Re: Pakistan - America Relations
^
Bro, you are a credit to this forum for bringing out these excellent articles on Pakistan!
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
^ thanks bro,I feel that by blindly following American orders the rulers are creating problems for the country
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
^ thanks bro,I feel that by blindly following American orders the rulers are creating problems for the country
salaam...how are you bro? where have been recently...didn't get to read your posts...welcome back :)
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
Actually no. Israel was not created as a Jewish state. It was created by the UN as a place for the jewish people to have homeland. None of the original documentation mentions religion as a reason for the state rather the notion after the Holocaust something must be done. That is why the Congo and Argentina were also locations for the Jewish state.
****ing Indian public education system.
Pakistan was also not meant to be a state for a particular religion. As Yamaha Guy said, it was simply a Muslim Majority country, not an Islamic state.
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
The Pakistanis sent CIA operatives packing home, but later had to allow 87 CIA operatives back. Pak, US strategic dialogue postponed ‘indefinitely’
The military sent the American trainers back after OBL raid but guess what we want them back now. 
Strategic dialogue: Pakistan seeks US military trainingBy Kamran Yousuf / Umer Draz
Published: July 6, 2011
ISLAMABAD:
**Days after Pakistan’s insistence that the US withdraw its military personnel, Islamabad is now seeking Washington’s help in countering terrorism and in setting up an academy to train law enforcement and counter-terrorism officials in the use of explosives.
This was discussed at a meeting of the Pakistan-US Joint Working Group on Counter Terrorism in Islamabad on Tuesday. A 15-member US delegation led by US Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement William Brownfield met Interior Minister Rehman Malik, officials from the interior ministry, the police and counter-terrorism experts.**
The meeting remained vague in terms of whether Pakistan would allow more US military personnel on its territory, even if it was just for training.
However, the interior minister sought US assistance in the fight against terrorism and in the capacity building of the country’s law enforcement agencies against improvised explosives devices (IEDs).
“More than 11,000 Pakistanis have lost their lives to IED explosions. It is a deadly weapon in the hands of terrorists,” said Malik.
Taking note of the easily-accessible and inexpensive fertilisers, the main raw material used in the making of IEDs, Malik said changes will be made to the Explosives Act to make it more stringent and effective against illegal production and distribution of fertilisers across the country.
Brownfield said his government was committed to continuing the strategic dialogue with Pakistan. “We have shared our objectives and interests. It will lead us to conclusions that will benefit both of us,” he said. “There was a consensus here to fight the common enemy – the terrorists. We need to have a common strategy.”
Speaking about the visa controversy, Brownfield said Pakistan was a sovereign state which could not be dictated to, while Malik reminded him that the “same laws that apply to people of other nationalities, apply to US nationals trying to obtain Pakistani visas”.
However, the interior minister said that no US citizen was denied a visa, adding that some just got delayed due to procedural loopholes.
Responding to a question regarding the recent terrorist intrusion into Pakistan from Afghanistan, Malik said the matter had already been taken up with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and measures were being taken to tackle the issue.
“We take it seriously. I hope no non-state actors in Afghanistan have the same agenda as those involved in the Mumbai attacks which nearly brought Pakistan and India to the brink of a war,” said Malik.
In a joint statement issued at the end of the meeting, the US agreed to assist Pakistan in ensuring that Pakistan’s law enforcement officers are adequately equipped to combat the threat posed by terrorists.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 6th, 2011.
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
salaam...how are you bro? where have been recently...didn't get to read your posts...welcome back :)
Thanks was just reading the posts for the time being :)
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
http://www.dawn.com/2011/08/09/‘the-pakistani-government-sanctioned-drone-attacks’.html
‘The Pakistani government sanctioned drone attacks’By Malik Siraj Akbar | DAWN.COM
**Steve Coll, the president and CEO of the New America Foundation, is a distinguished American investigative journalist. He spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent at the Washington Post where he also served as the paper’s Managing Editor from 1998 to 2004. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Coll, 52, is the author of six books, including the highly acclaimed Ghost Wars (2004) which focuses on the history of CIA, Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.
**
**In an exclusive interview with Dawn.com, Steve Coll talks about the war in Afghanistan, counter-insurgency operations, the future of al Qaeda and Pakistan’s role in the war on terror.
**
**Q: How big a difference have the drone attacks made in the Afghan war?
**
A: The American military commanders think that the drones have been the best tactic to sustain pressure on foreign fighters in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
They have also been important for Pakistan because they have brought the war on the Pakistani soil. The high technology system used to operate the drones creates all kinds of questions and reactions among the Pakistanis about their lack of control over these drones and the sense of violated sovereignty that the attacks create.
**Q: How much is the will and cooperation of the Pakistani authorities involved in these drone strikes which, as you pointed out, many Pakistanis describe as a violation of national sovereignty?
**
A: The government of Pakistan has not only known about them but it has also sanctioned and supported them. However, there have been debates about the extent of the Pakistani involvement in the program. Throughout the process, the Pakistani authorities have provided logistical support — air bases, permissions— to the United States. What has been harder is to have an agreed plan as to who has to be on the target list and how the strikes are carried out. The US has found it difficult to share intelligence reports with the Pakistani government because the Americans think the intelligence often leaks to the target.
On their part, the Pakistanis resent the lack of trust. They want to have their own ideas about who is an enemy of the Pakistani state; who should be targeted while drawing the list of targets in the drone attacks. One year ago, the US and Pakistan made kind of a new agreement on targeting in particular to go after the leaders of the Pakistani Taliban who had not been previously high priority targets for the US. As the insurgency grew, the Pakistani Taliban became a high priority for the Pakistani military. Towards the end of last year, there was a period when the sense of a shared purpose was relatively strong as the Pakistani Taliban leaders were targeted along with al Qaeda. That working agreement changed with the Raymond Davis case and of course the bin Laden raid brought things to a very low point.
**Q: Does that mean that these strikes have renewed anti-Americanism in Pakistan and they pose more security threats to the United States in the future?
**
A: From what is reported by the governments and newspaper accounts in Pakistan, the drone attacks have reduced the threat of terrorist attacks on the United States by constantly disrupting the leadership of al Qaeda. At the same time, they have increased the threat by inflaming anti-American feelings in some sections of Pakistan. There is not really good evidence about attitudes of the local people in some of these areas that are Taliban-controlled to the role of the military action in attacking the Taliban and al Qaeda.
**Q: What does bin Laden’s killing mean for al Qaeda?
**
A: Al Qaeda has had the same leader for more than twenty years and it never had to deal with a succession crisis. Bin Laden was not only an important source of finance and symbolic leadership but he also had a unique history in the Muslim world as a militant leader who raised voice for the oppressed people. He was the architect of 9/11 attacks; no one can replace him in that role. There is no one in the organisation who has bin Laden’s communication skills and his history. So, there are some significant military leaders but I don’t think anyone can provide his symbolic leadership.
**Q: What is your critique of Pakistan’s Afghan policy?
**
A: You see big countries always exert pressure on their smaller neighboring countries.
For example, the United States exerts pressure on Mexico to the extent it can. The problem is that the Pakistani army has chosen self-destructive methods to achieve this influence by arming groups which are not friendly with the Pakistani state.
