Pakistan allowed US drone strikes under secret deal: NYT

[danish_vij]

NEW YORK: The New York Times on Sunday reported that Pakistan in a secret deal, allowed American drone strikes on its soil on the condition that the unmanned aircraft would stay away from its nuclear facilities and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.

Under secret negotiations between Pakistani intelligence agency ISI and America’s CIA during 2004, the terms of the bargain were set, the newspaper said. “Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas - ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans to fly the drones. Pakistani officials also insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets, the NYT added. The “secret deal” over drone strikes was reached after CIA agreed to kill tribal warlord Nek Muhammad, a Pakistani ally of the Afghan Taliban who led a rebellion and was marked by Islamabad as an “enemy of the state,” the newspaper reported, citing an excerpt from the book ‘The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth’.

A CIA official had met the then ISI chief Ehsanul Haq with the offer that if the American intelligence agency killed Nek Muhammad, “would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas,” the report said.

The ISI and CIA also agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the American agency’s “covert action authority”, which meant that the US would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent. While Pakistani officials had in the past considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, it was Nek Muhammad’s rise to power that forced them to reconsider their line of thought and eventually allow Predator drones.

The ISI-CIA’s “back-room bargain” sheds light on the beginning of the covert drone war which “began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama.”

The deal resulted in the CIA changing 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.” Meanwhile, Pakistan Foreign Office responding to a query regarding a story published in New York Times on an alleged deal on drones, said that the story is baseless and a part of the propaganda to create confusion about the clear position of Pakistan on this matter. “We have repeatedly affirmed that Pakistan regards the use of drone strikes as counter productive,” said Foreign Office spokesman Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry responding to this news. He said drone strikes violate Pakistan’s sovereignty and International Law. The spokesman said there is now a growing debate in the international community to consider the legality and legitimacy of drone strikes.
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http://www.khaama.com/pakistan-allowed-us-drone-strikes-in-a-secret-deal-with-cia-1558

 

[Kompromat]

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