Islamabad: Pakistan Army Chief Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani has demanded United States officials that reduce CIA operatives and special operations force working in Pakistan, besides stops drone attacks in northwest Pakistan, New York Times reported.
The demand that the United States scale back its presence is the immediate fallout of the arrest in Pakistan of Raymond A. Davis, a CIA security officer who killed two men in broad daylight during a mugging in January, Pakistani and American officials said in interviews.
In all, about 335 American personnel — CIA officers and contractors and Special Operations forces — were being asked to leave the country, said a Pakistani official closely involved in the decision. The cuts threatened to badly hamper American efforts — either through drone strikes or Pakistani military training — to combat militants who use Pakistan as a base to fight American forces in Afghanistan and plot terrorist attacks abroad.
The reductions were personally demanded by the chief of the Pakistan army, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, said Pakistani and American officials, who requested anonymity while discussing the sensitive issue.
The Pakistani army firmly believes that Washington’s real aim in Pakistan is to neutralize the nation’s prized nuclear arsenal, which is now on a path to becoming the world’s fifth largest, said the Pakistani official closely involved in the decision on reducing the American presence.
Another apparent price, however, is the list of reductions in American personnel demanded by General Kayani, according to the Pakistan and American officials. These include a 25 to 40 percent cutback in the number of US special operations soldiers, most of them involved in training the paramilitary Frontier Corps in northwest Pakistan.
American officials said last year that the Pakistanis had allowed a maximum of 120 Special Forces soldiers to operate in Pakistan. The Americans had reached that quota, the Pakistani official said.
Pakistan is also demanding the removal of all American contractors used by the CIA in Pakistan and CIA operatives who were involved in “unilateral” assignments — like that of Raymond Davis — that the Pakistani intelligence agency did not know about, the Pakistani official said.
An American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said without elaborating that the Pakistanis had asked “for more visibility into some things” — presumably the nature of CIA covert operations in the country — “and that request is being talked about.”
In addition to reducing American personnel on the ground, General Kayani has also told the Obama administration that its expanded drone campaign had gotten out of control, a Pakistani official said. Given the reluctance or inability of the Pakistani military to root out Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants from the tribal areas, American officials have turned more and more to drone strikes, drastically increasing the number of strikes last year.
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