Washington: The US has put its drone campaign that targets alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives in Pakistan’s tribal agencies “on hold”, a US magazine quoted US security officials as saying.
It is to mention here that the The News Tribe on December has published the news about the halt in drone strikes under the title of Drone attacks come to an end in Pakistan.
According to the US magazine, several US intelligence officials involved in the CIA program, which uses unmanned Predator told The Long War Journal that US officials fear that an attack at this point in time would further damage the already fragile relationship between the US and Pakistan.
Relations between the two countries have been deteriorating over the past two years as the US has ramped up the drone program while accusing Pakistan of supporting the Taliban and other terror groups. The Raymond Davis affair and the US raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan earlier this year further inflamed the Pakistanis. But the Nov. 26 US airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani troops in Mohmand has led to Pakistan’s shutting down the Chaman and Torkham (Khyber Pass) border crossings to Nato supply convoys.
“There is concern that another hit [by the drones] will push US-Pakistan relations past the point of no return,” one official. “We don’t know how far we can push them [Pakistan], how much more they are willing to tolerate.”
One official was clear that the program is “on hold” but that they would consider striking if a target of opportunity presented itself.
“We may strike soon if an extremely high value target pops up, but otherwise there is hesitation to pull the trigger right now,” the intelligence official said. The official refused to say which terror leaders would cause the US to reconsider the pause, and attack.
Despite its 10-year presence in Afghanistan and drone attacks on civilians, US has seemed to fail to achieve any concrete success on achieving its decided targets.
Earlier American Human Rights groups declared the drones as “scandalous” as the secret US bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
In 2009, when President Barack Obama took office, there were 53 strikes, compared with 42 over the previous four years. In 2010, that number jumped to 118, followed by 68 this year, according to the New America Foundation.
The think tank’s statistics raise doubts about the success of the drones. It estimates as many as 471 civilians were killed by drone strikes in Pakistan between 2004-2011, a 20 per cent non-militant fatality rate.
The US drone strikes are deeply unpopular among the Pakistani public, who see foreign military action on Pakistani soil as a violation of national sovereignty.
Pakistan has officially protested to the United States that the strikes violate its sovereignty, although some officials have said there is a tacit understanding between the two militaries allowing such action.
