Another missile attack

A missile attack was carried out on a house in Kaloosha area of South Waziristan Agency on Wednesday, which caused unspecified number of casualties. Beyond this, the accounts vary as to who conducted the attack, what weapon was used and who was the target of this pre-dawn strike. ISPR Director-General Major General Athar Abbas says that the blast was caused by explosives dumped in the house, ruling out the possibility of attack by a foreign aircraft. From across the border, the spokesman of the US-led coalition force said he had no reports that either the US force or the Nato combined force was involved in the attack. Some residents claimed they heard a drone over the place before three loud explosions; others said the missiles that hit the house were fired from the Afghan territory. There is also a disagreement as to how many were killed or injured and who they were since the militants are said to have cordoned off the site soon after the attack. Various media reports put the figure of the dead between eight and 13, of whom six were believed to be foreigners. Four of the foreigners were reported to be Arabs and two Turkmen besides two ‘Punjabi Taliban’. But certainly, the attack completely fitted into the pattern of an aerial attack of last month in Mirali area of North Waziristan, in which the victims included senior al Qaeda commander Abu Laith Al-Libbi. This is not the first time Pakistani authorities have denied intrusion of foreign drones and their deadly attacks on targets in Pakistan’s territory. In some cases, they learnt of the attacks quite some time after they had taken place, and, no less surprisingly, even owned them up as their doing. The fact is that the government has persistently denied any such collusion with the Americans or Nato-led coalition leadership, so much so that the recent reports about a secret accord on letting the US predators do sighting and striking of terrorist targets in Pakistan, was strongly denied by the Foreign Office. So in the absence of an open agreement to join hands in conducting aerial attacks inside Pakistani territory this silence and cover-up tend to earn the suspicion of complicity. This ambiguity about the stealthy drone strikes in the darkness of the night must be removed, more so now that striking so-called terrorist hideouts inside Pakistan has acquired the status of an election issue in the United States. Democrat Party presidential hopeful Barack Obama has for the second time talked of “hunting down terror outfits” in places such as Pakistan.
Before it is too late the United States leaders must be made to realise that fighting terrorism inside Pakistan is primarily our own concern and not theirs, because in the aftermath of nine/eleven we have suffered far greater losses while there has not been a single terrorist attack inside their country. But, even more importantly, the message must go out to them that the sanctity of our territorial integrity is more dear to us than any friendship. The time for such a straight talk with allies in the war on terror has arrived. A significant part of victory the electoral exercise delivered to the new leadership in Pakistan stems from their pledge to rethink the Musharraf government’s cooperation in the war on terror. There is the growing public realisation that not only this cooperation has increased Pakistan’s vulnerability to terrorism, its role in combating international terrorism as an ally too is being equated to the function of a mercenary outfit. The ongoing dispute about the genuineness of costs Pakistan incurred in anti-terrorist operations seriously undermines the moral dimension of its commitment as an international player.





Defusing Gaza

WHAT Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza can and should be called a war crime, genocide, and to borrow from the lexicon of one Israeli official, a holocaust. Israel has declared open season on Palestinian infants and children, against those who can do nothing in return. Not only have more Palestinians been murdered in the past five days than at any other time in the past eight years, but tough voices from Israel say that the slaughter will continue, that Israel has still not hit Hamas hard enough and that a full-scale invasion of Gaza is coming up. The root of the Gaza problem is not, as Israel and the US like to claim, Hamas. It is that hundreds of thousands of human beings are rotting there in refugee camps — camps that are incubators of poverty and despair, ignorance, and hatred and violence spawned by Israel. It would be suicidal for Israel to invade Gaza. Israel and its friends may not mind the huge number of casualties in a ground offensive but can the Jewish state ensure that reoccupying the Gaza Strip would put an end to the rocket fire on Sderot, Ashkelon and their environs? When Israel controlled the entire Gaza Strip, hundreds of rockets were fired on its southern towns anyway.
From a historical point of view, there can be no solution to the problem of Gaza as long as there is not at least a modicum of hope for these desperate people somewhere on the horizon. Thus, in parallel to the fighting, there has been a diplomatic effort between Egypt and Israel, aided by the European Union and the United States, to negotiate a package deal between Israel and Hamas. The idea would be to reopen the Gaza-Egyptian border at Rafah under renewed European monitoring, allow Gazan exports through Rafah, push the Egyptians to patrol the border better, release the captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit and arrange a cease-fire in Gaza, with Hamas promising to stop rockets in return for a halt in Israeli military action. While this ambitious plan hardly looks like taking off at present, it is assisted by the results of a recent opinion poll indicating a majority of Israelis favor a truce with Hamas which will cease fire if Israel stops its military operations in Palestinian areas and ends the blockade of the territory which has cut essential supplies to its 1.5 million inhabitants. Unfortunately, the situation is getting worse, with Gaza essentially still closed to normal commerce, with severe shortages of oil, gasoline, medicine and chlorine for drinking water. For now Prime Minister Ehud Olmert may not be keen on ordering a major ground operation in Gaza, in part because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to visit Israel, to nudge Palestinians and Israel closer to an accord that should, according to Annapolis and President Bush, be reached before the end of the year. The timing of Rice’s visit to the region could not have been worse if she sought to talk peace. But her presence could help prevent more Israeli attacks, and hopefully lead to a stoppage of this free flowing Palestinian hemorrhage of blood.

—Arab News