WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Pakistan and the United States depend on one another too much to allow the deaths of two dozen Pakistani soldiers in a clash with NATO forces on Saturday to cause a definitive rupture.
But the incident, the latest in a series of embarrassments this year to bedevil the relationship between two ostensible allies, will only aggravate the mistrust between the countries and will require quick diplomatic work to contain.
Analysts and Western officials who track the relationship said a speedy, thorough investigation to find out what happened, establish responsibility and make amends is vital, though any reconciliation may be harder to achieve if NATO forces conclude that the Pakistani side started the fight.
“They still have a great deal of co-dependence. The United States needs Pakistan until it wraps up kinetic operations in Afghanistan,” said Shuja Nawaz, an authority on the Pakistani military at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
“Pakistan, of course, is still fairly heavily dependent on US financial and military support,” he added. “But the way things have been going this past year, it’s one event after another.”
NATO helicopters and fighter jets based in Afghanistan attacked two Pakistan military outposts on Saturday, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers in what Islamabad called an unprovoked assault. A Western official and a senior Afghan security official on Sunday said that NATO and Afghan forces came under fire from across the border with Pakistan before NATO aircraft attacked the Pakistani forces.
Extremely murky
An early test of how much the US-Pakistani relationship has been hurt may come from how well, or poorly, the sides cooperate with one another and with the Afghan authorities to establish precisely what happened on the border.
The key questions include who fired first and from where; why NATO and Pakistani forces appear to have been unable to communicate so as to prevent the Pakistani deaths; and whether NATO helicopters knew they had entered Pakistani territory.
“All of this is extremely murky and needs to be investigated,” said an Obama administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“Our goal today is … that the investigation gets mounted in a way that is confidence-building on all sides,” the official added.
Pakistan shut down NATO supply routes into Afghanistan — used to send in nearly half of the alliance’s land shipments — in retaliation for the incident, the worst such attack since Islamabad uneasily allied itself with Washington following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
The NATO attack was the latest perceived provocation by the United States, which infuriated Pakistan’s powerful military with a unilateral US special forces raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May.
That raid also cost Pakistan much goodwill among US politicians who questioned why the United States provides so much military and economic assistance — CRS report — to a country where bin Laden lived with impunity.
Ties have been strained by a series of events over the past 15 months, including a September 30, 2010 incident in which NATO forces killed two Pakistani service personnel, leading Pakistan to cut off NATO’s vital ground supply route for 10 days.
On January 27, a CIA contractor killed two Pakistani men he said were trying to rob him in Lahore, undermining ties between the US and Pakistani intelligence services.
An in September, the then top US military officer accused Pakistani intelligence of backing violence against US targets including a September 13 attack on the US embassy in Kabul.
Former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen, said Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) had supported militants known as the Haqqani network, which he described as a “veritable arm” of the ISI.
Last straw?
“Is this the last straw? (I) hope not. I believe both governments also hope not,” said retired Ambassador Teresita Schaffer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as a US diplomat in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
While there have been suggestions Pakistan could seek to improve its ties to China as a strategic counterweight to the United States, analysts dismissed this idea.
Islamabad receives significant amounts of military hardware from Beijing and their armed forces are close but Schaffer said the United States is a source of two things Beijing does not provide: top-flight weaponry and extensive cash assistance.
Even if there is no radical rupture, things are unlikely to improve quickly.
“The US-Pakistan relationship appears destined to lurch from crisis to crisis unless and until the two sides can reach some kind of understanding on the way forward in Afghanistan,” said Lisa Curtis of the Heritage Foundation think tank.
With NATO planning to intensify its operations in Eastern Afghanistan next year to try to cut off insurgent routes from Pakistan, Curtis said “the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.”