Pakistan: Will U.S. drone strikes ever end?

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.”

For Obama, escalating the drone program was at first a matter of politics, said Syed Mansoor Hussain in the Daily Times. “Pakistan was Obama’s Sister Souljah.” Just as Bill Clinton had to condemn the rapper to prove to white voters that he was willing to criticize a black activist, Obama had to unleash the big guns on a Muslim country to put to rest the rumors that his father’s religion made him too pro-Muslim. Now that Obama has been re-elected, though, he “no longer needs to beat up on Pakistan for any political reasons.” Maybe now, in his second term, we can hope for a lessening or even stoppage of drone strikes.

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Hope is all we have, said The Express Tribune. We certainly can’t force the U.S., or even cajole it. “We are not equal partners: Pakistan today is dependent on the U.S.” and has “no power to stop the drones.” A better use of our diplomatic talent would be to try to “persuade the U.S. to play a bigger role in bringing development to the tribal areas.” If the U.S. gave us jobs instead of bombs, militancy would end. And that would be a happy outcome for both countries.