A US drone strike on a seminary in the Hangu district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province killed at least six people Thursday, including several civilians.
The three-missile attack was only the second-ever US drone strike in Pakistan outside the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The previous such strike occurred in 2008.
The Nov 21 attack came just one day after Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s chief foreign policy advisor, Sartaj Aziz, told a parliamentary committee that Washington had pledged that it would not mount further drone strikes while Islamabad was holding peace negotiations with the Pakistan-based allies of the Afghan Taliban.
Washington has denied the strike targeted a seminary and is boasting that it killed two senior leaders of the Haqqani Network—a Taliban ally reportedly responsible for several of the most daring and successful attacks on US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
Pakistani officials have disputed Washington’s account and stuck to their old refrain that drone strikes are counterproductive. They have confirmed that some insurgents died, but the missiles led to killing of at least two seminary students, as well as the wounding of others.
On Nov 22, Sharif and several of his aides adopted a more strident tone in opposing the US drone campaign, but these protests did not come in the way of high-level meetings held this week as a part of the resumed Pak-US Strategic Dialogue.
The “Security, Strategic Stability and Non-proliferation Working Group” discussed nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear energy in Islamabad, while in Washington the “Pakistan-US Defence Consultative Group” discussed military operations against Afghan Taliban over the next 13 months as the US reduces its Afghan troop strength to ten thousand or less.
Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party has upped the ante, however; it has called for protesters to prevent the US and NATO from using the Khyber Pass as of Saturday, November 23.
Led by former cricketer- playboy Imran Khan, the PTI is the ruling party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Khan and his PTI have vowed to block what is one of the two US-NATO land supply routes through Pakistan. “If it’s in our hands, we will block it today. Our powers are that we can tell them that NATO supplies can’t pass through our province until they stop drone attacks,” Imran Khan thundered.
For the past twelve years Pakistan has provided a lifeline to the US forces in Afghanistan through its territory. But NATO appears confident that the Sharif government will not allow the PTI to disrupt their supply routes and that Khan, who has himself repeatedly voiced his eagerness to have closer relations with Washington, means to stage little more than a publicity stunt.
If this prognosis turns out to be true, it should not come as a surprise since Pakistani leadership has perfected the art of saying something for domestic audience and quite the opposite to please the interlocutors in Washington.
-yamarar
