Question: Article:

Story highlights U.S. commander wants an investigation complete before Christmas 
  
 Pakistan denies firing first at a NATO aircraft that killed two dozen Pakistanis 
  
 The Pakistani Taliban say Pakistan must respond in kind to the attack 
  
 A top Afghan official warns of possible conflict with Pakistan 
  
 Tensions among Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States jumped a notch Monday, with Pakistan's prime minister warning there would be "no more business as usual" with Washington after NATO aircraft killed two dozen Pakistan troops. 
  
 Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told CNN in an exclusive interview that Pakistan is re-evaluating its relationship with the United States in light of the airstrike, which NATO called a "tragic unintended" event. He said the South Asian nation wants to maintain its relationship with the United States so long as there is mutual respect and respect for Pakistani sovereignty. 
  
 Asked directly if Pakistan is getting that respect, Gilani said: "At the moment not." 
  
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 "If I can't protect the sovereignty of my country, how can we say that this is mutual respect and mutual interest?" he asked. 
  
 The Pakistani Taliban urged Pakistan to respond in kind to the airstrike, while a top adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned that Afghanistan and Pakistan could be on a path to conflict. 
  
 In his CNN interview, Gilani highlighted incidents such as the killing of the Pakistani troops and a U.S. raid into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden as violations of his country's sovereignty. 
  
 "You cannot win any war without the support of the masses ... and such sort of incidents makes people move away from this situation," he said. 
  
 Pakistan is a vital land supply route into Afghanistan for the United States and its allies, and a key partner in the battle against al Qaeda and its aligned jihadist movements. But Pakistani authorities turned back 300 trucks carrying NATO supplies and fuel into Afghanistan on Monday, and the prime minister said his government had not yet decided whether to boycott an upcoming Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan. 
  
 Details of Saturday's deadly raid remained unclear Monday, and the chief of U.S. forces in the region named an Air Force general from the military's Special Operations Command to lead an investigation. Gen. James Mattis ordered the investigating officer, Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark, to report back to him by December 23. 
  
 According to two senior U.S. officials with direct knowledge of initial reporting on the incident, the probe is focusing on what coordination failures occurred before the airstrike. 
  
 One of the officials said initial reports indicate U.S. and Afghan forces said shots were fired across the border from Pakistan, noting that it is a known tactic of insurgents to fire into Afghanistan from very close to Pakistan border checkpoints because they believe it will give them sanctuary. The United States believes the Pakistanis "were called" before NATO opened fire, the official said, but he added that "at this point, we just don't know exactly what coordination was done." 
  
 A NATO official said Afghan troops were working with elements of U.S. Special Operations forces in a combined mission on the Afghan side of the border. 
  
 Pakistani military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas denied the reports that Pakistani troops had prompted the attack Saturday by firing on the NATO helicopters. Speaking by phone to Pakistan's Geo TV News, Abbas said NATO helicopters fired first on the Pakistani military checkpoints. 
  
 Abbas said the soldiers notified Pakistani military headquarters, which informed NATO authorities immediately. The spokesman said Pakistani soldiers fired at the NATO aircraft in retaliation. 
  
 Speaking in London, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, acknowledged that the U.S.-Pakistani relationship was "troubled." But he suggested it would survive once the two nations work through the "real tragedy" of the Pakistani deaths. 
  
 "We've had other moments before," Dempsey said. "I'm hopeful that with the relationships we've built leader-to-leader and worked at over the past years, that we can find our way forward. But I understand the anger. I understand the concern." 
  
 The White House offered its condolences to Pakistan, while State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Washington was concerned about the impact the incident could have on relations with Pakistan. 
  
 "The relationship is vitally important to both countries. We both face a shared threat from extremists. ... We're taking this very seriously," he said. 
  
 A U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity told CNN that Pakistan remains a "critical" partner in counterterrorism, "and we do not anticipate significant changes in that relationship." 
  
 The Pakistani Taliban appeared to try to widen the rift Monday. A spokesman for the fundamentalist Islamic movement, Ihsanullah Ihsan, said in a phone call to CNN that the U.S. will infringe on Pakistan's sovereignty and continue operations on Pakistani soil in the coming days. 
  
