Afghan Police. — File Photo

KABUL: Two American soldiers were killed by a member of the Afghan local police Friday in a new “green-on-blue” attack, Nato said.

The deaths take to 39 the number of international troops killed in 28 such attacks so far this year, according to Nato figures.

The attack came a week after six American troops were killed in a single day by their local colleagues and will further erode trust between foreign troops and the Afghans they work with.

“Two US Forces-Afghanistan service members died this morning as a result of an insider threat attack in (western) Farah province,” the US-led International Security Assistance Force said.

“A member of the Afghan Local Police turned his weapon against two USFOR-A service members. The attacker was shot and killed.”

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said Tuesday he was “very concerned” about the rise in “insider attacks” and the impact they are having on cooperation with Afghan allies.

Some of the attacks are claimed by Taliban insurgents, who say they have infiltrated the ranks of Afghan security forces, but many are attributed to cultural differences and antagonism between local and US-led allied forces.

Nato has about 130,000 soldiers helping the Afghan government fight an insurgency by Taliban, but they are due to pull out in 2014 and are increasingly working with Afghans they are training to take over.

US soldiers with the Nato-led Isaf wrap the body of a comrade.—AP Photo

KABUL: The Nato military coalition in Afghanistan says two of its service members have been killed in an insurgent attack in the east of the country.  

The military alliance says the attack happened on Saturday but doesn’t provide further details.

Nato also did not provide the nationalities of the dead.

Most of the troops in eastern Afghanistan are Americans, Saturday’s deaths bring the number of international service members killed in Afghanistan so far this month to at least 42.

July 2011 saw 52 international service members killed.

Nato supply trucks. — File photo

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD: The United States and Pakistan appear to be close to resolving the dispute over the reopening of Nato supply routes to Afghanistan, official sources in both the capitals told Dawn on Sunday.

The sources pointed out that two new developments — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call to Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf and the presence of a high-level US delegation in Islamabad — had raised hopes that the dispute might soon be resolved.

According to informed sources in Islamabad, an important meeting between the two sides took place on Sunday shortly after the arrival of Commander of International Security Assistance Force General John Allen on his second visit to the country in four days.

The Pakistani side at the talks included Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, Finance Minister Dr Abdul Hafeez Shaikh and Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, while the US side was represented by Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, Isaf Commander General John Allen and US Ambassador Cameron Munter.

The meeting coincided with Secretary Clinton’s call to Raja Pervez.

While congratulating Mr Ashraf on assuming the office of prime minister, she said Pakistan and the United States were partners in the war on terror and would succeed in defeating the common enemy.

Official sources in Washington said that “both sides are rapidly moving towards resolving this issue” but refused to give details for fears that “a media leak at this stage may derail the process”.

A US team, which includes senior members of the White House National Security staff, is believed to have come with the draft of a proposal that “meets Pakistan’s demand for an apology without embarrassing” the Obama administration, the sources said.

The sources in Washington are linking Secretary Clinton’s call to the prime minister to these developments.

Washington’s diplomatic and political circles say that the State Department is strongly supporting the proposal to accept Pakistan’s demand for an apology over the Nov 26 US air raid that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

Initially, US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta and other officials said that the Pakistanis were focusing on increasing tariff rates for using the supply routes – from $250 to $5,000 per container.

But the Pakistanis later made it clear that this was not their focus and that they were even willing to give up the demand for a tariff increase if the US apologised over the Salala incident.

The Americans, however, insisted that they could not tender a one-sided apology as their own investigations showed that US and Pakistani soldiers based near Salala were both responsible for the incident.

The US Defence Department, once considered a traditional ally of the Pakistani establishment, however, opposed the proposed apology. The US Congress not only opposed apologising to Pakistan but also demanded punitive actions against the country for allegedly sheltering Osama bin Laden, backing the Haqqani network —charges that Pakistani strongly rejects — and for jailing Dr Shakil Afridi.

But since the State Department backed the Pakistani demand for an apology, it made sense for Secretary Clinton to take a lead in resolving the dispute.

