US hot pursuit into Pakistan

Houston Chronicle:

American commandos are poised to stage "hot pursuit" raids into Pakistan's loosely governed tribal areas to stem mounting Taliban attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan and to disrupt resurgent al-Qaida operatives' efforts to map strikes against the U.S. homeland, according to three Texas congressmen briefed during a trip to the region.

The lawmakers — Reps. Gene Green, D-Houston, Michael McCaul, R-Austin, and Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo — told the Houston Chronicle in separate interviews that the plans for stepped-up U.S. military operations are in response to Pakistan's failure to disrupt terrorist training camps and cross-border attacks from a region known as "the Federally Administered Tribal Areas," a remote, mountainous border area.

The Bush administration is recalibrating U.S. operations in the region because of a 40 percent increase in violent attacks against U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan that have pushed U.S. casualties for the month of June beyond the monthly toll in Iraq, the lawmakers said.

Osama bin Laden, who has a $50 million bounty on his head, is widely believed to be hiding among the 3.3 million people in the rural region.

...

The Texas congressmen said they devoted much of their delegation's separate meetings with President Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan's prime minister, Yusaf Raza Gillani, last Friday to urging additional action against Islamic militants in the tribal territories.

But they said Pakistani officials rejected resumption of the joint U.S.-Pakistani operations that ended in 2003, calling instead for additional U.S. military assistance and intelligence cooperation to target seven or eight terrorist leaders operating in the tribal areas.

Pakistan's ineffective campaign makes it "imperative that U.S. forces be allowed to pursue the Taliban and al-Qaida in tribal areas inside Pakistan," McCaul insisted. "If we don't do something now, they're going to strike us again (in the United States) and it is going to be out of this area."

Cuellar said that "either Pakistan does more or we will be taking things into our own hands," adding: "If our troops are fired on, there will be hot pursuit into that territory."

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U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan already have exercised hot pursuit on a limited basis to chase Taliban fighters and al-Qaida militants into adjacent Pakistani areas.

A joint U.S.-Afghan operation pursuing Taliban fighters from Afghanistan's Kunar province into Pakistan on June 10 provoked members of Pakistan's 85,000-strong Frontier Corps to fire upon U.S. forces, the congressmen were told, prompting U.S. commanders to call in airstrikes that killed 11 Pakistani soldiers.

That operation was not initially described as one involving hot pursuit.

I am not a big fan of "hot pursuit" because it can lead to deadly ambushes, not that the Taliban have shown much talent for those things in recent years. One tactic that is popular among some insurgents is the feigned retreat intended to draw an aggressive force into an ambush. The Vietnamese communist were very good at it and had much more effective ambushes. It has been a tactic used in the Afghan Pakistan region for centuries.

A much more effective way of dealing with the Taliban is to have planned attacks on their compounds. This disrupts their sanctuaries and makes them edgy. That in turn makes it harder for them to plan attacks in Afghanistan.

If we are going to use hot pursuit, using aircraft is probably the best way to do it. Who knows when they can find a Taliban "wedding" to blow up.