New York Times on US military's investigation of Nov. 25 NATO-Pakistan border shooting incident

"In an important detail that was not disclosed at the Pentagon briefing but is likely to further aggravate relations with Islamabad, an American officer in Afghanistan said the joint patrol of 120 Afghan and American Special Operations forces, operating along the often poorly demarcated frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, had come under Pakistani fire as it was entering an Afghan village, endangering Afghan civilians as well as the soldiers. The American officer said he believed that the Pakistanis had used night-vision technology because their shooting was unusually accurate, even though there were no casualties."

Here is the link to the full transcript of the Pentagon press briefing under discussion in the Times report (see below). The details provided by the report raise many questions; for instance:

> Why did the Pentagon offer to make "bereavement payments" to families of the dead Pakistani soldiers? Who advised them to do this? A NATO 'partner?' Someone at State, Pentagon, NSC? A U.S. commander in Afghanistan?

> Given the U.S. military's certain knowledge that it would be folly to share specific information on U.S. troop locations with Pakistan's military, why did the Pentagon characterize U.S. actions leading up the shooting incident as "mistakes?" See Michael Waltz's December 6, 2011 report for Foreign Policy's AFPAK Channel on Pakistan's Double Game on the Durand Line:

[...] Indeed, it is important to understand that incidents such as the [Nov. 25] exchange in Mohmand are not isolated occurrences, though only the most serious make headlines. Second, as our policy community is finally coming to fully realize, Pakistani forces are not only turning a blind eye, but actively aiding and abetting the insurgency in attacks on not only the Afghans but U.S. and coalition forces as well. That said, it's equally important to realize the painstaking, almost paralyzing, lengths to which the coalition goes to attempt to coordinate with the Pakistani Army and to avoid accidental attacks on their posts.
[...]
Rather than questioning the [NATO] coalition procedures, we should be questioning why the Taliban are so confident in their own safety in proximity to the Pakistani military.[...]

> Regarding the speculation that the Pakistani troops were using night-vision goggles when they fired into Afghanistan -- where did they obtain such equipment? One place would be the markets in Pakistan that specialize in selling military equipment stolen from NATO supply convoys trucking through Pakistan and Afghanistan. (See Shahan Mufti's detailed Dec. 15 report on the thefts.) But has the U.S. provided the Pak military with night-vision goggles?

The above questions are just for starters but for now here's the report, which I'm featuring in its entirety because every sentence is important -- right down to the last sentence. Or I should say especially the last sentence is important because it's a reminder that the Pakistanis didn't initiate shooting at the U.S.-Afghan patrol for no reason:

U.S. Concedes Error, but Says Pakistan Fired First at Border
By ERIC SCHMITT and MATTHEW ROSENBERG
December 22, 2011

Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Matthew Rosenberg from Kabul, Afghanistan. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.

WASHINGTON — A United States military investigation has concluded that a series of checks and balances designed to prevent deadly cross-border mishaps with Pakistan failed to avert a NATO airstrike last month that killed 26 Pakistani troops in part because American officials did not trust Pakistan enough to give it detailed information about American troop locations in Afghanistan.

A report by the inquiry concluded that mistakes by both American and Pakistani troops led to airstrikes against two Pakistani posts on the Afghanistan border. But two crucial findings — that the Pakistanis fired first at a joint Afghan-American patrol and that American aircraft fired back after repeatedly warning the Pakistanis that they were shooting at allied troops — were likely to further anger Pakistan, and plunge the already tattered relationship between the United States and Pakistan to new depths.

In a statement and later at a news conference here on Thursday, the Defense Department said that “inadequate coordination by U.S. and Pakistani military officers” and “incorrect mapping information” that NATO had provided to the Pakistani authorities capped a chain of errors that caused the debacle.

“This, coupled with other gaps in information about the activities and placement of units from both sides contributed to the tragic results,” George Little, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters.

The incident, the worst in nearly a decade riddled with fatal cross-border blunders, underscored gaping flaws in a system established in recent years to avoid such mistakes. In this case, American officials acknowledged that the American policy of not divulging to Pakistan the precise location of allied ground troops patrolling in Afghanistan — for fear Pakistan might jeopardize their operations — contributed to the accident and underscored what the chief investigator called an “overarching lack of trust between the two sides.”