Pakistan’s Ambassador Sherry Rehman and her team also played a key role in this process.

They held dozens of meetings at the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon and in the Congress over the past three weeks, strongly advocating Pakistan’s case.

Diplomatic sources in Washington, however, warn that the dispute is far from resolved and even a small glitch can derail the whole process as it has happened at least three times in the past two months.

Recently, a US team spent weeks in Islamabad, discussing various aspects of the dispute but returned to Washington earlier this month without an agreement.

But both US and Pakistani officials later said that this team of US experts had finalised all technical details of the Nato routes dispute with their Pakistani counterparts.

“What both sides need now is a political will, so we are now waiting for a political decision,” a senior US official told Dawn in a recent meeting.

Diplomatic observers in Washington say that Secretary Clinton’s call to Prime Minister Ashraf “perhaps indicates that both sides are now coming close to this political will needed to resolve the dispute”.

General James Mattis, the head of the US military's Central Command. — AFP File photo

NEW YORK: A top American military commander is expected to travel Pakistan this month in an effort to repair United States’ strategic relationship with Pakistan which was frozen for more than two months.

The New York Times Tuesday, citing Obama administration officials, reported that General James Mattis, the head of the US military’s Central Command, will meet General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the Pakistan Army chief of staff, to discuss the investigations of Nato’s attack on Pakistani posts near Afghan border that killed 24 soldiers, as well as new border coordination procedures to prevent recurrence of the episode.

The newspaper said in a dispatch from Washington that General Mattis’s visit, the first by a high-ranking US official since the cross -border confrontation in November, was to have begun Thursday, but has been postponed by at least a week pending what is expected to be a spirited debate in Pakistan’s Parliament over a new security policy toward the United States.

The dispatch cited Pakistani officials as saying they will probably reopen Nato supply lines running through their territory, which have been closed for more than two months.

The State Department is supporting a proposal circulating in the US administration to issue a formal apology for the deaths of the Pakistani soldiers in the Nato strikes.

“We’ve felt an apology would be helpful in creating some space,” an unnamed US official who has been briefed on the State Department’s view was quoted as saying by the Times.

Pakistan's High Commissioner in Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hassan - File Photo

KARACHI: Pakistan’s High Commissioner in Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hassan said he could not come to present in front of the Abbottabad Commission due to his ill health, DawnNews reported on Saturday.

Earlier, Wajid Shamsul Hassan had also not attended the conference of the Pakistan’s ambassadors which took place pertaining to the issue of the Nato attacks.

Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, head of the ISI. - Photo by AFP (File Photo)

ISLAMABAD: Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Chief Lt-Gen Shuja Pasha’s visit to Qatar, home to US Centcom’s regional headquarters, has led to speculations about an ‘intelligence back channel’ between Pakistan and the US to reset troubled security cooperation.

Gen Pasha, whose overseas trips are not officially announced, is said to have returned on Wednesday from a trip to Qatar, which had been ‘authorised’ by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.

Mr Gilani had earlier this week himself disclosed Gen Pasha’s visit during a media interaction when he said he had approved the trip.

Mr Gilani would travel to Doha next month.

A western diplomatic source claimed that Gen Pasha during his stay in Qatar met the US officials.

The claim could not be independently verified.

Gen Pasha’s visit followed the release of Centcom’s preliminary report on the November 26 Nato attacks on Pakistani border posts.

Centcom Commander Gen James Mattis initially planned to visit Islamabad this week for sharing with the Pakistani military authorities findings of the probe, but had to cancel the visit after his hosts expressed their inability to receive him because of the situation at home, where anti-America sentiments are running high and a parliamentary body is working to review the terms of engagement with Washington.

No comments were available from military’s public affairs wing, the ISPR.

But diplomatic observers insist that indications from both Islamabad and Washington point towards an impending thaw in relations that went into a free fall after the Nato attacks.

While Gen Mattis directed Isaf (International Security Assistance Force) to improve ties with Pakistan and Pentagon hinted at possible punitive action against those responsible for the border incident — something desired by Pakistan Army, the Foreign Office on Thursday too spoke about efforts to mend ties.

