on Pakistani television on Tuesday night.
Hasan said Pakistan's foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, had spoken to William Hague, the foreign secretary, on Sunday ? hours after the incident in Mohmand.
Khar asked Hague to act as a go-between and mediator to help achieve a "better understanding" between Pakistan and the US. Hague responded sympathetically to the request, Hasan added.
He said that most Pakistanis believe the Mohmand incident, the latest in a series of fierce rows between the US and Pakistan this year, was a deliberate provocation by US forces attached to Nato and Afghan army operations in Afghanistan.
American disregard for Pakistani sovereignty and democracy threatened to make it impossible for the government in Islamabad to continue co-operating with Washington on counter-terrorism and an overall Afghan settlement, he warned.
"This business could be a watershed in Pakistan relations with the US. It could wreck the timetable for an American troop withdrawal," the high commissioner said. "If they walk away in 2014 without ensuring the stability and peace in Afghanistan, the graveyard they leave behind will come back to haunt them. If they leave without a viable settlement in place, they will push all the debris of their failures into our lap and we will have to face it alone."
Hasan took his demand for British help to on Tuesday to Alistair Burt, the foreign minister responsible for South Asia. Hasan said he urged ministers to show solidarity with Pakistan and make plain that Britain disapproved of infringements of Pakistani sovereignty ? such as Saturday's attack, repeated US aerial drone attacks in the tribal territories and the raid in Abbottabad in May that killed Osama bin Laden, the head of al-Qaida.
Hasan claimed US actions beyond Afghanistan were contributing to the destabilisation of Pakistan by increasing public anger towards the government over its co-operation with Washington. These included one-sided support for India's civil nuclear energy programme, public airing of concerns about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, an insistence on unfair market-access trade rules and a history of supporting Pakistan's military rulers ? thereby undermining the country's democratic institutions.
"The way the Americans behave, they are not leaving any political space for Gilani and Zardari. They are up against the wall. They have no room to manoeuvre", the high commissioner said. Pakistan, he said, was "a nation in distress... if democracy collapses in Pakistan, a radical regime could take over."
In a briefing carried in Pakistani newspapers on Wednesday, Major-General Ishfaq Nadeem, director general of military operations, said Nato forces had been alerted they were attacking Pakistani posts but helicopters kept firing.
"Detailed information of the posts was already with Isaf [the Nato-led force in Afghanistan], including map references, and it was impossible that they did not know these to be our posts," the News quoted Nadeem as saying in the briefing held at army headquarters.
Nadeem said the attack was a deliberate, blatant act of aggression, according to Reuters.
US officials admit the incident has thrown into disarray the coalition's strategy for stabilising Afghanistan. Washington has been pressing Pakistan to use its influence to bring the Taliban and its allied Haqqani network to the negotiating table.
As the Obama administration scrambled diplomatically to repair the damage caused by the incident, the US state department said that Pakistan had "a crucial role to play in supporting a secure and stable and prosperous Afghanistan".
A spokesman, Mark Toner, said: "It's absolutely critical that Afghanistan's neighbors play a role in its future development, and certainly its relationship with Pakistan has been critical in that regard."
Afghanistan's President, Hamid Karzai, meanwhile urged Gilani to attend the Bonn conference. The meeting had seemed unlikely to produce international agreement, but Pakistan's withdrawal will further hinder any chance of progress. The gathering marks a decade since the first Bonn conference on Afghanistan, which followed the US-led toppling of the Taliban regime.
"President Hamid Karzai asked ... for the foreign minister to participate in the Bonn Conference because Pakistan's participation is in the interest of both countries," Karzai's office said in a statement.
Islamabad, China and Iran oppose US plans to keep military bases in Afghanistan past a 2014 deadline for ending the coalition's combat operations in the country.
Pakistan has already blocked supplies for Nato troops crossing its border into Afghanistan and barred the US from using an airbase in retaliation for the border incident, which also saw 13 injured. Anger in Pakistan is growing over attack, which is being likened to the humiliation suffered when a US squad unilaterally entered Pakistani territory to kill Bin Laden.
Pakistani and US officials have given conflicting versions of the chain of events that culminated in the Nato air strikes.
Afghan and US officials say a combined team of Afghan soldiers and US special forces called in strikes after taking fire from a position across the border. Pakistan, however, says there was no firing from its side of the border before the bombardment from Nato helicopters.
According to accounts in the US media, some US military officials believe Taliban insurgents may have staged the attack deliberately in such a way as to draw fire on to the two outposts, located just 300 metres into Pakistani territory.
An Afghan Taliban commander, Mullah Samiullah Rahmani, denied the Taliban were involved.Late on Monday, the US military appointed a senior officer, air force brigadier Stephen Clark, to investigate the incident.
American "off-the-record" explanations of the incident as self-defence have generated further anger in Pakistan. "The US has been nowhere near as apologetic as it should be for the killings, even if they were accidental, of a supposed ally," said an editorial in the Pakistani newspaper Express Tribune.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/29/pakistan-boycotts-bonn-conference-afghanistan
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