U.S. Offered to Scale Back Drone War

U.S. Offered to Scale Back Drone War:

An MQ-9 Reaper sits in a hanger during a sandstorm at Joint Base Balad, Iraq. Photo: Airman 1st Class Jason Epley

The CIA offered in January to scale back its unofficial drone war in Pakistan, hoping to convince the country’s reluctant spy chiefs to acquiesce to a continued robotic campaign against al-Qaeda and its allies. The problem: a fair-sized chunk of Pakistan’s political leadership would rather have the drones leave altogether.
The offer was made during a meeting in London between CIA chief David Petraeus and then-top Pakistani intelligence boss Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, according to a blockbuster Associated Press story. Petraeus not only said he would give advance notice of drone strikes to Pakistani authorities. And to sweeten the deal: Petraeus offered to end the practice of so-called “signature” strikes, CIA parlance for targeting groups of people deemed suspicious by association with terrorists, and which compromise the “bulk of CIA’s drone strikes,” as reported the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.
But Pasha reportedly refused. Instead, the former Pakistani spy chief demanded the U.S. halt the strikes, and added that Pakistan “would no longer carry out joint raids with U.S. counterterrorist teams inside its country,” noted the Associated Press. Instead, Pasha demanded the U.S. give up its own intelligence, which would allow Pakistan to carry out strikes on its own — either bombing militants based in rural tribal areas with its aircraft or hunting down terrorists in Pakistan’s cities.
The acrimony was further — and publicly — echoed last week by demands from Pakistan’s parliament to stop the drone war. “The U.S. must review its footprints in Pakistan,” said Sen. Raza Rabbani, a lawmaker with the governing Pakistan People’s Party. “This means the cessation of drone attacks inside the territorial borders of Pakistan.” And not just drone attacks — but all U.S. actions in Pakistan without Islamabad’s approval, potentially adding pressure to a  meeting today between President Obama and Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in South Korea. Complicating matters further is the recent (and unexpected) appointment of Lt. Gen. Zaheerul Islam to head Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, who the AP notes “is a mostly unknown quantity to U.S. officials.”

Of course, whether or not any of this puts an end to the drone war — or slows it down further — is another question. The U.S. has indeed slowed the pace of strikes, down to only 10 strikes so far this year, in comparison to the 117 strikes in all of 2010. Currently, the pace of strikes, as noted by Bill Roggio of Long War Journal, is on track to match less than half of 2010′s record. (This can be a bit deceptive, however, because the drone war has also migrated to other countries like Yemen.)
Drone strikes were briefly paused in Pakistan late last year following a November air attack by U.S. gunships which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. A military investigation found the gunships attacked the soldiers after they fired on a U.S. commando team operating near the Afghan-Pakistan border. The last drone strike, meanwhile, occurred March 13 against suspected militants in South Waziristan, which killed 15 people including two commanders of a Taliban faction led by Maulvi Nazir.
Still, lawmakers in Islamabad have yet to determine what actions Pakistan will take if the U.S. carries on with the strikes regardless of the ISI and parliament’s demands. Deny overflight rights? It’s possible, though Pakistan has passed up opportunities to do so in the past, notably following the raid which killed Osama bin Laden, a nadir of sorts in U.S-Pakistan relations. Likewise, the U.S. has worked around restrictions before: ban drones from flying out of Pakistani airbases? We’ll fly them out of Afghanistan instead.
There are signs Pakistani lawmakers know they lack options. “What’s the guarantee that, keeping in mind our previous record, there won’t be any backtracking again?” asked Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan of the opposition Pakistan Muslim League. “Won’t we have egg on our face once again?”
Nonetheless, if Pakistan doesn’t backtrack, or the regime sides firmly with parliament and the ISI against drone strikes, that could signal the coming end of the drone war.