On Nov. 25, the same day the incident began, Gen. John Allen, the allied commander in Afghanistan, met in Islamabad with Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistani Army chief, to try to improve border coordination procedures.

In an important detail that was not disclosed at the Pentagon briefing but is likely to further aggravate relations with Islamabad, an American officer in Afghanistan said the joint patrol of 120 Afghan and American Special Operations forces, operating along the often poorly demarcated frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, had come under Pakistani fire as it was entering an Afghan village, endangering Afghan civilians as well as the soldiers. The American officer said he believed that the Pakistanis had used night-vision technology because their shooting was unusually accurate, even though there were no casualties.

Pakistan has insisted that its forces did nothing wrong, and that they did not fire the first shots. Rather, senior Pakistani military and civilian officials have openly accused the United States of intentionally striking the border posts, even after Pakistani officers called their counterparts to complain their outposts were under allied attack.

The Defense Department statement included an expression of regret, though it did not appear to go as far as the apology Pakistani officials have demanded. “For the loss of life — and for the lack of proper coordination between U.S. and Pakistani forces that contributed to those losses — we express our deepest regret,” it said.

Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the Pakistani military spokesman, said in a text message on Thursday: “The Pak Army does not agree with the findings of the US NATO inquiry as being reported in the media.”

Pentagon officials said that on Wednesday, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. James N. Mattis, head of the military’s Central Command, called General Kayani to tell him the inquiry was complete and to offer a briefing. It is unclear when that briefing will happen, American officials said.

A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, said the United States was prepared to make bereavement payments to families of the Pakistani soldiers killed. But a senior Pakistan security official in Islamabad said last week that Pakistan would refuse any “blood money.”

In a telephone briefing with reporters here, Brig. Gen. Stephen A. Clark of the Air Force, who conducted the inquiry, said that both sides erred after the allied patrol.

According to a chronology by General Clark and other American military officials, the patrol planned to raid the village of Maya, about one mile inside the Afghan province of Kunar, near the Pakistani tribal area of Mohmand. Hiking up steep “goat trails” on a moonless night, the patrol came under heavy machine-gun fire from the ridge above at 11:09 p.m. on Nov. 25.

General Clark said the first allied mistake was that NATO did not inform Pakistan about the allied patrol that night, so the Pakistani soldiers would not have known to expect allied forces near their posts. NATO and Pakistani forces are supposed to inform each other about operations on the border precisely to avoid this kind of mistake.

After the allied ground force came under fire, the Pakistanis continued their attack despite flares fired from an AC-130 gunship and deafening, 600-mile-an-hour, low-level passes by two F-15E fighter jets — neither of which the Taliban would have been able to do — intended to warn to the Pakistanis.

The second American error came at 11:24 p.m. when, with the Pakistani firing continuing, the AC-130 gunship opened fire for six minutes. That strike was set in motion when ground commanders believed they had been told no Pakistani troops were in the area. In reality, NATO was still checking.

Moreover, before calling in the airstrikes, the Americans tried to verify whether Pakistani troops were in the area, but gave the Pakistani Army only a general location of the potential airstrike targets, and a wrong one at that. That error was compounded when a NATO liaison incorrectly configured his digital map.

“This goes back to the opening part of an overarching lack of trust between the two sides as far as giving out specifics, but it’s also a very specific failure that occurred now that we have a firefight on our hands,” General Clark said.

The Pakistanis made mistakes, too, he said. Pakistan never told NATO that it had established the border posts, which had been up for about three months and which a senior American military official called “a bunch of rocks.” Pakistan has said it did tell NATO. Each side is supposed to inform the other when setting up new border positions.

Why the Pakistanis were firing remains unclear. Pakistan did not participate in the inquiry, but General Clark acknowledged that he did not take into consideration news media reports on several detailed public briefings held by the Pakistani military in recent days.

From 11:44 p.m. until midnight, the AC-130 and Apache helicopter gunships resumed firing on “rudimentary bunkers.”

A third engagement took place starting at 12:40 a.m., when a heavy machine gun began firing from the Pakistani side “a little further north” of the first Pakistani shooting. About 1 a.m., American officials finally confirmed the Pakistan presence at the posts, and firing ceased.

The joint patrol resumed its mission in the village, the American officer said, and seized one of the largest caches of weapons in Kunar Province this year along with a bomb-making facility.

