US military officials are seeking raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas

The US-led coalition in Afghanistan Tuesday denied a newspaper report that senior U.S. military officials in Afghanistan are seeking to  expand anti-militant ground raids into Pakistan’s tribal  areas bordering Afghanistan.“There is absolutely no truth to reporting in The New York Times that US forces are planning to conduct ground operations into Pakistan,” Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, deputy chief of staff for communication for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), said according to a media report.NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, has “developed a strong working relationship with the Pakistan military to address shared security issues,” Smith said in a statement, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times. “This coordination recognizes the sovereignty of Afghanistan and Pakistan to pursue insurgents and terrorists operating in their respective border areas,” he added. The unusually vehement denial and sharply worded statement underscored the sensitivity of the issue of dealing with militant sanctuaries along the border and the U.S.-Pakistan relations. In addition to being key to checking movement of miliatnts on porous 2400 km-long Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where Pakistan has deployed well over 100,000 troops, the South Asian country is also the critical route for more than 70 per cent of NATO supplies that sustain Afghan operations. The New York Times had reported Monday that American military and political officials believe expanded raids could bring an intelligence windfall from militants that are captured in Pakistan and then  taken into  Afghanistan for interrogation. Islamabad has ruled out the notion of any anti-militant raids into Pakistani territory, with its ambssador in Washingtion Husain Haqqani saying “Pakistani forces are capable of handling the militant threat within our borders and no foreign forces are allowed or required to operate inside our sovereign territory,” he said. The controversial  proposal described  by the Times is met with fierce resistance from both Islamabad officials and the Pakistani public which opposes any foreign operations inside their country. The U.S. officials and a White House review of the Obama Administration’s own Afghan policy claimed that progress in the fight against militants hiding in Pakistani border regions is important to achieving counterinsurgency success in Afghanistan, where nine years after 2001 invasion of Afghanistan following 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S.-led forces are fighting a fierce Taliban insurgency. According to some reports, the Taliban control as much as 70 per cent of the Afghan territory. Top American and South Asian experts feel that the Obama Administration’s overriding focus on Afghan Taliban sanctuaries in North Waziristan, the Pakistani tribal border area, amounts to scapegoating as it ignores the nagging problems besetting U.S. security efforts inside Afghanistan. “Unfortunately, by focusing all of our attention on the safe havens, we have taken our ball off of (Afghan president) Karzai and we have taken the ball off of our successes in decisions and our bad decisions that we have made over the last nine years in Afghanistan. This is, in some sense, scapegoating,” Christine Fair, an academic and South Asian expert, told PBS while discussing the issue of  militant sanctuaries and U.S.-Pakistan cooperation along the Afghan border.