The Afghan-Pakistani is ill-defines and regardless, U.S. troops will cross it in hot pursuit of Taliban units. He believes that it is like that the American ground troops involved were U.S. special forces engaged in just such a pursuit. When they came upon the Pakistani fire base they would be uncertain who was manning it.
Which ever side fired first, the American troops called in air support and the base was then attacked with Apache helicopters and an AC-130 gunship. The result of this fight was that the already strained U.S. Pakistani relationship was strained even further, with both sides trying to control the narrative of the fight to their own political and strategic advantage.
Because the fight did occur in a tribal area, I looked to a female tribal warrior for the article's Host Stratfor Babe. Naturally this led directly to Lucy Lawless who played Xena the Warrior Princess.
Ms Lawless has had a very active career, but she is probably best known for her role as Xena in the popular TV series. I don't know much about the show, having only caught bits and pieces of it. However, I do know that among the shows fans there was more than a passing suspicion that Xena and her sidekick Gabrielle were more than just good friends, if you know what I mean, and I think that you do.
For the bonus article which is embedded after the article I had intended to find a clip of Xena fighting, but most of the clips ended up being Xena/Gabrielle shipper clips. Shippers are TV fans who root for a relationship between two TV characters, and they tend to make schmaltzy fan videos with crappy pop music over romantic scenes of the characters they're shipping.
Finally, after watching about a dozen of these damn things I just gave up and grabbed one of them for the bonus video. So, turn the sound down and watch the two of them goo-goo eying each other, blubbering a lot, smooching each other and so forth.
A Deadly U.S. Attack on Pakistani Soil
By Nate Hughes, December 1,2011
In the early hours of Nov. 26 on the Afghan-Pakistani border, what was almost certainly a flight of U.S. Army AH-64 Apache attack helicopters and an AC-130 gunship killed some two dozen Pakistani servicemen at two border outposts inside Pakistan. Details remain scarce, conflicting and disputed, but the incident was known to have taken place near the border of the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar and the Mohmand agency of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The death toll inflicted by the United States against Pakistani servicemen is unprecedented, and while U.S. commanders and NATO leaders have expressed regret over the incident, the reaction from Pakistan has been severe.
Claims and Interests
The initial Pakistani narrative of the incident describes an unprovoked and aggressive attack on well-established outposts more than a mile inside Pakistani territory — outposts known to the Americans and ones that representatives of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had visited in the past. The attack supposedly lasted for some two hours despite distressed communications from the outpost to the Pakistani military’s general headquarters in Rawalpindi.
The United States was quick to acknowledge that Pakistani troops were probably killed by attack aircraft providing close air support to a joint U.S.-Afghan patrol near the Kunar border, and while U.S. Marine Gen. James Mattis, the head of U.S. Central Command, promised a high-level investigation, the United States and NATO seemed to be more interested in smoothing relations with Islamabad than endorsing or correcting initial reports about the specifics of the attack.
What has ensued has been a classic media storm of accusations, counteraccusations, theories and specifics provided by unnamed sources that all serve to obscure the truth as much as they clarify it. Meanwhile, no matter what actually happened, aggressive spin campaigns have been launched to shape perceptions of the incident for myriad interests. Given the longstanding tensions between Washington and Islamabad as well as a record of cross-border incidents, stakeholders will believe exactly what they want to believe about the Nov. 26 incident, and even an official investigation will have little bearing on their entrenched views.
The Framework
While statements and accusations have often referenced NATO and the ISAF, it is U.S. forces that operate in this part of the country, and this close to the border the unit involved was likely operating under the aegis of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan (the U.S. command in Afghanistan) rather than under the multinational ISAF. Indeed, many American allies have also expressed frustration over the incident, convinced that it undermines ISAF operations in Afghanistan. [continues after the jump]
