Still no apology?
Obama Offers ‘Condolences’ in Deaths of Pakistani Troops
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
WASHINGTON — President Obama phoned the president of Pakistan on Sunday to offer “condolences” for the deaths of two dozen soldiers who were killed in NATO airstrikes along the Afghan border, the White House said.
The conversation, eight days after the incident, overcame the reservations of some officials in the Defense Department and favored an approach suggested by diplomats who had urged a more conciliatory gesture. But the president’s comments stopped short of a formal apology or videotaped statement to ease the public anger in Pakistan.
“Earlier today, the president placed a phone call to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to personally express his condolences on the tragic loss of 24 Pakistani soldiers this past week along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the White House said in a statement issued by its press office.
“The president made clear that this regrettable incident was not a deliberate attack on Pakistan and reiterated the United States’ strong commitment to a full investigation,” the statement said. “The two presidents reaffirmed their commitment to the U.S.-Pakistan bilateral relationship, which is critical to the security of both nations, and they agreed to stay in close touch.”
Senior officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, had already issued expressions of remorse and the United States, conceding that its forces were involved, had promised a full investigation. Pakistani and American accounts of what happened have diverged widely, and there has been no full explanation from either side.
The strikes on the two Pakistani outposts came during a tightly planned operation by Afghan and American Special Forces against a Taliban training camp in a remote and mountainous border area.
American officials have said that during the skirmish both sides thought they were under attack by the Taliban. But efforts to sort out precisely what happened — and in the process ease the latest crisis to strain the tenuous alliance between the United States and Pakistan — are being hindered by Pakistan’s refusal to cooperate with the American-led military investigation into the attack, the officials said.
Even the most basic facts are in dispute. The Americans say they were fired on first and cleared the strikes with the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis say that NATO gave the wrong coordinates for the proposed airstrikes and that their forces fired only after the attacks began.
Previous cross-border strikes were investigated jointly and the fallout quickly contained, like the dispute that followed the American helicopter attacks on Pakistani forces in September 2010. But a year of crises that began with an American contractor shooting two Pakistanis to death on a street in Lahore and included the Navy Seal raid northwest of Islamabad that killed Osama bin Laden, now risks ending with the breach of an alliance that has been the cornerstone of American national security policy for the past decade, American officials and analysts have said.
Pakistan has responded to last week’s attack by blocking all NATO logistical supplies from crossing into Afghanistan, telling the Central Intelligence Agency to vacate an air base where drone strikes are launched, and boycotting an international conference on Afghanistan next week in Bonn, Germany.
Some administration aides had worried that if Mr. Obama were to apologize formally to Pakistan, the move could become fodder for his Republican opponents in the presidential campaign.
