Secret Deal on Drone strikes, sealed in Pakistani Blood.

[waheed gul]

On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.

Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Mr. Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.

That was a lie.

Mr. Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the C.I.A., the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state. In a secret deal, the C.I.A. had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.

That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.

The C.I.A. has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.

Neither American nor Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened to Mr. Muhammad — details of the strike that killed him, along with those of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government databases. But in recent months, calls for transparency from members of Congress and critics on both the right and left have put pressure on Mr. Obama and his new C.I.A. director, John O. Brennan, to offer a fuller explanation of the goals and operation of the drone program, and of the agency’s role.

A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood | The News Informer

 

[manojb]

So much for anti-drone campaign , fooling public!

 

[fatman17]

US drone war deal 'in return for killing Pakistani militant in CIA missile strike'


The US assassinated a Pakistani tribal rebel with an armed Predator drone to win support from the country's government to launch the war from the skies with drones in 2004, according to US reports.

The president relented to demands from senators to disclose 11 classified legal memos in which his administration argues that it has the authority to use drone strikes to kill terror suspects who are US citizens.

The back-room deal, although not publicly confirmed, was detailed in several interviews with officials in the US and Pakistan for a New York Times investigation.

The bargain was crucial in allowing the Central Intelligence Agency dramatically to escalate its use of unmanned drones to target suspected terrorists in Pakistan’s border areas in what the then Bush administration called the “war on terror”.

President Barack Obama has intensified America’s covert drone operations, expanding their role in Yemen and East Africa, as he has tried to reduce US boots on the ground in combat missions.

John Brennan, the new CIA director, was the architect of Mr Obama’s “targeted killing” programme as the president’s chief counterterrorism adviser in the first term.

But the drone war has become increasingly controversial in the US, particularly after Mr Obama authorised the assassination overseas of American citizens who are alleged senior al-Qaeda operatives. The most notable case was the killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the US-born radical preacher, in a drone missile strike in Yemen.


Several Democratic and Republican politicians have challenged the legality of orders to kill Americans without judicial review and expressed concern that drones could be used over US soil.

Nek Muhammad had been a small-time teenage car thief and storekeeper in the tribal region of South Waziristan before he crossed the border in 1993 to join the new Taliban movement in Afghanistan.

Mr Muhammad fled back to Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban regime in late-2001, playing host to Arab and Chechen fighters from al-Qaeda who crossed the border with him.

The Pashtun tribal leader used his new armed strength to attack Pakistani bases and also to stage cross-border raids on US positions in Afghanistan. The Pakistani military’s attempts to kill Mr Muhammad and quell his insurgency failed as he became a major challenge for the government of President Pervez Musharraf.

According to the New York Times, then CIA director George Tenet authorised his CIA officers in Islamabad to begin negotiations with their Pakistani ISI counterparts.

“If the CIA killed Mr Muhammad, would the ISI allow armed drone flights over the tribal areas?” Mr Musharraf signed off on the secret talks.

The US would never acknowledge a role in the missile strikes and Pakistan’s military would take credit for the killings. In June 2004, Mr Muhammad was killed in a missile attack and Pakistan’s military was quick to claim responsibility.

The deal had been signed in the blood of the militant. It came at a crucial stage for the Bush administration as the CIA had just completed a damning internal report about the abuse of terror suspect detainees in secret prisons across the world.

The timing of that report and the secret drone deal played a central role in the controversial transition of the CIA’s role from capturing to killing suspected terrorists.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes killed between 474 and 881 civilians – including 176 children – in Pakistan between 2004 and last year.

Meanwhile, even as America winds down its military foothold in Afghanistan, a Taliban suicide car bomb attack this weekend provided a bloody reminder of the dangers there.

Five Americans, including two civilians, died in the attack on their convoy on a trip to deliver books to a school. The victims of the deadliest attack on Americans there for nine months included Anne Smedinghoff, a 25-year-old diplomat.

 

[fatman17]

An Inconvenient Truth


Finally, proof that the United States has lied in the drone wars.

BY MICAH ZENKO | APRIL 10, 2013



It turns out that the Obama administration has not been honest about who the CIA has been targeting with drones in Pakistan. Jonathan Landay, national security reporter at McClatchy Newspapers, has provided the first analysis of drone-strike victims that is based upon internal, top-secret U.S. intelligence reports. It is the most important reporting on U.S. drone strikes to date because Landay, using U.S. government assessments, plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides -- that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al Qaeda who pose an imminent threat of attack on the U.S. homeland -- is false.