Secondly, they [the army] keep overreaching the degree of the influence. They feel they need to have an Afghanistan to be satisfied. They seem to be driven by the fear of India in Afghanistan in a way out of proportion to the actual degree of influence that India could ever reasonably exercise in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has legitimate interests in Afghanistan but has not been able to develop balanced sustainable policies that can produce a friendly Afghanistan. When Islamabad tries to over reach its influence in Afghanistan, it bounces back with adverse fallout of instability for Pakistan. I am afraid we are about to enter into another period of that character.
**Q: In your book, Ghost Wars, you talk about Pakistan’s deception in the war against terror. Islamabad has handed over several al Qaeda leaders to the Americans in the past. Are you trying to argue that Pakistan selectively takes action against Taliban and al Qaeda based on a case by case approach?
**
A: There is a level of detail [on this matter] about which I don’t think anyone, including a lot of people in the Pakistani military, understand. Even the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] is not so organised as if they sit around and make plans. It is not a monolithic entity. Just like any other institution in Pakistan, the ISI is also a mess where there are different elements engaged in various deals.
The Pakistan army for long has had the view that they can distinguish between the good militants — those who are in an alliance with Pakistan— and bad militants — who are engaged in criminal revolutionary activity against Pakistan. So, if you are willing to refrain from attacking the Pakistani state, its army and refrain from undermining its negotiations then you can maintain your bank accounts, buildings, safe sanctuaries, businesses and remain able to travel to the Gulf or something like that. Many Afghan
Taliban refugees have accommodated the Pakistani State in that way by refusing to join the Pakistani Taliban.
For example, unlike the TTP, the Lashkar-e-Taiba has, by and large, adhered to that norm by not declaring the Pakistani state as their enemy. Pakistani security services feel like they have got their hands full. They don’t want everyone to be their enemy. So, they try to reward those groups which refuse to join the TTP and keep them focused on Afghanistan. They even go to the extent of motivating the Taliban to attack the Americans but stay away from targeting Pakistan’s interests. Thus, the Americans regard them as deceptive. Pakistanis tell the Americans that they treat everybody among the Taliban as the same but in practice it is in their interest not to treat everyone as the same.
**Q: What is the future of al Qaeda?
**
A: Al Qaeda will remain under pressure from the US authorities in Afghanistan and some pressure from the Pakistani security services. Yemen looks like the best place for the young al Qaeda fighters. If I were a twenty-two year old Arab provoked by my corner mosque to fight the “Great Holy War” with 1000 bucks in my pocket, I would be interested in going to Yemen because no one is looking for you there. Al Qaeda is now in control over there in the south, as we know from published reports. They are likely to end up with significant space there. It’s an Arabic speaking country where al Qaeda can be strong in the next few years.
**Q: How badly has the Abbottabad incident damaged the ISI-CIA relationship?
**
A: The damage has been pretty severe. It, nonetheless, did not lead to a complete breakup of relations between the ISI and the CIA. The ISI has done a skillful job of maintain formal contacts with the United States but still maintaining its independence and holding the Americans at a distance. The Americans have also taken a similar approach. They developed a relationship with the ISI to work on some shared projects but also kept their independence by distancing the ISI in some other operations. The Raymond Davis case and the Abbottabad raid were clear examples of this approach. I don’t think either side is going to change its approach. Intelligence sharing is a dirty business. Even countries with friendly relations will recruit agents in state with which they share cordial diplomatic relations only to pursue their own interests.
**Q: Where does Pakistan go from here? How does the future look like?
**
A: Pakistan’s future depends on strengthening civilian and the economic sectors of the country. The only way to break this pattern of internal violence and self-defeating policies is to open up the economy. Pakistan has to benefit from the transformation and the economic growth that has so much changed India, for example. Once that growth clicks, then the balance of power inside Pakistan will change. It won’t be about personalities or wishing for great politicians. Pakistan does have sources of strength to overcome its challenges. You have a talented business sector; professional diaspora and a strong media. There have been a lot of countries with similar terrible situations of civil- military conflict, corruption, internal violence, separatist movements and drug smuggling.
For instance, Columbia in late 1990s looked like a hopeless case. Today, it is a pretty healthy country. Indonesia was about to fall apart in late 1990s after three civil wars; the army was disappearing people; attracting international sanctions; al Qaeda was emerging through the Jamaat-e-Islamia. Only twelve years later, today Indonesia is full of shopping malls; it has a large middle class and its stock exchange is performing very well. How did that happen? It could be possible only because of the economic growth. Pakistan lives on the edge of a neighborhood that is entering an age of transformation and success. This is the Asian century. Pakistan is on the western edge of the Asian century. It has an opportunity to become a part of that prosperity.
This can happen only if Pakistan normalises its relations with India and let economic activity and trade flourish in that region by opening up its borders. Pakistan has the talent and the human capital to benefit from the Asian century. An economic change will ultimately put these arguments about the ISI, the army and corrupt politicians in the dustbin of the history.
Malik Siraj Akbar, a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow based in Washington DC, is a visiting journalist at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) of the Center for Public Integrity (CPI).
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
Q: How big a difference have the drone attacks made in the Afghan war?
**
A: **The American military commanders think that the drones have been the best tactic to sustain pressure on foreign fighters in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
They have also been important for Pakistan because they have brought the war on the Pakistani soil. The high technology system used to operate the drones creates all kinds of questions and reactions among the Pakistanis about their lack of control over these drones and the sense of violated sovereignty that the attacks create.
Looks like Steve Coll was there as US representative and not a journalist.
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html?_r=1&hp
C.I.A. Is Disputed on Civilian Toll in Drone Strikes[
WASHINGTON — On May 6, a Central Intelligence Agency drone fired a volley of missiles at a pickup truck carrying nine militants and bomb materials through a desolate stretch of Pakistan near the Afghan border. It killed all the militants — a clean strike with no civilian casualties, extending what is now a yearlong perfect record of avoiding collateral deaths.
Or so goes the United States government’s version of the attack, from an American official briefed on the classified C.I.A. program. Here is another version, from a new report compiled by British and Pakistani journalists: The missiles hit a religious school, an adjoining restaurant and a house, killing 18 people — 12 militants, but also 6 civilians, known locally as Samad, Jamshed, Daraz, Iqbal, Noor Nawaz and Yousaf.
The civilian toll of the C.I.A.’s drone campaign, which is widely credited with disrupting Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan’s tribal area, has been in bitter dispute since the strikes were accelerated in 2008. Accounts of strike after strike from official and unofficial sources are so at odds that they often seem to describe different events.
The debate has intensified since President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, **John O. Brennan, clearly referring to the classified drone program, said in June that for almost a year, “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” Other officials say that extraordinary claim still holds: since May 2010, C.I.A. officers believe, the drones have killed more than 600 militants — including at least 20 in a strike reported Wednesday — and not a single noncombatant.
**
Cutting through the fog of the drone war is important in part because the drone aircraft deployed in Pakistan are the leading edge of a revolution in robotic warfare that has already expanded to Yemen and Somalia, and that military experts expect to sweep the world.
“It’s urgent to answer this question, because this technology is so attractive to the U.S. and other governments that it’s going to proliferate very rapidly,” said Sarah Holewinski, executive director of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or Civic, a Washington nonprofit that tracks civilian deaths.
**The government’s assertion of zero collateral deaths meets with deep skepticism from many independent experts. And a new report from the British Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which conducted interviews in Pakistan’s tribal area, concluded that at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 strikes during the last year.