 Ihsan said Pakistan must respond in kind to the NATO attacks, and he warned that the Pakistani Taliban will continue jihad as long as Pakistan remains an ally of the United States. 
  
 In Kabul, meanwhile, a senior adviser to President Karzai said Afghanistan and Pakistan may be on a course toward military conflict. 
  
 Ashraf Ghani said the link between Pakistan and the assassination of a former Afghan president had united his country "against interference." 
  
 Ghani accused Pakistan of harboring and assisting the insurgency in Afghanistan, and said his country's neighbor probably helped the suicide bomber who killed former Afghan President Burhanudin Rabbani in September. 
  
 "The assassination of President Rabbani has gelled the nation together against interference. And one or two more actions could put us in an irreversible course (toward) conflict. And we've shown through our history that we are a match for any invader," he said. 
  
 The two nations have been trading accusations in the border regions in the past few months, with Pakistan accusing the Afghans of harboring militants and Afghanistan claiming Pakistani shells have hit Afghan territory. 
  
 But on Sunday, a spokesman for Karzai urged Pakistan to come to the Bonn conference, which is being billed as a chance to start a reconciliation process in Afghanistan. 
  
 "We want Pakistan to participate in that. We want Pakistan to be part of the solution in Afghanistan," Aimal Faizi said. ||||| Supporters Pakistani religious party Jamatud Dawa burn representation of the U. S. flag and posters of US President Obama and NATO's general during a protest rally to condemn NATO strikes on Pakistani... (Associated Press) 
  
 The NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers lasted almost two hours and continued even after commanders at the bases pleaded with coalition forces to stop, Pakistan's military claimed Monday, charges that could further inflame anger in Pakistan. 
  
 NATO has described the incident as "tragic and unintended" and has promised a full investigation. 
  
 Unnamed Afghan officials have said that Afghan commandos and U.S. special forces were conducting a mission on the Afghan side of the border and took incoming fire from the direction of the Pakistani posts. They responded with airstrikes. 
  
 Ties between Pakistan and the United States were already deteriorating before the deadly attack and have sunk to new lows since, delivering a major setback to American hopes of enlisting Islamabad's help in negotiating an end to the 10-year-old Afghan war. 
  
 Army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said the Pakistani troops at two border posts were the victims of unprovoked aggression. He said the attack lasted almost two hours and that commanders had contacted NATO counterparts while it was going on, asking that "they get this fire to cease, but somehow it continued." 
  
 The Pakistan army has previously said its soldiers retaliated "with all weapons available" to the attack. 
  
 The poorly defined, mountainous border has been a constant source of tension between Pakistan and the United States. NATO officials have complained that insurgents fire from across the frontier, often from positions close to Pakistani soldiers who have been accused of tolerating or supporting the militants. NATO and Afghan forces are not allowed to cross over into Pakistan in pursuit of militants. 
  
 Saturday's strikes added to popular anger in Pakistan against the U.S.-led coalition presence in Afghanistan. Many in the army, parliament, general population and media already believed that the U.S. and NATO are hostile to Pakistan and that the Afghan Taliban are not the enemy. 
  
 "Whoever is a friend of America is a traitor to the land," around 400 members of Jamaat-e-Dawa, an alleged front group for the militant Lashkar-e-Taiba organization, chanted in a demonstration in Karachi, the country's biggest city. 
  
 While the United States is widely disliked in Pakistan, the army has accepted billions in American aid over the last 10 years in return for its cooperation in fighting al-Qaida. It has been accused of fomenting anti-American sentiment in the country to extract better terms in what is essentially a transactional and deeply troubled relationship with Washington. 
  
 Saturday's deadly incident also serves to shift attention away from the dominant perception of the Pakistani army in the West over the last five years _ that of an unreliable ally that supports militancy. That image was cemented after al-Qaida's chief Osama bin Laden was found to have been hiding in an army town close to the Pakistani capital when he was killed. 
  
 For Pakistan's weak and much criticized elected government, Saturday's airstrikes provide a rare opportunity to unite the country and a momentary relief from attack by rivals eyeing elections in 2013 or sooner. 
  
