FORMER US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may not have been shy about projecting US military power, but even he didn't dare send American troops into Pakistan's tribal lands to snatch or kill Al-Qaeda leaders. But now Pakistanis fear the US presidential campaign has heated up the foreign policy debate over how to handle the Taleban and Al-Qaeda threat to a point where American leaders could throw caution to the wind by taking unilateral action. “If this was a possibility in the past, it's a high possibility now,” said a senior security official in the northwestern city of Peshawar, shuddering at the statements coming from the United States. In 2005, Rumsfeld reportedly aborted a mission to eliminate Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, because it involved too many troops, chances of success were too uncertain, and the danger of riling the situation in Pakistan was too great. The risks today may be even greater, with Pakistan going through a precarious transition to civilian-led democracy and tribesmen across the northwest reaching for their guns. “If Americans hit the Pakistani side, they will make more enemies for themselves,” Ayaz Wazir, a former Pakistani ambassador to Kabul, said. Taleban protection Mounting casualties among Western troops across the border in Afghanistan have fuelled alarm, as have intelligence assessments that Al-Qaeda could organize strikes on Western soil having regrouped in the tribal areas under Taleban protection. The United States is now piling resources into Afghanistan, where the Taleban insurgency is stronger than ever six-and-a-half years after US-backed forces drove the Islamist militia and its Al-Qaeda guests into the mountains on the Pakistan border. With Western forces pressing into areas where the militants had ranged, there have been more encounters, more casualties, and more talk of ordering “hot pursuit” into Pakistani territory. Talat Masood, a former general-turned-political analyst, said US Congressional hearings, the media and think-tanks were generating the kind of hype that could persuade President George W. Bush to authorize an intensification of air strikes and even limited ground operations in the tribal belt. “Pakistan must have to take action on its own. It is left with no other option,” Masood told Reuters. An American incursion would be a call to arms for tribesmen who had hitherto shunned the insurgency based in the ethnic Pashtun tribal belt straddling the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and undermine the fledgling civilian, coalition government. “Anti-American sentiments will rise exponentially,” Masood wrote in the Daily Times. “The civilian government would be destabilized and moderate forces will be further marginalized.” Trust running low In past week US impatience has been very evident. There is a perception that the Pakistan army reduced pressure on Taleban groups in the border areas as the new government tried to get tribal elders to persuade the militants to end their war. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also cast accusations that members of Pakistan's security apparatus are playing a double-game by helping the Taleban insurgency in order to preserve leverage in southern Afghanistan for the day when Western governments pull their forces out. Bush has said he is “troubled” by Al-Qaeda's presence in Pakistan and will discuss the matter with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani when they meet in Washington on July 28. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke of greater numbers of insurgents and foreign fighters crossing from Pakistan, “unmolested and unhindered” and warned: “This movement has to stop.” Rumsfeld's successor, Defence Secretary Robert Gates repeated that US troops were “ready, willing and able” to help if the Pakistani government asked, but there was “a real need to do something on the Pakistani side of the border.” Analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi doubted whether the United States would act too rashly. “If at all they decide to take action, it will be very, very limited but quite effective action.” But the sense of trepidation in Pakistan that the United States might dispense with diplomatic niceties was reinforced by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's remarks. “We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as president, I won't,” Obama said in a major foreign policy speech. “We must make it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high level terrorist targets like Bin Laden if we have them in our sights.” - Reuters __