Senior officials and agencies have emphasized this point over and over because it is essential to the legal foundations on which the strikes are ultimately based: the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force and the U.N. Charter's right to self-defense. A Department of Justice white paper said that the United States can target a "senior operational leader of al-Qa'ida or an associated force" who "poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States." Attorney General Eric Holder said the administration targets "specific senior operational leaders of al-Qaeda and associated forces," and Harold Koh, the senior State Department legal adviser dubbed them "high-level al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks." Obama said during a Google+ Hangout in January 2012: "These strikes have been in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] and going after al-Qaeda suspects." Finally, Obama claimed in September: "Our goal has been to focus on al Qaeda and to focus narrowly on those who would pose an imminent threat to the United States of America."

As the Obama administration unveils its promised and overdue targeted-killing reforms over the next few months, citizens, policymakers, and the media should keep in mind this disconnect between who the United States claimed it was killing and who it was actually killing.

Landay's reporting primarily covers the most intensive period of CIA drone strikes, from September 2010 to September 2011. "[T]he documents reveal estimates of deaths and injuries; locations of militant bases and compounds; the identities of some of those targeted or killed; the movements of targets from village to village or compound to compound; and, to a limited degree, the rationale for unleashing missiles," he writes.

While he provides few direct quotes from the documents, his most important finding is this:

At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S. intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were "assessed" as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists.

Drones killed only six top al Qaida leaders in those months, according to news media accounts.

Forty-three of 95 drone strikes reviewed for that period hit groups other than al Qaida, including the Haqqani network, several Pakistani Taliban factions and the unidentified individuals described only as "foreign fighters" and "other militants."...

At other times, the CIA killed people who only were suspected, associated with, or who probably belonged to militant groups.

This scope of targeting complicates the Obama administration's claim that only those al Qaeda members who are an imminent threat to the U.S. homeland can be killed. In reality, starting in the summer of 2008, when President Bush first authorized signature strikes in Pakistan, the vast majority of drone-strike victims were from groups focused on establishing some form of Sharia law, attacking Pakistani security forces, and destabilizing Afghanistan by supporting the Taliban and attacking U.S. servicemembers. The United States essentially replicated the Vietnam War strategy of bombing the Vietcong's safe haven in Cambodia. In addition, the CIA was engaging in "side payment strikes" against the Pakistani Taliban to eliminate threats on Islamabad's behalf. This was not a secret to anyone following the CIA's drone program. As I wrote as early as March 2009:
The covert program that began as an effort to kill high-value al-Qaeda and Taliban officials responsible for previous international terror attacks (and who continue to provide strategic guidance to the global jihadist movement) has since led to the CIA's serving, in effect, as a counterinsurgency arm of the Pakistani air force.

Landay also writes that "the reports estimated there was a single civilian casualty, an individual killed in an April 22, 2011, strike in North Waziristan." This should finally demolish John Brennan's claim in June 2011 that "For the past year there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we've been able to develop." As I noted previously, either Brennan did not receive the information in these top-secret documents (an implausible notion given his central role in managing the targeted killings program), or he was being dishonest.

It is important to note that the claim of a single civilian casualty is based on the CIA's interpretation that any military-age males who are behaving suspiciously can be lawfully targeted. No U.S. government official has ever openly acknowledged the practice of such "signature strikes" because it is so clearly at odds with the bedrock principle of distinction required for using force within the laws of armed conflict. According to the documents reviewed by Landay, even the U.S. intelligence community does not necessarily know who it has killed; it is forced to use fuzzy categories like "other militants" and "foreign fighters."

Some of the drone strikes that Landay describes, such as a May 22, 2007 attack requested by Pakistan's intelligence service to support Pakistani troops in combat, do not appear in the databases maintained by the New America Foundation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, or Long Wars Journal. This should strengthen the concerns of many analysts about the accuracy of reporting from Pakistan's tribal areas. It also suggests that there may be a few additional targeted killing efforts of which we know nothing.

This lack of understanding further reinforces the need for a comprehensive official history of U.S. targeted killings in non-battlefield settings, comparable in scope and transparency to the government reports about other controversial counterterrorism policies. Some policymakers will question why we should care about what the United States was doing two years ago, which in Washington is considered ancient and irrelevant. Yet, for all of the historical accounts and professed concerns over the CIA's detention and extraordinary rendition program, which involved "136 known victims," it is time for an accounting of the CIA's drone strikes, which have killed between 3,000 and 4,000 people in Pakistan and Yemen.