 By contrast, deaths of soldiers and civilians in attacks by militants, some with alleged links to the country's spy agencies, are often greeted with official silence. 
  
 Abbas dismissed Afghanistan's claims that the joint Afghan-NATO troops were fired upon first. 
  
 "At this point, NATO and Afghanistan are trying to wriggle out of the situation by offering excuses," he said. "Where are their casualties?" 
  
 Abbas said the two military posts, named "Volcano" and "Golden," were situated on a ridge in Mohmand region around 300 yards (meters) from the border with Afghanistan. He said their exact location had been provided to NATO and that the area had recently been cleared of militants. 
  
 Hours after the attack on Saturday, Pakistan closed its western border to trucks delivering supplies to NATO troops in Afghanistan, demanded that the U.S. abandon an air base inside Pakistan used to operate drone strikes, and said it will review its cooperation with the U.S. and NATO. 
  
 However, a complete breakdown in the relationship between the United States and Pakistan is considered unlikely. Pakistan relies on billions of dollars in American aid, and the U.S. needs Pakistan to push Afghan insurgents to participate in peace talks. 
  
 After the bin Laden raid, ties almost collapsed but slowly resumed, albeit at a lower level and with lower expectations on the American side. 
  
 Despite high-tech targeting systems, accidents in the "fog of war" happen often. 
  
 NATO has hit friendly forces, civilians and even a diplomatic mission in conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya and Serbia. 
  
 During the 1999 bombing of Serbia, NATO jets struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade by mistake, killing three Chinese reporters. Canadian and British troops were killed in "friendly fire" incidents involving NATO airpower in Afghanistan. In Libya, NATO reportedly bombed opposition fighters at least twice during the seven-month campaign. 
  
 ______ 
  
 Associated Press writers Deb Reichmann in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Slobodan Lekic in Brussels contributed to this report. ||||| The U.S. military began a high-level investigation to help salvage relations with Pakistan after an air strike by the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan killed 24 Pakistani troops at the border. 
  
 The U.S. military’s highest commander for the region, Marine General James Mattis, yesterday named Air Force Special Operations Command Brigadier General Stephen Clark to lead the investigation. Marine General John Allen, the top U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander in Afghanistan, had requested that Central Command take charge of the review, Pentagon Press Secretary George Little said yesterday. 
  
 “You can expect the investigation to look at the full range of factors that contributed to this tragedy,” Little told reporters at the Pentagon. “It will be broad, expansive and thorough.” 
  
 The investigation and repeated U.S. condolences were aimed at avoiding a prolonged rift in a relationship that was already in a rebuilding stage after a tumultuous year. Ties had been strained by the killing of two Pakistanis by a Central Intelligence Agency contractor, the raid near Islamabad that killed Osama bin Laden, and U.S. accusations that Pakistan’s army aids groups attacking Americans in Afghanistan. 
  
 President Barack Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, said the U.S. takes the latest border incident “very seriously,” and will work to maintain cooperation with Pakistan. The two countries have “shared goals” when it comes to combating terrorism, he said. 
  
 Expressing Outrage 
  
 Pakistani authorities responded to the Nov. 25 air strike with expressions of outrage and by closing border crossings into Afghanistan that the coalition relies on to ferry supplies from a port to the land-locked war zone. Supply trucks for American- led forces in Afghanistan backed up on Pakistani roads near the border after the closure, leaving drivers and their cargo vulnerable to attack by Islamic guerrillas. 
  
 U.S. military officials have said their forces can sustain operations in Afghanistan for weeks in case of such a shutdown. 
  
 “There are other supply routes,” Little said. “The war effort continues.” 
  
 U.S. General William Fraser told Congress in July the Pakistan route was carrying 35 percent of “non-lethal” supplies for American-led forces in Afghanistan. The military has worked to shift to a northern route through Russia and Central Asia, Fraser said. 
  
 Drone Base Expulsion 
  
 Pakistan also ordered U.S. officials to leave an airbase in the southwest that has served as a launching point for Predator unmanned aircraft used against the Taliban and its allied guerrillas on both sides of the border. 
  
 Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a weekend phone call that the Nov. 25 attack by helicopter gunships triggered a “deep sense of rage” in the nuclear-armed nation, according to a foreign ministry statement. 
  
 Mattis’s instructions to Clark for the investigation said he should include representatives of NATO, the broader coalition fighting in Afghanistan, Afghan forces and the Pakistani government. 
  
 “Ensure openness and candor with them, respond to their questions they need to be addressed in the investigation and coordinate through them to receive evidence they offer,” Mattis told Clark in the letter. “Their participation will facilitate the investigative process to determine what happened and how we preclude it from happening again.” 
  
 Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, predicted “this crisis will get papered over” and “the U.S. will face even less prospect that Pakistan will really crackdown on insurgent groups in the border area.” 
  
 Joint Investigation 
  
 The U.S. and Pakistan conducted a joint investigation last year after a similar border incident involving several Pakistani deaths. In that case, the resolution prompted a NATO apology and opened border crossings that had been shut in the aftermath of the incident. 
  
 The Pakistan-Afghanistan border passes through rugged mountains and desert terrain and is unmarked over most of its more than 2,600-kilometer (1,600-mile) length. The two countries dispute the border’s location in many areas. 
  
 U.S. military and intelligence officials have cited a pattern of similar incidents at and around Pakistani frontier outposts. 
  
 In June 2008, U.S. aircraft bombed a remote Pakistani Frontier Corps border checkpoint and killed at least 11 soldiers. 
  
 At the time, U.S. officials said the bombing occurred after Taliban fighters “ambushed” American troops 1,000 yards inside Afghanistan, then fled into Pakistan through the border crossing. Pakistani officials called the bombing “completely unprovoked and cowardly.” 
  
 Murky Case 
  
 While the facts of the current case remain murky, “We have patterns of behavior that suggest that these bases sometimes provide cover for militants, or that militants use them as cover,” said Dr. Tim Hoyt, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, who has studied Pakistan for 25 years. 
  
 The Pakistani military’s ties to some Afghan militant groups date back to their fight, alongside the U.S., against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. 
  
 “There is also a pattern of the Pakistanis supporting militant groups against their neighbors,” Hoyt said in a telephone interview. 
  
 Expressing Condolences 
  
 Arizona Senator John McCain, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, referred to Pakistani support for the militant Haqqani network and other Afghan insurgents in expressing condolences yesterday for the latest incident. 
  
 “I fully support NATO’s commitment to investigate this tragedy thoroughly and immediately,” McCain said in a statement. “It is important to note that certain facts in Pakistan continue to complicate significantly the ability of coalition and Afghan forces to succeed in Afghanistan.” 
  
 The latest rift between the two nations comes as Afghanistan and its supporters prepare for a conference in Bonn, Germany, on Dec. 4 and 5 to mark the 10th anniversary of a similar gathering that helped form an Afghan government after the U.S. ousting of the Taliban in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon. 
  
 The U.S. is counting on Pakistan to help broker a peace deal in Afghanistan, drawing on its influence on Taliban militants whose leaders have their headquarters on Pakistani territory. Pakistan may boycott the conference because of the NATO strike. 
  
 “It’s very much in Pakistan’s interest to attend the Bonn conference because the focus of that is all about trying to build a more stable, peaceful Afghanistan,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters in Washington yesterday. 
  
 The relationship between Afghanistan and Pakistan is “critical to the region’s stability,” Toner said. 
  
 To contact the reporters on this story: Viola Gienger in Washington at vgienger@bloomberg.net; Haris Anwar in Islamabad at hanwar2@bloomberg.net. 
  
 To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net ||||| Unfriendly Fire 
  
 The U.S. is bracing for a spike in terrorist attacks on its Afghan supply lines after 27 Pakistani soldiers were killed by a NATO helicopter—which may have been fired on from a Pakistani military post. 
  
 As if the U.S.–Pakistan relationship needed any more tensions, American military officials believe a NATO helicopter that killed up to 27 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border over the weekend may have been attacked first from within a Pakistani military post. And American officials are now bracing for the possibility of retaliatory strikes on U.S. supply lines. 
  
