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Vol. 75/No. 17      May 2, 2011

 
No letup of U.S. drone
strikes in Pakistan
 
BY SETH GALINSKY  
Washington’s frequent bombing and increasing use of spies and commandoes in northwest Pakistan is widely resented by the people of that country. But it remains a centerpiece of the imperialists’ war strategy in the region, a conflict raging now for nearly 10 years with no end in sight.

Two days after Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, head of Pakistan’s spy agency, called for a suspension in U.S. drone attacks and scaling back the presence of CIA agents in Pakistan, a U.S. aerial drone fired two missiles in the country, killing seven and wounding six.

Pasha made the request during an April 11 meeting at CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., with CIA director Leon Panetta and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“If the message [of the new drone attack] was that business will continue as usual, it was a crude way of sending it,” a senior Pakistani intelligence official told the New York Times. The Pakistani foreign ministry lodged a “strong protest” against the attack.

The two governments “are locked in an uneasy embrace,” said Pakistan’s Daily Times. “They do not trust each other but need each other’s help.” The Pakistani economy “is heavily dependent on aid from Washington,” the paper pointed out, referring to billions of dollars of military and economic aid Washington sends there every year.

The CIA station in Islamabad is one of the spy agency’s largest with hundreds of agents on the ground. There are also at least 120 U.S. Special Operations troops in the country, most working with the paramilitary Frontier Corps in northwest Pakistan.

Although the Pakistani government at times criticizes the drone attacks, it has collaborated with the CIA in locating Taliban targets and has asked for access to drone technology for its own use. At the same time, the CIA has increasingly established its own Pakistani contacts and has become less reliant on Pakistani intelligence, according to U.S. officials.

Last year 118 drone attacks were carried out, double the number in 2009 and more than in all the previous years combined.

On March 17 Pakistani officials say a drone strike killed more than 40 civilians, including tribal elders who were meeting about a dispute over a local mine. Washington, as usual, claimed all the dead were Taliban.  
 
 
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