U.S. Report on Pakistan Strike Reveals Crucial NATO Delays
A military investigation has concluded that it took about 90 minutes for NATO officers to notify a senior allied commander about Pakistan’s calls that its outposts were under attack, underscoring a lack of timely senior-level “override” measures to avoid deadly cross-border errors like last month’s airstrikes that killed 26 Pakistani soldiers.
Once alerted, the commander immediately halted American attacks on two Pakistani border posts. But by then, military communications between the two sides had sorted out a chain of errors and the shooting had already stopped. The delays — by two different officers — raise questions about whether a faster response could have spared the lives of some Pakistani soldiers.
An unclassified version of the report, released Monday by the military’s Central Command on its Web site, also revealed for the first time that an American AC-130 gunship flew two miles into Pakistani territory to return fire on Pakistani troops that had attacked a joint American-Afghan ground patrol just across the border in Afghanistan.
The 30-page report, which expanded upon a telephone briefing last week by the chief investigator, Brig. Gen. Stephen A. Clark of the Air Force, also found that competing NATO and American rules of engagement related to border-area and cross-border operations “lacked clarity and precision, and were not followed.”
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/world/asia/us-report-on-pakistan-strike-reveals-crucial-nato-delays.html
