Pack Your Bags: Pakistan Tells US to Leave After NATO Strike Kills 24 Troops

In the early hours of November 26, 2011, NATO helicopters attacked two Pakistani military checkpoints at Salala in the Mohmand Agency, near the Afghan border. Twenty-four Pakistani soldiers were killed. Pakistan called it an unprovoked act of aggression; NATO said its forces had come under fire and called in air support. Whatever the truth of those first minutes, the consequences for the US-Pakistan relationship were immediate and severe.

Meeting in emergency session that Saturday, the Defence Committee of the Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, ordered a set of retaliatory measures: the immediate closure of the NATO/ISAF logistics supply lines running through Pakistan into Afghanistan, a demand that the United States vacate the Shamsi airbase in Balochistan within 15 days, and a boycott of the international conference on Afghanistan scheduled for Bonn in December.

The decision invoked the resolution of the joint parliamentary session of May 14, 2011 — held after the May 2 American raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad — which had warned that Pakistan would reconsider its cooperation if its sovereignty were violated again.

The Salala strike brought the already-strained alliance to its lowest point. NATO's supply route through Pakistan, the lifeline for the Afghan war effort, stayed shut for over seven months. It reopened only in July 2012, after Washington issued a formal apology. The Shamsi base — reportedly used for CIA drone operations — was vacated by the Americans in December 2011.

For India, watching from across the border, the episode was a reminder of how quickly the arithmetic of the Afghan war could change — and how little control any regional player had over the US-Pakistan rupture.