By Richard Sisk
The War Report
The Special Ops pilots who carried out the cross-border airstrikes that killed 26 Pakistani soldiers and wounded 13 last Saturday will have to justify their actions to one of the best from their ranks.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark, a veteran combat pilot in the Special Operations Command, will have little more than three weeks to head up an investigation fraught with political overtones of the nighttime attacks on two remote Pakistani outposts about 500 yards from the border of Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan.
Clark, who is the director of plans, programs, requirements and assessments at the headquarters of the Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida, was picked for the thankless job by Marine Gen. James Mattis, head of the Central Command overseeing Afghanistan.
Clark was ordered to report back to Mattis by Dec. 23 on “the facts of the incident and any matters that facilitate a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding the deaths and injuries of the Pakistan forces.”
Getting to the facts, much less an understanding, will be an uphill climb for Clark, but he’s been there before. Clark has logged more than 3,500 hours on 13 different aircraft on combat missions in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq as a Special Operations pilot.
His task will be to unravel what happened in actions that commenced with a joint border patrol by Afghan and U.S. Special Operations troops in mountainous terrain. The initial reports were that the patrol took fire from the vicinity of the Pakistani border posts and the patrol called for air support that came from two Apache helicopters and an AC-130 Spectre gunship.
Only the day before the airstrikes, Marine Gen. John Allen, the coalition commander in Afghanistan, sought to make headway in shoring up the already-frayed relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan in a meeting with the Pakistani army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani. The border post raids left the relationship in shreds.
On Tuesday, Pakistan pulled out of a Dec. 5 peace conference in Bonn on forging peace in Afghanistan. “Pakistan looks forward to the success of this conference, but in view of the developments and prevailing circumstances, it has decided not to participate in the conference,” the Pakistani Foreign Office said in a statement.
Earlier, Pakistan closed two vital border crossing points to U.S. supply convoys and ordered the closing of a CIA drone airbase in Pakistan as demonstrators in major Pakistani cities burned U.S. flags and effigies of President Obama.
Pakistani officials angrily denied that their troops had fired first. “This is not true, they are making up excuses,” said Major General Athar Abbas, a spokesman for Pakistan’s armed forces. “By the way, what are their losses, their casualties?”
U.S. officials said the Bonn conference would proceed without Pakistan. “It’s also worth noting that there’s still going to be 85 nations and 15 international organizations that are going to be in Bonn,” said State Department spokesman Mark Toner.
“So while we would like to have Pakistan there, we still think it’ll be a valuable opportunity to talk about Afghanistan’s future,” Toner said.
Gen. Allen and others have sent their condolences to the Pakistanis over the loss of life but Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made clear that there would be no apologies.
In an interview with Britain’s ITV News, Dempsey said he telephoned Gen. Kayani and “expressed regret.” Dempsey said the Pakistanis “have reason to be furious,” but when asked if the Americans would say they were sorry, Dempsey replied “Absolutely not.”
(Photo: Troops from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division overlook the Pakistani border. Army photo by Spec. George Hunt.)
