Anger widen in Pakistan Sunday over a NATO cross-border air strike that murdered 24 Pakistani soldiers and could weaken the U.S. attempts to end the war in Afghanistan.

Sunday night in Pakistan, in excess of 40 hours after the mishap, many queries remained.

NATO explained the deaths as a "tragic unintentional incident" and said an inquiry was in progress. A Western official and an Afghan security officer who requested anonymity said NATO troops were responding to fire from across the border.

It's possible both clarifications are accurate: that a retaliatory attack by NATO troops took a tragic, wrong turn in cruel terrain where recognizing friend and foe can be tricky.

"All of this is tremendously gloomy and requires to be inspected," said a U.S. official in Washington, who spoke on condition of secrecy. "Our objective today is ... that the inquiry gets increased in a way that is confidence-building on all sides."

Insurgents often assault from Pakistani soil or run after battle across a porous border that NATO-led troops, under their UN mandate, cannot cross.

What is obvious is the mishap could weaken U.S. attempts to make better ties with Pakistan so that the local power helps stabilize Afghanistan before NATO war troops go home by the end of 2014.

The strike was the newest identified annoyance by the United States, which furious Pakistan's powerful military with a one-sided special forces raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May.

Several of gathered outside the American consulate in the city of Karachi to gripe against the NATO attack.

A Reuters reporter at the scene said the annoyed crowd shouted "Down with America." One young man climbed on the wall surrounding the heavily equipped compound and attached a Pakistani flag to snide wire.

"America is striking our borders. The government should instantly split ties with it," said Naseema Baluch, a housewife attending the protest march. "America desires to take up our country but we will not let it do that."

Pakistan buried the troops died in the air strike on Sunday. Television stations showed coffins draped in green and white Pakistani flags in a prayer ceremony at the headquarters of the local command in Peshawar, attended by army chief General Ashfaq Kayani.

Militants attacking NATO forces have long taken benefit of the truth that the coalition's mandate finishes at the border to either assault from within Pakistan or run away to relative secure after an attack.

Three Pakistani security men were murdered last year by NATO gun-ships. NATO said then that its forces had wrongly advice shots from Pakistani forces for an insurgents attack.

In the fresh incident, a Western officer and a senior Afghan security officer said NATO and Afghan forces had come under fire from across the border with Pakistan before NATO aircraft strike a Pakistani army post, killing the soldiers.

"They came under cross-border fire," the Western officer said, without making out the source of the fire.

The Afghan authorities said troops had come under fire from inside Pakistan as they were sliding from helicopters, which had returned fire.

Both authorities asked not to be identified because the attack is so sensitive.

Pakistan has said the air-strike was an unprovoked attack and has said it keeps the right to strike back.

U.S. and NATO authorities are endeavoring to calm strains but the soldiers' deaths are testing a bad marriage of expediency between Washington and Islamabad. Thousands of Pakistanis thought their army is combating a war against insurgents that only serves Western interests.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar talked with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by telephone early Sunday to express the deep sense of anger felt across Pakistan" and warned that the mishap could weaken attempts to make better relations, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Pakistan closed down NATO supply roads into Afghanistan in revenge for the incident, the lethal of its kind since Islamabad anxiously allied itself with Washington following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Pakistan is the way for about half of NATO supplies shipped overland to its troops in Afghanistan. Land consignments account for about two thirds of the alliance's cargo.

A same mishap on Sept 30, 2010, which dies two Pakistani security men, led to the closure of one of NATO's supply roads through Pakistan for 10 days.

U.S. ties with Pakistan have undergone numerous great holds up beginning with the one sided U.S. special forces raid in May that killed bin Laden in a Pakistani town where he had seemingly been residing for years.

"From Raymond Davis and his gun slinging in the streets of Lahore to the Osama bin Laden incident, and immediately to the firing on Pakistani soldiers on the unstable Pakistan-Afghan border, things hardly look like able to get any worse," said the Daily Times.

Islamabad depends on billions in U.S. aid and Washington thinks Pakistan can help it bring about peace in Afghanistan.

But it is continuously fighting Anti-American emotions over everything from U.S. drone aircraft strikes to Washington's calls for economic restructurings.

"We should finish our association with America. It's good to have hostility with America than friendship. It's nobody's friend," said laborer Sameer Baluch.

In Karachi, numerous truck drivers who should have been carrying supplies to Afghanistan were inoperative.

Taj Malli valiant the risk of Taliban assaults to deliver supplies to Afghanistan so that he can support his children. But he feels it is time to end the road permanently in protest.

"Pakistan is so significant against money. The government must suspend all supplies to NATO so that they understand the value of Pakistan," he said.

 

Ashfaq Kayani Pakistan's army chief has told the US that it will have to consider"10 times" before taking any one-sided action in North Waziristan.

He said that the US should concentrate on alleviating Afghanistan instead of pushing Pakistan to assault insurgent groups in the key border area.

Washington has for several years advocated Islamabad to make a treaty with insurgents in the region, particularly the Haqqani network.