Finally, based on the Obama administration's patterns of behavior, the Department of Justice will assuredly target Landay and his sources for leaking classified information. While the DOJ has refrained from plugging the many selective leaks by anonymous administration officials that praise the precision and efficacy of drone strikes, it has sought more criminal prosecutions of leaks in Obama's first term than during all previous presidential administrations combined. Like almost everything else we know about targeted killings, these latest revelations come from an investigative journalist who served the public interest by reporting new information on a highly controversial policy -- a policy that the government absurdly insists remain secret. Absolutely nothing in Landay's reporting reveals the CIA's sources and methods for determining who had been killed.

The hypocrisy behind U.S. targeted killings has long been apparent to casual news readers, and it is now confirmed by internal intelligence documents. The Obama administration has a fundamental choice to make if it is serious about reforming its targeted-killing program: Either target who officials claim they are targeting, or change their justifications to match the actual practice. If they are unable or unwilling to do this, then other White House efforts toward drone-strike reform or transparency will be met with skepticism.


Micah Zenko (@MicahZenko) is the Douglas Dillon fellow with the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations. He writes the blog Politics, Power, and Preventive Action.

 

[fatman17]

Rob Crilly

Rob Crilly is Pakistan correspondent of The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. Before that he spent five years writing about Africa for The Times, The Irish Times, The Daily Mail, The Scotsman and The Christian Science Monitor from his base in Nairobi.

It's time to come clean about Voldemorts over Pakistan

By Rob Crilly World Last updated: April 15th, 2013




The CIA's drone programme over Pakistan occupies not so much a legal grey area as a black hole. The programme is classified as "covert", making it not just secret but deniable. Frustrated staffers at the American embassy in Islamabad have resorted to expressing mystification at the frequency of spontaneous human combustion along the Afghan border and in private refer to drones as Voldemorts – "he who must not be named" in the Harry Potter tales.

Such a position could never last. There is a growing clamour in America and around the world for President Barack Obama to open his drones programme to legal scrutiny perhaps by transferring it to the Pentagon.

In some ways the use of drones offers no different legal questions from the use of piloted ground attack war planes. The technology is not so much the issue as the way it is being used and the way in which targets are selected. And we already have international legal frameworks for that.

In January Ben Emmerson, the UN's special rapporteur for counter-terrorism and human rights, began an investigation into drone attacks, and neatly laid out three competing legal analyses (PDF here):

There are those who contend that outside situations of recognised international armed conflict, the applicable framework is international human rights law, under which it is unlawful to engage in any form of targeted killing

At the other end of the spectrum the analysis that has been promoted by international lawyers in the United States, and by John Brennan … to the effect that Western democracies are engaged in a global against a stateless enemy, without geographical boundaries to the theatre of conflict, and without limit of time

A third way of analysing the issue is to ask whether a terrorist organisation is engaging in an internal armed conflict with a particular government such as the governments of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; and then to ask whether and in what circumstances it is lawful for a third State to become engaged as a party to an internal armed conflict in support of the government forces

Much of the debate has focused on this third way, with the government of Pakistan making repeated complaints that the US has violated its sovereignty by launching unilateral strikes. Mr Emerson recently visited Islamabad and came away echoing that concern, concluding:

It involves the use of force on the territory of another state without its consent and is therefore a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty.

Yet, there was already Wikileaks evidence that Pakistan was privately giving the green light while protesting in public.

Confirmation came last week, when Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's former military ruler, admitted approving a handful of strikes during his time in office and with the leak of documents suggesting Islamabad's spies at the ISI have long been co-operating with the CIA.

Other questions are just as difficult to answer. The US has disavowed two apparent drone strikes this year. Maybe they were the result of an accident, or off-target artillery, a secret Pakistani programme, a gas cylinder explosion. Who knows? The point is that drone strikes happen in remote, inaccessible areas. While the programme remains covert and denied by both sides, then no one follows up to find out who died and why. Often we can't even tell whether civilians or militants died.

Yet all these questions are crucial – and becoming more so. As the draw-down in Afghanistan continues you can bet that drone strikes will take on even greater importance. They meet Obama's light footprint approach and carry no risk to their operators.

Mr Emmerson's investigation into drones offers one possible beam of light into the darkness. But his acceptance of Pakistan's denials as well as his recent comments to CNN, suggesting that CIA drones and al-Qaeda might be legally equivalent, indicate that this too could be a missed opportunity.