“We are on speaking terms with the US. Doubtless there are problems but we are trying to put our relations on a track that is transparent and in sync with our aspirations. I am reluctant to discuss specifics,” FO spokesman Abdul Basit said at the weekly media briefing.

“We want to have a good relationship with the US, a relationship that is based on mutual trust and mutual respect,” Mr Basit said.

The FO has all along said that normalisation of ties will begin only after parliament completes the review of ties.

“Please wait for our parliamentary process to complete,” the spokesman said when asked about back channel diplomacy to end impasse in the ties.

The diplomatic observers are also attaching importance to the timing of Kabul’s withdrawal of objection to Qatar hosting Taliban’s office because the announcement came while Gen Pasha was in Qatar, supposedly talking to US officials.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai had on Tuesday for the first time agreed to setting up of the Taliban office in the Gulf state, something which he had all along opposed.

Cooperation between the US and Pakistan over Afghan reconciliation efforts too came to a halt after the border incident.
Pakistan boycotted Bonn conference on Afghanistan earlier this month and the trilateral Pakistan-US-Afghanistan meeting was also cancelled because of strained ties.

Ties between the United States and Pakistan are fraught, with Islamabad blocking the Afghan supply line for one of the longest periods yet. - File Photo

KABUL: Pakistan has restored liaison officers at coordination centres on the Afghanistan border, Nato said on Monday, in a slight easing of tensions, after Nato air strikes last month killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers and provoked fury across the country.

But the US-led coalition’s supply lines that run through Pakistan remain closed since the Nov. 26 incident and it is both in the interests of foreign forces as well as Pakistan that the routes be opened sooner rather than later, the alliance said.

Ties between the United States and Pakistan are fraught, with Islamabad blocking the Afghan supply line for one of the longest periods yet.

Last week, US lawmakers agreed to freeze $700 million in aid to Pakistan demanding it disrupt the movement of fertilisers used in making homemade bombs, the deadliest killer of foreign troops.

But the top Nato commander in Afghanistan, US General John Allen, had spoken to the Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani and there were signs of progress over the last few days, Brigadier General Carsten Jacobsen, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told reporters.

“We have seen liaison officers, Pakistani officers, return to border coordination centres, General Allen has spoken to General Kayani, so we are moving in the right direction,” he said.

The border control centres were set up to help Nato and Afghan forces and their Pakistani counterparts on the other side of the porous border to coordinate operations against militants and avoid the kind of the incident that occurred last month in which two Pakistan army posts in Mohmand came under Nato fire.

Pakistan said the United States had carried out an unprovoked attack, an accusation rejected by Washington. An investigation has been ordered and Jacobsen declined to go into details of the incident ahead of the results.

But he urged Pakistan to reopen the two supply routes into Afghanistan, which carry just under a third of all cargo for foreign forces fighting in the landlocked nation.

“It is in our interest as well as Pakistan’s interests, for economic reasons that they reopen these routes sooner rather than later,” he said.

Night Raids

Jacobsen also defended the use of night raids on Afghan homes to hunt down insurgents, despite yet another call overnight from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to end the practice, deeply hated by most Afghans.

“Night operations remain the safest form of operations conducted to take insurgents off the battlefield,” he said, adding that in 85 percent of such raids not a single shot is fired.

To begin this discussion, I recognise that many readers may discount the institutions and treaties of international law as mere manipulations by Western powers to impose their will on developing nations like Pakistan. If one looks to organisations like the International Criminal Court, their prosecutions have primarily targeted African leaders. In this respect, international courts are similar to the domestic courts of Europe and the US, where possessing dark-skin often subjects one to greater scrutiny by the law.

Though the international tribunals may be influenced by its ‘elite members’ who enjoy immunity from the law they subject others to, few alternative options remain for Pakistan to successfully challenge the violation of its sovereignty. One example of the ways in which Pakistan is protesting the recent incursion by Nato that led to the death of two dozen Pakistani soldiers is by shutting down American interests like Shamsi Airbase and supply routes to Afghanistan. However, these strategies have been attempted previously and failed; usually the US issues some threats and promises to the Pakistan military and things return to “normal” (if such a state exists in US-Pak relations).

