Pakistan secretly endorsed US drone strikes: Report

Washington: The Washington Post published a report Wednesday describing a top-secret Central Intelligence Agency file which claimed that Pakistan for years secretly approved of US drone attacks on its territory despite public denunciations. The purported evidence of Islamabad's involvement came as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited the White House and urged an end to the attacks, which are widely unpopular with the Pakistani public. Specific notations on those documents indicate that much of the file was created by the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and intended to inform Pakistani government officials of successful operations that killed suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists. While Islamabad's implied approval of the drone strikes has long been an open secret in Washington – in part because of the CIA's ability to land predator drones on Pakistani military airstrips – the documents add new insight to the relationship. At least 65 attacks are outlined in the report, with a detailed drone timeline revealing that the initial list of Al-Qaeda targets quickly blossomed into a shadow war against anti-American militant groups. At least 15 strikes took place between December 2007 and September 2008, with each of the attacks save for two targeting Al-Qaeda suspects. Twenty-three strikes have occurred in Pakistan in 2013 alone, the latest on September 29 when three men accused of being involved with the Haqqani network were killed. The most attacks in a single year came in 2010, with 117. A spokesman for the CIA refused to provide the Post with any comment on the report but did admit the files appear to be genuine. Also included is a short history of the contentious relations between American and Pakistani leaders that exist to this day.Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, once pressed her Pakistani counterpart to disclose the nature of the relationship between hostile militant networks and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Clinton cited “cell phones and written material from dead bodies that point all fingers” at an insurgency group in Pakistan. “The US had intelligence proving ISI was involved with these groups,” the cable noted. Most of the dates and statistics included were similar to the numbers previously disclosed by human rights groups. The number of civilians who have been killed or wounded though were all listed as “zero” in the CIA report, while hundreds of innocent Pakistanis are known to have been killed as a result of the strikes. For the first six months of 2011, 152 combatants were killed, according to a table cited by the Post that did not list any civilian casualties. The Obama administration has defended drone strikes as a better way to avoid civilian casualties, saying that it carefully selects Al Qaeda-linked extremists in lawless parts of Pakistan.