Afghans in Pakistan clash with troops

Hours after being deployed to stifle unrest over the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan, paramilitary troops opened fire Thursday on a crowd attempting to storm a jail and free pro-Taliban activists.

The incident at Bajur, a border area in southwestern Pakistan, came as the military prepared for a national strike Friday called by radical Islamic parties to protest Pakistan’s support of the U.S.-led campaign.

In the short, intense clash with stone-throwing protesters, 11 people were wounded, three seriously.

Troops also patrolled the streets of other restive cities, including Quetta in the southwest. Tensions in Pakistan have reached a boiling point, with a large segment of the Pashtun population enraged by the air attacks on neighboring Afghanistan, where many of their Pashtun relatives live.

The protests have been fueled by reports that more U.S. troops had landed in Pakistan. U.S. forces were establishing operations at an air base in Pasni, 180 miles west of Karachi and at Jacobabad air base, closer to Afghanistan. At least 15 U.S. military planes, including C-130 transports, unloaded troops and equipment in the past two days, Pakistani officials and witnesses told The Associated Press.

But a Foreign Ministry spokesman immediately qualified the U.S. contingent as “non-combatants” who would not invade Afghanistan.

Radical Muslim leaders have called on Muslims to overthrow the government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. In a bid to ward off a possible coup, the general this week reshuffled the hierarchy of the armed forces, sidelining pro-Taliban generals and corps commanders and replacing them with more secular-minded officers.

“Musharraf made a tactical mistake when he supported a broad-based coalition government in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban. No one has imposed a government on Afghanistan for 200 years. The army is not behind him on this broad-based coalition,” said Pakistan’s former chief of staff, Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg.

A key test for the loyalty of Pakistani troops will come after midday prayers Friday. Muslim activists have promised to confront security forces in a stand-off that could decide the future of this country, a key front-line component in the anti-terrorist campaign.

“In 1977 troops fired on a first wave of protesters but then refused to obey their superiors to fire on a second wave. You have to remember almost every family in Pakistan has one member in the military and they are not going to shoot their own people,” Beg said.

In Bajur, troops opened fire Thursday only after protesters threw stones for two hours and then began to break into a jail.

During demonstrations Thursday, thousands of Islamic activists vowed a holy war against Musharraf if he permits U.S. troops to Pakistan to launch attacks on Afghanistan.

“By supporting non-Muslims against an Islamic state, Musharraf has committed a heinous crime and sin, and he should apologize for it,” said Haroon-ur-Rashid, leader of a radical Islamic party.

Pakistan confirmed Thursday that U.S. military personnel had begun to arrive in the country and would be allowed to use several airbases. But government spokesman Anwar Mehmood said the Americans would not use Pakistani territory for launching incursions into Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in the border city of Peshawar, an Afghan refugee was badly wounded Thursday when a grenade he intended to throw at a Western journalist exploded during a scuffle with police.

Police said the man, identified as Shafi Ullah, told police he wanted to kill a Westerner after he was told his wife and children had been killed during a bombing raid on Kabul.

Police said Ullah bought the grenade for $3 in a border area where guns, ammunitions and grenades, most of them home made, are easily and cheaply available.

As the first wounded and refugees from the bombings trickled into Pakistan, their stories of death and hardship enflamed an already restive population along the border with Afghanistan.

Government spokesman Maj. Gen. Rashid Qureshi has warned that the military will not tolerate further rampages and intended to crack down on those who incite people to demonstrate.

“Police, the district and provincial administrators, have all been instructed to make sure that nobody incites hatred against anyone,” he said.

Qureshi said no more than 100,000 of Pakistan’s 140 million population were involved in demonstrations at the height of the protests Monday, the day after the bombing of Afghanistan had begun. He alleged that 60 percent of the protesters had been Afghan and he warned that Afghan protesters face deportation if caught.

Although Musharraf has dismissed the protests as a fringe movement, Pakistan’s largest Islamic party said Thursday that it will launch a campaign to force him to change his policy on the U.S. action in Afghanistan or relinquish power.

“If the government does not change its support to America, we have the right to pull down the unconstitutional government of Pervez Musharraf,” Jamaat-i-Islami party leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed told several thousand tribal members at Timergara, near the Afghan border.

The authorities already have detained at least three pro-Taliban Islamic leaders, including Maulana Samiul Haq, the leader of Jamiat-e-Uleam Islam party whose seminary in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province has been the academic cradle of a number of Taliban leaders.

Afghan refugees escaping the air raids reached Peshawar and Quetta Thursday and said dozens of bombs had slammed late Wednesday into Kandahar’s airport, where at least 300 bin Laden followers had lived and at nearby Maiwan, a suspected terrorist training camp hidden in the mountains.

The Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Saeef, said Thursday that 140 Afghan civilians had died in the bombings thus far. He warned “the real war will only start when ground troops invade.”