Others who question the C.I.A. claim include strong supporters of the drone program like Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal, who closely tracks the strikes.
“The Taliban don’t go to a military base to build bombs or do training,” Mr. Roggio said. “There are families and neighbors around. I believe the people conducting the strikes work hard to reduce civilian casualties. They could be 20 percent. They could be 5 percent. But I think the C.I.A.’s claim of zero civilian casualties in a year is absurd.”**
A closer look at the competing claims, including interviews with American officials and their critics, discloses new details about how the C.I.A. tracks the results of the drone strikes. It also suggests reasons to doubt the precision and certainty of the agency’s civilian death count.
In a statement on Tuesday for this article, Mr. Brennan adjusted the wording of his earlier comment on civilian casualties, saying American officials could not confirm any such deaths.
“Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq, and we will continue to do our best to keep it that way,” Mr. Brennan said.
**If there are doubts about the C.I.A. claim, there are also questions about the reliability of critics’ reports of noncombatant deaths. Reporters in North Waziristan, where most strikes occur, operate in a dangerous and politically charged environment. Many informants have their own agendas: militants use civilian deaths as a recruiting tool, and Pakistani officials rally public opinion against the drones as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty.
“Waziristan is a black hole of information,” acknowledged Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who is suing the C.I.A. on behalf of civilians who say they have lost family members in the strikes. American officials accuse Mr. Akbar of working to discredit the drone program at the behest of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, the Pakistani spy service. Mr. Akbar and others who know him strongly deny the accusation.
**
American officials, who will speak about the classified drone program only on the condition of anonymity, say it has killed more than 2,000 militants and about 50 noncombatants since 2001 — a stunningly low collateral death rate by the standards of traditional airstrikes.
The officials say C.I.A. drone operators view their targets for hours or days beforehand, analyzing what they call a “pattern of life” and distinguishing militants from others. They use software to model the blast area of each proposed strike. Then they watch the strike, see the killed and wounded pulled from the rubble, and track the funerals that follow.
The video is supplemented, officials say, by informants on the ground who sometimes plant homing devices at a compound or a car. The C.I.A. and National Security Agency intercept cellphone calls and e-mails discussing who was killed.
“Because our coverage has improved so much since the beginning of this program, it really defies logic that now we would start missing all these alleged noncombatant casualties,” said an American official familiar with the program.
In one recent strike, the official said, after the drone operator fired a missile at militants in a car and a noncombatant suddenly appeared nearby, the operator was able to divert the missile harmlessly into open territory, hitting the car minutes later when the civilian was gone.
“Nobody is arguing that this weapon is perfect, but it remains the most precise system we’ve ever had in our arsenal,” the official said.
The agency’s critics counter that an intelligence officer watching a video screen thousands of miles away can hardly be certain of the identity of everyone killed in a strike. In a tribal society where men commonly carry weapons and a single family compound can include a militant fighter, an enlistee in the Pakistani government’s Frontier Corps, and a shopkeeper, even villagers may be uncertain about the affiliations of their neighbors.
Skeptics likewise say that militants can commandeer a car or a compound from neighbors who cannot safely refuse the demands. And civilians may be present among militants: the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, for example, found that one strike that killed about two dozen militants also killed two civilians, a prisoner of the militants and a visitor negotiating the release of relatives held elsewhere.
The standard drone weapons, Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs, like other ordnance, are not absolutely predictable.** A strike last Oct. 18, all reports agree, hit a militant compound and killed a number of fighters. But Mr. Akbar, the lawyer, said the family next door to the compound had told his investigators their 10-year-old son, Naeem Ullah, was hit by shrapnel and died an hour after being taken to the hospital in nearby Miram Shah. Neighbors confirmed the account, Mr. Akbar said.
**
The C.I.A. would not permit its drone operators to speak about their work. But Col. David M. Sullivan, an Air Force pilot with extensive experience with both traditional and drone airstrikes from Kosovo to Afghanistan, said remotely piloted craft offered far greater opportunities to study a target and avoid hitting civilians.
An F-117 fighter or a Reaper drone each carries the same 500-pound bombs, “but the Reaper has been sitting for hours on target,” allowing the operator time to study who will be hit by a strike, said Colonel Sullivan, who is on the staff of the secretary of defense.
Still, he said, there is still a margin of error in drone strikes, even if it is far smaller than in traditional strikes.
“Zero innocent civilians having lost their lives does not sound to me like reality,” Colonel Sullivan said. “Never in the history of combat operations has every airborne strike been 100 percent successful.”
American officials said the Bureau of Investigative Journalism report was suspect because it relied in part on information supplied by Mr. Akbar, who publicly named the C.I.A.’s undercover Pakistan station chief in December when announcing his legal campaign against the drones. But Mr. Akbar, a former prosecutor, denied he had ever received money or instructions from the ISI, which he said he had often faced off against as a lawyer. He said that in July two ISI agents visited him to ask, “who do you work for?”
Christopher Rogers, an American human rights lawyer who lived in Pakistan in 2009 and 2010, said that he had helped interest Mr. Akbar in the drone strikes and their legal implications. “The idea that ISI was the puppeteer here is not credible at all,” said Mr. Rogers, now at the Open Society Institute in New York.
Though Pakistani officials often denounce the drone program, even as they have at times quietly assisted it, skeptics about its overall impact include American officials as well. The former director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, said at a public forum in Aspen, Colo., last month that he thought unilateral American strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia should end.
“Pull back on unilateral actions by the United States except in extraordinary circumstances,” said Mr. Blair, who headed national intelligence from January 2009 until May 2010.
C. Christine Fair, an expert on Pakistan at Georgetown University, said that getting full cooperation with Pakistan on drone strikes might be impossible. But Ms. Fair, who said she began as a skeptic but has come to believe that the drones are highly effective and civilian casualties are very low, said the semisecrecy surrounding the program fuels suspicion and allows propaganda to thrive.
The C.I.A. should make public its strikes and their results — even to the point of posting video of the strikes online, she said.
“This is the least indiscriminate, least inhumane tool we have,” Ms. Fair said. “But until there is complete transparency, the public will not believe that.”](“http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html?_r=1&hp”)
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
](Pakistan and U.S. Redefining Troubled Relationship Heading into New Year | Fox News)Pakistan and U.S. Redefining Troubled Relationship Heading into New Year | Fox News
Pakistan and U.S. Redefining Troubled Relationship Heading into New Year
Published January 02, 2012| Associated Press
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan – Fatigued by a series of diplomatic crises over the past year, the United States and Pakistan are redefining their troubled relationship, stepping back from the assumption that common goals and shared interests can trump mutual suspicion.
For Pakistan that means less cooperation with Washington and willingness, and in some cases eagerness, to swear off some of the American financial aid that often made Pakistan feel too dependent, and too pushed-around.
For the United States it means lower expectations in several areas, including the crucial question of Pakistani help in ending the war in next-door Afghanistan.
**Overall it could be the biggest change in a decade in a relationship that has been a mainstay of U.S. military and counterterrorism policy since the 9/11 terror attacks.
**
**Both U.S. and Pakistani officials said the November killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO airstrike and Washington’s refusal to outright apologize for the deaths has been a game changer in a relationship characterized by mistrust and mutual acrimony.
**
In the United States, civilian and military officials have called the friendly fire incident a tragedy caused by mistakes on both sides, but insist that Pakistan fired first. Pakistan denies that and has called the airstrike an unprovoked attack.
