U.S. Sccretary of State Condoleezza Rice offered a generalized justification for the missile strike on a Pakistan village that was supposed to take out al Qaeda no. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri. It didn't, and now the whole nation is in an uproar.
An excerpt from the BBC story:
Protesters in Pakistan have blamed the US for the deaths of 18 civilians in a missile attack on a village on Friday.
Ms Rice did not say if the US carried out the attack, the intended target of which, according to media reports, was al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Islamabad has protested to the US, saying the strike missed its target.
Jets, or in some accounts an unmanned aircraft, reportedly fired missiles at a housing compound in the village of Damadola, near the Afghan border, on Friday.
Tough tactics
Pakistan's Islamic opposition parties have led street protests against the attack, accusing the US of killing innocent civilians and violating Pakistani sovereignty.
"America raised the bogey of Zawahri to provide justification for this attack," Meraj ul-Huda, an opposition leader, told a rally in the city of Karachi.
Ms Rice said tough tactics are necessary in the fight against al-Qaeda.
"We'll continue to work with the Pakistanis and we'll try to address their concerns," she said on Monday.
Describing the country as an ally in the "war on terror", she said al-Qaeda and its supporters "are not people who can be dealt with lightly".
She said she could not comment on any specific circumstances.
Enlarge Image