The Pakistani government would like the CIA's aggressive drone
campaign "suspended" and only resumed under "new rules" and "formalized
terms," according to a Pakistani military official familiar with
discussions between the two nations.
Only then, in the instances
where there was "compelling evidence" that a militant "high value
target" had been located and that the operation was jointly coordinated
between Pakistan and the United States, would the Pakistani government
sanction a drone strike in the future, the official said.
The
Pakistani official pointed out that there have been more than 100
reported CIA drone strikes in Pakistan in 2010 -- a record number -- yet
almost no one killed in these strikes were "high value targets," such
as leaders in al-Qaeda or allied militant groups. Instead, the official
said, the vast majority of the victims of the strikes have been militant
foot soldiers or civilians.
According to an independent count of the drone strikes maintained by the
New America Foundation, there were 118 U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan
in 2010 killing somewhere between 600 and 1,000 people.
To read the rest of this article, visit CNN.com, where this was
originally published.
Peter Bergen, the editor of the AfPak Channel, is the Director of the National Security Studies Program at the
New America Foundation, a senior fellow at New York University's Center on Law and Security,
and the author of The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al Qaeda. He is a national security analyst for CNN.
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