**Pakistan’s loud and angry reaction has, if anything, hardened attitudes in Congress and elsewhere that Pakistan is untrustworthy or ungrateful.
**
A senior Obama administration official conceded that the deaths made every aspect of U.S. cooperation with Pakistan more difficult, and that the distance Pakistan has imposed may continue indefinitely. The official, like most others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of ongoing discussions.
**Pakistan has already stopped billing the United States for its anti-terror war expenses under the 10-year-old Coalition Support Fund, set up by Washington after the 9/11 attacks to reimburse its many allies for their military expenses fighting terrorists worldwide and touted by the U.S. as a success story.
**
**“From here on in we want a very formal, business-like relationship. The lines will be drawn. There will be no more of the free run of the past, no more interpretation of rules. We want it very formal with agreed-upon limits,” military spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas told The Associated Press in an interview in the garrison town of Rawalpindi.
**
**Pakistan will further reduce the number of U.S. military people in Pakistan, limit military exchanges with the United States and rekindle its relationship with neighbors, such as China, which has been a more reliable ally, according to Islamabad. **Earlier this year Pakistan signed a deal with China for 50 JF-17 aircraft with sophisticated avionics, compared by some, who are familiar with military equipment, to the U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets.
Pakistan retaliated for the friendly fire deaths by shutting down NATO’s supply routes to Afghanistan and kicking the U.S. out of an air base it used to facilitate drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal belt.** Both U.S. and Pakistani officials expect more fallout, most likely in the form of additional tolls or taxes on NATO supplies into Afghanistan through Pakistan. There could also be charges for use of Pakistani airspace, said some officials in Pakistan.**
**Pakistan also asked the U.S. not to send any high-level visitors to Pakistan for some time, the U.S. official said.
**
After past crises, including the flare-up of anti-U.S. anger following the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces in May, Pakistan had accepted top-level U.S. officials for a public peace-making session rather quickly. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the then-top U.S. military official visited Pakistan less than a month after the bin Laden raid, and pledged continued cooperation on several fronts.
U.S. officials said they would like to mend fences quickly, but the senior administration official and others said they assume there will be less contact, fewer high-profile joint projects and fewer American government employees living and working in Pakistan.
Since 2001, the U.S. has pumped aid to the country under both Republican and Democratic administrations with the expectation that Pakistan will be a bulwark against the spread of Islamic terrorism. Anti-American sentiment in Pakistan has only grown, and spiked in 2011. Both a military dictatorship and the elected civilian government that followed it have accepted the aid and pledged cooperation against terrorism and on other fronts.
The mutual conclusion that each side can live with a more limited relationship comes at a troubling time for Washington. It has suspended drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas since the NATO bombings, yet the unmanned drone is considered by many who are familiar with the conflict to be one of the most effective weapons against insurgents hiding in Pakistan’s tribal regions.
With the clock ticking until its combat withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2015, Washington’s battlefield strategy is to break the momentum of the Taliban in order to improve its negotiating position at the table. Pakistan is seen as crucial to the success of this effort.
Washington needs Pakistani help to bring the Taliban to the table. Senior Taliban leaders live in Pakistan, and mid- and low-level fighters who target U.S. troops in Afghanistan slip across the Pakistan border to regroup and rearm.
The United States has long pressed Pakistan to flush insurgents out of tribal safe havens along the border, with minimal success. While the Pakistan army denies giving direct aid to Taliban groups, particularly the Haqqani network, it also says it won’t launch an offensive to kick them out.
**With more than 3,000 Pakistani soldiers killed and thousands more injured in border fights with militants as part of the anti-terror war, Abbas said the Pakistan military has grown weary of Washington’s repeated calls for Pakistan to do more.
**
Meanwhile some U.S. politicians are calling for an aid cut off to Pakistan, arguing that the U.S. has little to show for billions sent to Pakistan over the past decade. A total aid cutoff is extremely unlikely, but Congress has already trimmed back the Obama administration latest request and is expected to demand less generosity and more strings over the coming year.
The U.S. official said that the current political standoff has made the already difficult White House argument to Congress even harder to make. That argument basically holds that because of its geographic location, prominence in the Islamic world, past willingness to hunt terrorists and its nuclear weapons, Pakistan is a partner the U.S. may not fully trust but cannot afford to lose.
Pakistani military officials said a U.S. aid cutoff would suspend delivery next year of six refitted F-16 aircraft. Currently Pakistan currently has 47 F-16s, a small percentage of a fighter wing that also includes Chinese and European-made jets.
Abbas said U.S. cash payments, made through the Coalition Support Fund, have been erratic. In the last 10 years Pakistan’s army has seen only $1.8 billion of $8.6 billion in support funds. The rest of the money was siphoned off by the military government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf to finance subsidies and prop up his government.
Currently the U.S. is withholding another $600 million in support funds that was promised last year.
**“The equipment we have been getting from America over the last five years has been almost a trickle,” said former national security adviser retired Gen. Mahmud Durrani.
He complained of “second-hand helicopters that were badly refitted.”
Less aid might propel Pakistan toward greater financial independence, Durrani added.**
**“If the money stops, we can get our act together and manage. It is not the first time that American money has dried up and maybe we need to go cold turkey. Maybe in the long term we will be saying, `Thank God this happened.”’
**
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
oops Americans are concerned about Pakistan and Afghan economies…
Nato hopes for reopening of Pakistan supply route
**KABUL: Nato says it hopes for a quick reopening of the blocked supply routes through Pakistan because the 5-week closure is damaging the economies of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
**Nato spokesman Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson says the coalition has a stockpile of supplies that can keep operations in Afghanistan running at their current level even if those routes remain closed.
The coalition has reduced its dependence on Pakistan over the last two years by developing alternative routes that enter Afghanistan through Russia and Central Asia.%between%
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
Maybe someone’s fingers are itching to start the drone attacks again…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/world/asia/lull-in-us-drone-strikes-aids-pakistan-militants.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1Lull in Strikes by U.S. Drones Aids Militants in Pakistan
WASHINGTON —** A nearly two-month lull in American drone strikes in Pakistan has helped embolden Al Qaeda and several Pakistani militant factions to regroup, increase attacks against Pakistani security forces and threaten intensified strikes against allied forces in Afghanistan, American and Pakistani officials say.**
The insurgents are increasingly taking advantage of tensions raised by an American airstrike in November that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers in two border outposts, plunging relations between the countries to new depths. The Central Intelligence Agency, hoping to avoid making matters worse while Pakistan completes a wide-ranging review of its security relationship with the United States, has not conducted a drone strike since mid-November.
**Diplomats and intelligence analysts say the pause in C.I.A. missile strikes — the longest in Pakistan in more than three years — is offering for now greater freedom of movement to an insurgency that had been splintered by in-fighting and battered by American drone attacks in recent months. **Several feuding factions said last week that they were patching up their differences, at least temporarily, to improve their image after a series of kidnappings and, by some accounts, to focus on fighting Americans in Afghanistan.
Other militant groups continue attacking Pakistani forces. Just last week, Taliban insurgents killed 15 security soldiers who had been kidnapped in retaliation for the death of a militant commander.
**The spike in violence in the tribal areas — up nearly 10 percent in 2011 from the previous year, according to a new independent report — comes amid reports of negotiations between Pakistan’s government and some local Taliban factions, although the military denies that such talks are taking place.
