U.S. image suffers a black eye

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Friday's U.S. airstrike on a Pakistani village has disrupted America's efforts to improve its image in this country, one of its most important Muslim allies, and has turned glaring publicity on a part of the global war on terror that the United States and Pakistan have tried to keep hidden.

In both ways, it has weakened one of Washington's main backers in the Muslim world, President Pervez Musharraf.

Since October's earthquake here, both governments have played up the role of U.S. troops and helicopters in rushing relief supplies to millions of homeless villagers in the mountains of Kashmir.

That imagery has helped counter a three-year wave of public-relations disasters for the United States in Pakistan and the Muslim world, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the abuse and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and other military prisons abroad.

But since Saturday, positive images of American relief work have been swept aside here by pictures and stories about the U.S. missile attack that killed between 13 and 18 Pakistanis in an attempt to hit al-Qaida leaders in a village near the border with Afghanistan.

"American soldiers have been acting as brothers to Pakistanis, and we are all happy about this," said Hussain Javed, a Pakistani businessman who was taking a flight Sunday at Islamabad's airport.

"But now they are killing us, too, and so maybe they are our enemies instead."

Thousands of Pakistanis marched Sunday in protest of the attack, and Islamic militant leaders vowed Monday to keep the demonstrations going.

While Pakistani political analysts do not suggest the protests are likely to threaten Musharraf's control, Javed and others say a recent string of U.S. border incursions strengthens a popular image of him as a lapdog of the unpopular U.S. superpower.

While the CIA has played a major role in the 4-year-old manhunt for al-Qaida militants in Pakistan's unruly tribal borderlands with Afghanistan, the U.S. and Pakistan have kept that fact as quiet as possible to protect Musharraf from popular disapproval, U.S. and Pakistani officials have said.

Musharraf's government has insisted that, as a sovereign nation, Pakistan is conducting the chase with its own troops and only technical assistance from U.S. intelligence.

Since November that claim has been eroded by four U.S. air raids on Pakistani villages that have been increasingly difficult to conceal from the public.

Not that Pakistan's government didn't try.

On the night of Nov. 30, explosions demolished a home in Asoray, a village in North Waziristan, killing a senior al-Qaida figure, Hamza Rabia.

Residents told Pakistani journalists of hearing aircraft overhead and several explosions, and they displayed rocket fragments with U.S. markings. U.S. news agencies quoted unnamed American intelligence officials in Washington as saying the CIA had gotten Rabia with a missile strike.

National-security adviser Stephen Hadley sidestepped the question of the CIA's role, saying, "Musharraf has been very aggressive in dealing with al-Qaida and the Taliban," and "we have helped him in terms of providing intelligence and cooperating with his forces."

Pakistani officials denied that any attack had taken place, saying Rabia and his colleagues had accidentally exploded a bomb in the house. A local journalist, Hayatullah Khan, challenged the official version. A few days later, he was abducted by masked gunmen and has not been heard of since.

Officials in Northern Waziristan offered the same explanation — an explosion of a bomb under construction — for another blast that destroyed a house Rabia had been staying in two weeks earlier.

On Jan. 7, missiles destroyed the home of a militant cleric in the Pakistani border village of Sedgai, and accounts of U.S. involvement were clear enough that Pakistan formally protested to Washington.

The attack Friday on the village of Damadola received immediate, worldwide publicity because U.S. officials in Washington leaked the news to American TV networks with the victorious claim, still unsubstantiated, that the CIA had killed al-Qaida's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's top lieutenant, was invited to an Islamic dinner in the village but did not show up, two Pakistani officials told The Associated Press.

Al-Zawahri sent some aides to the dinner instead and investigators were trying to determine whether they had been in any of the three houses destroyed in the missile strike, one of the officials said Sunday.

In Washington, a U.S counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the information's sensitivity, said it is not yet known if al-Zawahri was killed in Friday's attack.

With media reports out of Pakistan indicating that at least four foreigners were killed, the official said it appears that some damage was done, even if al-Zawahri was not there.

"This place had a history," one Pakistani official said.

The official said the compound that was hit has been visited in the past by significant terrorist figures.

"There were strong indications that was happening again," the official said.

Pakistan's ruling party on Monday demanded an apology for the airstrike, but the country's prime minister said his trip to the United States this week would go ahead as planned.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and his ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Q condemned the airstrike.

He is still scheduled to leave today for the United States, where he said he would talk about security issues but also meet business leaders to encourage foreign investment.

He said the incident in the village near the Afghan border was "very regrettable" but said, "I don't think that takes away from the fact that Pakistan needs investment."

The Muslim League-Q party later issued a statement demanding an official apology from the United States.

"They should try to work to improve their image," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Monday of U.S. activities in the region.

Islamic groups, meanwhile, vowed to step up anti-American protests. "There will be more ... bigger protests," Shahid Shamsi, a spokesman for the anti-American religious coalition that organized the rallies, said Monday.

Shamsi said the war on terror should not extend across borders without permission.

"Pakistani civilians, including children, were killed," Shamsi said.

"Principles cannot be broken in the name of (fighting) terrorism."

Additional information from The Associated Press