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching (hanging) me, and I think that’s pretty important.” In this manner, there are several international principles that support Pakistan’s claims that the US has violated international law in trampling on their sovereignty. The United Nation’s Charter Article 2 states the organisation is based on “the principle of sovereign equality of all its members”, and that all members must refrain “from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

Therefore, there is an actionable claim by Pakistan against the US for the drone attacks carried out on its territory, leading to the death of hundreds of civilians. A nation in Pakistan’s position can file such a claim through various international venues including the International Court of Justice (ICC) or the International Criminal Court (ICJ). However, there is a cost to bringing an action before an international tribunal. Not only will bringing such claims subject Pakistan to international scrutiny of its own domestic policies, but the US is likely to raise valid defenses against Pakistan’s allegations.

The first case Pakistan could lodge against the US is with respects to how the drone program violates its sovereignty, for which the US will raise the defense of “consent.” While international law bans the use of force, under the principle of consent, a nation may use force on the territory of another nation, so long as the other nation agrees to allow the action. Therefore, if the US was brought before an international tribunal, it would likely uncover the secret agreements between themselves and Pakistani leaders giving permission and consent for the drone program.

This is only one part of Pandora’s surprise for Pakistan. The International Court of Justice also has a requirement that a nation must exhaust all local remedies before attempting to bring a claim before the court. With the accusations and evidence presumably to be presented by the US, the ICJ could find the case against the US as ‘unripe’. This would mean that Pakistan’s highest domestic court, the Supreme Court, would have to initiate a case to determine the liability of Pakistan’s top brass in consenting to a violation of the nation’s sovereignty through secret deals with the US.

The other issue that could be raised by Pakistan is the recent cross border Nato raid that led to the destruction of two military outposts and the death of two dozen soldiers. The International Criminal Court was established by the Rome Convention, and aims to prosecute any crimes of war and aggression with universal jurisdiction. This means that any nation that has signed the Convention is obliged to arrest any suspected violator of the Convention, including military personnel.

This would mean that if Nato’s cross border raid was found to be a crime of aggression, any individual from the Obama Administration involved in the decision could face arrest and criminal penalties. However, the treaty also bans all forms of ethnic cleansing, through murder or forced disappearance, which has been an issue raised in Balochistan. This means that while Pakistan could bring a claim against the US for a crime of aggression, Pakistan would have to subject itself to inquiries on Balochistan, a topic the military would much rather avoid.

However, fortunately or unfortunately for these nations, neither Pakistan nor the US have consented to the Convention or the International Criminal Court. Further, under Article 98 of the Convention, nations may grant immunity to one another and relieve themselves of the obligation to arrest and deliver any potential violators. Based on their historical relationship and the shared critique that the Rome agreement tramples on the sovereignty of nations, the US and Pakistan would be likely to make such an agreement.

International treaties, at least nominally, attempt to prosecute crimes not nations. Therefore, a nation should ensure their hands are clean of international crimes, or that they are willing to air their ‘dirty laundry’ in the international forum before they bring a case against another state.

When it comes to a violation of sovereignty, Pakistan would have to look introspectively to its generals and civilians who created secret deals with the US and “consented” to their military action. Further, before bringing a case to the International Criminal Court, Pakistan would need to sign the Rome Convention and remove its immunity agreement with the US

This would subject Pakistan’s own leaders to the Court’s inquiries and criminal convictions. Which brings us full circle in the paradox of sovereignty in international law: in attempting to defend ones sovereignty by legal means, a nation must partly sacrifice its own sovereignty to the international tribunals and rules.

The writer holds a Juris Doctorate in the US and is a researcher on comparative law and international law issues.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar - Photo by AFP

ISLAMABAD: Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar received a telephone call from UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, William Hague on Friday evening.