**
A logistics operative with the Haqqani terrorist group, which uses sanctuaries in Pakistan to carry out attacks on allied troops in Afghanistan, said militants could still hear drones flying surveillance missions, day and night. “There are still drones, but there is no fear anymore,” he said in a telephone interview. The logistics operative said fighters now felt safer to roam more freely.
Over all, drone strikes in Pakistan dropped to 64 last year, compared with 117 strikes in 2010, according to The Long War Journal, a Web site that monitors the attacks. Analysts attribute the decrease to a dwindling number of senior Qaeda leaders and a pause in strikes last year after the arrest in January of Raymond Davis, a C.I.A. security contractor who killed two Pakistanis; the Navy Seal raid in May that killed Osama bin Laden; and the American airstrike on Nov. 26.
Pakistan ordered drone operations at its Shamsi air base closed after that airstrike, but C.I.A. drones flying from bases in Afghanistan continue to fly surveillance missions over the tribal areas. The drones would be cleared to fire on a senior militant leader if there was credible intelligence and minimal risk to civilians, American officials said. But for now, the Predator and Reaper drones are holding their fire, the longest pause in Pakistan since July 2008.“It makes sense that a lull in U.S. operations, coupled with ineffective Pakistani efforts, might lead the terrorists to become complacent and try to regroup,” one American official said. “We know that Al Qaeda’s leaders were constantly taking the U.S. counterterrorism operations into account, spending considerable time planning their movements and protecting their communications to try to stay alive.”C. Christine Fair, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who just returned from a month in Pakistan, put it more bluntly: “They’re taking advantage of the respite. It allows them to operate more freely.”
Several administration officials said Saturday that any lull in drone strikes did not signal a weakening of the country’s counterterrorism efforts, suggesting that strikes could resume soon. “Without commenting on specific counterterrorism operations, Al Qaeda is severely weakened, having suffered major losses in recent years,” said George Little, a Defense Department spokesman. “But even a diminished group of terrorists can pose danger, and thus our resolve to defeat them is as strong as ever.”Analysts say the hiatus coincides with and probably has accelerated a flurry of insurgent activity and new strategies.In the past week, leaflets distributed in North Waziristan announced that the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda had urged several Pakistani militant groups to set aside their differences and some commanders have reportedly asked their fighters to focus on striking American-led allied forces in Afghanistan.
The Pakistani groups include the Pakistani Taliban, an umbrella group led by Hakimullah Mehsud that has mounted attacks against the Pakistani state since the group was formed in 2007. The new council also includes the Haqqani network and factions led by Maulvi Nazir of South Waziristan and Hafiz Gul Bahadur of North Waziristan, which already target NATO soldiers and have tacit peace agreements with the Pakistani military.
In telephone interviews, some Pakistani militants said the purpose of the agreement was to settle internal differences among rival factions and improve the image of the Taliban, which has been tarnished because of the increasing use of kidnapping and the rise in civilian killings.
Other analysts say that the Afghan Taliban are also feeling the pinch of American-led night raids and other operations across the border. They said the Taliban needed the militants in Pakistan’s tribal region to focus more on helping to launch a final offensive in Afghanistan, in hopes of gaining leverage before any peace talks and the ultimate withdrawal of most American forces from Afghanistan by 2014.
One of the main drivers of the accord was Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani network, prompting some Pakistani analysts to reason that the Pakistani Army had also prodded the creation of the council, or shura, to maintain its leverage in any peace negotiations. Last summer Adm. Mike Mullen, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the Haqqanis “a veritable arm” of Pakistan’s main military spy agency.
“No agreement is ever permanent in frontier politics, and it’s all very complicated,” said one American government official with decades of experience in Pakistan and its tribal areas.
**Stuck in a stalemate in the lawless borderlands with this array of militants are 150,000 Pakistani troops. A recent report by an Islamabad-based research organization, the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, said that militant-based violence had declined by 24 percent in the last two years. But it also concluded that terrorist attacks in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province increased 8 percent in 2011 from the year before.
**
**“The security situation remained volatile as militants dislodged from their strongholds constantly managed to relocate to other parts of the FATA,” the report said.
**
In a sign of the shifting insurgent tactics, the number of suicide bombings in the country declined to 39 through November, compared with a high of 81 in all of 2009, according to the Pakistani military.
**
The number of attacks from homemade bombs, however, increased to 1,036 through November, compared with 877 for all of 2009. More than 3,500 Pakistani soldiers and police officers have been killed since 2002.
**One senior Pakistani Army officer with experience in the tribal areas said that insurgents had devised increasingly diabolical triggers and fuses for bombs.
Unlike Americans, Pakistani soldiers still drive in pickups or carriers with little protection. “The effects are devastating,” said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Vehicles are basically vaporized.”
“The Pakistani Army is overstretched, and that’s clearly had an impact on morale,” said Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States. “But we have to maintain the pressure on the militants.”
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
drone attacks resume
Drone attack in Miranshah kills 4 Last Updated On 11 January,2012 About 2 hours ago
**At least four people were killed as a drone attack targeted a house in Miranshah.
**
A US drone attack targetting a militant compound in Pakistan s tribal area near the Afghan border killed four militants late Tuesday, security officials said.
Two missiles hit a compound on the outer skirts of Miranshah, in the North Waziristan region, killing four, one official said.
This is the first such strike since Nov. 17 last year, and comes at a time when anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan is running high after a Nov. 26 NATO cross-border air attack killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
The American-Pakistani Cold War?[(http://nationalinterest.org/profile/christine-fair)
| January 10, 2012
On September 10, 2001, Pakistan was, for all intents and purposes, a rogue state. It was encumbered by numerous layers of sanctions pertaining to nuclear and missile proliferation, the 1998 nuclear tests, as well as sanctions that resulted from General Pervez Musharraf’s 1999 coup. When then president Bill Clinton visited the subcontinent in 2000, he spent five days in India and a mere few hours in Pakistan. During his Pakistan visit, Clinton refused to shake Musharraf’s hand and hectored the dictator on the necessity of democracy. Pakistan was one of the three countries that recognized the odious Taliban regime, and it had by the fall of 2001 secured a long track record of supporting terrorism. Back in 1993, Pakistan teetered upon a U.S. government designation as a state that supported terrorism.
The gruesome crimes of 9/11 changed Pakistan’s fortunes and those of its military dictator, Musharraf. By joining with the United States in its so-called war on terror, Musharraf was transformed from U.S. pariah to U.S. ally. Pakistan was relieved of its sanctions, reaped billions in loan forgiveness and loan rescheduling, benefited from more than $20 billion in military and economic assistance as well as lucrative reimbursements for military operations on its purportedly sovereign soil. Most importantly, the tragedy of 9/11 afforded Pakistan the opportunity to rehabilitate itself among nations and stave off what Musharraf believed would be an Indian effort to take advantage of Pakistan’s precarious position.
Those heady days are gone. Pakistan has not been celebrated as a light of moderation or even a reliable partner in the war on terrorism for several years. Now, American analysts and policy makers realize the United States and Pakistan have strategic interests that diverge starkly even while there are some important—albeit retrenching—issues upon which they agree. After ten years of precarious military, intelligence and other security cooperation between Pakistan and the United States, the two countries could not loathe each other more. Worse, as much as they despise each other, they each know that their security depends in varying degrees upon the other.
