As US-Pakistan relations hit yet another rough patch over the killing of Pakistani-Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud in a drone strike barely 10 days after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington, a senior Republican lawmaker has strongly defended the US action.
Congressman Mike Rogers, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, commented that Mehsud was a “bad guy” and dwelt on the Pakistan-Taliban’s deadly activities in Afghanistan, including attacks on American troops.
“This was a bad guy. There’s some information recently that concerned us about the safety of our troops. I feel a little better for our troops today than I did before this event happened,” Rogers told CBS News on Sunday.
As of Monday morning, a statement was still awaited from the State Department on Friday’s drone attack which, according to Pakistani officials, killed Mehsud and three others.
For Washington, however, Mehsud had been a wanted man, who carried a US bounty of $5m on his head. His Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), having a “symbiotic relationship” with Al Qaeda, was held responsible for the abortive bombing of Times Square in New York in 2010, attempted by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad.
mid Islamabad’s accusations that America has destroyed the nascent peace process with Mehsud’s outfit with this drone operation, an unnamed State Department official was quoted by Reuters as saying that talks with the Taliban were “an internal matter for Pakistan”.
The official broadly spoke of the two countries having a “vital, shared strategic interest in ending extremist violence so as to build a more prosperous, stable, and peaceful region”.
With Pakistani officials stating in Islamabad on Monday that they would review ties with the United States amid calls by some politicians for blocking US military supply lines to Afghanistan, Washington was expected to come out with a detailed comment on the subject later in the day.
Pakistan lost little time in condemning the drone attack by summoning the US Ambassador on Saturday to register its protest, even as Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan was quoted as saying the that drone strike represented not just the killing of one person, but the “death of all peace efforts”.