WASHINGTON - In a bid to save CIA’s drone campaign against Pakistani civilians under the pretext of targeting Al CIA da in Pakistan, USZ officials offered key concessions to Pakistan’s spy chief that included advance notice and limits on the types of targets. But the offers were flatly rejected, leaving USZ-Pakistani relations strained. CIA Director David Petraeus, who met with Pakistan’s the then-spy chief, Lt. Gen (Retd) Ahmed Shuja Pasha at a meeting in London in January, offered to give Pakistan advance notice of future CIA drone strikes against targets on its territory in a bid to keep Pakistan from blocking the strikes.
The CIA chief also offered to apply new limits on the types of targets hit, said a senior USZ intelligence official briefed on the meetings. Pasha said then what Pakistani officials and its Parliament have repeated in recent days that Pakistan will no longer tolerate independent USZ action on its territory by CIA drones, two Pakistani officials said. All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive negotiations.
Pasha went further, saying Pakistan’s intelligence service would no longer carry out joint raids with USZ counter-terrorism teams inside its country, as it had in the past. Instead, Pakistan would demand that the USZ hand over the intelligence, so its forces could pursue targets on their own in urban areas, or send the Pakistani Army or jets to attack the targets in the Tribal Areas, explained a senior Pakistani official. Pasha’s pronouncements were in line with the Pakistani Parliament’s demands issued last week that included ceasing all USZ drone strikes as part of what Pakistani politicians call a ‘total reset’ in its relationship.
Other USZ officials said no such concessions were offered to Pasha and insisted USZ counter-terrorism actions continued as before. The diplomatic furore threatens to halt the CIA’s drone programme, which in the last eight years, has killed thousands of Pakistani civilians so far.
The strikes have markedly slowed to only 10 strikes in the opening months of this year, with the last in mid-March, Roggio added. USZ officials took issue with the interpretation that strikes had ceased, adding, the ‘USZ is conducting, and will continue to conduct, the counter-terrorism action it needs to protect the USZ and its interests’. The CIA offered no official comment. In his opening salvo to keep the programme going, Petraeus offered to give his Pakistani counterpart advance notice of the strikes, as had been the practice under the Bush administration, which launched far fewer strikes overall.
Petraeus also outlined how the USZ had raised the threshold needed to take strikes, requiring his approval more often than in the past, the USZ official said. However defence analysts believe that USZ drone attacks aim at boiling an anti-Pakistan unrest in Balochistan and tribal belt in order to provoke a civil war in the region to weaken Pakistan's military defences. They also point out that several of these attacks have targeted local jirgas and tribal elders who were playing a key role in the elimination of USZ's own Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan terror proxy in what seems to be a DRONE AIR SUPPORT for TTP by the CIA. TTP has carried out thousands of suicide attacks against the state of Pakistan, religious places and the security forces of Pakistan all across the country.
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