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, reported ASia
Times.
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.
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.
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. Online
