How skillful of the U.S. to try to deflect the blame for the civilian carnage it has wrought in Pakistan, said The News (Pakistan) in an editorial. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif went to Washington last week to appeal for an end to U.S. drone strikes, which target militants in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas but have killed hundreds of innocent Pakistani women and children. Independently bolstering his point, the U.N. and Amnesty International both released reports exposing the loss of civilian life in heartbreaking detail. Yet then, “with timing that was certainly not coincidental,” some U.S. official tried “to show up the Pakistani position on drones as hypocritical” by leaking documents to The Washington Post proving that Pakistani authorities had been informed of the strikes—and had even ordered at least one of them.
Everyone already knew that, said Munir Akram in Dawn. It was “one of the worst-kept secrets of the war on terrorism.” But the true story is more complicated. In 2006, after coming under intense pressure from the Bush administration, Pakistan gave permission for U.S. drone strikes against the top 10 al Qaida leaders. Later, though, the program morphed into a kind of open season on Pakistani militants-—collateral damage be damned. And that happened under the Obama administration. When the U.S. began to suspect that the Pakistani spies it relied on for targeting information were playing a double game, it sent some 400 new agents—including Raymond Davis, the spy who killed two Pakistanis in 2011 and was whisked out of the country to evade justice—and “built its own intelligence network in Pakistan, enabling, among other things, the operation to track and kill Osama bin Laden.” At this point, though, “for the U.S., it is evident that the political costs of drone attacks outweigh their military value.”
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