ISLAMABAD - Pakistani civilian and military leaders are insisting on an
effective veto over which targets United States drone strikes hit, according to
well-informed Pakistani military sources here.
The sources, who met with Inter Press Service (IPS) on condition that they not
be identified, said that such veto power over the conduct of the drone war was
a central element in a new Pakistani demand for a formal
government-to-government agreement on the terms under which the US and Pakistan
would cooperate against insurgents in Pakistan.
The basic government-to-government agreement now being demanded would be
followed, the sources said, by more detailed
agreements between US and Pakistani military leaders and intelligence agencies.
The new Pakistani demand for equal say over drone strikes marks the culmination
of a long evolution in the Pakistani military's attitude toward the drone war.
Initially supportive of strikes that were targeting al-Qaeda leaders, senior
Pakistani military leaders soon came to realize that the drone war carried
serious risks for Pakistan's war against the Pakistani Taliban.
A key turning point in the attitude of the military was the unilateral US
decision to focus the drone war on those Pakistani insurgents who had already
decided to make peace with the Pakistani government and who opposed the war
being waged by al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban against the Pakistani
military.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was allowed to run the drone war almost
completely unilaterally for years, according to former Pakistani military
leaders and diplomats, and the Pakistani military has only mustered the
political will to challenge the US power to carry out drone strikes
unilaterally in recent months.
General Pervez Musharraf, when president, allowed the drone strikes from 2004
to 2007 to ensure political support from the George W Bush administration,
something Musharraf had been denied during the Bill Clinton administration,
Shamshad Ahmad, who was Pakistan's foreign secretary and then ambassador to the
United Nations from 1997 to 2002, told IPS.
"Those were the days when we felt that we had to work with the Americans on
al-Qaeda," recalled General Asad Durrani, a former director general of
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), in an interview with IPS.
The choice of targets "usually was done by the US unilaterally", said Durrani.
Two Pakistani generals confirmed that point in a separate interview with IPS.
The Musharraf regime even went so far as to provide cover for the drone
strikes, repeatedly asserting after strikes that the explosions had been caused
by the victims themselves making home-made bombs.
But that effort at transparent deception by the US and Musharraf quickly fell
apart when drone strikes were based on faulty intelligence and killed large
numbers of civilians rather than al-Qaeda leaders.
The worst such strike was an October 30, 2006, drone attack on a madrassa
(Islamic seminary) in Chenagai village in Bajaur Agency, which killed 82
people. Musharraf, who was primarily concerned with avoiding the charge of
complicity in US attacks on Pakistani targets, ordered the Pakistani military
to take complete responsibility for the incident.
The spokesman for the Pakistani military claimed "confirmed intelligence
reports that 70 to 80 militants were hiding in a madrassa used as a
terrorist training facility" and said the Pakistani military had fired missiles
at it.
But eyewitnesses in the village identified US drones as the source of the
attack and said all the victims were simply local students of the madrassa.
Local people compiled a complete list of the names and ages of all 80 victims,
showing that 25 of the dead had been aged seven to 15, which was published in
the Lahore daily The News International.
Senior military officers believed the CIA had other reasons for launching the
strike in Bajaur. The day before the drone attack, tribal elders in Bajaur had
held a public meeting to pledge their willingness to abide by a peace accord
with the government, and the government had released nine tribesmen, including
some militants.
Former ISI chief Durrani recalled that the strike "effectively sabotaged the
chances for an agreement" in Bajaur. That was "a very clear message" from the
CIA not to enter into any more such peace agreements, Durrani told IPS.
The Bajaur madrassa strike was a turning point for many officers. "So
many of us went in and said this is stupid," Durrani recalled.
When Musharraf was pressured to step down as army chief of staff, and was
replaced by General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani in November 2007, the unilateral
character of the CIA's drone war "pretty much continued", according to General
Jehanger Karamat, who was ambassador to the United States from 2004 to 2006
after having retired as army chief of staff in 1998.
The CIA's drone war became more contentious in 2008, as the Bush administration
concentrated the strikes on those who had made peace with the Pakistani
government. Two-thirds of the drone strikes that year were on targets
associated with Jalalludin Haqqani and Mullah Nazeer, both of whom were
involved in supporting Taliban forces in Afghanistan, but who opposed attacks
on the Pakistani government.
Targeting the Haqqani network and his allies posed serious risks for Pakistan.
When the Pakistani army was fighting in the South Waziristan tribal area, it
had its logistic base in an area that was controlled by the Haqqani group, and
it had been able to count on the security of that base.
Meanwhile, the ISI had given the CIA accurate information on anti-Pakistan
Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud's location on four occasions, but the US had
failed to target him, according to a May 2009 column by retired Pakistani
General Shaukat Qadir.
In 2009, more of the drone strikes - almost 40% of the total - focused on the
Taliban under Mehsud, and Mehsud himself was killed, which tended to mollify
the Pakistani military.
But that effect did not last long. In 2010, only three strikes were aimed at
Mehsud's anti-Pakistan Taliban organization, while well over half the strikes
were against Hafiz Gul Bahadur, an ally of Haqqani who had signed an agreement
with the Pakistani government in September 2006 that he would not shelter any
anti-Pakistani militants.
The Barack Obama administration had made a deliberate decision around mid-2010
that it didn't care if targeting the Haqqani network and other pro-Pakistani
Taliban groups upset the Pakistanis, as the Wall Street Journal reported
October 23, 2010.
But two events caused Pakistani army chief Kiani to demand a fundamental change
in US policy toward the drone war.
The first was the arrest of CIA operative Raymond Davis on the charge of
killing two Pakistanis in cold blood in January, which was followed by intense
US pressure for his release.
The second was a drone strike on March 17, just one day after Davis was
released, which was initially reported to have been an attack on a gathering of
Haqqani network officials.
It turned out that the drone attack had killed dozens of tribal and sub-tribal
elders who had gathered from all over North Waziristan to discuss an economic
issue.
A former US official admitted that the strike was carried out because the CIA
was "angry" over the fact that Davis had been kept in prison for seven weeks.
"It was retaliation for Davis," the official said, according to an August 2
Associated Press story.
That strike helped galvanize the Pakistani military leadership. ISI chief Shuja
Pasha took it as a slap in the face, because he had personally intervened to
get Davis out of jail. Kiani shocked the Americans by issuing the first
denunciation of drone strikes by an army chief.
When Pasha went to Washington in April, he took with him the first official
Pakistani demand for an equal say in drone strike decisions.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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