Obama is expanding the war in Pakistan

With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.

The missile strikes on training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud represent a broadening of the American campaign inside Pakistan, which has been largely carried out by drone aircraft.

Under president Bush, the US frequently attacked militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban involved in cross-border attacks into Afghanistan, but had stopped short of raids aimed at  Mehsud and his followers, who have played less of a direct role in attacks on American troops.

The strikes are another sign that president Obama is extending US policy in using American spy agencies against terrorism suspects in Pakistan, as he had promised to do during his presidential campaign. At the same time, Obama has begun to scale back some of the Bush policies on the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, which he has criticised as counterproductive.

Mehsud was identified early last year by both American and Pakistani officials as the man who had orchestrated the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister and the wife of Pakistan’s current president, Asif Ali Zardari. Mehsud’s name figures in a classified list of militant leaders whom the CIA and American commandos were authorised to capture or kill.

There is growing concern in Washington that militant attacks are increasingly putting the government of Pakistan, a nation with nuclear weapons, at risk. 

For months, Pakistani military and intelligence officials have complained about Washington’s refusal to strike at Baitullah Mehsud, even while CIA drones struck at Qaeda figures and leaders of the network run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a militant leader believed responsible for a campaign of violence against American troops in Afghanistan.

Bush administration officials had charged that it was the Pakistanis who were reluctant to take on Mehsud and his network.

Last week’s missile strikes came after a visit to Islamabad by Richard C. Holbrooke, the American envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Senior Pakistani officials are scheduled to arrive in Washington next week at a time of rising tension over a declared truce between the Pakistani government and militants in the Swat region.

While the administration has not publicly criticized the Pakistanis, several American officials have said in interviews that they believe appeasing the militants would only weaken Pakistan’s civilian government. Holbrooke has expressed concern about what was happening in Swat and the need to send Pakistani troops to the West.

But Obama administration officials face the same intractable problems that the Bush administration did in trying to prod Pakistan toward a different course. Pakistan still deploys the overwhelming majority of its troops along the Indian border, not the border with Afghanistan, and its intelligence agencies maintain shadowy links to the Taliban even as they take American funds to fight them.