The Foreign Minister apprised the British Foreign Secretary of Pakistan’s concerns with regard to the Nato attacks in Pakistani territory as well as Pakistan’s decision not to participate in the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, according to a press release issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here.

The British Foreign Secretary expressed United Kingdom’s understanding of Pakistan’s position on the matter.

In Pakistan, patriotism is an organised affair, managed and overseen by state institutions through their beneficiaries, lackeys and the right wing lobby as and when the need arises. We have a long history of patriotism of the negative variety only, which oscillates between anti-India and anti-US/West rhetoric.

There is hardly anything positive about Pakistani patriotism; it relies mainly on condemnation of the enemy, real or perceived. Once such rhetoric starts it assumes larger than life proportions; everyone everywhere feels obliged to chip in with their own vent of anger until the brinkmen calling the shots decide that tactical results have been achieved. Whilst the fit lasts, nothing can hold back its fury, not even genuine national interest.

The way Pakistan has reacted to the killing of 24 soldiers by Nato air strikes is the most recent case in point, following the Memogate scandal. Granted it’s intolerable and unacceptable that our so-called allies should attack our army posts, but while our military is able to take armed assaults on the GHQ and the Mehran Naval Base from home-grown militants with some calm, western forces attacking our soldiers is somehow much more outrageous. Similarly, hundreds killed in American drone attacks, mostly terrorists, is more disgraceful than over 20,000 civilian lives lost, including those of women and children, in terrorist attacks on shrines, mosques, schools and in the bazaars. Were those not the sons and daughters of Pakistan, who were killed not in the line of duty defending their country on remote hilltops but whilst going about their daily, innocent routine in our cities? They were not even in the war zone, where bloody accidents can happen.

One is not saying that the latest Nato attack was an accident or a terrible miscalculation on the part of the foreign troops and their Afghan hosts, because if truth be told under these charged up conditions, we don’t really know that. The inflexible reaction shown by the ISPR tells us that it has totally rejected such an explanation and called the assault deliberate. The government too has stood firmly behind the armed forces’ stand on the issue, and the media just picked up the story and ran with it, with war songs blaring from TV sets and anchors baying for enemy blood. Cable operators have done their bit for the country and taken western news channels off the air. Under whose orders and under what rules and regulations, no one is willing to ask.

Is this a well thought out stance, especially when an inquiry into the air strikes is underway across the border? Even if it is held that the Nato attack was not a mistake but a deliberate move, it has to be asked what was Nato’s motive behind attacking Pakistan Army check posts? If the motive was to pit the Pakistan Army against the foreign troops based in Afghanistan and make that an excuse to extend the theatre of war into Pakistani territory, then the sinister mind that cast the bait must now feel vindicated because we have taken the bait.

Nato supplies have been cut off from Pakistan and the US has been told to vacate the Shamsi air base in Balochistan, perhaps a fitting response to the provocation, but what is next, you may well ask. Where do we go from here? When nations become angry, they behave like the individuals who run them, and this isn’t the best frame of mind in which to rush to conclusions and take action. The past 10 years show us that the hubris displayed by the US in its ‘war on terror’, whose battle cry is vengeance, is not the way to go, because it has got them nowhere. Is that the destination Pakistan also wants to embark upon?

A saner response would have been to use the Bonn conference to put across Pakistan’s point of view much more aggressively to convince the world that Pakistanis have borne the brunt of this war which is going nowhere. A forceful argument based on logic would perhaps still work better than the knee-jerk reaction shown so far. Islamabad should reconsider boycotting the Bonn moot and not opt for diplomatic isolation by being absent from it. Being absent from Bonn can lead to further estrangement from the international community that can spill over to the economic and military domains — a spectre Pakistanis can ill-afford to grapple with on their own, all alone.

It is time to save Pakistan from international isolation even as we damn Nato and demand retribution for the outrageous attack on our border check posts. The soldiers died in the line of duty in a war zone defending their country, which was their job, and have been duly and rightfully honoured. It would be wrong to conduct foreign policy on their martyrdom.

The writer is a member of the staff at Dawn Newspaper.