Re: The champ of democracy.. General Pervez Musharraf
Regarding Musharraf and drones: :chai:
Musharraf told a lie on drone attacks - thenews.com.pk
Musharraf told a lie on drone attacks
Amir MirTuesday, December 02, 2014
From Print Edition
**ISLAMABAD: General (R) Pervez Musharraf’s November 25, 2014 claim that he had allowed just one drone strike during his tenure is nothing more than a blatant white lie. In fact, his latest statement contradicts his April 12, 2013 confession in an interview with CNN that he had signed a secret deal with the Americans on drone strikes according to which the targets were only approved when there was little chance of collateral damage.
**
The secret deal over drone strikes was reached after Musharraf had requested the Americans to hunt down tribal warlord Commander Nek Muhammad. He was marked as an enemy of the state after he threatened to target Musharraf and his men ambushed the convoy of the then corps commander Karachi Lt Gen Ahsan Saleem Hayat [on June 10, 2004] and killed 12 people on the Clifton Bridge. Nek had claimed responsibility for the attack, saying Musharraf would be the next target. Six days after the Karachi attack, Nek Mohammad was killed in the first-ever US drone strike on Pakistani soil [on June 17 2004]. He was giving interview to the BBC radio on his satellite phone when his hideout near Wana in South Waziristan was located. A precision-guided missile hit the home of Sher Zaman Ashrafkhel around 9.45 pm in Dhok village of Wana, where Nek was hiding.
Nek subsequently received serious injuries and was rushed to a hospital in Wana where he expired at 2.30 am. While a military spokesman had claimed that it was a hundred percent Pakistani action with no US involvement, eye-witnesses were quoted by the media as saying the missile which killed Nek was actually fired from a plane which flew into the Wana area from Afghanistan and went back to Afghanistan after firing. International media also reported that Nek was actually killed by a missile fired from a CIA-run Predator. The manner in which Nek was killed may not have been imagined by many of his jehadi followers, and perhaps himself, mainly because none of the Pakistani militants had been hunted down through a drone attack in the past on the Pak-Afghan border and that too, by the Americans.
However, talking to the BBC in its programme Hard Talk, Musharraf claimed on November 25, 2014 that he had allowed only one American drone strike during his tenure. “I said yes only once, though there were approximately nine drone attacks during my tenure. I am only talking about one occasion - we did not have much time and there was evidence leading to a major terrorist group, so we gave permission for the strike,” he said in his interview to BBC’s Stephen Sackur in his famous programme Hard Talk. But while making this claim, Musharraf seemed to have forgotten his April 12, 2013 interview with CNN wherein he had clearly acknowledged having cleared several drone strikes inside the Pakistani territory which were carried out under a secret deal.
Musharraf stated in his CNN interview that his government had cleared missile attacks ‘only on very few occasions where the target was absolutely isolated and the drone strike had no chance of causing collateral damage’. “The drone strikes were discussed at the military and intelligence level and cleared only if there was no time for our own special operations task force and the military to act. That was…maybe two or three times only”. Sometimes, he said, “You couldn’t delay action. These ups and downs kept going. It was a very fluid situation, a vicious enemy…mountains, inaccessible areas.”
Pervez Musharraf then recalled that one of those killed by the drones was Nek Mohammad, a tribal warlord who was accused of harbouring al-Qaeda militants. But what he did not mention was the fact that his regime had signed a peace deal with Nek in April 2004 in South Waziristan despite the fact that the concerned political agent of the area had opposed the pact and refused to accompany the then corps commander Peshawar to Shakai area to attend the signing ceremony of the deal. Nek was killed two months later when he had violated the deal and reiterated his commitment to al-Qaeda and Taliban. Musharraf’s CNN interview also belied repeated claims by Pakistani officials that Islamabad never authorised drone strikes.
Musharraf’s confession followed American media claims that Pakistani officials were intimately involved in the US drone campaign in the country for years now. A US State Department official also defended the legality of drone strikes and said they are conducted only with the consent from the states involved. Hardly a week after Pervez Musharraf’s revelation, a newly published book ‘The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth’, claimed that the CIA had made a deal with Musharraf which allowed the United States to begin its drone assassination programme in exchange for the killing of an enemy of the state of Pakistan - Nek Mohammad.
America’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mark Mazzetti outlined in his book how Musharraf, who was resistant to allowing the CIA to begin killing targets within its borders, asked the CIA in 2004 to kill Nek Muhammad, in exchange for allowing the CIA to begin its drone killings programme in Pakistan. “As per the agreement, Pakistan would take responsibility for the death of Nek and the CIA would never be mentioned in official accounts of his killing. Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing the CIA predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey”, claimed the award-winning journalist in his book. Subsequently, when a predator blew up Nek’s South Waziristan compound, killing him and several others, Pakistan took credit for the deaths.
Therefore, according to Mark Mazzetti’s book: “The Nek Muhammad deal paved the way for the CIA to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organisation. In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And they 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 going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. The two sides agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the CIA’s covert action authority - meaning that the US would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent”.
Earlier in 2010, Wiki Leaks made public a 2008 cable by former US ambassador to Islamabad, Ann Patterson, who recalled her meeting with former Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in which the latter spoke of the issue of drone strikes, “As long as they (Americans) get the right people, we’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it”. Similarly, in his book, ‘Magnificent Delusions’, Pakistan’s ex-ambassador to US Hussain Haqqani, who was involved in the Pak-US strategic dialogue, disclosed that it was Pakistan that requested the killing of TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud in August 2009. His successor, Hakeemullah Mehsud, was also killed in a drone attack in November 2013.
Therefore, Musharraf’s admission that Pakistan was in the know about US drone strikes during his rule only confirms what has been suspected for a long time, although his confession is in stark contrast to the state’s long-standing policy of denying any role in the drone war.
