Tracking and destroying terror networks along the Afghanistan border is going to get much more difficult as Pakistan shuts down some intelligence gathering channels in response to a NATO air assault that left 24 Pakistani army soldiers dead, analysts and officials said.
“We’re going through a power curve in the wrong direction,” said James Carafano, senior defense analyst with The Heritage Foundation, a Washington D.C. think-tank. “Our intelligence gathering capabilities for targeting terrorist networks in the region is not going to go down slowly, it’s just going to plummet.”
Preliminary U.S. military reports suggested the two-hour battle between U.S. and Pakistani forces along the eastern border of Afghanistan may have been a case of mistaken identity on both sides, each believing the other was Taliban, according to an Associated Press report.
The assault, in which American and Afghan troops said they were defending themselves against weapons fire, is just one of multiple incidents over the past year that has strained intelligence operations and information sharing between Pakistan and the United States.
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On Tuesday, Pakistani officials said they would not attend the Afghan security conference in Bonn, Germany on Dec. 5, in protest of the attacks. At the same time, Pakistani military officials offered their first accounts of the assault, saying it was not a case of mistaken identity as the U.S. military is claiming but “an unprovoked attack of blatant aggression,” according to reports from the region.
Intelligence operations along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border “will be unequivocally negatively effected,” said Arturo Munoz, senior analyst for the RAND Corporation and expert in counterinsurgency.
“But I don’t believe that the power structure in Pakistan wants to cut us off completely because of the threat of radical Islamic terrorist that have been attacking the government itself,” said Munoz, formerly with the CIA Counterterrorism Center. “The cumulative effect is that the Pakistan government is going to have to take a nationalistic stance on the situation, or they could have a coup or riots in the streets.”
A senior Pakistani official told The Washington Examiner, “It will not be the same relationship, from intelligence sharing to our diplomatic relations, until this is resolved.”
“Somebody should be held responsible for it,” the Pakistani official said. “I think if the U.S. conducts an inquiry into this and share[s] with [the} Pakistani side – this is the action we would need to move forward.”
On Saturday, Pakistan’s Defense Cabinet vowed to “review” all military and intelligence gathering programs with the U.S. and NATO. Pakistan also ordered all Americans out of Shamsi Air Base, where the CIA’s fleet of unmanned drone aircraft is housed, within 15 days.
That will hurt intelligence gathering, but the bigger loss would be an unresolved fracture with Pakistani intelligence agencies who gather critical information via “boots on the ground,” experts said.
Complicating matters is the Obama Administration’s announced plan to begin a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014, Carafano said. That gives Pakistan’s government little incentive to heal an alliance with the U.S. even as it contemplates surviving in the region after the U.S. departs, he said.
“People have lost confidence in us and question why they should back us up,” he said.
Sara A. Carter is The Washington Examiner’s national security correspondent. She can be reached at [email protected].