It has been difficult for the United States to grasp the limits of its national power and accept that it cannot transform Pakistan. For nearly a decade, Washington has used financial allurements and strategic weapons systems to persuade Islamabad to renounce Islamist militancy as a tool of foreign policy. However, none of these inducements has yielded significant dividends. At long last, Washington has concluded that it cannot metamorphose Pakistan or the generals that have variously run and ruined the country. Nor can Washington meaningfully transform Pakistan’s civilian leadership, which has shown consistent preference towards avarice over governance.
The time has come for the United States to adopt a more modest and sustainable relationship with the country aimed at managing it as a security risk rather than embracing absurd transformational goals. At the most fundamental level, the United States has one overarching goal: work to ensure that Pakistan does not become an Islamist variation of North Korea. That is, the United States should work with the international community to prevent Pakistan from becoming an inward-focused, hostile and aggressive nuclear-armed rogue state that turns to other threatening states in the international system as its sole source of sustenance and support. This requires sustainable and practical engagement rather than isolation. This will require the U.S. Congress to resist its understandable urge to simply cut Pakistan off. While this path is no doubt tempting in an election year and during a period of economic austerity, such instincts should be rebuffed.
Under the prevailing circumstances, the Cold War may offer important lessons for U.S. policy makers restructuring U.S. relations with Pakistan. First, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union maintained diplomatic missions and contacts at all levels. Second, they continued ordinary contacts with military and intelligence liaisons. However, these engagements were with the obvious lucidity that the two states were competitors, not partners. The two states understood that their strategic interests were divergent and that they would operate against each other even if there were opportunities elsewhere to cooperate. Third, the United States invested in civil society where it could and with the modest hope that one day that system would change. Finally, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the world learned that it could manage the numerous problems stemming from the Soviet Union’s vast nuclear and missile arsenal. The world did not end when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Pakistan is not the Soviet Union, of course. Still, the Cold War offers insights for how the United States might view Pakistan’s place in its national-security strategy. **First, while the two countries may share some common interests in counternarcotics, maritime security, energy security, global warming, water scarcity, peacekeeping missions and the like, they also clash over Pakistan’s reliance upon Islamist terrorism under its ever-expanding nuclear umbrella. Second, the United States may increasingly target Pakistan’s intelligence operatives and terrorist assets in and beyond the South Asian theater, be it through restricting travel or freezing financial assets of Pakistani citizens—officials and civilians alike—supporting terrorism or nuclear proliferation. The United States may even increasingly work with local authorities to arrest or otherwise eliminate such persons in third countries. Pakistan and the United States will almost certainly clash over groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Haqqani Network and the Afghan Taliban, particularly if Afghanistan and Pakistan become renewed sources of international terrorism. However, both countries need to sustain diplomatic, political, military, intelligence and law-enforcement ties to the extent that it is mutually beneficial.
**
Most importantly, by remembering that when the Soviet Union collapsed, the global order did not come under threat due to its nuclear arsenal, the United States and its partners can undercut Pakistan’s most potent strategy for wresting political and financial rents from the international community: nuclear blackmail.
Pakistan continually menaces the international community by appearing to be an out-of-control state chock full of tactical nuclear weapons and ever-expanding fissile material production—and ready to use them as soon as the first Indian sepoy tiptoes across the international border armed with a slingshot.
**While one cannot underestimate the possibility of further destabilization in Pakistan, the international community may in fact help incentivize Pakistan to fix its numerous governance problems by embracing the possibility that Pakistan can fail. Then perhaps Pakistan would begin taking the necessary steps to become the sovereign state that Pakistanis and the rest of the world alike want Pakistan to become.
C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.](“http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&winname=addthis&pub=nationalinterest&source=tbx-250&lng=en-au&s=digg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnationalinterest.org%2Fcommentary%2Fthe-american-pakistani-cold-war-6340%3Futm_source%3Dtwitterfeed%26utm_medium%3Dtwitter&title=Commentary%3A%20The%20American-Pakistani%20Cold%20War%3F%20|%20The%20National%20Interest&ate=AT-nationalinterest/-/-/4f0cf877cf744095/1&frommenu=1&uid=4f0cf8774a150cff&ct=1&rxi=4f0cef9f9b8e75cd&gen=1&pre=http%3A%2F%2Ft.co%2FFo4pecRR&tt=0&captcha_provider=recaptcha")]("http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-american-pakistani-cold-war-6340?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter#”)
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
[http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-intel-afghan-20120112,0,3639052.story
U.S. intelligence report on Afghanistan sees stalemate
[COLOR=#292727]By Ken Dilanian and David S. Cloud, Los Angeles TimesJanuary 11, 2012, 6:39 p.m.
](http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-intel-afghan-20120112,0,3639052.story)Reporting from Washington—
**The U.S. intelligence community says in a secret new assessment that the war in Afghanistan is mired in stalemate, and warns that security gains from an increase in American troops have been undercut by pervasive corruption, incompetent governance and Taliban fighters operating from neighboring Pakistan, according to U.S. officials.
**
The sobering judgments, laid out in a classified National Intelligence Estimate completed last month and delivered to the White House, appeared at odds with recent optimistic statements by Pentagon officials and have deepened divisions between U.S. intelligence agencies and American military commanders about progress in the decade-old war.
The detailed document, known as an NIE, runs more than 100 pages and represents the consensus view of the CIA and 15 other U.S. intelligence agencies. Similar in tone to an NIE prepared a year ago, it challenges the Pentagon’s claim to have achieved lasting security gains in Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan, according to U.S. officials who have read or been briefed on its contents.
In a section looking at future scenarios, the NIE also asserts that the Afghan government in Kabul may not be able to survive as the U.S. steadily pulls out its troops and reduces military and civilian assistance.
“Its viability is tenuous,” said one official, citing the report.
Although the review gives the U.S. military and its allies credit for driving the Taliban out of some areas last year, it says the gains were not enough to bolster the weak central government in Kabul, haven’t diminished the Taliban’s will to keep fighting, and haven’t instilled confidence among Afghans in much of the country.
As a result, the NIE warns that the overall difficulties could jeopardize the Obama administration’s plans to withdraw most U.S. troops and hand over responsibility for the war to the Afghan government by 2014.
The findings prompted a sharp response from Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, the U.S. commander of Western forces in the war, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, who filed their objections in a one-page written dissent. The comment was also signed by Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, commander of Central Command, and Adm. James Stavridis, supreme allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
**Military and Pentagon officials argued that assumptions used by intelligence agencies were flawed.
**
"It assumes a quicker drawdown of U.S. support to the Afghan government than a lot of people are projecting, " said one U.S. official familiar with Pentagon thinking, speaking of the assessment.
**Military officials also cited what they claim are gaps in the intelligence agencies’ understanding of the Taliban leadership’s thinking, the officials said.
Some in Congress and the Obama administration are concerned that the bleak assessment suggests little progress was made in the last year. During that time, the U.S. has suffered more than 400 military fatalities and spent more than $100 billion. As of Wednesday, 1,873 Americans had been killed in Afghanistan since U.S. forces invaded in late 2001, according to the website icasualties.org.**
Army Gen. David H. Petraeus wrote a dissent to last year’s NIE when he was U.S. commander in the war. He is now CIA director, and he pledged during his Senate confirmation hearings not to allow his personal views as a former commander to color the CIA’s analysis.
