CIA documents reveal that Pakistan has agreed to the Drone strike inside by the US.
It is a known fact the US was striking targets in Pakistan with Drones in its effort to eradicate terrorism.
And Pakistan, in its efforts to ensure that it is not alienated from the International Community post terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the flushing out of Osama Bin Laden and killing him by the US in Pakistani soil, had agreed for the Drone strikes inside Pakistan.
And another important factor in agreeing to Drone strikes is the dire need of Pakistan for US money followed by the contribution of the West to prop up uts tottering economy.
The US need to strike at the terrorists hide out as it became known that Pakistan was harboring the terrorists , including Osama Bin Laden in its soil and was actively promoting terrorism.
keeping quiet on Pakistan won’t do.
This is the back ground of the Pakistan agreeing to the Drone strikes and I see no reason to condemn Pakistan on this core for any Nation,given the state Pakistan was/is in, would have done this.
When the Drone strike involved the killing of the Civilians, it aroused Public Anger.
The West and in particular the US was supremely indifferent.
Drone attacks can not distinguish Civilians, Terrorists and most importantly the Westerners.
When the Drone strike involved the killing of a UK national, there started a Hue and cry and Human Rights issue.
Ironically these votaries of Human Rights were silent when Pakistani civilians were killed!
Now as the issue has become a Human Rights controversy, the CIA, with the sanction of the White House, is releasing the information that Pakistan was a Party to Drone Strikes.
They could have done this when Pakistani civilians were being killed.
This is how contradictory international policies work out.
Story:
In time, the CIA identified so many suspected al-Qaeda and militant compounds that it gave them coded designations, including MSC 215 for a Miran Shah compound where explosives were manufactured and SC 5 for Spailpan Compound No. 5 in South Waziristan.
The dates and number of strikes generally correspond with public databases assembled by independent groups, indicating that those organizations have reliably tracked drone attacks from media reports, even if the number of civilian casualties has often been a source of dispute…
The documents confirm the deaths of dozens of alleged al-Qaeda operatives, including Rashid Rauf, a British citizen killed in 2008 who “helped coordinate al-Qaeda’s summer 2007 plot to blow up transatlantic flights originating from Great Britain,” one memo said.
But the documents also reveal a major shift in the CIA’s strategy in Pakistan as it broadened the campaign beyond “high-value” al-Qaeda targets and began firing missiles at gatherings of low-level fighters.
The files trace the CIA’s embrace of a controversial practice that came to be known as “signature strikes,” approving targets based on patterns of suspicious behavior detected from drone surveillance cameras and ordering strikes even when the identities of those to be killed weren’t known.
At times, the evidence seemed circumstantial.
On Jan. 14, 2010, a gathering of 17 people at a suspected Taliban training camp was struck after the men were observed conducting “assassination training, sparring, push-ups and running.” The compound was linked “by vehicle” to an al-Qaeda facility hit three years earlier.
On March 23, 2010, the CIA launched missiles at a “person of interest” in a suspected al-Qaeda compound. The man caught the agency’s attention after he had “held two in-car meetings, and swapped vehicles three times along the way.”
Other accounts describe militants targeted because of the extent of “deference” they were shown when arriving at a suspect site. A May 11, 2010, entry noted the likely deaths of 12 men who were “probably” involved in cross-border attacks against the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
Although often uncertain about the identities of its targets, the CIA expresses remarkable confidence in its accuracy, repeatedly ruling out the possibility that any civilians were killed..
There have been 23 strikes in Pakistan this year, far below the peak in 2010, when 117 attacks were recorded. The latest strike occurred Sept. 29, when three alleged fighters with ties to the militant Haqqani network were killed in North Waziristan, according to news media reports.
Several documents refer to a direct Pakistani role in the selection of targets. A 2010 entry, for example, describes hitting a location “at the request of your government.” Another from that year refers to a “network of locations associated with a joint CIA-ISI targeting effort.”
The files also contain fragments of code words — including SYL-MAG, an abbreviation of Sylvan Magnolia — that correspond to covert drone operations. The code word was later changed to Arbor-Hawthorn.
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