By December up to 75 percent of U.S. military supplies for Afghan War will not be shipped through Pakistan

Passengers boarding a Tashkent-bound train in Termez, the Uzbek station nearest the Afghan border, June 25. Soon trains from here will be going to the Afghan cities of Hairatan and Mazar-i-Sharif.

Photo: Maksim Yeniseyev

As recently as 2009, the U.S. military moved 90 percent of its surface cargo through Pakistan ... Today, almost 40 percent of surface cargo arrives in Afghanistan from the north, along a patchwork of Central Asian rail and road routes that the Pentagon calls the Northern Distribution Network. Military planners said they are pushing to raise the northern network’s share to as much as 75 percent by the end of this year.

Whenever I feature an entire report from a news organization rather than quoting a few paragraphs I have strong reasons for doing so, as with the following Washington Post report.

In this case I want to direct your attention to the amount of space that the Washington Post gives to complaints about the human rights abuses of Russia-friendly nations in the northern supply network. I observe with bitterness that if, during the past decade, the U.S. Department of State and "human rights groups" had invested a fraction of the effort in criticizing Pakistan's regime and human rights abuses as they've done in criticizing such nations, the U.S. effort in Afghanistan not to mention Pakistan's human rights/democracy activists would be in much better shape than they are today.

I have the same feelings about the slowness with which the U.S. military has devised alternate transport routes. If only the U.S. public had known as early as 2007 that its tax dollars were going toward helping Pakistan's military murder U.S. troops, it would have raised such a hue and cry that by 2009 -- when the "reset" of U.S. relations with Russia finally allowed the U.S. military to begin using former Soviet republics as alternate supply routes -- there would have been no U.S. supplies transported through Pakistan since then.

That would have given the U.S. a huge tactical advantage in the Afghan War -- one that it threw away with its almost exclusive reliance on Pakistan as a supply route. And the advantage would have helped save God Knows how many Afghans and NATO forces from being killed and maimed by Taliban working under the direction of Pakistani military advisors.

The State Department wasn't interested in tactical advantage; it was interested in expansion of its power. Thus, it found in the success of the PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team) approach in Iraq a way to increase its budget by applying the approach to Afghanistan. State also saw a bonanza for its contractors (and thereby another avenue to increasing its budget) by pushing for increased USAID projects in Pakistan.

All this meant State had to blind itself to the fact that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terrorism, a democracy in name only, and the primary enemy combatant against NATO forces in Afghanistan. Not to mention the fact that State's pushing for nation building efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan added to the huge amount of non-military stuff that NATO convoys had to haul through Pakistan.

Read USAID's April interview with General John Allen -- now the head of ISAF and U.S. forces in Afghanistan -- for an idea of whether State has turned over a new leaf since the U.S. public learned that Pakistan is conducting a covert war on the United States. When pigs fly will State return of its own cognizance to being only a foreign office.

With regard to the WaPo report's discussion about the poor condition of the railway system in Uzbekistan -- see this June 29 report from Central Asia Online (not to be confused with Asia Times Online) titled, Uzbek-Afghan railway to start running in July. Note that the Asian Development Bank financed much of the vital railway project. And the WaPo report mentions that in February Uzbekistan announced that it had received $218 million loan from Japan to upgrade the line to the Afghan border.

If you ask why the World Bank -- still a U.S.-led organization despite China's great influence there -- didn't finance such loans, go ask the Pentagon and U.S. Department of State to speed-dial their buddies in the 'Get Russia' crowd for the answer. You might also ask State whether any USAID funds ever went to helping Uzbekistan upgrade a portion of their railway system so that U.S. military supplies could be more reliably shipped via that route.

More a logistics nightmare than a "miracle" but by gum the routes skirt Pakistan

Source: National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. By Gene Thorp - The Washington Post

See the following report at the Washington Post website for source links.

U.S. turns to other routes to supply Afghan war as relations with Pakistan fray

By Craig Whitlock
July 2, 2011
The Washington Post

The U.S. military is rapidly expanding its aerial and Central Asian supply routes to the war in Afghanistan, fearing that Pakistan could cut off the main means of providing American and NATO forces with fuel, food and equipment.