**The recent NIE agrees with the military that Afghan Taliban fighters have found safe haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas. After a six-week lull, CIA drone strikes resumed this week in North Waziristan, reportedly killing four people Wednesday, but U.S. officials warned that drone strikes alone cannot prevent Afghan insurgents from regrouping there.
“It’s all about the safe haven,” one congressional official said. “That has to be solved.”
Military officials have acknowledged that there are no easy answers, and that a peace deal may be the only solution.**
The Taliban has suffered heavy losses, particularly in southern Afghanistan, but it also has gained ground in the country’s east, near Pakistan, according to officials briefed on the NIE. But the intelligence community is not convinced that military gains in the south can be maintained once large numbers of U.S. forces withdraw.
The Afghan army and in particular the police face enormous problems contending with the insurgency as U.S. assistance declines, the document concludes. But it also raises doubts about whether Afghan civilian ministries can govern successfully in the south and other areas.
The sobering judgments in a classified National Intelligence Estimate appear at odds with recent optimistic statements about the war by Pentagon officials.
In late 2009, President Obama agreed to deploy 33,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, and the total U.S. force in the country peaked at about 100,000 last summer. The U.S. now has 91,000 troops there, and all combat forces are scheduled to withdraw by 2014.
Pentagon planners assume that a residual force will remain to train and assist the Afghans, but the White House has yet to sign off on that. The Obama administration is negotiating a long-term military alliance with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.Pentagon officials insist that the troop increase has put the Taliban on its heels.
“We’re moving in the right direction and we’re winning this very tough conflict,” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta told troops on Dec. 14 at Forward Operating Base Sharana in the eastern province of Paktika.
Pentagon spokesman George Little said Wednesday that Panetta continues to believe there has been “substantial progress.” The key, he said, is “to strengthen Afghan security forces and to build toward a long-term relationship with Afghanistan.”
National intelligence estimates often carry significant weight in U.S. policy circles, although they are hardly immune from errors.
**
Most famously, the 2002 NIE on Iraq judged with high confidence that Saddam Hussein was secretly amassing chemical and biological weapons, and trying to build a nuclear bomb. The George W. Bush administration repeatedly cited that NIE before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it ultimately was proved inaccurate in almost every respect.
Although they declined to discuss the contents of the current NIE, some members of Congress with access to intelligence said they are concerned about the lack of progress in Afghanistan.**
“I think there are real problems,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein(D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. “There have been gains in security … but the Taliban is still a force to be reckoned with. They still occupy considerable land in the country.”
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the Obama administration should release an unclassified version of the NIE for public debate.
“I do think it would be very helpful to release an unclassified version,” she said. “Given the expense and the lives that are at stake, the American people should see some of the top-line conclusions of the NIE.”
**
*[email protected]
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
two drone attacks in two days.
http://www.dawn.com/2012/01/12/drone-strikes-resume-amid-us-pakistan-strains.html
Drone strikes resume amid US-Pakistan strains
**WASHINGTON: The US resumption of drone strikes against militant targets in Pakistan does not signal an improvement in deeply frayed relations between Washington and Islamabad, US officials and experts said on Wednesday.
**In the first such attack since November 17, at least four militants were killed by missiles fired from an unmanned US drone at a house on the outskirts of Miranshah in the Pakistani tribal region of North Waziristan, Pakistani security and intelligence officials said.
Tense US and Pakistani relations worsened after a November 26 incident in which 24 Pakistani troops manning remote border posts were accidentally killed in a misdirected air strike by coalition forces based in Afghanistan.
Current and former US government officials familiar with the drone program said the apparent lull in attacks since the November incident represented no major change in US policy governing drone use.
US officials insisted there was no formal decision to suspend drone attacks after the wayward November 26 attack.
Officials said that while the operating practices of the drone program had evolved over time, the timing of attacks was based on the availability of adequate targeting intelligence and the suitability of flying conditions and did not depend on the ups and downs of the US-Pakistan relationship.
But one former US official who has advised President Barack Obama on policy in the region did not discount the possibility the most recent lull in drone attacks might have been calculated, at least in part, to “cool tempers” in Pakistan following the November incident.
Officials and experts in Washington said the militants targeted in Wednesday’s air strike were believed to be “foreign fighters” of Arab and possibly also Uzbek extraction.
None of the militants killed fit the description of “high-value” targets, US sources said, meaning they were not believed to be leaders of al Qaeda, the Taliban or related militant groups.
The CIA has run the US government’s drone program in Pakistan as a clandestine operation whose existence US and Pakistani authorities officially deny.
When the program started during President George W. Bush’s administration, lethal drone strikes were limited initially to “high-value militant” targets and occurred very infrequently.
In the summer of 2008, Bush secretly authorised a change that significantly expanded possible targets for lethal drone attacks.
Under the new rules, the CIA, if it had appropriate intelligence, was authorised to fire on encampments of “foreign fighters” as well as on “high-value” targets.
Following the rule change, drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas became more frequent in the last few months of Bush’s presidency.
By most accounts, until US relations with Pakistan began to deteriorate sharply toward the end of 2010, Obama’s administration further stepped up the rate of drone strikes.
**ADVANCE NOTICE UNLIKELY
**
**Current and former US and Pakistani government officials and advisers said it was extremely unlikely that the United States gave Pakistani authorities advance notice of Wednesday’s drone strike, although Pakistan may have been notified either at the time of, or shortly after, the attack.
**The former Obama adviser said that in every case he knew of before 2007 where the United States gave Pakistan notice of a drone strike; targeted militants fled the target location before the drones hit.
As a consequence, the former official said, Washington stopped giving Islamabad warning of drone strikes, although intelligence officials from the two countries sometimes shared intelligence on possible drone strike targets.
The former official said there was no reason to believe such collaboration occurred in preparing the latest drone attack.
Current and former US officials said that in the wake of the November attack, the United States was forced by Pakistani authorities to evacuate an airstrip in Pakistan it used previously to stage drone operations.
Some officials said the CIA was well-placed to continue drone operations unfettered from other bases – principally believed to be in Afghanistan.
But a former US official said the Pakistan airstrip did provide the United States with backup capability, particularly for operations during the bad weather season beginning in mountainous Afghanistan.
Current and former US officials said many US counter-terrorism experts inside the government believed drone strikes must continue at a fairly regular pace if the United States is to keep al Qaeda and other Pakistan-based militants off balance and prevent them from rebuilding their strength.
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
As U.S.-Pakistani relations sink, nations try to figure out ‘a new normal’
By Karen DeYoung and Karin Brulliard, Tuesday, January 17, 7:13 AM
I**n a call to her Pakistani counterpart this month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated the Obama administration’s counterterrorism “red line”: The United States reserved the right to attack anyone who it determined posed a direct threat to U.S. national security, anywhere in the world.
Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar responded in kind, telling Clinton that Pakistan’s red line was the violation of its sovereignty. Any unauthorized flight into its airspace, Khar bluntly told Clinton, risked being shot down.**
The conversation, recounted by U.S. officials, was one of the few high-level exchanges between the two governments in recent months, and it illustrated the depths to which U.S.-Pakistan relations have fallen after an inadvertent November border clashin which a U.S. air assault killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.
