Unconventional Tactics

Assuming that Ayman al-Zawahiri was present in the Pakistani village of Damadola, an unmanned American aircraft fired four Hellfire missiles at a mud walled compound killing 18 people. Few Al Qaeda members including the weapons expert Midhat Mursi was killed in the attack. While this attack got major press coverage both in United States and in Pakistan, there was another minor incident which happened a week before it which was not noticed much. According to Jim Hoagland, some foreign troops landed in Saidgi in North Waziristan, grabbed some folks and flew back into Afghanistan.
All this happened due to the help Musharraf is doing to prevent terrorism from Pakistani soil. Remember how he tried to hoodwink India into believing that there are no terrorists in Pakistan. He has been trying to do the same with the Americans. But since Americans are not Indians, they decided to take matters into their own hands and teach Musharraf a lesson.

“You can draw the Afghan-Pakistan border on a map by looking at the pattern of signal intercepts,” says one U.S. official. “The bad guys chatter away in Pakistan, feeling they are safe. That area lights up like a Christmas tree. Then they go silent when they cross into Afghanistan, where they fear getting hit.”
Two limited, carefully planned border attacks in rapid succession would appear to be something more than accidents of opportunity. The escalation by terrorists in Afghanistan has been met with an escalation, still at a low level, in U.S. attacks on Pakistani soil. Musharraf’s failure to curb the terrorist forays into Afghanistan after the incursion at Saidgi conceivably led to the attack on Damadola and the death of innocents there.[Message to Musharraf]

Fighting terrorism requires unconventional tactics and only Americans seem to have understood it.