[The details of the ambush indicate that
Americans were keenly aware of Pakistan’s sometimes duplicitous role long
before Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate last week that Pakistan’s intelligence service was undermining
efforts in Afghanistan and had supported insurgents who attacked the American Embassy
in Kabul this month.]
By Carlotta Gall
 |
Richard Mills for The Times of London
An Afghan soldier near the border with Pakistan in May 2007,
around the time of a border dispute and an attack on Americans.
|
KABUL, Afghanistan — A group of American military
officers and Afghan officials had just finished a five-hour meeting with their
Pakistani hosts in a village schoolhouse settling a border dispute when they
were ambushed — by the Pakistanis.
An
American major was killed and three American officers were wounded, along with
their Afghan interpreter, in what fresh accounts from the Afghan and American
officers who were there reveal was a complex, calculated assault by a nominal
ally. The Pakistanis opened fire on the Americans, who returned fire before
escaping in a blood-soaked Black Hawk helicopter.
The
attack, in Teri Mangal on May 14, 2007, was kept quiet by Washington, which for
much of a decade has seemed to play down or ignore signals that Pakistan would pursue its own interests, or even sometimes
behave as an enemy.
The
reconstruction of the attack, which several officials suggested was revenge for
Afghan or Pakistani deaths at American hands, takes on new relevance given the
worsening rupture in relations between Washington and Islamabad, which has
often been restrained by Pakistan’s strategic importance.
 |
| Pakistanis attacked Americans and Afghans in Teri Mangal. |
The
details of the ambush indicate that Americans were keenly aware of Pakistan’s
sometimes duplicitous role long before Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate last week that Pakistan’s intelligence service was undermining
efforts in Afghanistan and had supported insurgents who attacked the American Embassy
in Kabul this month.
Though
both sides kept any deeper investigations of the ambush under wraps, even at
the time it was seen as a turning point by officials managing day-to-day
relations with Pakistan.
Pakistani
officials first attributed the attack
to militants, then, when pressed to investigate, to a single rogue
soldier from the Frontier Corps, the poorly controlled tribal militia that
guards the border region. To this day, none of the governments have publicly
clarified what happened, hoping to limit damage to relations. Both the American
and Pakistani military investigations remain classified.
“The
official line covered over the details in the interests of keeping the
relationship with Pakistan intact,” said a former United Nations official who
served in eastern Afghanistan and was briefed on the events immediately after
they occurred.
“At
that time in May 2007, you had a lot of analysis pointing to the role of
Pakistan in destabilizing that part of Afghanistan, and here you had a case in
point, and for whatever reason it was glossed over,” he said. The official did
not want to be named for fear of alienating the Pakistanis, with whom he must
still work.
Exactly
why the Pakistanis might have chosen Teri Mangal to make a stand, and at what
level the decision was made, remain unclear. Requests to the Pakistani military
for information and interviews for this article were not answered. One
Pakistani official who was present at the meeting indicated that the issue was
too sensitive to be discussed with a journalist. Brig. Gen. Martin Schweitzer,
the American commander in eastern Afghanistan at the time, whose troops were
involved, also declined to be interviewed.
At
first, the meeting to resolve the border dispute seemed a success. Despite some
tense moments, the delegations ate lunch together, exchanged phone numbers and
made plans to meet again. Then, as the Americans and Afghans prepared to leave,
the Pakistanis opened fire without warning. The assault involved multiple
gunmen, Pakistani intelligence agents and military officers, and an attempt to
kidnap or draw away the senior American and Afghan officials.
 |
| Major Larry J. Bauguess |
“Looking
back, there were always these attacks that could possibly be attributed to
deliberate retaliation,” the official said, speaking on the condition of
anonymity because his job does not permit him to talk to journalists. Pakistani
forces had suffered losses before the May 14 attack, he added.
As with
so many problems with Pakistan, the case was left to fester. It has since
become an enduring emblem of the distrust that has poisoned relations but that
is bared only at critical junctures, like Teri Mangal, or the foray by American
commandos into Pakistan in May to kill Osama bin Laden, an operation
deliberately kept secret from Pakistani officials.
The
attack in 2007 came after some of the worst skirmishes along the ill-marked
border. By 2007 Taliban insurgents, who used Pakistan as a haven with the
support of Pakistan’s military and intelligence establishment, were crossing
the border, frequently in sight of Pakistani border posts, and challenging the
Afghan government with increasing boldness. American and Afghan forces had just
fought and killed a group of 25 militants near the border in early May.
To stem
the flow of militants, the Afghan government was building more border posts,
including one at Gawi, in Jaji District, one of the insurgents’ main crossing
points, according to Rahmatullah Rahmat, then the governor of Paktia Province
in eastern Afghanistan.
