What’s for certain is that all their griping strengthens the U.S. resolve to keep bases in neighboring Afghanistan to launch drones into Pakistan unilaterally.
In the spirit of their pique with the United States after the SEALs’ unilateral Osama bin Laden kill, the Pakistanis are loudly declaring the United States is cut off from its most prominent drone launching pad. “No U.S. flights are taking place from Shamsi any longer,” says Pakistani Defense Minister Chaudhary Ahmed Mukhtar.
He’s referring to the Shamsi air base near Quetta. Shortly after Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) blabbed that the Pakistanis hosted CIA drones in 2009, eagle-eyed sleuths ID’d Shamsi as an epicenter of the drone war using GoogleEarth.
But losing Shamsi is no great shakes — if it’s even happening, and not just a cynical Pakistani sop to anti-Americanism. (“News to the United States,” a U.S. counterterrorism official says to McClatchy.)
For one thing, if Mukhtar’s for real, Defense Tech’s John Rood notes that the United States is rumored to fly drones out of two other Pakistani air bases. More fundamentally, the CIA already flies drones into the Pakistani tribal areas from Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. And Air Force drones hovering above Afghanistan, launched from J’bad and Kandahar in the south, chase fleeing insurgents into Pakistan with regularity — they just have to give the Pakistanis a heads-up.
The harsh truth is that the Pakistanis can’t stop the drone war on their soil. But they can shift its launching points over the Afghan border. And the United States is already working on a backup plan for a long-term drone war, all without the Pakistanis’ help. Full Article >>>
Location: Islamabad
