U.S. Rockets Reportedly Kill 5 Pakistanis

A battle between U.S. forces and militants in eastern Afghanistan spilled across the border into Pakistan during the weekend, and witnesses said American rocket fire had killed five Pakistani tribesmen.

U.S. attack helicopters opened fire in Lawara Mandai, a Pakistani border town in the North Waziristan tribal region, as American forces pursued a dozen men who the U.S. military said had staged an ambush, officials and local residents said.

Although Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf quietly allows U.S. “hot pursuit” missions when guerrillas cross into his country from Afghanistan, opposition groups have denounced the American incursions as illegal attacks on Pakistani territory.

Reports of Pakistani dead are likely to intensify anger here, which is already running high after a Newsweek magazine report this month that interrogators at the U.S.-run prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had desecrated the Koran to rile inmates. The magazine has since retracted the story and apologized.

The U.S. military said its warplanes had killed 12 guerrillas after an attack on a coalition patrol east of Gayan, in Afghanistan’s Paktika province, Saturday night.

“A group of four insurgents crossed the border into Afghanistan from Pakistan and attacked a U.S. patrol with small arms near the eastern city of Gayan,” the U.S. military said in a statement.

“The unit returned fire and the insurgents fled the area, meeting up with a group of eight other individuals a short distance later. U.S. warplanes responded to the attack and, in coordination with soldiers on the ground, reported killing all 12 insurgents,” the statement added.

U.S. forces did not confirm any deaths in Pakistan.

Pakistani witnesses said helicopters had attacked the border town with rockets, killing the tribesmen. At least 20 artillery shells fired by U.S.-led forces from Paktika province landed across the border near Lawara Mandai.

Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said the U.S.-led troops had violated the country’s territorial jurisdiction and fired several shells, which had hit near Lawara Mandai. Sultan said the coalition commanders on the Afghan side of the border had informed their Pakistani counterparts about the operation in the area.

“We don’t know about the casualties,” he said in a telephone interview Sunday from Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

He said the matter would be taken up with the coalition authorities.

But authorities in Miram Shah, the tribal region’s administrative headquarters, said that five men of the Madakhel Wazir tribe were killed after two U.S. helicopters fired rockets in the border area. They did not name the victims.

In an interview on CNN’s “Late Edition” Sunday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai suggested that it was time for Afghanistan to make more decisions about the U.S. military’s role in his country.

Describing the cooperation between the two countries as “a partnership that [was] very, very successful” in overthrowing the Taliban and bringing liberation to his nation, Karzai noted that the relationship had changed.

“Now, we are in a different phase of this struggle,” he said. “The Afghan people have gone to elections, they have a constitution, they have elected a government. They are expecting much more ownership by the Afghan government and Afghanistan.”

Karzai, who will meet with President Bush at the White House this week, also urged that any American troops who mistreated prisoners be punished.

“This is simply, simply not acceptable,” Karzai said of reports of brutality by U.S. interrogators against prisoners held at the air base in Bagram, Afghanistan. “We are angry about this. We want justice. We want the people responsible for this sort of brutal behavior punished and tried and made public.”

Karzai rejected complaints that Afghanistan’s efforts to eradicate the production of opium had been unsuccessful, saying that “we have done our job” in reducing the poppy crop and that any failure in that mission was the responsibility of agencies funded by the international community.

“We are going to have probably all over the country at least 30% poppies reduced, already have been reduced. So we have done our job,” he said. “Now the international community must come and provide alternative livelihood to the Afghan people, which they have not done so far.”

He was responding to an article in Sunday’s New York Times, which quoted a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital, to the State Department as saying that Afghan efforts to eradicate the opium poppies had been ineffective and accusing Karzai of weak leadership in that area.