It has been accused for a numbers of latest assaults in Afghanistan.

"If someone proved to me that all troubles will be resolved by taking action in North Waziristan, I'd do it tomorrow," a parliamentarian who focused an updating given by Gen Kayani quoted him as saying.

"If we required to take action, we will do it on our timetable and according to our limits."

Gen Kayani told the closed-door parliamentary defense committee meeting in Rawalpindi that any pulling out of US help would not affect Pakistan's defense competences.

The Haqqani network - considered to be connected to the Taliban and al-Qaeda - is blamed of carrying out last month's 19-hour blockade of the American embassy in Kabul.

The US has accused the new attack on Kabul's US embassy on the Haqqani network.

Different reports illustrate that during the meeting Gen Kayani shielded Pakistani contacts with the groups "positive" for intelligence gathering.

The verbal and military war waged by the US against the network has strengthened in recent months and is the key reason of uneasiness between the US-led allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

US national security consultant Thomas E Donilon is reported to have told Gen Kayani at a confidential meeting in Saudi Arabia previous this month that Pakistan must either kill the Haqqani leadership, assist the US to kill them or persuade them to join a peaceful, democratic Afghan government.

In September outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm Mike Mullen described the Haqqanis a "veritable arm" of the Pakistani spy agency, blaming it of directly favoring the militants who had grown the attack on the US embassy.

But Pakistan has been hesitant to give in to US demand on the issue. Last month Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said that his country "will not bend over US pressure" on combating insurgency.

A senior officer in Afghanistan said on Tuesday that the allies was "very concentrated" now on the Haqqani network.

He said that the Haqqani network functions mainly in Khost, Paktia and Paktika provinces, but there has been a notable development in its actions in Wardak and Logar provinces.

Afghan and Nato authorities disagree that Pakistan's unwillingness to tackle the Haqqani network has enforced them to increase missile strikes against them in their secure haven of North Waziristan.

For months, the US has been attacking insurgents, as well as members of the Haqqani network, in Pakistan's tribal regions near the Afghan border - some in the US Congress are now calling for it to away from drone attacks. 

Pakistan's military was greatly infuriated and embarrassed when US commandos killed al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in a confidential raid on Pakistani region in May.

While Pakistan has long rejected favoring the Haqqani group, it has about ten year old policy of following foreign policy goals through associations with the insurgents.

After 10 years of war in Afghanistan, US and Nato partners stay faraway from reaching their objectives, an chief of allies forces has said.

Stanley McChrystal a Retired Army General said the US started the fight with a "terrifyingly basic" view and still not have the information to get a winning end.

"Operation Enduring Freedom" meant to track down Osama Bin Laden after 9/11 and devastate the Taliban. The UN states in excess of 10,000 common people have killed in the previous five years alone.

More than 2,500 worldwide soldiers have been died – most of them American.

The fight has already exceeded Vietnam to become the lengthy war in American history.

Talking at the Council on Foreign Relations, Gen McChrystal, who controlled the allies forces in 2009-10 before being enforced to quit after a magazine interview, said the US and Nato partners were "a little better than" half way to acquiring their military objectives.

The harder assignment would be to establish a legal government that common Afghans could consider in and that would balance the authority of the Taliban, he said.

"We didn't familiar enough and we still don't know enough," he said. "The majority of us - including me - had a very superficial consideration of the circumstances and history, and we had a shockingly simplistic analysis of recent history, the last 50 years," he said.

He further said that while the option to involve in Afghanistan may have been seen as the US acting on its right to protect itself after 9/11, the choice to attack Iraq two years later had both "changed the Muslim world's view of America's effort" and preoccupied some military resources that could have been put to good use in Afghanistan.

Gen McChrystal's remarks come as a partner of aid groups said in spite billions of dollars in aid, developments were only inconsistent.

The Acbar group said health and education area especially remained in awful need of development.

The Western authorities accept that parts of the country will stay brutal after 2014 when Nato surrenders its fighting role. Without a peace agreement with the Taliban, he says, few actually expect the fighting to be taken to an end.

Sir William Patey, British ambassador to Afghanistan: "I think by 2015 we will have a doable country"

Some $57bn (£37bn) of aid has been consumed over the previous ten years, according to the NGO who form part of the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, but, while some achievements have been done, the expenditure has not always decoded into actual developments for several Afghans.

For example, now 80% of Afghans have approached to health facilities, compared to only 9% in 2001, according to data from the Public Health Ministry.

But several of the newly opened clinics are frequently closed or badly equipped.

"Behind the title numbers there lies an image of people endeavoring to reach clinics which without medicines or doctors, and school children attempting to educate without textbooks or classrooms," said Acbar director Anne Garella. 

The country is also facing its severe famine for a decade, with the World Food Program saying it expects that 2.6 million people will require aid.

More Photos: A decade of Afghanistan War

Rights group Amnesty International previous this weeks appreciated development in latest human rights laws, the availability of education and health facilities and declined prejudice against women, but said in some areas - including justice and policing, security and disarticulation- the condition had remained sluggish, or even got worsen.

