Mounting tension along the Durand Line calls for serious attention. It is not enough to condemn the American bombing raids over the Pakistan territory. The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai says Afghan forces reserved the right to chase into tribal areas militants who cross over to launch attacks on Afghanistan. His logic is quite simple if the raiders from tribal areas enter the Afghan territory to hit targets we also have the right to hit them back and cross over into Pakistan territory.  Needless to say, Karzai neither has the authority to make such a threat nor the capability to implement it, unless he was speaking at the behest of Americans. Karzai’s threat should therefore be taken as an American warning of what they were planning to in the near future. They have hitherto not bothered about Islamabad’s protestations, nor they have accepted their error of judgement in killing eleven Pakistani soldiers who they suspected of being Taliban. Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s dash to discuss the matter with the US secretary of State was indeed a futile endeavour.
Presidential candidate Obama said long time ago that if hostile intruders do not stop their game, he would order American war planes to bomb targets in the tribal areas. It seems that we may have to wait to see Obama win the US presidentship. There appear to be chances of that happening sooner than that. The Americans are indeed annoyed with Islamabad’s stance of not relying on use of force to settle issues of discord with the Pakistani Taliban. Talking to the militants, they have insisted, would give them wrong ideas and truce with them would give them the opportunity to regroup for future hostilities. The upshot of American reservation about ‘peace accords’ with the militant is it is ‘counterproductive to war on terror’. Small wonder if and when a peace accord with militants is being negotiated there is always uproar from across the border that infiltration into Afghanistan was on the rise. The American ‘think tanks’ did not even approve of the ‘Swat Peace deal’, as an American scholar bluntly said ‘I do not understand the logic of releasing Sufi Mohammad’ even though it was widely known that Sufi-Muhammad once the high priest of enforcing Shariah by force has renounced to use of gun to promote ‘Talibanisation’.
Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani interrupted the presentation of the new budget in the National Assembly on June 12 to condemn an air-strike by the US-led coalition forces in the tribal areas, which hit a Frontier Corps border check post killing 11 personnel. The government would take a stand, he said, for the ‘sovereignty, dignity and self-respect of the country’. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi who was in Paris to attend a meeting on Afghanistan was asked to make a protest to the coalition forces about the ‘third air-strike in Pakistan’s tribal areas within seven weeks’. The foreign office called the air strikes, ‘unprovoked and gross violation of the international borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan’. And then the Foreign Office termed the air strikes ‘totally unacceptable’. It is a wilful negation of the huge sacrifices Pakistan has made in its endeavour to combat terrorism. Ironically the Americans insisted that the air strike was ‘first coordinated’ with the Pakistan Army was anybody's guess.
That Washington has of late been uneasy about developments in the Tribal Areas is widely known. A spokesperson of the US-led Nato forces in Afghanistan defended the air strikes saying the coalition forces had come under fire. Coalition forces had acted in self-defence, he said. At the same time Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman US Joint Chiefs of Staff alleged that Al-Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas were planning new terrorist attacks against the US. He called upon Islamabad to ‘eliminate their sanctuary’. Needless to say the Americans are not satisfied with Pakistan’s endeavour to ‘eliminate the Al-Qaeda sanctuary in the tribal areas, and it would be surprising if American response to what they call alleged continued militants intrusion into Afghanistan in the days to come as a ‘pre-emptive action’ against targets in the tribal areas. Interestingly enough the US defence secretary invited Pakistan to join an investigation that killed 11 Pakistani soldiers saying it regretted it had created problem with a key ally. Foreign Minister Qureshi agreed at joint probe but said, ‘we have to see whether the mechanism that is already there is adequate or inadequate and how can we improve on it so that such incidents are not repeated’.
In a Senate hearing State Department official insisted that Pakistan government must bring the frontier area under its control. About Islamabad’s offer to talk to tribal leaders to secure peace, he said ‘An agreement that allows the extremists to regroup and re-arm is unacceptable’. Ironically, Stephen Cohen, a renowned US scholar told the Senate committee that there were individuals in Pakistani government institutions, particularly the Frontier Corps, who helped the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Pakistan, he said, had tolerates US incursions into the tribal belt as part of a ‘larger deal’. According to him nobody had so far linked the US air attacks to the billion dollar annual assistance Pakistan received from the US but obviously he added ‘there is a link’. To put it bluntly Cohen said ‘one who pays the piper calls the tune’, and if Pakistan was the beneficiary of one billion dollar annual subsidy Pakistan has little choice but to accept US air strikes as part of the ‘larger deal’. You have to live with the American incursions into Pakistani territory is what Stephen Cohen tells Pakistan. Thus all ‘presentations’ against US air strikes, according to him is mere gimmickry, because this was a pre-arranged scenario.
Is hot pursuit into Pakistan territory also a part of the ‘larger deal’ is anybody’s guess. But when Hamid Karzai threatened to chase militants into the tribal areas, the Nato officials did not contradict him by saying ‘this was not on’. The Nato official said that the Karzai statement should be seen as reflection of frustration with militants’ ‘safe havens’, and not as an indication of an imminent attack. Moral of the story for Islamabad, ‘you cannot eat a cake and have it too’; you cannot make peace accords with Pakistan Taliban if you are still a member of the US-led coalition against terrorism.