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Washington: The United States has escalated its unilateral strikes against the Al Qaida and other insurgent groups operating in the country's remote tribal areas, partly because of anxieties that the new leadership in Islamabad could insist on a scaling back of military operations, US officials say.
Washington is worried that pro-Western President Pervez Musharraf, who has generally supported the US strikes, will almost certainly have reduced powers in the months ahead and is now looking to inflict as much damage as it can to Al Qaida's network, the officials said.
Over the past two months, US-controlled Predator aircraft have struck at least three sites used by Al Qaida operatives. The attacks followed a tacit understanding with Musharraf and Army chief General Ashfaq Kiyani that allows US strikes on foreign fighters operating in Pakistan, but not against the Pakistani Taliban, the officials said.
Shake-the-tree strategy
About 45 Arab, Afghan and other foreign fighters have been killed in the attacks, all near the Afghan border, US and Pakistani officials said. The goal was partly to jar loose information on senior Al Qaida leaders, including Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants, by forcing them to move in ways that US intelligence analysts can detect. Local sources are providing better information to guide the strikes, the officials said.
A senior US official called it a "shake the tree" strategy. It has not been without controversy, others said. Some military officers have privately cautioned that airstrikes alone - without more US special forces soldiers on the ground in the region - are unlikely to net the top Al Qaida leaders.
The campaign is not specifically designed to capture Bin Laden before Bush leaves office, administration officials said. "It's not a blitz to close this chapter," said a senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing operations. "If we find the leadership, then we'll go after it. But nothing can be done to put Al Qaida away in the next nine or 10 months. In the long haul, it's an issue that extends beyond this administration."
Musharraf, who controls the country's military forces, has long approved US military strikes on his own. But senior officials in the country's leading parties have signalled that such unilateral attacks - including the Predator strikes launched from bases near Islamabad and Jacobabad - could be curtailed.
"We have always said that as for strikes, that is for Pakistani forces to do and for the Pakistani government to decide; we do not envision a situation in which foreigners will enter Pakistan and chase targets," said Farhatullah Babar, a top spokesman for the Pakistan Peoples Party, whose leader Yousuf Raza Gilani is the new prime minister. "This war on terror is our war."
Leaders of Gilani's party say they are interested in starting talks with local Taliban leaders and giving a political voice to the millions who live in the tribal areas.
US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher heard the message directly from tribal elders in the village of Landi Kotal in the Khyber area on Wednesday.
"We told the visiting US guests that the traditional jirga (tribal decision-making) system should be made effective to eliminate the causes of militancy and other problems from the tribal areas," said Malik Darya Khan, an elder. "We also told them that we have some disgruntled brothers" - an indirect reference to local Taliban and militants - who should be pulled into the mainstream through negotiations and dialogue, he said.
"The tribal turmoil can be resolved only through negotiations, not with military operations," Khan added. But he and others have said little specifically about how the new government should cope with foreign fighters, causing the Bush administration to engage in heavy lobbying on that issue.
Unsure of approach
President Bush called Gilani on Tuesday, for example, to stress the importance of the US-Pakistani alliance and to emphasise that "fighting extremists is in everyone's interest," a White House spokesman said.
Daniel Markey, a former State Department policy planning staffer who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said "the new faces" in Pakistan's leadership "are not certain how they want to manage their relationship with the United States. You can't blame them," because they are pulled in opposite directions by their electorate and the Bush administration.
But Kamran Bokhari, who directs Middle East analysis for Strategic Forecasting, a private intelligence group in Washington, said the new government will almost certainly take a harder line against such strikes. "These are very unpopular, not because people support Al Qaida, but because they feel Pakistan has no sovereignty," he said.
The latest Predator strike, on March 16, killed about 20 people in the Shahnawaz Kot village in South Waziristan, a mountainous enclave on the western border with Afghanistan.
According to accounts confirmed by Pakistani officials, at least three missiles hit a compound owned by Noorullah Wazir, a tribal leader in an area implicated in numerous cross-border attacks by Islamist militants into eastern Afghanistan.
The attack destroyed Wazir's home and damaged nearby buildings. Among those killed were several Arab and Afghan militants, Pakistani officials said.
The identities of the dead have not been publicly confirmed, although US and Pakistani sources say that no prominent Al Qaida or Taliban leaders were among the victims.
Asked for comment, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell denied that the two governments have an "arrangement" or an "understanding," but said that they face a mutual enemy and that "everything we do to go after terrorists operating there is in consultation and coordination with the Pakistani government".
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