"The Afghan government and its companions can't carry on to defend their so poor performance by saying that things are improved than during the 1990s," said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty's Asia Pacific director.

 

Pakistan's strong military chief General Ashfaq Kayani on Sunday called a "special" meeting of his high commands to talk about the security condition, the army said, as the battle of words with the United States shoot up.

The special meeting of the corps commanders came against the surroundings of bitter U.S. blames that Pakistan army's strong spy agency assisted the Haqqani insurgent group Washington blames for the latest assault on its embassy and other objectives in Kabul.

In a short two-line statement, the army said the commanders would "evaluate (the) existing security condition."

Kayani, who is leaving for London later tonight to deliver a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Royal College of Defense Studies, is presiding the meeting.

"The meeting reproduces the seriousness of calamity," retired general, turned security expert, Talat Masood said.

"They will issue a statement to articulate harmony (within the army) and to show that they all are on one page."

The corps commanders meeting appears to a day after Kayani met with U.S. CENTCOM commander General James N. Mattis in Pakistan, but Pakistan’s army spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas said the two meetings were "not related."

CONTACTS WITH HAQQANIS

In an interview with CNN, Abbas accepted that military's Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) sustained contacts with the Haqqani network, but said that didn't indicate it hold up it.

"Any spy agency would like to carry on links with whatever opposition group, whatever rebel organization ... for some positive results, " he told CNN in a telephone interview.

However, he said there was a biggest distinction between upholding those contacts to ease peace and sustaining it against a partner.

In the most straight comments by a U.S. officer since Pakistan tied the U.S.-led war on insurgency in 2001, the leaving chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, on Thursday showed before the U.S. Senate that the Haqqani insurgent network is a "absolute arm" of the ISI.

He also for the first time held Islamabad in charge for the Kabul assault, saying Pakistan given assistance for that attack.

The Haqqani network is the most aggressive and efficient faction among Taliban militants in Afghanistan.

On Saturday night, Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani denied U.S. blames as an indication of American "puzzlement and policy disorder."

"We clearly deny statements of any involvement with the Haqqanis or of stand in war," Gilani said, breaking off from an address to aid agencies and foreign ambassadors on the country's flood catastrophe.

Though Pakistan formally discarded assistance for the Taliban after the September 11 assaults on the United States in 2001 and associated itself with Washington's "war on terror," spectators say components of the ISI denied making the doctrinal transfer.

Gilani's Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told Washington on Friday that it endangered losing an ally if it kept blaming Islamabad of playing a dual game in the war against terror, and raising a crisis in ties generated by U.S. forces' killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in an unexpected attack in May.

Security expert Masood said the sharpened speechifying between Pakistan and the United States could result to a "collision."

One of the choices for Pakistan, he said, could be to build up pressure on Haqqani fighters to run off Pakistan to turn away a quarrel.

"I consider both Pakistan and the United States will move back to prevent making things ruined.

Militants initiated a composite attack against the American Embassy and a close to NATO base on Tuesday, hiding the greatly secured compound with rockets in an attack that move up new queries about the protection of Afghanistan’s capital and the Westerners working there.

As a minimum10 heavy blasts —evidently from rockets launched by insurgents — and waves of automatic weapons fire were reported amongst the drone of bells and English-language warnings conveying Americans inside the embassy to take shelter.

It was not clear whether anybody — Western or Afghan — had been injured or died in the assault, but it showed that one rocket had hit a minibus belonging to the Tak Beer private school, and observers said that children had been carried away bleeding and evidently insensible.

Afghan authorities said many attackers were behind the attack, but it was not clear exactly how many attackers there were or whether they were assaulting from a single or numerous places. As of 2:30 p.m., security forces were on going to fight the assaulters, some of whom showed to be holed up in an incomplete building neglecting the embassy.

“We don’t recognize how many suicide attackers are in the building,” said Col. Abdul Zahir, of the criminal investigative section of the Kabul police. “They’re shelling at the embassy. We’re still in battling position. We can’t say something.”

The attack, which started around 1:15 p.m., was the newly in a string of assaults that have broken off at a shaky sense of security in the capital. In August, insurgent murdered eight people in an assault on a British cultural center, and in June, nine suicide attackers broken layers of security to assault the hillside Intercontinental Hotel.

On Monday afternoon, the streets nearby the location of the attack, usually choked with the traffic of minibuses, bicycles and Toyotas, were deserted of all but security forces and people competing for cover.

“We don’t aware what’s occurring,” one Afghan soldier said. “All over the place you can hear gun firing.”

Taliban’s spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid professed responsibility for the assault in a text message, stating the Taliban had embarked to assault the embassy, a NATO base and Afghan government building. His statement could not be instantly verified.

A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said there was a continuing assault in the center of Kabul, but could not give any other information or say whether NATO forces were engaged in fighting the attackers.

The attack came under two months after Afghan forces believed official responsibility for security in the capital, one of several corners of the country where security was formally handed over in July. 

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