Friday's U.S. airstrike on a Pakistani village has disrupted America's efforts to improve its image in this country, one of its most important Muslim allies, and has turned glaring publicity on a part of the "global war on terror" that the United States and Pakistan have tried to keep hidden. In both ways, the incident has weakened one of Washington's main backers in the Muslim world, President Pervez Musharraf. Journalist James Rupert, head of Newsday's international bureau in Islamabad, Pakistan began his career abroad as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching mechanics and welding in Morocco.
James Rupert writes: String of attacks tarnish U.S. image in Pakistan
String of attacks tarnish U.S. image
Another incident strengthens notion that Pakistan leader is U.S. lapdog and hurts America’s image
BY JAMES RUPERT
STAFF CORRESPONDENT
January 17, 2006
Caption: In this picture taken 18 January Pakistani tribesmen remove the debris of their collapsed house in Damadola. Al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri said he escaped a controversial US raid targeting him in Damadola, Pakistan, according to a video broadcast on the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera.(AFP/File)
PAKISTAN -- Friday's U.S. airstrike on a Pakistani village has disrupted America's efforts to improve its image in this country, one of its most important Muslim allies, and has turned glaring publicity on a part of the "global war on terror" that the United States and Pakistan have tried to keep hidden. In both ways, the incident has weakened one of Washington's main backers in the Muslim world, President Pervez Musharraf.
Since October's earthquake here, both governments have played up the role of U.S. troops and helicopters in rushing relief supplies to millions of homeless villagers in the mountains of Kashmir. That imagery has helped counter a three-year wave of public relations disasters for the United States in Pakistan and the Muslim world, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the abuse and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other military prisons abroad.
But since Saturday, positive images of American relief work have been swept aside here by pictures and stories about the U.S. missile attack that killed between 13 and 18 Pakistanis in an attempt to hit al-Qaida leaders in a village near the border with Afghanistan.
"American soldiers have been acting as brothers to Pakistanis, and we are all happy about this," said Hussain Javed, a Pakistani businessman who was taking a flight Sunday at Islamabad's airport. "But now they are killing us, too, and so maybe they are our enemies instead."
Thousands of Pakistanis marched Sunday in protest of the attack, and Islamic militant leaders vowed yesterday to keep the demonstrations going. While Pakistani political analysts do not suggest the protests are likely to threaten Musharraf's control, Javed and others say a recent string of U.S. border incursions strengthens a popular image of the president as a lapdog of the unpopular U.S. superpower.
While the CIA has played a major role in the four-year-old manhunt for al-Qaida militants in Pakistan's unruly tribal borderlands with Afghanistan, Washington and Islamabad have kept that fact as quiet as possible to protect Musharraf from popular disapproval, U.S. and Pakistani officials have said. Musharraf's government has insisted that, as a sovereign nation, Pakistan is conducting the chase with its own troops and only technical assistance from U.S. intelligence.
Since November that claim has been eroded by four U.S. air raids on Pakistani villages that have been increasingly difficult to conceal from the public.
Not that Pakistan's government didn't try.
On the night of Nov. 30, explosions demolished a home in Asoray, a village in North Waziristan, killing a senior al-Qaida figure, Hamza Rabia. Residents told Pakistani journalists of hearing aircraft overhead and several explosions, and they displayed rocket fragments with U.S. markings. U.S. news agencies quoted unnamed American intelligence officials in Washington as saying the CIA had gotten Rabia with a missile strike.
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley sidestepped the question of the CIA's role, saying, "Musharraf has been very aggressive in dealing with al-Qaida and the Taliban," and "we have helped him in terms of providing intelligence and cooperating with his forces."
Pakistani officials denied that any attack had taken place, saying Rabia and his colleagues had accidentally exploded a bomb in the house. A local journalist, Hayatullah Khan, challenged the official version. A few days later, he was abducted by masked gunmen and has not been heard from since.
Officials in Northern Waziristan offered the same explanation -- an explosion of a bomb under construction -- for another blast that destroyed a house Rabia had been staying in two weeks earlier.
On Jan. 7, missiles destroyed the home of a militant cleric in the Pakistani border village of Sedgai, and accounts of U.S. involvement were clear enough that Pakistan formerly protested to Washington.
The attack Friday on the village of Damadola got immediate, worldwide publicity because U.S. officials in Washington leaked the news to American TV networks with the victorious claim, still unsubstantiated, that the CIA had killed al-Qaida's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.