The truth is that while the US and Pakistan continue to dissemble, obfuscate and lie, the drones – and their shadowy masters – are reshaping the nature of warfare. And we can't do anything about it.

Read more by Rob Crilly on Telegraph Blogs

 

[fatman17]

Reports detail CIA war crimes in Pakistan

By Tom Carter


20 April 2013


A series of recent articles by journalist Mark Mazzetti published in the New York Times have shed further light on the activities of the US Central Intelligence Agency in Pakistan. Mazzetti’s articles incorporate and summarize material from his recent book, The Way of the Knife, which in turn was based on dozens of interviews with inside sources both in Washington and Islamabad.

In particular, Mazzetti’s April 6 article, “ A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood ,” exposes the wanton and deliberate criminality with which the CIA launched its drone murder program in Pakistan in June 2004. Using a missile launched from a Predator drone, the CIA killed Pashtun tribal leader Nek Muhammad—who Pakistan wanted out of the way—and six other people as they were sitting down to dinner, including two children aged 16 and 10.

Mazzetti reveals that the assassination of Muhammad was part of a quid pro quo: the CIA agreed to murder Muhammad in return for assurances from Pakistan’s authorities that the CIA would be free to use Pakistan’s airspace to carry out future assassinations. Meanwhile, the governments of both Pakistan and the US agreed to falsely claim that Pakistan had carried out the attack. The two children and the other men killed in the attack were labeled “militants.”

In other words, in a deal any mafia don or hit man would readily understand, America offered to do Pakistan’s dirty work in return for a license from Pakistan to carry out further murders. The two governments conspired to carry out the murder, lied about who carried it out, and lied about who was killed.

The episode further exposes Pakistan’s ruling establishment, which occasionally denounces the activities of the US military and intelligence agencies in the country, but which in reality is implicated in a long line of backroom conspiracies with the same agencies to murder its own citizens. According to Mazzetti, then-president Pervez Musharraf scoffed at the idea that the public would find out that the CIA was involved. “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time,” Musharraf said.

The missile strike that killed Muhammad, without charges or trial, constitutes a war crime and a clear violation of international law.

America’s deal with Pakistan included the proviso that the CIA would carry out drone assassinations only in a narrow range of areas near the Afghan border. Specifically, the US agreed that the drones would steer clear of “the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.”

The drone assassination program launched under the Bush administration underwent a massive expansion under the Obama administration, with the rate of strikes increasing by as much as 300 percent. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham recently boasted that at least 4,700 people have been killed so far.

Nek Muhammad was among the first of the victims of the CIA reign of terror in Pakistan. While the US government claims that everyone it murders is a “militant,” the victims in Pakistan have included young children and infants, rescue workers, political dissidents, mourners, and innocent bystanders. One Brookings Institution study found that for every reputed militant killed by a drone strike, ten civilians had been killed.

“The C.I.A. had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in Pakistan even when the agency’s targeters weren’t certain about exactly whom they were killing,” Mazzetti explained. “Under the rules of so-called ‘signature strikes,’ decisions about whether to fire missiles from drones could be made based on patterns of activity deemed suspicious.

“For instance, if a group of young ‘military-age males’ were observed moving in and out of a suspected militant training camp and were thought to be carrying weapons, they could be considered legitimate targets. American officials admit it is nearly impossible to judge a person’s age from thousands of feet in the air, and in Pakistan’s tribal areas, adolescent boys are often among militant fighters. Using such broad definitions to determine who was a ‘combatant’ and therefore a legitimate target allowed Obama administration officials at one point to claim that the escalation of drone strikes in Pakistan had not killed any civilians for a year.

“It was something of a trick of logic: in an area of known militant activity, all military-age males could be considered enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a combatant.”

Mazzetti also describes how the CIA made the “switch” from torture to murder during the Bush administration. Specifically, senior CIA officials, including the CIA’s Inspector General John L. Helgerson, voiced concerns that the use of torture against prisoners captured in the course of the so-called “war on terror”—such as “confining them in a small box with live bugs”—could land CIA operatives and officials in jail. Rather than capture and interrogate, it was deemed easier just to kill them.

“Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike,” Mazzetti wrote, “and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.”

The New York Times itself supports the government’s drone murder program, with a few minor reservations as to the procedure. (See, The New York Times defends drone murder )

The Times urged Obama in an editorial on April 7 to “work with Congress to create a lasting legal framework for drone strikes.” The Times suggested that that framework should resemble “the special court that approves wiretaps for intelligence gathering”—that is, the secret rubber-stamp court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that approves 99.9 percent of the government’s warrant requests.

