| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| Pakistani militiaman who shot US soldier acted alone: Pentagon |
| 2011-11-02 |
| [Dawn] A Pak militiaman who allegedly shot to death a US Army officer in a 2007 ambush near a Pak border town acted alone and not as part of a coordinated Mighty Pak Army plot, according to an investigation details released Monday by the Pentagon. Army Maj. Larry J. Bauguess Jr. was bumped off as he and other US officers were headed toward helicopters that would take them back across the border following a meeting with Afghan and Pak officers in the frontier town of Teri Mengel. The meeting was meant to calm tensions along the border. In reporting Bauguess' death on May 15, 2007, one day after the incident, the US military said he died of wounds sustained from "enemy small arms fire," without mentioning that the gunman was Pak. Pakistain is a US counterterrorism ally and receives billions of dollars in aid from Washington, but relations are badly strained. Pakistain has resisted strong US pressure to expand its military counterterrorism operations to include areas and hard boyz that pose direct threats to US soldiers in Afghanistan. The Army investigation conducted in the days following the attack was withheld from public release until Monday, when declassified excerpts from an executive summary were released. The probe said none of the other Americans with Bauguess at the time could have done anything to prevent the killing. No follow-up US investigation was done, according to the US Central Command. Pak authorities suggested at the time that the soldier acted alone or in concert with a small number of individuals. It is unclear from the US investigation report whether the gunman was killed in an ensuing exchange of gunfire with US soldiers. For years, Washington sought to play down any signs of duplicity by Pakistain, whose alleged tolerance of havens on its side of the border is widely seen as aiding the Taliban and other hard boyz who are fighting and killing American and Afghan forces in Afghanistan. The May 2007 killing of Bauguess raised tough questions about Pak motives. A September 2011 New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... report, based on interviews with Afghan and Americans officers who were at the scene, portrayed the attack as a deliberate, planned assault by Pakistain, possibly as an act of Dire Revenge™. But excerpts from the US Army investigation discount the notion of a Pak conspiracy. It said the man who shot Bauguess with an AK-47 was wearing the uniform of a local militia, known as the Kurram militia, which is part of the larger Frontier Corps. The militia reports to the Mighty Pak Army. "This appears to have been a premeditated event on the part of the initial shooter," the report said. "There is little evidence to support collaboration within the Pak militia or military. Based upon this finding, there is little the coalition forces could have done to prevent the ambush." Bauguess, 36, was assigned to the 4th Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division. He was among a group of American officers who attended what is known as a Border Flag meeting to discuss with Afghan and Pak officers how to tamp down tensions and lessen fighting along the border. "There were no indications of hostile intent or suspicious activity before, during or immediately following" the talks "that would have led to a heightened security posture on the part of the coalition forces," the report said. After the meeting, the Americans were getting into vehicles for a short drive to their helicopters when the lone gunman standing eight to 10 feet from Bauguess's vehicle launched a burst of automatic gunfire. One of the Americans in the bed of a pickup truck leaped to the ground and returned fire. That precipitated a "sporadic engagement" of fire between US and Pak personnel for about 10 minutes. As many as seven Paks were killed. The report concludes that the Paks who fired on the Americans after the killing of Bauguess were reacting to the US shots and were not in concert with the gunman. Although the US government had not previously revealed any details of its investigation, the top US commander in Afghanistan at the time, Army Gen. Daniel McNeill, briefly mentioned the attack in a June 2008 interview with Pentagon news hounds. He called Bauguess's death an "liquidation" and he said the killer was himself "immediately shot down" by an American soldier. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Even the NY Times isn't stupid enough to believe this. Pakistanis Tied to 2007 Border Attack on Americans American officials familiar with Pakistan say that the attack fit a pattern. The Pakistanis often seemed to retaliate for losses they had suffered in an accidental attack by United States forces with a deliberate assault on American troops, most probably to maintain morale among their own troops or to make a point to the Americans that they could not be pushed around, said a former American military officer who served in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The attack in 2007 came after some of the worst skirmishes along the ill-marked border. By 2007 Taliban insurgents, who used Pakistan as a haven with the support of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment, were crossing the border, frequently in sight of Pakistani border posts, and challenging the Afghan government with increasing boldness. American and Afghan forces had just fought and killed a group of 25 militants near the border in early May. To stem the flow of militants, the Afghan government was building more border posts, including one at Gawi, in Jaji District, one of the insurgents’ main crossing points, according to Rahmatullah Rahmat, then the governor of Paktia Province in eastern Afghanistan. Pakistani forces objected to the new post, claiming it was on Pakistani land, and occupied it by force, killing 13 Afghans. Over the following days dozens were killed as Afghan and Pakistani forces traded mortar rounds and moved troops and artillery up to the border. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, began to talk of defending the border at all costs, said Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the senior American general in Afghanistan at the time. The border meeting was called, and a small group of Americans and Afghans — 12 men in total — flew by helicopters to Teri Mangal, just inside Pakistan, to try to resolve the dispute. Then, just as the American and Afghan officials were climbing into vehicles provided to take them the short distance to a helicopter landing zone, a Pakistani soldier opened fire with an automatic rifle, pumping multiple rounds from just 5 or 10 yards away into an American officer, Maj. Larry J. Bauguess Jr., killing him almost instantly. An operations officer with the 82nd Airborne Division from North Carolina, Major Bauguess, 36, was married and the father of two girls, ages 4 and 6. An American soldier immediately shot and killed the attacker, but at the same instant several other Pakistanis opened fire from inside the classrooms, riddling the group and the cars with gunfire, according to the two senior Afghan commanders who were there. Both escaped injury by throwing themselves out of their car onto the ground. “I saw the American falling and the Americans taking positions and firing,” said Brig. Gen. Muhammad Akram Same, the Afghan Army commander in eastern Afghanistan at the time. “We were not fired on from one side, but from two, probably three sides.” |
| Posted by: Eohippus Phater7165 2011-11-02 08:54 |
| #1 1.4 billion Muslims: each, and every one, acting alone. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2011-11-02 03:47 |