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US ties with Pakistan under strain
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US ties with Pakistan under strain
The failure of Pakistan's President General Pervez Musharraf to stamp out the Islamist presence in the Pashtun-dominated tribal provinces along the border with Afghanistan is placing increasing strain on relations between Islamabad and Washington. At the same time, the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly accused the Pakistanis of aiding the Taliban, a movement that was nurtured by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) during the 1990s.
Islamabad continues to deny that it maintains any ties to the ousted Taliban regime. However, the activities of some members of the Pakistani security agencies in the war against the Islamists have led to allegations that some Islamists linked to Al-Qaeda and other extremist groups have been eliminated or locked away in secret prisons to keep them out of US hands because of their alleged connections with the ISI.
Strikes without warning
Given this situation, US forces have sometimes taken matters into their own hands, in recent months mounting several attacks on suspected Al-Qaeda hideouts in the federally administered tribal areas. It appears that Washington did not notify Pakistan in advance of these attacks, which were usually carried out by Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) armed with Hellfire missiles.
In the early hours of 12 January, a US missile strike on the village of Damadola in the Bajaur tribal agency near the Afghan border destroyed three houses and killed an estimated 18 people. Four of them were senior Al-Qaeda operational commanders and the rest were reported to be civilians.
Islamabad claimed it had not approved the air strike and hotly denounced the violation of its sovereignty. If nothing else, the incident exposed Washington's growing impatience with Musharraf's failure to pursue an all-out war against the jihadists and their supporters in Pakistan. This friction between Pakistani and US security agencies over counter-terrorism operations in the highly sensitive tribal areas has worsened noticeably in recent months.
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