At the same time, there are doubtless concerns within the ruling establishment—reflected in Mazzetti’s article—that the sudden return of the CIA to the “assassination business,” and the targeted killing of US citizens, has far-reaching implications.

More details of the CIA’s dirty activities in Pakistan no doubt remain to be uncovered. In particular, in the period leading up to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011, the once-collaborative relationship between the CIA and the Pakistani intelligence agencies broke down under circumstances that are not yet fully understood.

During that period, the CIA broke various promises it had made to the Pakistani authorities, including the promise to clear drone targets with them, and dramatically ramped up the rate of killings. Meanwhile, Pakistan captured CIA operative Raymond Davis (whom the Obama administration falsely claimed was a “diplomat&#8221 after a January 2011 incident in Lahore, in which Davis shot and killed two Pakistani civilians and an American SUV ran over and killed a third before fleeing the scene.

What Davis was doing in Pakistan has never been fully explained. A February 2011 report in the Karachi-based Express Tribune, an affiliate of the International Herald Tribune, cited a senior official in the Punjab police who claimed “that Davis was masterminding terrorist activities in Lahore and other parts of Punjab.”

Davis had “close links” with the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP), the official said. “Davis was instrumental in recruiting young people from Punjab for the Taliban to fuel the bloody insurgency.”

After the US secured Davis’ release in March 2011, the CIA bombed a tribal council meeting in the village of Datta Khel in North Waziristan, killing dozens of people. Mazzetti cites unnamed “American officials” who “suspected that the massive strike was the CIA venting its anger about the Davis episode.” (See, CIA killer Raymond Davis released by Pakistani authorities .)

According to Mazzetti, the Datta Khel massacre—which provoked intense protests and opposition within Pakistan—precipitated bitter recriminations within the Obama administration. The American ambassador in Pakistan, Cameron Munter, demanded the right to approve CIA attacks before they were carried out. This led to a meeting in which then-CIA Director Leon Panetta told Munter, “I don’t work for you.” When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sided with the ambassador, Panetta replied, “No, Hillary, it’s you who are flat wrong,” Mazzetti writes.

Obama appointed Panetta to be secretary of defense shortly afterwards, and he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate.

The latest revelations concerning the CIA’s drone murder program in Pakistan confirm the need for the immediate arrest, indictment, and prosecution of all of the top officials in the Bush and Obama administrations on charges of war crimes.

 

[Cherokee]

was it the military government or civilian government who inked this deal ?

 

[Hawaii's Finest]

OMG why can't Pakistan take care of the terrorist problem?

 

[Devil Soul]

AFP
Tuesday, Jul 09, 2013
ISLAMABAD - Pakistan reached an understanding with the United States on drone strikes targeting Islamist militants and the attacks can be useful, according leaked remarks from a former intelligence chief.

Pakistan publicly condemns US missile attacks on Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives as a violation of its sovereignty, but the new revelations are the latest sign of double-dealing in private.

They come in findings of a Pakistani investigation into how Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden evaded detection for nearly a decade, which were published by the Al-Jazeera news network Monday.

Ahmed Shuja Pasha, who headed Pakistan's premier Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency at the time of bin Laden's killing in 2011, told investigators that drone strikes had their uses.

"The DG (director general) said there were no written agreements. There was a political understanding," the report said.

The Americans had been asked to stop drone strikes because they caused civilian casualties, but "it was easier to say no to them in the beginning, but 'now it was more difficult' to do so," it quoted the former spymaster as saying.

"Admittedly the drone attacks had their utility, but they represented a breach of national sovereignty. They were legal according to American law but illegal according to international law," the report quoted the ISI chief as saying.

He also confirmed that Shamsi air base, in southwestern Pakistan, had been used for US drone strikes against people in the country.

Pakistan ordered US personnel to leave the base after botched US air strikes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in November 2011.

His interviews also laid bare extraordinary levels of distrust between Pakistan and the United States, particularly in 2011 when relations plummeted over the US raid that killed bin Laden and a CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis.

Pasha said US arrogance "knew no limits" and accused the Americans of waging "psychological warfare" over the whereabouts of Taliban leader Mullah Omar and bin Laden's successor Ayman al-Zawahiri.

He quoted a US intelligence officer as saying "you are so cheap... we can buy you with a visa," and said himself that systemic failures showed Pakistan was a "failing state".