Since then, Pakistan’s border crossings have remained closed to U.S. and NATO supplies in transit to the Afghan war. At Pakistan’s demand, U.S. personnel have evacuated a secret drone airstrip, and the number of American military trainers in the country has been cut to a fraction of previous levels.
Marc Grossman, the administration’s top diplomat in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan, asked to visit Islamabad during a current trip to the region, but Pakistani officials responded that it was not convenient.
The “fundamentals” of mutual interest in destroying al-Qaeda and safely managing Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal haven’t changed, said a senior Obama administration official, who, like several sources in this article, discussed sensitive diplomatic matters on the condition of anonymity. But the two countries are groping their way toward what he called “a new normal” — somewhere between the strategic alliance that President Obama once proffered in exchange for Pakistan severing its ties with militants, and a more businesslike arrangement with few illusions.
**
“It’ll be much more realpolitik,” another U.S. official said. “It’s getting away from the g***ose vision of what could be to focusing on what is.”
A senior Pakistani military official said, “We’ve had some glorious times,” citing past interludes of intelligence and military cooperation in pursuit of Pakistan-based al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.
**But the military official also spoke emotionally about the deaths of the 24 soldiers in November and said the incident would not soon be forgotten. The same was true of what he said were other insults in 2011, including the shooting deaths of two Pakistanis by a CIA contractor in Lahore, the U.S. Special Operations raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani suburb and the assertion by Adm. Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the insurgent Haqqani network was a “veritable arm” of Pakistani intelligence.
**
Pakistan, the military official said, wants some “significant changes” in the way the two countries do business.
After the November border clash, the Obama administration suspended its regular drone attacks inside Pakistan to avoid further unsettling relations, U.S. officials said. And in a rare display of deference early this month, the CIA informed the Pakistani government that it planned a drone strike against a terrorist target in the North Waziristan tribal region and asked Islamabad’s permission. When Pakistan declined, the strike was canceled, officials said.
But on Jan. 10, barely a week later, the 55-day drone hiatus ended abruptly with a strike that killed four alleged militants in North Waziristan, followed by another strike two days afterward. Although officials said Pakistan was notified in advance, permission was not sought.
A Pakistani parliamentary committee, with input from feuding military and civilian political factions, is conducting what Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Saturday called “a full review of the terms of cooperation” with the United States and the U.S.-led international coalition in Afghanistan.
“Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are not negotiable,” Gilani said.
**A senior Pakistani government official said the committee’s recommendations will probably include a demand for explicit U.S. assurances that there will be no violation of sovereignty — no American boots on the ground, no more unilateral raids, no manned airstrikes. The official said there is likely to be some arrangement on drone attacks, with Pakistan calling for large reductions in their number and geographic scope, and demanding prior notification and approval of every strike.
**
**Any explicit agreement on drones would be a major change from past practice, in which Pakistan has privately agreed to strikes but publicly denounced them.
Pakistan also wants more explicit compensation for U.S. and NATO supplies transiting its ports and roads, perhaps in the form of taxes. And it wants more comprehensive information about CIA operations and personnel. “There are over 1,000 houses in Pakistan that have been hired by the U.S. Embassy, and we don’t know who lives in them,” the Pakistani official said.
**
Yet in a recent parliamentary briefing, Finance Minister Abdul Hafiz Sheikh cautioned against a complete breakdown of U.S. ties, saying the nation’s economy could not absorb the shock, according to a second Pakistani official.
In addition to receiving nearly $3 billion in annual military and civilian assistance — much of which has been withheld by the Obama administration over the past year of conflict — Pakistan is well aware of the U.S. influence in international financial institutions and other important world forums.
U.S. peace talks with the Taliban are also a top issue for Pakistan, which has provided sanctuary for the Haqqani network, a Taliban ally, as well as the main Taliban leadership as leverage to protect its long-term interests in Afghanistan. Although the Obama administration and the Afghan government have offered the Pakistanis a role in the peace talks, both mistrust their motives.
**Role in the Afghan war
**
In the United States, Obama is under political pressure to show Islamabad who is the global boss. Patience here has grown paper-thin with what is seen as Pakistani double-dealing and intransigence that is getting in the way of efforts to wind down the Afghan war.
An emerging U.S. military narrative, in preparation for internal administration discussions over the pace of troop withdrawal, holds that the U.S.-led coalition cannot quickly consolidate its considerable gains in Afghanistan because of Pakistan. A heavy U.S. footprint needs to be maintained, a senior Pentagon official said, because Pakistan refuses to crack down on the Haqqani network, whose forces regularly attack coalition troops in Afghan border provinces.
Pakistan also has snubbed U.S. efforts to boost the Afghan economy with a gas pipeline that would run from Tajikistan through Afghanistan to Pakistani ports. Instead, it has reiterated its plans to proceed with an alternative pipeline from Iran.
Obama administration officials said they will resist responding until Pakistan’s Parliament has finished its review of relations with the United States. “We have views on where we’d like to see this go,” a U.S. official said. But it will “take another week or two . . . for their internal process to come to some kind of formal communication that would be communicated back to us.”
U.S. officials question whether Pakistan has the ability or the desire to shoot down U.S. aircraft, whether armed drones; unarmed, unmanned planes that regularly conduct surveillance over border areas; or manned attack and military transport planes that sometimes stray unintentionally over the border.
They said there have been at least two accidental violations of Pakistani airspace in recent weeks by piloted aircraft in Afghanistan, but both incidents were calmly defused by border coordination centers on the Afghan side.
Brulliard reported from Islamabad. Staff writers Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe, and special correspondent Shaiq Hussain in Islamabad, contributed to this report.
Re: Pakistan - America Relations
http://www.dawn.com/2012/01/28/gilani-bemoans-trust-deficit-with-us.html
Gilani bemoans ‘trust deficit’ with US
**DAVOS: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said on Saturday there was “a trust deficit” between Islamabad and Washington as he criticised the resumption of US drone strikes on his country’s tribal belt.
**Speaking the day after over 100,000 people massed in Karachi to protest the strikes, Yousuf Raza Gilani said they only served to bolster militants.
**“Drones are counter-productive. We have very ably isolated militants from the local tribes. When there are drone attacks that creates sympathy for them again,” Gilani told reporters at the Davos forum.
**“It makes the job of the political leadership and the military very difficult. We have never allowed the drone attacks and we have always maintained that they are unacceptable, illegal and counterproductive.”
Relations between the United States and Pakistan have deteriorated sharply over the last year, with Islamabad furious about the surprise deadly raid on al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad last year.
The two sides have also been at loggerheads over a US air strike in November in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed.
Gilani said that Pakistan now wanted to agree new rules of engagement with the United States.
“The unilateral action taken in Abbottabad, that was not liked in any quarter … We need assurances that such a unilateral action will not be repeated in the future. There is a trust deficit.”
The prime minister said it was in both countries’ interests to cooperate as partners and Pakistan had paid a high price at the hands of militant groups.
“We want to work together and we are fighting against militants and terrorists. We have paid a huge price for that.”
On the subject of neighbours, Gilani said Pakistan wanted good relation with all negihbouring countries including Afghanistan. He also mentioned the Kashmir issue in his talk and said that dialogue was the only possible way to resolve all outstanding issues with India.
He said that democratic institution of Pakistan should be respected.
Dismissing recent reports of a coup by the military, the PM asserted that democracy in Pakistan was not in danger and that fears of clash between state institutions were baseless.%between%