RAWALPINDI: Presidential Spokesman Maj. Gen. (retd) Rashid Qureshi has strongly rejected the news of US magazine in which it was said that the President has allowed US forces to launch operation in tribal areas of the country.
“The report is baseless and unfounded. No such type of approval was given to US forces”, he said this while talking to Private TV Channel on Monday.
The US has been informed several times that the only the Pakistan forces have right to launch operation in the tribal areas of the country against Al-Qaeda, he said.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and US forces are free to launch attack outside the Pakistan soil, Rashid pointed out. Answering to a question, he said, Foreign Office had lodged strong protest before US against missile strike in Pakistan recently.
Neither US forces is operating in Pakistan nor we would allow forces of any other country to take any type of action in our soil, he maintained.
It may be recalled that the “Newsweek” in his report said that the Musharraf regime has given tacit approval to attacks by pilot-less United States planes on Al Qaeda targets along Pakistan’s restive border area.
The strikes have been stepped up, as officials fear that the new civilian Government will be hostile to such an offensive.
Since January, missiles reportedly fired from Central Investigative Agency operated Predator drones have hit at least three suspected hideouts of militants, including a strike on March 16 in Toog village in South Waziristan that left 20 dead.
The Newsweek, quoting US officials and Pakistani sources, said the recent wave of Predator attacks are at least partly the result of understandings the US officials reached with Musharraf and other top Pakistanis, giving Washington virtually unrestricted authority to hit targets in the border areas.
The surge, says the magazine in its upcoming issue, began after visits to Pakistan at the beginning of the year by senior US officials, including intelligence czar Mike McConnell, CIA director General Michael Hayden and Admieal William Fallon, who recently resigned as commander of the US forces in the region.
Some news reports had said at the time that President Pervez Musharraf had rebuffed US proposals to step up combat operations inside Pakistan.
Bruce Riedel, a retired CIA expert on the region, said that a new wave of terrorism inside Pakistan has forced Musharraf and new military chief Ashfaq Kayani to acknowledge that the extremists threatening Americans now also pose a growing threat to Pakistan’s internal security.
Another reason for the rise in Predator strikes is that Washington fears that any newly formed civilian Government in Pakistan will be more hostile to US operations there than Musharraf’s current regime, the report said.
Time to act, in other words, may be running out. A former official told the magazine that the United States has been relying on its own intelligence to uncover terror targets because Pakistani intelligence agencies are weak on espionage in the tribal areas. By contrast, the news magazine said, US forces have a heavy presence on the Afghan side of the border.
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