Reportedly, the US administration has refused to vacate the Shamsi Air Base located in Balochistan that is being used by the CIA to launch drone attacks in FATA. According to an American official, the US personnel have not left the base and have no plans to abandon it. This comment has come in response to the Pakistani Defence Minister’s statement that Washington has been asked to vacate the base. However, the US officials claim that Islamabad has not asked them to vacate any facility; in fact, the Minister’s statement is for home consumption to pacify domestic anti-US feelings.
In bilateral military relationships, the bases to operate from are provided with mutual consultations. For instance, Pakistan had provided a base near Khyber Peshawar (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, or KP) in early 1950s to the USA from where it used to operate spy missions over the then USSR till a U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Red Army and Khrushchev had openly declared marking the province (KP) as a target on his hit list. After that Pakistan asked the Americans to close down the base and they complied; it showed that there were mutually agreed conditions that regulated the base operations. However, it is not known what are the conditions that govern the provision of bases under US control now, or if there are any. It is now amply clear that our present “alliance” was perhaps obtained through coercion, under coercion the terms are dictated and not discussed. The fact that the US has outright refused to vacate the air base confirms that dictation, otherwise a demand from a sovereign state is not ignored. So, our Ministry of Defence should determine under what conditions these bases were provided and for how long to the USA.
Drone-borne missile attacks on suspected terrorist hideouts and safe havens are the main methods of engaging the enemy. These attacks are now becoming the major strategic options in fighting terrorism. For the US, this strategy will be less costly and can be sustained over a longer duration with minimum essential troop deployment on ground. The new plans unveiled by Washington calls for a sustained long-term engagement of Al-Qaeda till the threat to US home security is eliminated for good.
Moreover, a decade-long war on ground has financially hurt the US immensely. According to an estimate, the US is spending about a billion dollars every week in Afghanistan. This estimate may be on a higher side, but its economy is under debt of trillions of dollars; at this rate, surely it is not possible to execute the war in a conventional manner. Thus, the new strategy provides the Obama administration opportunities to withdraw maximum forces from the war zone for domestic political gains and cut costs to the level that can be managed easily. John Brennan’s new approach calls for “delivering precise, targeted surgical pressure to the groups that threaten the US.” This means that the drone attacks, precise Special Forces operations a Ia Abbottabad will be the new face of the war on terror.
ohh GOD!!!
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