NATO AIRSTRIKE STRAINS U.S.-PAKISTAN RELATIONS

[The disagreements underscored the vast fissures between the warily allied countries amid efforts to engineer a negotiated settlement to the war in Afghanistan, which U.S. officials say requires Pakistani participation. U.S. and Pakistani officials have worked to improve relations despite regular blows to their alliance, and military officials have focused on border coordination. But officials on both sides said the NATO airstrike appeared to represent a monumental failure of communication.]

By Karin Brulliard and Joshua Partlow

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — U.S. efforts to enlist Pakistani cooperation for peace talks with the Taliban were in limbo Sunday, as the circumstances surrounding a NATO airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers remained in dispute and Pakistan threatened to boycott an international conference on Afghanistan’s future.

The military coalition in Kabul said it was still investigating the Saturday morning incident, but a spokesman suggested a joint U.S.-Afghan operation had called in the NATO helicopters for support after coming under fire. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasumussen called it a “tragic unintended accident.” But Pakistani officials maintained that the air assault was unprovoked, sustained and continued even after the Pakistani military informed its coalition counterparts at two joint border centers that an official checkpost was under attack.

The disagreements underscored the vast fissures between the warily allied countries amid efforts to engineer a negotiated settlement to the war in Afghanistan, which U.S. officials say requires Pakistani participation. U.S. and Pakistani officials have worked to improve relations despite regular blows to their alliance, and military officials have focused on border coordination. But officials on both sides said the NATO airstrike appeared to represent a monumental failure of communication.

“This is a mess,” said a U.S. military official in Kabul, who, like other officials, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation.

In a phone call Sunday to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said the airstrike inside Pakistani territory “negates the progress made by the two countries on improving relations.” Her office said it was now undecided about attending the Bonn conference on Afghanistan in early December. Afghan and American officials view Pakistan’s attendance — and its help with peace talks -- as important because of the influence it is believed to have over the Taliban.

The incident once again ground regular diplomatic encounters to a halt, as has happened after other recent crises, including the U.S. raid to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May. Pakistan said it is reviewing its intelligence and diplomatic relations with the United States, and officials said Sunday that various upcoming U.S.-Pakistan meetings on reconciliation and other topics had been put on hold.

“This is pretty serious,” a U.S. official said. “We should not expect this to blow over soon.”

As Pakistan buried the 24 soldiers Sunday, its two main border crossings remained closed to cargo trucks that carry nearly half of the supplies to coalition troops in Afghanistan. Interior Minister Rehman Malik said the move, enacted Saturday in response to the air assault, would be permanent. American officials view that as unlikely, but they say the blockade could last longer than the 10-day stoppage after a NATO airstrike killed two Pakistani soldiers last year.

Anger over the incident gripped Pakistan, leaving the unpopular government little incentive to soften its stance.Thousands of people protested the strike outside the U.S. consulate in the southern city of Karachi. Religious parties and banned militant outfits demonstrated in various cities, calling for retaliation against what they described as an offensive attack.

Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a Pakistani military spokesman, stopped short of that characterization, but he said the strike was “inexplicable.” In an interview, he said the two border posts are clearly marked and their locations are known to Afghan and coalition forces. No militant or military firing preceded the NATO assault, nor did coalition troops inform Pakistan that they were receiving fire from the Pakistani side, as is procedure, Abbas said.

Once the strike began, Abbas said, soldiers notified their commanders in the nearby city of Peshawar, who told officials at military headquarters in Rawalpindi, who then informed two trilateral border coordination centers located at the Torkham pass and the border of Pakistan’s North Waziristan region.

“But somehow it continued,” Abbas said of the firing. “Our side believes there is no possibility of confusion. The post location is not where a Taliban would take position.”

Afghan and U.S. military officials, however, say they believe Taliban fighters — many of whom are based in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas — sometimes operate alongside Pakistani troops. The United States has long alleged that insurgents are sheltered and at times aided by Pakistan, which views them as assets for influence in Afghanistan. Pakistan denies that.

In Afghanistan’s Paktika province, a border area farther south from where Saturday’s incident took place, U.S. soldiers have repeatedly come under attack by rockets fired near Pakistani border posts, sometimes within sight of these bases. Some U.S. soldiers believe Pakistani troops are complicit in these attacks, or at least do little to stop them, while others say the evidence for this is not clear. Pakistan says all military firing from its side into Afghanistan is aimed at fleeing insurgents.

Abbas said the area on the Pakistani side of the border where the airstrike occurred, Mohmand, has been “cleared completely” of militants, so none would have fired on the Afghan-U.S. operation. Leaders of anti-Taliban tribal militias that fight alongside Pakistani security forces in Mohmand supported that Sunday, and they also described a sustained NATO air assault that lasted two to three hours.

“The attack has helped militancy prevail,” said Malik Sultan Khan, who heads a militia that has been fighting the Taliban in Mohmand for three years. “We are desperate to take revenge from the U.S.”

Partlow reported from Kabul. Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan contributed from Peshawar, Pakistan.


