Drones and deception

The tragedy of Pakistan is that in this age of realism, its leaders are never realistic. They are creatures of absurd emotions, the consequences of which can be catastrophic. The chief of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Imran Khan, for instance, swears that were he prime minister, US drones would be shot down. A political commentator, who is also an incurable cynic, could not resist the temptation of citing an ancient proverb which says, “The real fool, such as the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself.”
But Imran Khan alone cannot be faulted for such inane pronouncements. Like a creeping cancer, the drone issue has eroded the ability of the country’s leadership to think rationally. As a consequence they reject outright the probability that the attacks have occurred with the consent of the previous governments. In his maiden speech at the National Assembly on Wednesday, marking the commencement of his third prime ministerial term, Mian Nawaz Sharif harped on the usual theme of national sovereignty and demanded that “the drone campaign should come to an end.”
The past needs to be revisited and incontrovertible facts have to be dispassionately examined if the new government is at all serious about formulating a cogent and credible policy on this issue. The first known drone strike in the country was on June 18, 2004, in Wana, South Waziristan which resulted in the killing of Nek Muhammad along with seven of his fighters. The storyline advanced by the Musharraf regime was that the militant leader had been killed in an army operation. This was the earliest indication – which went unnoticed – that a secret understanding had been reached with the Americans on drone operations.
In the initial phase from 2004 to 2007, there were only ten drone strikes and it was fairly easy to brush these under the rug, even though one of them had hit a seminary in Chenagai, Bajaur, on October 30, 2006, killing 70-80 people. But in 2008, the number of attacks suddenly soared to 33; they rose to 48 in 2009 and more than doubled to 97 the following year. Popular resentment was roused and condemnation of the strikes became progressively strident.
It was no longer possible for the government to remain silent in the face of the public outcry but its pronouncements were unconvincing and saturated with duplicitous phrases of resolve about safeguarding the country’s territorial integrity. In his second address to the joint session of the National Assembly and the Senate on March 28, 2009, President Asif Ali Zardari vaguely alluded to the drone operations when he reiterated the hackneyed slogan that Pakistan would never countenance the violation of its sovereignty.
But this ridiculous posturing served no purpose other than to undermine the government’s own credibility. Zardari’s speechwriter should have known that the cat was out of the bag because two or three days earlier, the chairperson of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dianne Feinstein, stated publicly that drones had been taking off from airbases in Pakistan with the consent and approval of the authorities in Islamabad.
This was corroborated by the WikiLeaks disclosures which cited a cable sent in August 2008 by US ambassador Anne Patterson on her meeting with former prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, in which the irrepressible interior minister, Rehman Malik, was also present. Patterson reported to her government that “Malik suggested we hold off alleged Predator attacks until after the Bajaur operation, (but) the PM brushed aside Rehman’s remarks and said: ‘I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.’”
Neither Feinstein’s statement nor the contents of Patterson’s cable were ever denied or contradicted by the PPP-led coalition. These disclosures, however, compelled the government to concede that the drone attacks had been effective in targeting terrorist outfits. In time it also stopped dismissing perceptions of its support for the operations as the speculative ramblings of the mentally unemployed.
But it was not till the spring of 2011, that Pakistan gradually became more open about its actual stance. On March 8 of that year, Maj Gen Ghayur Mehmood, GOC of the 7th Infantry Division gave a rare briefing to reporters in Miranshah, North Waziristan in which he left no doubt that the overwhelming majority of those killed in the drone attacks were Al-Qaeda and TTP fighters. Subsequently a paper titled ‘Myths and Rumours about US Predator Strikes’ was distributed among the journalists.
Prime Minister Gilani was even more forthright. In the course of an interview to Time magazine in May 2011, he openly admitted that his government supported the drone operations. Four months later, on September 27, former foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar addressed the Asia Society in Washington and affirmed that Pakistan was not against drone strikes but qualified this by adding “… we have to find ways that are lawful…”
Khar’s insistence on working out the modalities to legalise drone operations was sheer nonsense for two reasons. First, her own prime minister had publicly stated that Pakistan supported the strikes and second, reports sourced to American officials had surfaced earlier in the year that Washington and Islamabad had agreed on a mechanism for drone flights. Under this arrangement, the US would merely notify Pakistan through fax about intended strikes, and all that was required of the relevant authorities in Islamabad was to acknowledge receipt. This report, again, has never been denied and, therefore, must be presumed to be accurate.
In April this year former president and army chief, Gen (r) Pervez Musharraf, unabashedly told CNN that his government had on occasions – few and far-between – colluded with the US on drone strikes “but only if there was no time for our own military to act.” He even conceded for the first time that Nek Muhammad had actually been killed in a Predator attack in June 2004 and not by the Pakistan Army as had been claimed at the time.
These are the unvarnished facts that need to be thought through and mulled over by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Three elements in particular need to be addressed by the new government. First, there has to be clarity whether the drone operations constitute an infringement of the country’s territorial integrity or a violation of its sovereignty if they have been carried out with the permission of the Pakistan government.
Second, the PML-N leadership must come to terms with the reality that the drone operations will not be terminated though the number of strikes will be reduced after US troops withdraw from Afghanistan. This was made clear by President Obama in his address at the American National Defence University last month when he said “…the progress we’ve made against core Al-Qaeda will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.”
Third, the recent drone attack that resulted in the killing of the deputy leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Waliur Rehman, has demonstrated yet again that the banned outfit is irretrievably splintered. The US State Department disclosed that Rehman had been successfully targeted on a tip-off provided to American intelligence by the Hakimullah Mehsud faction of the TTP. Since then Fazal Farooq Haqqani, the TTP commander in the Kurram Agency, has also broken away from Mehsud and formed his own group.
These are the factors that need to be brainstormed within the ‘charmed circle’ of the PML-N’s policy formulation team. What emerges is that the initiation of negotiations with the TTP is a self-defeating proposition. Furthermore, instead of making futile statements on drone operations, the government should focus on reviving the crippled economy. This is the time for the new prime minister to recast the country’s foreign policy priorities. The emphasis has to be on economic diplomacy.
The writer is the publisher of Criterion Quarterly.Email: iftimurshed@gmail.com