DTN News: U.S. Offers Pakistan Drones To Urge Cooperation U.S.

DTN News: U.S. Offers Pakistan Drones To Urge Cooperation U.S. *Source: DTN News / The NY Times By ELISABETH BUMILLER Published: January 21, 2010 (NSI News Source Info) ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - January 21, 2010: The United States will provide a dozen unarmed aerial spy drones to Pakistan for the first time as part of an effort to encourage Pakistan’s cooperation in fighting Islamic militants on the Afghanistan border, American defense officials said Thursday. But Pakistani military leaders, rebuffing American pressure, said they planned no new offensives for at least six months. In this photo provided by the Pakistan Press Information Department, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates met with his Pakistani counterpart, Ahmad Mukhtar, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on Thursday. The Shadow drones, which are smaller than armed Predator drones, will be a significant upgrade in the Pakistanis’ reconnaissance and surveillance ability and will supply video to help cue strikes from the ground or the air. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who is in Pakistan on a two-day visit, disclosed plans for the drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, in an interview Thursday with a Pakistani television reporter. Asked if the United States planned to provide the Pakistani military with drones, something it has long requested, Mr. Gates replied, “There are some tactical U.A.V.’s that we are considering, yes.” Other Defense Department officials later confirmed that the United States was making such an offer. Shortly before Mr. Gates’s remarks, the chief spokesman of the Pakistani Army indicated that the army would not begin any assault against militants in the tribal region of North Waziristan for 6 to 12 months, pushing back against calls by the United States to root out militants staging attacks along the Afghan border. The army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, told American reporters at the army headquarters in Rawalpindi that Pakistan had to stabilize its gains and contain Taliban militants scattered by offensives already opened last year. “We are not capable of sustaining further military operations,” General Abbas said. The developments underscored the difficulties that President Obama now faces in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Even as the Taliban have stepped up attacks on both sides of the border, the Pakistani Army has been reluctant to take on all of its factions in all parts of the country’s tribal areas. Pakistan, which already has some limited surveillance ability, has long asked for drone technology from the United States, arguing that it should have the same resources to watch and kill militants on its own soil as does the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducts regular drone strikes in Pakistan. American officials have rejected giving Pakistan armed drones. The Shadow surveillance drone appears to be a compromise aimed at enticing Pakistan further into the war and helping the country’s political leadership explain the drone strikes to a deeply suspicious and anti-American public. “It will have a very positive political impact,” said Talat Masood, a retired general in Islamabad. “It will reduce the embarrassment of the political leadership.” American defense officials said that the drones would be for use in Pakistan’s tribal areas and would be restricted to defensive rather than offensive operations. One major concern for the American military is the possibility that Pakistan could use the drones against India, its archrival in the region. The latest version of the Shadow is used by the United States Army and the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has a wing span of 14 feet, is about 12 feet long, is launched from a trailer by ground units and can fly about 70 miles. Mr. Gates, who is on his first trip to Pakistan in three years, met Thursday with the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and with Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the director of the country’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. He attended a dinner in his honor given by the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, and is to deliver a speech on American policy on Friday before a military audience. American officials said that Mr. Gates had urged the Pakistanis in the meetings to do more against the militants, a constant American theme that the defense secretary also sounded in an opinion article published on Thursday in The News International, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily newspaper. In the article, Mr. Gates implicitly pressed Pakistan to root out the Afghan Taliban leadership, the Quetta Shura, which has found refuge in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, outside the tribal areas. American officials are increasingly frustrated that while the Pakistanis have conducted offensives against the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, they have not so far pursued the Afghan Taliban and an allied militant faction on their border, the Haqqani network, whose fighters pose a threat to American forces. “Maintaining a distinction between some violent extremist groups and others is counterproductive,” Mr. Gates wrote. “Only by pressuring all of these groups on both sides of the border will Afghanistan and Pakistan be able to rid themselves of this scourge for good.” American officials say privately that the Pakistanis are reluctant to go after the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network because they see them as a future proxy against Indian interests in Afghanistan when the Americans leave. Under Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, announced last month, the United States is to begin withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan by July 2011. In the same article in The News International, and in his public comments in Pakistan, Mr. Gates lavishly praised the Pakistani Army for its efforts against the militants in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, and noted that the army had suffered nearly 2,000 deaths in the last three years. He also sought to reassure Pakistani citizens that Americans had a long-term interest in their country, not just in a short-term strategic gain across the border in Afghanistan. Mr. Gates said in the article that he regretted past injustices in the American-Pakistan relationship that he himself has been part of since the late 1980s, when he was No. 2 at the C.I.A. At that time, he helped funnel covert Reagan administration aid and weapons through Pakistan’s spy agency to the Islamic fundamentalists who ousted the Russians from Afghanistan. Some of those fundamentalists are now part of the Taliban and are fighting against the United States. Mr. Gates said that the United States largely abandoned Afghanistan and cut military ties with Pakistan once the Russians left Kabul, which he called “a grave mistake driven by some well-intentioned but short-sighted U.S. legislative and policy decisions.” He also repeated an assessment that the militant groups on Pakistan’s border were an inter-connected syndicate, a view that General Abbas rejected as not as “black and white” as Mr. Gates described.