Pakistan 'secretly endorsed drone strikes'
Pakistan's
complicity over US drone strikes emerges as prime minister Nawaz Sharif calls
on Barack Obama to cease them
Pakistan for years
secretly approved of US drone attacks on its territory despite public
denounciations according to secret documents obtained by the Washington Post.
The purported evidence of
Islamabad's involvement came as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited the White
House and urged an end to the attacks, which are widely unpopular with the
Pakistani public.
Pakistani support for
drone attacks has long been widely suspected.
The newspaper said that
top-secret documents and Pakistani diplomatic memos showed that the Central
Intelligence Agency had drafted documents to share information on drone attacks
with Pakistan.
At least 65 drone
strikes were marked for discussion with Pakistan, including through briefings
at its embassy in Washington and in materials sent physically to senior
officials in Islamabad.
In one case in 2010, a
document describes hitting a location "at the request of your
government." Another file referred to a joint effort at picking targets.
The
article - co-written by Bob Woodward, one of the two journalists who broke the
Watergate scandal in the 1970s - said that the documents also showed that the
United States raised concerns that extremists were linked to Pakistan's powerful
intelligence service.
In
one incident, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton confronted Pakistan about
mobile phones and written materials from dead bodies of militants that showed
links to the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
In
turn, a Pakistani memo gave the names of 36 US citizens believed to be CIA
agents and urged the embassy in Washington not to issue visas to them, the
newspaper said.
The
report came a day after Amnesty International said that the United States may
have broken international law by killing civilians with drones.
It
pointed to an October 2012 attack that killed a 68-year-old grandmother as she
picked vegetables.
For
the first six months of 2011, 152 combatants were killed, according to a table
cited by the Post that did not list any civilian casualties.
The
Obama administration has defended drone strikes as a better way to avoid
civilian casualties, saying that it carefully selects Al-Qaeda-linked
extremists in lawless parts of Pakistan.
Edited
by Bonnie Malkin
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