@ The Washington Post

AT MEETING ON CLIMATE CHANGE, URGENT ISSUES BUT LOW EXPECTATIONS

[Negotiators postponed until Durban the politically freighted question of whether to extend the frayed Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that requires most wealthy nations to trim their emissions while providing help to developing countries to pursue a cleaner energy path. Also still on the agenda are the structure of, and the sources of financing for, a climate adaptation and technology fund that is supposed to reach $100 billion a year by 2020.]

By John M. Broder

WASHINGTON — With intensifying climate disasters and global economic turmoil as the backdrop, delegates from 194 nations will gather in Durban, South Africa, starting Monday to try to advance, if only incrementally, the world’s response to dangerous climate change.

To those who have followed the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change over their nearly 20-year history, the conflicts and controversies to be taken up in Durban are monotonously familiar: the differing obligations of industrialized and developing nations, the question of who will pay to help poor nations adapt, the urgency of protecting tropical forests, the need to rapidly develop and deploy clean energy technology.

The negotiating process itself is under fire from some quarters, including the poorest nations who believe their needs are being neglected in the fight among the major economic powers. Criticism is also coming from a relatively small but vocal band of climate-change skeptics, many of them sitting members of the United States Congress, who doubt the existence of human influence on the climate and ridicule international efforts to deal with it.

But scientists warn that this squabbling serves only to delay actions that must be taken to reduce climate-altering emissions and to improve vulnerable nations’ ability to respond to the changes they say are surely coming.

“I feel we are losing completely the scientific rationale for action,” said Rajendra K. Pachauri, director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global body of scientists and statisticians that provides the technical underpinning of the United Nations talks. He noted that the group had recently released a detailed assessment of the increasing frequency of extreme climate events like droughts, floods and cyclones, and of the necessity of moving quickly to take steps to reduce emissions and adapt to the inevitable damage.

“All of these indicate that inaction in dealing with climate change and delays would only expose human society and all living species to risk that could become serious,” Dr. Pachauri wrote in an e-mail. He said he was afraid the conference would “only focus on short-term political considerations.”

The Durban meeting is formally known as COP17, for the 17th conference of the parties to the United Nations convention on climate change.

Delegates in Durban will be addressing relatively small and, to many, arcane questions of process and finance. Negotiators, having entered the United Nations climate talks at Copenhagen two years ago with grand ambitions and having left with disillusion, are now defining expectations down and hoping to keep the process alive through modest steps.

Last year in Cancún, Mexico, delegates produced an agreement that set up a fund to help poor countries adapt to climate changes, created mechanisms for the transfer of clean-energy technology, provided compensation for the preservation of tropical forests and enshrined the emissions reductions promises that came out of the Copenhagen meeting.

Negotiators postponed until Durban the politically freighted question of whether to extend the frayed Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that requires most wealthy nations to trim their emissions while providing help to developing countries to pursue a cleaner energy path. Also still on the agenda are the structure of, and the sources of financing for, a climate adaptation and technology fund that is supposed to reach $100 billion a year by 2020.

One of the issues that is most contentious and least likely to be resolved involves the future of the Kyoto Protocol, which requires the major industrialized nations to meet targets on emissions reduction but imposes no mandates on developing countries, including emerging economic powers and sources of global greenhouse gas emissions like China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

The United States is not a party to the protocol, having refused to even consider ratifying it because of those asymmetrical obligations. Some major countries, including Canada, Japan and Russia, have said they will not agree to an extension of the protocol next year unless the unbalanced requirements of developing and developed countries are changed. That is similar to the United States’ position, which is that any successor treaty must apply equally to all major economies.

But the European Union, the major developing countries, and most African and Pacific island nations would like to see the Kyoto process extended as a prelude to a binding international agreement after 2020 to reduce emissions so as to keep the average global temperature from ever rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, or about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above its current level.

Todd Stern, the chief American climate negotiator, said he was flexible as to the form such a future agreement would take and even the time frame for reaching it, though he expects it will be after 2020, once the various Kyoto and Cancún agreements have run their course. He said that all countries, including the United States, must take meaningful unilateral steps to control their carbon dioxide emissions. The obligations are greatest among the 20 or so largest economies, which are responsible for more than 80 percent of global carbon output.

“In reality, the most effective thing we can do to address climate change is for all relevant countries to act vigorously at home,” Mr. Stern said in an interview, noting that most countries have adopted emissions targets or national action plans that will be followed regardless of the status of the negotiations toward a binding future agreement.

“At the same time,” Mr. Stern added, “climate is a classic global commons problem, where each country needs confidence that others are acting, so international cooperation is important, and this then takes you to the core international issue: you can’t rationally address this problem at the international level unless you get all the major economies, developed and developing, acting in a common system.”

The United States has been criticized at these gatherings for years, in part because of its rejection of the Kyoto framework and in part because it has not adopted a comprehensive domestic program for reducing its own greenhouse gas emissions. President Obama has pledged to reduce American emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, but his preferred approach, a nationwide cap-and-trade system for carbon pollution, failed spectacularly in Congress in 2010. United States emissions are down about 6 percent over the past five years, largely because of the drop in industrial and electricity production caused by the recession.

@ The New York Times