 The incident began in Kunar province in operations against a Salafi militia known as Jamaat Ud-Dawa Wal Quran. As the NATO forces pursued the militants across the porous border with Pakistan, an attack helicopter began to receive fire from bases at Pakistani border posts at Salala, U.S. military sources told The Daily Beast, speaking only on condition of anonymity. 
  
 “The NATO helicopter crossed the Afghanistan/Pakistan border in hot pursuit into Mohmand,” one U.S. military official said. “And in the process the helicopter took fire from Pakistani Army positions. We don’t know if this was fire from militants provided sanctuary at a Pakistani base or whether this was from the base itself.” 
  
 Officially, both the Pakistani government and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan have been tight-lipped about the incident. Pakistan has closed two border crossings between Pakistan and Afghanistan, effectively shutting down the supply routes between Pakistan and the allied forces in Afghanistan. 
  
 According to The New York Times, the Pakistanis also have closed the Shamsi air base in western Pakistan, the hub for the officially still secret CIA drone missions against suspected senior Taliban and al Qaeda operatives. 
  
 The incident has aggravated an already strained U.S.-Pakistani relationship. Over the weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, called their Pakistani counterparts to try to smooth the tensions. Meanwhile, the White House said President Obama received regular updates on the incident from National Security Adviser Tom Donilon. 
  
 In many ways, the incident could not have come at a worse time for the U.S.-Pakistani relationship, which was already rocky after the disclosure of a memo attributed to President Asif Ali Zardari and the recently departed Pakistani ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, that offered to sack Pakistan’s military leadership and renew efforts to root out the Taliban. 
  
 One U.S. military official told The Daily Beast that the scandal in Pakistan, known as “memo-gate,” has played into the worst fears of Pakistan’s military leader, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and his deputies. 
  
 “The fact that we did not warn Kayani that Zardari or even his ambassador were plotting against him has played into all of the conspiracy-theory assumptions that run rampant at the highest levels of the Pakistani military,” this official said. 
  
 Kayani enjoyed a close personal relationship with Gen. Dempsey’s predecessor, Adm. Mike Mullen, until the final months of Mullen’s tenure. But before leaving his post, Mullen publicly accused Kayani’s military of knowingly allowing elements of the Haqqani network to attack U.S. positions in Afghanistan. Dempsey does not have the same personal relationship with the powerful Pakistani general. 
  
 “If there was no memo-gate, they would have closed the border for a few days and that would be that,” a U.S. military official said. “It would have been a demonstration, but we all would live. Now there is potential for this to spin out of control.” 
  
 The incident also comes as Pakistan’s military is negotiating a new peace deal with the country’s Taliban. If those negotiations succeed, it’s likely the Pakistani military will pull its already inconsistent support for fighting the Taliban in its own country, resuming its posture from 2006 and 2007, when al Qaeda’s leadership was able to rebuild its base in the federally administered tribal areas of Pakistan. |||||
What is a summary?
Answer: – Tensions are increasing over the NATO airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers Saturday, as Pakistan’s military claimed today that the attack lasted nearly two hours and that NATO ignored its pleas for a ceasefire. Commanders at both bases that were hit contacted NATO while the strikes were under way, but though they asked NATO to “get this fire to cease,” says an army spokesperson, “somehow it continued.” NATO, which has promised to investigate, called it a “tragic and unintended” incident, the AP reports. Pakistan has continued to insist the attack was unprovoked. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s prime minister warned there will be “no more business as usual” with Washington, telling CNN today that the country is re-evaluating that relationship. A top adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai adds that Afghanistan and Pakistan could be headed toward military conflict. Also today, Pakistan blocked 300 trucks carrying NATO supplies to Afghanistan; Bloomberg notes that Pakistani TV has shown traffic jams and stranded supply trucks near two border crossings. The strikes have incensed Pakistanis who were already angry at the US, leading one group to chant in a demonstration, “Whoever is a friend of America is a traitor to the land.” The Daily Beast notes that American officials are now concerned about increased attacks on US supply routes in retaliation.