Night air assault

From an article by Pakistan correspondent Declan Walsh inThe Guardian:

An unnamed former NATO officer says that the only acknowledged U.S. Special Operations Forces raid into Pakistan, in September 2008, was in fact the fourth such cross-border air assault since 2003.

Two of the others targeted Taliban and al-Qaeda “high-value targets” near the border, while the third was to rescue a crashed Predator drone. [The source] said that one of the capture raids succeeded, the other failed and the US sent elite soldiers to the downed Predator because they did not trust Pakistani forces. “People were afraid they would take the parts and reverse- engineer its components,” he said.

Walsh speculates on the possibility that the Obama administration is about to launch more such operations in Pakistan.

Disrupting the Taliban safe haven inside Pakistan is the unspoken part of Barack Obama’s “surge” announced this month. Although 30,000 troops will be deployed to Afghanistan by next summer, the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership is believed to be sheltering on the Pakistani side of the 1,600-mile border.

In recent weeks Washington has sent a stream of senior officials to Islamabad seeking Pakistani action on at least two fronts: attacks on Sirajuddin Haqqani, a warlord with strong al-Qaida ties based in North Waziristan, and an expansion of the CIA-led drone strikes into the western province of Balochistan.

“This is crunch time,” said a senior Pakistani official. “The tone of the Obama administration is growing more ominous. The message is ‘you do it, or we will’.”

If President Obama seriously wants to wage war against al-Qaeda, then that war will be in Pakistan. Stay tuned.

Related One Utah post:
Did We Just Invade Pakistan? (September 4, 2008)