Pakistan Orders Troops to Return Fire if NATO Attacks Again

Denies NATO Claims that Pakistani Officials Endorsed Attack on Military Bases

Pakistan’s military commander, General Parvez Kayani, has issued a new order on the rules of engagement along the Afghanistan border, saying that the troops should return fire if NATO forces attack their positions.

The move comes just a week after US warplanes and attack helicopters crossed the border into the Mohmand Agency, attacking a pair of military bases and killing at least 24 Pakistani soldiers. The attack has sparked massive anti-US protests across the nation.

Pakistan’s Army also said that if the Air Force had been scrambled during the attack they would’ve fought with the US warplanes. They insisted it was “no fault” of the Air Force that they weren’t prepared in time to contest the bombings, which lasted for nearly two hours.

But exactly what happened? The story keeps changing. Officials have gone from saying it was an accident, to briefly claiming that they came under attack by Taliban, to insisting that they would “wait until the inquiry” to issue comments. Today, officials claimed that Pakistan had actually signed off on the attack, and that border control officials even gave them the coordinates of the bases to attack them.

Not true, insists Pakistan, who says that on the contrary the US gave them coordinates for what they planned to attack, and that it wasn’t where they actually attacked, a pair of bases on top of a mountain. Pakistan also rejected NATO claims that the bases were “temporary camps” and not well known, and they have noted in the past that the bases were made of concrete and had been there for years.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.