Editorial: No excuse for blunder in Pakistan

The United States fired missiles into a village in Pakistan at the weekend, believing the second-in-command of al Qaeda to be there. If he was there he had left by the time the missiles hit, reducing three houses to rubble and killing 18 people. Pakistan has duly protested to Washington but little good that will do. The world has become resigned to America's assumed right to act in a way that would not be tolerated from any other state save perhaps Israel.

Both the US and Israel reserve the right to carry out aerial attacks on foreign soil where they see a potential threat to their security. But Israel has been at least discreet about it, and deadly efficient. The US is prone to the kind of blunder it committed at the weekend because its intelligence in the Middle East plainly remains deficient. Success, of course, cannot justify invasions of other nations' jurisdiction but failure leaves attention focused on what the Pentagon calls collateral damage.

The US has long made it clear it will not necessarily respect national boundaries in conducting a "war on terror". It is pursuing a state-less enemy and argues that any country which lets itself be a haven for known terrorists has to accept the consequences. Pakistan's remote mountainous border region with Afghanistan is undoubtedly a refuge for al Qaeda militants who escaped US forces on the ground in Afghanistan four years ago. The organisation was based in Pakistan, as were the Taleban before the latter took power in Kabul.

A US missile attack on a Pakistani border village a few weeks ago succeeded in killing an Egyptian, Abu Hamza Rabia, reckoned to be ranked third in al Qaeda behind the man they missed last weekend, another Egyptian, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Pakistan undoubtedly harbours the enemy, but hit-and-miss methods of this kind can only discredit the cause for which the war on terror is being waged.

Wherever the US can prosecute this war within civilised international conventions it should do so. Pakistan's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf, is an ally of the US even if this does not make him popular there. His Government's authority does not extend strongly into the border region but the US could surely do something to change that. Instead, Washington seems content to stand back and wage this war from the air, using mostly unmanned craft controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The CIA will have contacts among the tribesmen or villagers of the Afghan border region and when they get word of an al Qaeda leader's presence they call counsels of war in Washington. The intelligence has to be quickly assessed, along with the number of innocent people likely to be in the vicinity, and decisions made before the quarry moves on. It is a hasty, haphazard operation. When it goes wrong it leaves the US looking little better than its enemies who bring death to civilians in distant places.

Terrorists might not respect international conventions but the US should. It ought to have agents on the ground in Pakistan capable of pursuing al Qaeda leaders with a good deal more precision than the "smart weapons" launched by stand-off forces. And it ought to be acting at all times with the consent of the Pakistan Government.

If a war on "terror" can ever be won it will not be by outdoing terrorists at their own methods. It must be waged with international co-operation and respect for the independence and integrity of friendly states. The US would not allow others to act with such disregard for sovereign territory and it should impose the same discipline on itself.