Noah Shachtman
Security

Pakistan Partners With U.S. on Killer Drone Strikes

Pakistani officials aren’t just allowing U.S. killer drones to take off from their airfields, and attack militants within their country. American and Pakistani intelligence services are closely cooperating on the unmanned aircraft strikes — even as Islamabad politicians condemn the attacks in public. Previous reports described the arrangement between Washington and Islamabad on the robotic […]

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Pakistani officials aren't just allowing U.S. killer drones to take off from their airfields, and attack militants within their country. American and Pakistani intelligence services are closely cooperating on the unmanned aircraft strikes -- even as Islamabad politicians condemn the attacks in public.

Previous reports described the arrangement between Washington and Islamabad on the robotic attacks as a kind of "don't ask, don't tell"
policy. According to today's Wall Street Journal, however, the arrangement is better described as hand-in-glove. "These operations are helping both sides. We are partners on this," one
Pakistani official tells the paper.

Pakistan's civilian and military leaders... have come to see the strikes as effective and are passing on intelligence that has helped recent missions, say officials from both countries. As a result, "the Predator strikes are more and more precise," said a Pakistani official...

Drones help in surveillance and target identification as well as strikes. On Jan. 22, Pakistani paramilitary forces arrested Zabu ul
Taifi, a Saudi national and alleged al Qaeda operative... An officer from Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's premier spy agency, said Mr. Taifi was located at a safe house in the Khyber
Agency, one of the tribal areas that run along the border with
Afghanistan, through a combination of human intelligence from Pakistani agents, informants on the ground and aerial surveillance by U.S. drones.

But what started out as an extension of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan is quickly morphing into -- well, something else. American unmanned aircraft are becoming a tool for the Islamabad government to exert control over its own people.

Most of the Predator strikes have so far targeted al Qaeda and
Taliban fighters who attack U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, using Pakistan's tribal areas only as a rear base. But in exchange for helping the U.S., Washington is "sharing more intelligence with"
Islamabad on Taliban factions focused on toppling Pakistan's government, said the Pakistani official.

UPDATE: On a related note, former U.S. intelligence officials confirm Senator Diane Feinstein's accidental revelation, that the U.S.
drones are, in fact, based in Pakistan. "It was a big mistake on her part," one tells the Journal. She's not the only one who made it however. There have been at least five instances when the press said they very same thing. "The Predators flying over Afghanistan have operated from an air base in Jacobabad, Pakistan," the New York Times reported, in November, 2002.

[Photo: USAF]

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