Although Pakistan has not explicitly threatened to sever the supply lines, Pentagon officials said they are concerned the routes could be endangered by the deterioration of U.S.-Pakistan relations, partly fed by ill will from the cross-border raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Memories are fresh of Pakistan’s temporary closure of a major crossing into Afghanistan in September, resulting in a logjam of hundreds of supply trucks and fuel tankers, dozens of which were destroyed in attacks by insurgents.

While reducing the shipment of cargo through Pakistan would address a strategic weakness that U.S. military officials have long considered an Achilles’ heel, shifting supply lines elsewhere would substantially increase the cost of the war and make the United States more dependent on authoritarian countries in Central Asia.

A senior U.S. defense official said the military wants to keep using Pakistan, which offers the most direct and the cheapest routes to Afghanistan. But the Pentagon also wants the ability to bypass the country if necessary.

With landlocked Afghanistan lacking seaports, and hostile Iran blocking access from the west, Pentagon logisticians have limited alternatives.

“It’s either Central Asia or Pakistan — those are the two choices. We’d like to have both,” the defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating Pakistan. “We’d like to have a balance between them, and not be dependent on either one, but always have the possibility of switching.”

U.S. military officials said they have emergency backup plans in case the Pakistan routes became unavailable.

“We will be on time, all the time,” said Vice Adm. Mark D. Harnitchek, deputy commander of the U.S. Transportation Command, which oversees the movement of supplies and equipment.

In such an event, however, the military would have to deliver the bulk of its cargo by air, a method that might not be sustainable; it costs up to 10 times as much as shipping via Pakistan.

“We’d have to be a little bit more mindful of what we put in the pipe,” Harnitchek said.

The Defense Department is already boosting the amount of cargo it sends to Afghanistan by air. To save on costs, the military is shipping as many of those supplies as possible to seaports in the Persian Gulf before loading them on planes bound for the war zone.

As recently as 2009, the U.S. military moved 90 percent of its surface cargo through Pakistan, arriving by ship at the port in Karachi and then snaking through mountain passes, deserts and remote tribal areas before crossing the border into Afghanistan. The Pakistan supply lines are served entirely by contractors instead of U.S. military convoys and are vulnerable to bandits, insurgents and natural disasters.

Today, almost 40 percent of surface cargo arrives in Afghanistan from the north, along a patchwork of Central Asian rail and road routes that the Pentagon calls the Northern Distribution Network. Military planners said they are pushing to raise the northern network’s share to as much as 75 percent by the end of this year.

Obama administration officials said they are negotiating expanded agreements with Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other countries that would allow for the delivery of additional supplies to the Afghan war zone. Washington also wants permission to withdraw vehicles and other equipment from Afghanistan as the U.S. military prepares to pull out one-third of its forces by September 2012.

By shifting the burden to Central Asia, however, the U.S. military has become increasingly reliant on authoritarian countries, prompting criticism from human rights groups that the Obama administration is cozying up to dictators.

For instance, more than one-third of the northern-route cargo passes through tiny Azerbaijan, a country saddled by “pervasive corruption,” according to the State Department’s annual human rights report. U.S. defense officials also say the northern supply lines would not be possible without the cooperation of Russia. One new route runs through Siberia.

The biggest potential choke point, however, lies in Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic that borders northern Afghanistan. It previously had kicked the U.S. military out of the country after Washington complained about the killing of hundreds of protesters in 2005.

But as the United States has deepened its involvement in Afghanistan, relations with Uzbekistan have warmed up again. Today, more than 80 percent of supplies shipped along the Northern Distribution Network pass through the country.

Expanded supply lines

The northern routes were developed in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration. Since then, the U.S. government has expanded the network into a spiderweb of supply lines.

Some start at Baltic seaports and run through Russia and Central Asia by rail. Another key line picks up traffic on the Black Sea and funnels it through the Caucasus region. One winding truck route begins at a U.S. Army depot at Germersheim, Germany, and ends, an average of 60 days later, at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. As with the Pakistan routes, the deliveries are all made by contractors.

“If you look at what we’ve done there in the last two years, we look at it more or less as a logistics miracle,” said Alan F. Estevez, the Pentagon’s principal deputy assistant secretary for logistics.

There are two big limitations, however, on what the Pentagon can ship through Central Asia. First, supplies are generally restricted to food, water and construction material; ammunition, weapons and other “lethal” cargo are prohibited.

