Obama holds off on condolences for Pak troops

NY Times:
The White House has decided that President Obama will not offer formal condolences — at least for now — to Pakistan for the deaths of two dozen soldiers inNATO airstrikes last week, overruling State Department officials who argued for such a show of remorse to help salvage America’s relationship with Pakistan, administration officials said.
On Monday, Cameron Munter, the United States ambassador to Pakistan, told a group of White House officials that a formal video statement from Mr. Obama was needed to help prevent the rapidly deteriorating relations between Islamabad and Washington from cratering, administration officials said. The ambassador, speaking by videoconference from Islamabad, said that anger in Pakistan had reached a fever pitch, and that the United States needed to move to defuse it as quickly as possible, the officials recounted.
Defense Department officials balked. While they did not deny some American culpability in the episode, they said expressions of remorse offered by senior department officials and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton were enough, at least until the completion of a United States military investigation establishing what went wrong.
Some administration aides also worried that if Mr. Obama were to overrule the military and apologize to Pakistan, such a step could become fodder for his Republican opponents in the presidential campaign, according to several officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
... 
Obama already has a reputation for gratuitous apologies for US actions, and jumping in now would probably enhance that reputation.

There is also reason to wait for a full investigation of the events.  Our troops and the Afghan troops with them insist they were under fire from the area where the Pakistan troops were killed.  Either those Pakistan troops were doing the firing or they were permitting Taliban fighters to fire from positions near them.  If that was the case then they should not act surprised that they got return fire.

The emotional response of the Pakistan leadership also suggest they have an agenda beyond dealing with a friendly fire episode.

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