Pakistani officials say U.S. forces knew they were opening fire on
Pakistani forces, and even apologized to Pakistani officers, throughout
the friendly fire incident that killed 24 Pakistani troops near the
Afghan border in November.
The rare Pakistani Embassy briefing on
Thursday offered little new beyond what has been reported in Pakistan on
the November incident, but it put the Pakistani version of events front
and center, ahead of the results of NATO's official investigation due
out next week.
Pentagon officials refused to comment on the
Pakistani account, saying they will not speak until their own
investigation is complete.
One new element was the alleged apology
offered by the NATO officer in charge to his Pakistani liaison officer
counterpart, at the NATO border outpost where such incidents are
supposed to be managed and avoided.
The Pakistanis say the NATO
officer apologized for relaying the wrong coordinates of the location
NATO planes were about to fire upon. The error meant that the Pakistanis
could not warn NATO forces that they were about to fire on a friendly
post.
The officer apologized again, according to the Pakistanis,
for the continued fire on the two remote outposts. The attack was in
support of a nearby U.S.-Afghan joint patrol that thought it was under
fire from Taliban militants.
The deadly incident briefly severed
military coordination between the two sides. It's also further
complicated an already fractured political relationship and again
angered the Pakistani public, which was made furious by the U.S. Navy
SEALs raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden last May.
Pakistan's
army Chief Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani has re-established contact with
U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen, the coalition's top commander in
Afghanistan, but two border posts used to ferry NATO supplies into
Afghanistan remain shut in protest.
U.S. officials believe
confusion and miscommunication between a joint US-Afghan patrol and the
Pakistani border posts led to the deaths in November.
Pakistani
officials at the embassy briefing — they declined to allow their names
to be used — said the Pakistani investigation found that continued fire
by U.S. attack helicopters and an AC-130 gunship, even after NATO had
acknowledged it was firing on the two Pakistani border posts, proved
that NATO troops intended to kill their troops.
Pakistan refused
to take part in the NATO investigation, the officials said, because its
cooperation in three previous deadly border incidents yielded no new
information, nor punishment of anyone on the NATO side for wrongdoing.
The
officials walked the assembled reporters through a painstaking
recreation of the incident from the Pakistani army's point of view, with
Powerpoint charts, maps, photographs and information drawn from
interviews with surviving troops and residents in the mountainous area.
Photos
of the bases — Volcano and Boulder posts — show barebones, roofless
posts made of stacked stones and sandbags, built on two exposed ridges,
roughly 300 yards inside the Pakistan border.
A slide titled
"Mistaken Identity Not Possible" detailed the numerous ways NATO and the
Pakistanis keep track of each other at the border, including NATO's
monitoring of the Pakistani border posts' radio transmissions, which
were frantically reporting being under fire by NATO aircraft.
The
Pakistanis say the incident began when Volcano base took fire from U.S.
aircraft at roughly 15 minutes past midnight and reported it was under
attack. The Pakistani liaison then immediately reported to his U.S.
counterparts at border coordination post Nawa, on the Afghan side of the
border.
Yet the attacks continued, the senior Pakistani defense
official said, so the second Pakistani base, Boulder, opened fire on the
NATO aircraft to try to protect the first — so the aircraft engaged the
second base as well. With communication with both posts lost, the
commanding officer ran up the hill with a rescue team and was also
killed, the official said. Another would-be Pakistani army rescue force
was pinned down when it tried to approach.
During this nighttime
firefight, NATO communicated at roughly 1:15 a.m. to the Pakistanis that
NATO commanders realized they were attacking a Pakistani base and had
been ordered to stop, the official said. Yet the Pakistanis say the
attack continued until almost 2:20 a.m.
An early, rough account of
the American version of events indicates the U.S.-Afghan patrol thought
it was under fire from militants just after midnight. The U.S. account
said the patrol checked with the Pakistani military at the outset, and
was assured there were no friendly troops in the area. The Pakistani
military says the coordinates given were actually nine miles north of
the posts and subsequent firefight.
U.S. records show the aerial
response included Apache attack helicopters and an AC-130 gunship,
though it's unclear from the battlefield report when the bombardment
started or ended.
In an earlier Pakistani version of events,
Pakistani border sentries heard suspicious activity about 12:15 a.m.
when the U.S.-Afghan patrol first reported contact with the Taliban. The
Pakistani post fired flares to illuminate the area, and then followed
that with small arms fire after spotting movement in the brush near
their camp.
Flares sound much like mortar fire, the type reported by the U.S.-Afghan patrol as their first contact with the Taliban. AP
