School bombing casts light on US role in Pakistan JANE PERLEZ, ISLAMABAD
February 5, 2010
THE deaths of three American soldiers in a Taliban suicide attack at a girls school that also killed four students and three foreign aid workers and injured 131 others, has lifted the veil on US military aid to Pakistan.
Pakistani authorities would like to keep quiet about the presence of US troops while the Americans, who are providing counter-insurgency and intelligence-gathering training and development assistance, chafe at not receiving credit.
The dead soldiers were among 60 to 100 members of a Special Forces Operation team that trains Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps.
The roadside bomb destroyed the girls school at Balambut in Pakistan's Lower Dir district and killed four students as well as three foreign aid workers and injured 131 people in total, mostly schoolgirls from a nearby school.
Militants in Dir have threatened women's rights activists in recent years, while the Pakistani government says the Taliban have destroyed hundreds of schools in the region.
Insurgents have been active in Balambut, where police seized explosives and arrested suspected bomb makers in August.
''We have been facing these attacks on schools, especially for girls, for the past three years,'' said Pasha, whose organisation, Khwendo Kor, runs programs for women's and children's welfare in north-western Pakistan.
During that time, about 490 schools ''have been burnt or bombed in Dir and the nearby districts'', he said. ''Sometimes the Taliban claim responsibility for these attacks and sometimes they deny them.
Usually the bombings happen in the middle of the night, but this time they bombed while the girls were in the classroom.''
The three US soldiers, who were in the region quietly training Pakistani troops, were part of a convoy driving to the reopening of the school, recently renovated with US help after being destroyed in an earlier Taliban attack.
At least 12 other US service members have been killed in Pakistan since September 11 in hotel bombings and accidents, according to the US Central Command, but these were the first killed as part of the Special Operations training, which has been under way for the past 18 months.
That training has been acknowledged gingerly by both the Americans and the Pakistanis, but has been kept low key so as not to trespass on Pakistani sensitivities about sovereignty, and not to further inflame anti-American sentiment.
Though Pakistan is termed an ally by the US, Pakistan has not allowed American combat forces to operate here, unlike in Afghanistan or Iraq, a point that is stressed by the Pentagon and the Pakistani army.
Instead the CIA operates what has become the main US weapon in Pakistan, the pilotless drones that have struck with increasing intensity against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants in the tribal areas.
The American soldiers were probably targeted as a result of the drone strikes, said Syed Rifaat Hussain, a professor of international relations at Islamabad University.
''The attack seems a payback for the mounting frequency of the drone attacks,'' he said.
If the Americans were specifically targeted, it raised the question of whether the Taliban had received intelligence or co-operation from within the Frontier Corps. The US soldiers were dressed in traditional Pakistani clothing to disguise themselves.
