In a damning revelation, The New York Times has reported that Pakistan made a secret deal in 2004 allowing the controversial CIA drone operations as long as they did not target the country’s nuclear facilities and mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were being trained for attacks in India.
The drone operations began with Pakistan’s ISI accepting CIA’s offer to kill Pashtun tribesman Nek Muhammad, who had become a thorn on Islamabad’s side. On a hot day in June 2004, Muhammad and several others, including two boys, became the first casualties of US drone operations in Pakistan.
Presenting new details on the origins of the CIA’s drone operations in Pakistan, the report throws light on secret negotiations and Pakistan’s terms allowing the strikes after the offer to kill Muhammad was made by CIA’s station chief in Islamabad to Gen Ehsan ul Haq, the then ISI chief.
That was when the Pakistani intelligence officials set forth their conditions that the drone strikes should steer clear of the nuclear facilities and train camps for terrorists who would be launching attacks in India.
“In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And, they insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas — ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India,” the NYT report said. The report is excerpted from NYT correspondent Mark Mazzetti’s forthcoming book, “The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth.”
The ISI and the CIA, according to the report, agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the CIA’s covert action authority — meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.
Gen Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani ruler at that time, did not think that it would be difficult to keep up the ruse, reportedly telling one CIA officer: “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all
the time.”
When tribesman Muhammad was killed, the Pakistani military took credit for the attack, saying it had fired on his compound in South Waziristan while the truth was he was the first victim of the CIA drone operations.
“The CIA has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike,” says the report, detailing how the covert drone war that began under the Bush administration was embraced and expanded by the Obama Administration.