Pakistani
forces objected to the new post, claiming it was on Pakistani land, and
occupied it by force, killing 13 Afghans. Over the following days dozens were
killed as Afghan and Pakistani forces traded mortar rounds and moved troops and
artillery up to the border. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, began to
talk of defending the border at all costs, said Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the senior
American general in Afghanistan at the time.
The
border meeting was called, and a small group of Americans and Afghans — 12 men
in total — flew by helicopter to Teri Mangal, just inside Pakistan, to try to
resolve the dispute. They included Mr. Rahmat. The Afghans remember the meeting
as difficult but ending in agreement. The Pakistanis described it as cordial,
said Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier and a military analyst who has spoken to
some of those present at the meeting.
The
Americans say the experience was like refereeing children, but after five hours
of back and forth the Pakistanis agreed to withdraw from the post, and the
Afghans also agreed to abandon it.
Then,
just as the American and Afghan officials were climbing into vehicles provided
to take them the short distance to a helicopter landing zone, a Pakistani
soldier opened fire with an automatic rifle, pumping multiple rounds from just
5 or 10 yards away into an American officer, Maj. Larry J. Bauguess Jr.,
killing him almost instantly. An operations officer with the 82nd Airborne
Division from North Carolina, Major Bauguess, 36, was married and the father of
two girls, ages 4 and 6.
An
American soldier immediately shot and killed the attacker, but at the same
instant several other Pakistanis opened fire from inside the classrooms,
riddling the group and the cars with gunfire, according to the two senior
Afghan commanders who were there. Both escaped injury by throwing themselves
out of their car onto the ground.
“I saw
the American falling and the Americans taking positions and firing,” said Brig.
Gen. Muhammad Akram Same, the Afghan Army commander in eastern Afghanistan at
the time. “We were not fired on from one side, but from two, probably three
sides.”
Col.
Sher Ahmed Kuchai, the Afghan border guard commander, was showered with glass
as the car windows shattered. “It did not last more than 20 seconds, but this
was a moment of life and death,” Colonel Kuchai said.
As he
looked around, he said, he saw at least two Pakistanis firing from the open
windows of the classrooms and another running across the veranda toward a
machine gun mounted on a vehicle before he was brought down by American fire.
He also saw a Pakistani shot as he fired from the back seat of a car, he said.
The rapid American reaction saved their lives, the two Afghan commanders said.
The
senior American and Afghan commanders had been driven out of the compound and
well past the helicopter landing zone when a Pakistani post opened fire on
them, recalled Mr. Rahmat, the former governor. The Pakistani colonel in the
front seat ignored their protests to stop until the American commander drew his
pistol and demanded that the car halt. The group had to abandon the cars and
run back across fields to reach the helicopters, Mr. Rahmat said.
His
account was confirmed by the former United Nations official who talked to the
unit’s members on their return that evening.
Those
who came under fire that day remain bitter about the duplicity of the
Pakistanis. Colonel Kuchai remembers the way the senior Pakistani officers left
the yard minutes before the shooting without saying goodbye, behavior that he
now interprets as a sign that they knew what was coming.
He
insists that at least some of the attackers were intelligence officers in plain
clothes.
Mr.
Rahmat remains incensed that back in Kabul an attack on a provincial governor
by Pakistan was quietly smothered. There was never any Afghan investigation
into the ambush, for fear of further souring relations.
Official
statements from Kabul and NATO went along with the first Pakistani claim that
insurgents were behind the attack. NATO did not call for an investigation by
Pakistan until two days later.
General
McNeill, who is retired, remembers the episode as the worst moment of his
second tour as commander in Afghanistan, not only because he knew Major Bauguess
and his family, but also because he never received satisfactory explanations in
meetings with his counterpart, the Pakistani vice chief of army staff, Gen.
Ahsan Saleem Hyat.
“Ahsan
Hyat did not take it as seriously as me in asking, ‘Have we done as much as we
could, and how could we have done it differently?’ ” he said.
Lt.
Gen. Ron Helmly, who led the Office of the Defense Representative at the
American Embassy in Pakistan at the time, was told that the Pakistani soldier
who opened fire was unbalanced and was acting alone, yet he was left acutely
aware of the systemic shortcomings of Pakistani investigations.
“They
do not have a roster of who was there,” said General Helmly, who is retired.
“It was all done from mental recollection.” The Pakistani soldiers who fired
from the windows consistently claimed that they were firing at the Pakistani
gunman, he said.
Both
Generals Helmly and McNeill accept as plausible that a lone member of the
Frontier Corps, whether connected to the militants or pressured by them, was
responsible, but they also said it was possible that a larger group of soldiers
was acting in concert. The two generals said there was no evidence that senior
Pakistani officials had planned the attack.
As for
the Afghans, they still want answers. “Why did the Pakistanis do it?” General
Same of the Afghan Army said. “They have to answer this question.”
Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed
reporting.
