No US apology for Bajaur civilian deaths

No US apology for Bajaur civilian deaths

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Richard Boucher, the new head of South and Central Asia at the State Department, stopped short of offering an apology for the death of more than a dozen civilians in the Bajaur airstike by US planes.

Asked at a talk he gave on Thursday at the Johns Hopkins University on President George Bush’s recently-concluded trip to South Asia as to why the United States had not apologised for the death of innocent civilians, including women and children, in an airstrike on the tribal town of Bajaur, he danced around an answer, in the end falling well short of the apology that he could well have made. It was obvious that he was not going to venture an answer that would go beyond what, by all indications, is a well-considered decision, No apology!

Washington has been encouraged in its resolve not to apologise by what many see as the Pakistan government’s apologetic and pusillanimous position on the issue. At no point has Pakistan demanded an apology from the United States. Even the US ambassador in Islamabad was not formally summoned to the Foreign Office to express Pakistan’s outrage at the attack. The Bajaur incident was mentioned, almost in passing, by the Foreign Minister when he ran into the American envoy at some venue in Islamabad.

Boucher’s first reaction to the question was that he did not have a “good answer”, which he followed by saying that when the bombing took place, he was “not in the job.”

He said it was always regrettable when innocent people got killed in “crossfire,” suggesting that “policy decisions” could not be influenced by such considerations.