If Pakistan Denies U.S. Its Drone Bases, There’s a Backup Plan Next Door | Danger Room | Wired.com
Pakistan may be kicking the CIA out of its premiere base for the drone war. Or it may not — who can tell with the Pakistanis anymore? What’s for certain is that all their griping strengthens the U.S. resolve to keep bases in neighboring Afghanistan to launch drones into Pakistan unilaterally.
In the spirit of their pique with the United States after the SEALs’ unilateral Osama bin Laden kill, the Pakistanis are loudly declaring the United States is cut off from its most prominent drone launching pad. “No U.S. flights are taking place from Shamsi any longer,” says Pakistani Defense Minister Chaudhary Ahmed Mukhtar.
He’s referring to the Shamsi air base near Quetta. Shortly after Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) blabbed that the Pakistanis hosted CIA drones in 2009, eagle-eyed sleuths ID’d Shamsi as an epicenter of the drone war using GoogleEarth.
But losing Shamsi is no great shakes — if it’s even happening, and not just a cynical Pakistani sop to anti-Americanism. (“News to the United States,” a U.S. counterterrorism official says to McClatchy.)
For one thing, if Mukhtar’s for real, Defense Tech’s John Rood notes that the
United States is rumored to fly drones out of two other Pakistani air bases. More fundamentally, the CIA already flies drones into the Pakistani tribal areas from Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. And Air Force drones hovering above Afghanistan, launched from J’bad and Kandahar in the south, chase fleeing insurgents into Pakistan with regularity — they just have to give the Pakistanis a heads-up.
The harsh truth is that the Pakistanis can’t stop the drone war on their soil. But they can shift its launching points over the Afghan border. And the United States is already working on a backup plan for a long-term drone war, all without the Pakistanis’ help.
The Obama team’s new counterterrorism strategy should remove all doubt about the centrality of drones to a long-term fight against al-Qaida. That’s one of the main reasons it’s quietly negotiating with the Afghan government to keep a few residual bases jointly with Afghan troops after most U.S. forces leave.
A senior Obama aide explicitly told Danger Room last week that the intent is to host a “counterterrorism capability … a strike capability” on the bases “to ensure that there’s not that reemergence of a safe haven threat to us.”
In other words: If the Pakistanis want to let the United States use their bases, great. If not, no big deal.
Former U.S. officials stationed in Afghanistan over the past few months have speculated to Danger Room about the bases the United States is likeliest to maintain for a counterterrorism war across the border. Most frequently mentioned: the huge airfields of Bagram and Kandahar, which already host drones. (These include the RQ-170 “Beast of Kandahar” spy drone used in the bin Laden raid.) Jalalabad, already a CIA drone epicenter, is another base the United States will likely want to retain.
Pushing the drone war’s origins a little bit westward isn’t without risk. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is hardly less mercurial than his Pakistani counterparts. But the senior Obama aide tells Danger Room that Karzai isn’t stupid — an incognito U.S. military presence doesn’t just help blast terrorists with Hellfire missiles, it keeps him alive and in power, too.
The big question is whether those bases will be a dealbreaker in peace talks with the Taliban.
It’s ironic. The more the Pakistanis deny U.S. air bases to protest unilateral strikes on its territory, the more they’ll wind up with … unilateral strikes on their territory. Maybe the Pakistanis won’t be so quick to declare Shamsi a U.S. no-fly zone.
