Asked whether he had recommended any punishments for the incident, Clark said that was not his job and added that any subsequent action would be “handled within the chain of command.”
Pakistan’s refusal to participate in the investigation meant that “a significant element is missing,” Clark said. “There are always two sides to an event,” and the inquiry “would have been facilitated greatly had Pakistan decided to participate.”
A Pentagon investigation finds a series of mistakes and bad coordination led to NATO airstrikes last month that killed 24 Pakistani troops near the Afghan border. (Dec. 22)
Pakistan has issued repeated public denials that its forces fired first at the Americans. But senior Pakistani defense officials acknowledged to The Washington Post after the incident that soldiers at the border post, located atop a ridgeline looking down at Afghanistan, initiated fire at what they thought were infiltrating militants.
Although the United States has long accused Pakistan of allowing insurgents to cross the border into Afghanistan, Pakistan has said that Afghanistan-based militants move in the other direction. Without being informed of U.S. operations in the area that night, Pakistani officials said, they had no way of knowing who was walking stealthily in the hills near their post.
According to a timeline provided by Clark, a team of about 120 U.S. and Afghan personnel had planned to raid a village close to the Pakistani border on the night of Nov. 25.
U.S. and Afghan forces were taken by helicopter to a landing zone less than two miles from the border, arriving at 9:40 p.m. local time, Clark said. They then walked the rest of the way along what he called the equivalent of “goat trails” through “steep and rugged terrain,” eventually splitting into two groups.
“At 11:09 p.m., they received the first fire” from “heavy machine guns” on a ridgeline to the east, Clark said.
The ground commander “calls back to headquarters for confirmation that there is no Pakistani military in the area” and directs a “show of force” from aircraft already hovering above. The aircraft fires flares, but this “does not cause the machine guns to cease firing,” and the air attack begins. Clark said the flares and a flyover by an F-15 should have signaled the presence of U.S. forces.
“This is the first point where we found a series of miscommunications,” Clark said. The response to the request for information about Pakistani forces, he said, was that “we are checking. . . . That was heard as ‘no Pakistani military in the area’ ” by the operational commander, he said.
Had that communication been correctly received, Clark said, it “may have stopped” the air attack. Pakistan and the United States dispute whether the border post appeared on maps available to both sides.
The first air attack, he said, continued for about six minutes. “Later, they were still receiving some fire” from the Pakistani positions at 11:44 p.m., “and a second engagement occurs,” lasting until about midnight.
“In the background, there are a series of telephone calls from [Afghanistan-based Pakistani liaison officers] to say that their forces are under fire. Confusion was caused by this because of a lack of precision” from the Pakistani side as to the exact location where the soldiers were taking fire. The Pakistani answer, he said, was: “Well, you know where it is, because you are shooting at them.”
“People are trying to do the right thing and nail down specifics so that they can take action,” Clark said. U.S. forces declined to supply the Pakistanis with the exact coordinates, instead giving them a general location and asking whether that was where their forces were located. But the U.S. technician had applied the coordinates to the wrong map — the location he described was about 8.5 miles off — and Pakistan said no.
A third engagement occurred from midnight until just before 1 a.m., Clark said, when a heavy machine gun was located on the Pakistani side “a little further north” of the site from where the Pakistanis first fired. Clark did not make clear whether the machine gun was actually firing at the time.
Systems set up after earlier incidents to prevent or quickly “deconflict” such clashes failed, Clark said, “because of an evolving lack of trust” and a “perception from ISAF [the NATO force in Afghanistan] that the Pakistanis are reticent to give full disclosure on all their border locations for one thing, and, two, that [ISAF is] under the impression that when they have shared information, specific operations have been compromised.”
Londoño reported from Kabul. Staff writer Greg Jaffe in Washington and special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
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