Conley
12-01-2011, 09:49 AM
WASHINGTON — 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 in NATO 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/world/middleeast/for-pakistan-no-formal-remorse-yet-from-obama.html
I definitely agree on letting the investigation take its course. The problem is of course that even if the report shows that the Pakistanis are to blame for the incident, they still won't accept that as an answer. I guess in the streets NATO = the U.S., which let's face it is basically is. Unless the French are leading us into Libya. So, maybe this will be the straw that ends the relationship between the two countries. The elections went in favor of Muslim extremists in Egypt and they'll be gaining more power in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well. The political landscape is being redrawn and it isn't pretty.
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/world/middleeast/for-pakistan-no-formal-remorse-yet-from-obama.html
I definitely agree on letting the investigation take its course. The problem is of course that even if the report shows that the Pakistanis are to blame for the incident, they still won't accept that as an answer. I guess in the streets NATO = the U.S., which let's face it is basically is. Unless the French are leading us into Libya. So, maybe this will be the straw that ends the relationship between the two countries. The elections went in favor of Muslim extremists in Egypt and they'll be gaining more power in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well. The political landscape is being redrawn and it isn't pretty.