Pakistan’s fury at the U.S.

The already strained relations between the U.S. and Pakistan were further inflamed this week after NATO helicopters and a ground-attack aircraft blasted two Pakistani army posts near the Afghan border, killing 24 soldiers. NATO officials said that the “tragic and unintended” deaths occurred after a U.S.-Afghan patrol took fire from militants inside Pakistan. When the patrol called for air support, NATO said, the aircraft mistakenly attacked Pakistani frontier posts instead of Taliban encampments. The Pakistani military disputed that account, saying that there had been no militant activity in the area, and that NATO knew the location of its bases and deliberately attacked them. In retaliation, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani closed Pakistan’s border to NATO supply convoys headed for Afghanistan, and demanded that the U.S. vacate a Pakistani air base used by CIA drones.

“Pakistan’s porous border with Afghanistan was an accident waiting to happen,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Our supposed ally has long hosted the Taliban on its territory and allowed these insurgents to cross the border and cause havoc in their Afghan homeland. If Pakistan had cracked down on these terrorists earlier, as the Bush and Obama administrations repeatedly requested, this tragedy could have been avoided.

Pakistan has every right to be furious, said D.B. Grady in The Atlantic. Even if this airstrike was an accident, it’s still “yet another violation of Pakistani sovereignty.” Between America’s drone bombing raids and commando operations—like the one that killed Osama bin Laden in May—we’ve “essentially claimed the right to much of Pakistan’s airspace.” Is it any wonder that relations between the U.S. and Pakistan are in a “perpetual state of collapse”?

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This alliance won’t end anytime soon, said Victor Davis Hanson in NationalReview.com. “For all its latest threats,” Pakistan isn’t going to give up the $1.5 billion in U.S. aid it receives every year, and it doesn’t want to send America into the arms of its “existential enemy, India.” The U.S., meanwhile, can’t easily supply its “landlocked Afghan forces without access from Pakistan,” and it fears that withdrawing support could result in Islamists gaining control of the country’s nuclear weapons. It will take more than this military flare-up to end this “weird strategic relationship.” For now, the U.S. and Pakistan are stuck with each other.