Kipling was right

The New York Times has an article by Zubair Shah and Jane Perlez about "American-led international forces" (whatever they are) that landed via helicopter in South Waziristan and shot the place up:

Two helicopters carrying American-led international forces landed in a Pakistani village in South Waziristan near the border with Afghanistan in the early hours of Wednesday morning and the soldiers opened fire on villagers, killing seven people, according to a spokesman for the Pakistani military. The account by the spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, broadcast on Pakistani television on Wednesday evening, described what appeared to be a first commando attack by NATO forces against the Taliban inside Pakistan.
Pakistan has lodged a “strong protest” to the American government and reserved the right of “self defense and retaliation", the general said. Local residents said most of the dead were women and children but this could not be immediately confirmed.
According to an earlier description of the military action Wednesday given by a Taliban commander and local residents, the latest attack was aimed at three houses in the village of Jalal Khel in the Angoor Adda area of South Waziristan, near a known stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and less than a mile from the border with Afghanistan.
The governor of the North-West Frontier Province, Owais Ahmed Ghani, said the helicopter attack occurred at about 3 a.m. and killed 20 people.
An American military spokesman at Bagram airbase declined to comment on the reports. The spokesman did not deny that the attack had occurred. Often, a statement of no comment by American and NATO spokesmen in Afghanistan, where NATO and American forces are fighting militants from the Taliban and Al Qaeda, indicates that the coalition forces were involved in a cross-border attack.
The Taliban commander, known by the nom de guerre Commander Malang, said the attack took place close to a Pakistani military position on the border and killed fifteen people. But the Pakistani military took no action, he said. According to Commander Malang, three helicopters flew into the Pakistani side of the border and one of them, carrying soldiers, landed. Soldiers who came out of the helicopter opened fire on people in the village, he said, while the other two helicopters hovered overhead. The commander, who is based in the town of Wana, said he was not at the scene. He received the description via radio, he said. The soldiers “killed innocent people” in the village located adjacent to a security post of the Pakistani Frontier Corps. There was no way to immediately independently confirm the account of the Taliban leader.
The Angoor Adda area is on the border with Afghanistan, and its mud-walled compounds are known as a center of Taliban and Al Qaeda strength. Sher Khan, a phone company employee in Angoor Adda, said in a telephone interview that 19 people were killed in the raid. He said most of the dead were women and children.

Seven dead. Fifteen dead. Nineteen dead. Twenty dead. Two helicopters. Three helicopters. Rico says he suspects someone is smoking the local product with this one, but who knows? Hide and watch... (And why is it always the women and kids who get killed? Slower...)