Also, the routes are strictly one-way. Nothing can be shipped back out of the war zone.

U.S. officials said they are trying to negotiate deals with several countries to remove those restrictions. That will be crucial as the United States withdraws 33,000 troops from Afghanistan over the next 15 months, military leaders said.

Perhaps the most vital section in the northern network is a rail line that crosses south through Uzbekistan and over the Amu Darya river to reach Hairaton, Afghanistan. About five out of every six cargo containers travel this route.

“In reality, Uzbekistan is really at the center of all these routes,” said Alexander Cooley, a Barnard College professor and an expert on U.S. military relations in Central Asia. “They’re certainly in the catbird seat. And they know it.”

The final leg of the Uzbek rail line, from the city of Karshi to the Afghan border, underscores how the U.S. military has been forced to rely on rickety routes to sustain its troops.

In November 2009, U.S. embassy officials in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, were warned by a confidential source that the tracks were brittle and at risk of fracturing if trains carried more than half their usual loads. On top of that, the Soviet-era locomotives carrying U.S. cargo were not designed to cross steep mountains; engineers had to apply the brakes almost constantly as they moved downhill.

“By the time the trains have descended from the mountains, the wheels are glowing red hot,” the embassy reported in a diplomatic cable. The source, an engineer, said he was “appalled by how long it takes to transport anything by rail in Uzbekistan” and that he refused to take the train for fear of a crash.

The cable, titled “Uzbek Rail: Red Hot Wheels to Afghanistan” and obtained by the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks, concluded that “a train wreck is possible in the literal sense.”

U.S. military officials said they knew of no accidents or safety problems on the 200-mile rail segment. In February, Uzbekistan announced it had obtained a $218 million loan from Japan to upgrade the line to the Afghan border.

Human rights concerns

Uzbekistan has been assailed by human rights groups for repression under President Islam Karimov, who has ruled the country since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Freedom House, a Washington-based advocacy group, ranks it as one of the nine worst countries in the world for civil liberties and political rights.

From 2001 to 2005, the U.S. military relied on an Uzbek air base as a hub for combat and supply missions to Afghanistan. U.S. forces were evicted from the base after Washington pressured Karimov to allow an international probe into the deaths of hundreds of anti-government protesters in the province of Andijan.

Since 2008, however, Washington has steadily worked to repair relations. A stream of U.S. military leaders and diplomats has visited Tashkent, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in December and Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, in late May. Uzbekistan, in turn, has reopened its railroads, highways and airspace for U.S. cargo.

Thomas M. Sanderson, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the Obama administration has continued to raise human rights concerns with Uzbekistan but that the Afghan supply routes usually take precedence.

“There is no doubt about it. We are there for one primary reason, and that is to enable our operations in Afghanistan,” said Sanderson, who has studied the Northern Distribution Network.

State Department officials said they do not hesitate to press Uzbekistan to improve its human rights record. When Clinton visited Tashkent, they noted, she made a point of meeting activists and calling for the release of jailed journalists.

“We’ve made a real effort to try to engage Uzbekistan on human rights and in trafficking persons, and in some cases there’s been some progress,” said Robert O. Blake, assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia. “This is something that’s in their own interest to do, to allow greater freedom of religion and greater freedom of expression.”

Diplomatic cables, however, show Uzbek officials have not hesitated to demand U.S. restraint on human rights in exchange for cooperation on the supply routes.

In March 2009, shortly after the State Department gave an award to an Uzbek human rights activist, Foreign Minister Vladi­mir Norov made an “implicit threat” to suspend deliveries to Afghanistan, according to a cable signed by Richard B. Norland, the U.S. ambassador in Tashkent at the time.

An angry Karimov also complained to Norland personally.

“Put yourself in my place,” Karimov told the ambassador, according to the cable. “Would you trust me if I had done this?”

In that cable and others to Washington, Norland counseled the Obama administration to check its public criticism of Karimov to maintain the viability of the supply lines. In advance of a visit to Tashkent by a senior State Department official, Norland advised using “private, but frank diplomacy” to cajole Uzbekistan rather than “more openly coercive measures.”

“Uzbek pride often gets the better of rationality and officials here will think nothing of cutting off their nose to spite their face,” Norland added in a July 2009 cable.