The Pakistani report condemned the US raid as an "American act of war" and said the military should have responded much more quickly to a three-hour operation, 100 miles inside its territory.

It was Pakistan's "greatest humiliation" since East Pakistan seceded in 1971, it said.
http://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/World/Story/A1Story20130709-435989.html

 

[Leader]

Confession :

ISI Chief: Pakistan Has ‘Understanding’ With US on Drone Strikes


Buried in a several-hundred page leaked report on the US raid on Abbotabad, former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha confirmed that the Pakistani government has a long-standing “understanding” with the Obama Administration about US drone strikes.

Pasha confirmed that while the Pakistani civilian government regularly complains about the drones in public, they have privately acquiesced to the US on the strikes, believing they were “useful” despite being hugely unpopular.

Recently elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has promised to revoke any “tacit” agreements with the US on drone strikes, but since those agreements were never written down in the first place, the US has assumed the public complaints are just part of the narrative.

Pasha confirmed that at this point it would be difficult to convince the US that the “understanding” no longer applies, and that it would’ve been much easier if Pakistan had simply rejected the strikes in the first place instead of trying to retroactively retract a secret deal.

ISI Chief: Pakistan Has ‘Understanding’ With US on Drone Strikes -- News from Antiwar.com


should we not change the section name now from "War against drones" to War of Drones?

 

[Argus Panoptes]

Confession :

ISI Chief: Pakistan Has ‘Understanding’ With US on Drone Strikes


Buried in a several-hundred page leaked report on the US raid on Abbotabad, former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha confirmed that the Pakistani government has a long-standing “understanding” with the Obama Administration about US drone strikes.

Pasha confirmed that while the Pakistani civilian government regularly complains about the drones in public, they have privately acquiesced to the US on the strikes, believing they were “useful” despite being hugely unpopular.

Recently elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has promised to revoke any “tacit” agreements with the US on drone strikes, but since those agreements were never written down in the first place, the US has assumed the public complaints are just part of the narrative.

Pasha confirmed that at this point it would be difficult to convince the US that the “understanding” no longer applies, and that it would’ve been much easier if Pakistan had simply rejected the strikes in the first place instead of trying to retroactively retract a secret deal.

ISI Chief: Pakistan Has ‘Understanding’ With US on Drone Strikes -- News from Antiwar.com


should we not change the section name now from "War against drones" to War of Drones?

Apnay galey vich dhol aapi paya hey tey fer hun vajaana vee paye gaa. Agla paisa suttay gaa tey tamasha vekhay gaa.

 

[Leader]

Apnay galey vich dhol aapi paya hey tey fer hun vajaana vee paye gaa. Agla paisa suttay gaa tey tamasha vekhay gaa.

itna sach bol kay honto ka tabasum na bhujay...

 

[Cheetah786]

Apnay galey vich dhol aapi paya hey tey fer hun vajaana vee paye gaa. Agla paisa suttay gaa tey tamasha vekhay gaa.

Good Cop Bad cop game being played here not exactly a secret.

 

[AnnoyingOrange]

Confession :

ISI Chief: Pakistan Has ‘Understanding’ With US on Drone Strikes


Buried in a several-hundred page leaked report on the US raid on Abbotabad, former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha confirmed that the Pakistani government has a long-standing “understanding” with the Obama Administration about US drone strikes.

Pasha confirmed that while the Pakistani civilian government regularly complains about the drones in public, they have privately acquiesced to the US on the strikes, believing they were “useful” despite being hugely unpopular.

Recently elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has promised to revoke any “tacit” agreements with the US on drone strikes, but since those agreements were never written down in the first place, the US has assumed the public complaints are just part of the narrative.

Pasha confirmed that at this point it would be difficult to convince the US that the “understanding” no longer applies, and that it would’ve been much easier if Pakistan had simply rejected the strikes in the first place instead of trying to retroactively retract a secret deal.

ISI Chief: Pakistan Has ‘Understanding’ With US on Drone Strikes -- News from Antiwar.com


should we not change the section name now from "War against drones" to War of Drones?

This is precisely the thing the World has been trying to tell Pakistani public at large... its your own people who are getting you killed... stop looking for international scapegoats.... look inside... your problem are your own people...not some conspirator sitting outside your country.

 

[Leader]

This is precisely the thing the World has been trying to tell Pakistani public at large... its your own people who are getting you killed... stop looking for international scapegoats.... look inside... your problem are your own people...not some conspirator sitting outside your country.

this is a precise problem between Pakistan and USA, nothing to generalize !

get lost now.