KABUL, Afghanistan — The president of Afghanistan threatened Sunday to send troops into Pakistan if Taliban fighters holed up there continue to cross the border and attack his country.
“Afghanistan has the right of self-defense,” President Hamid Karzai told journalists at his presidential palace in Kabul. He specifically threatened to target Baitullah Mahsud, the self-declared commander of Pakistan’s Taliban movement, who has boasted of sending fighters into Afghanistan.
The comments were the Afghan leader’s sharpest warning yet to Pakistan’s new leadership, which has been conducting negotiations with Islamic militants, including Mahsud, based in the tribal areas adjoining the border.
In response to the warning, Pakistan said it would consider any such strike by foreign forces inside its territory a violation of its sovereignty.
Statement called symbolic
“We hope that it is not the re-initiation of the blame game by Afghanistan,” said Mohammed Sadiq, Foreign Office spokesman, in a statement.
Analysts expressed doubt that Karzai would make good on his threat to send Afghan troops on cross-border raids but said the remarks reflected rising frustration on the Afghan leader’s part.
“It seems like more of a symbolic declaration rather than something that would really happen, but it shows the kind of pressure he is under,” said analyst Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani general.
The inability of Afghan and Western forces to contain the insurgency in Afghanistan, more than six years after the toppling of the Taliban movement, has hurt Karzai’s domestic popularity and credibility at a time when he is preparing to stand for re-election.
Violence in Afghanistan has been edging upward in recent months, and NATO and U.S. officials have charged repeatedly that militants continue to find haven inside Pakistan as the warmer weather brings a surge in battlefield activity.
Few prison escapees caught
Afghan forces have been trying, with little success, to round up hundreds of prisoners who escaped in a brazen jailbreak staged Friday by the Taliban in the southern city of Kandahar. Afghan officials said 15 insurgents had been killed in the manhunt, but only five prisoners were reported recaptured.
Karzai survived an assassination attempt six weeks ago, for which the Taliban claimed responsibility.
NATO- and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan also have been absorbing heavy blows. Four U.S. Marines were killed Saturday in a roadside bombing, the heaviest American toll in a single incident this year.
Military officials said Friday that fatalities among U.S. and coalition troops in Afghanistan last month had for the first time exceeded the toll in Iraq during the same period.
During the past year, Pakistani and Afghan leaders had toned down mutual accusations of lax policing of the countries’ rugged 1,500-mile border. Karzai’s outburst, however, could reignite long-standing ill will between two allies that are crucial for the Americans.
Pakistan has issued a sharp protest over a cross-border clash last week in which 11 of its paramilitary troops were killed, apparently in U.S. airstrikes. The incident is under investigation, but the American military has suggested that the strikes came after Afghan troops came under fire from insurgents who fled into Pakistan.
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General notes surge in attacks
WASHINGTON — The outgoing top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan said Friday that attacks increased 50 percent in April in the country’s eastern region, where U.S. troops primarily operate, as a spreading Taliban insurgency across the border in Pakistan fueled a surge in violence.
In a sober assessment, Gen. Dan McNeill, who departed June 3 after 16 months commanding NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, said that although record levels of foreign and Afghan troops have constrained repeated Taliban offensives, stabilizing Afghanistan will be impossible without a more robust military campaign against insurgent havens in Pakistan.
The Taliban is “resurgent in the region,” particularly in sanctuaries in Pakistan, and as a result “it’s going to be difficult to take on this insurgent group . . . in the broader sort of way,” McNeill said at a Pentagon news conference.
Comprehensive data released by the NATO-led command show a steady escalation in violence since NATO took charge of the Afghanistan mission in 2006.
The number of roadside bombs, for example, increased from 1,931 in 2006 to 2,615 last year.
