Pakistan updateU.S.-Pakistan cooperate in UAV campaign, but it is a qualified cooperation
The United States offered to give Pakistan a much larger amount of imagery, including real-time video feeds and communications intercepts gleaned by remotely piloted aircraft; information about the UAVs’ operating patterns, blind spots, and takeoff and landing locations is not shared for fear that elements inside the Pakistani intelligence and military would leak it to the insurgents
This is an update of a story we published yesterday:
The United States military for the first time has provided Pakistan with a broad array of surveillance information collected by American UAVs flying along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the New York Times’s Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti report. It is not clear whether the cooperation will continue, however. While American military UAVs flew a handful of noncombat surveillance missions along the border earlier this spring at the request of the Pakistani government, requests for additional flights abruptly stopped without explanation, American officials said.
Schmitt and Mazzetti write that the offer to give Pakistan a much larger amount of imagery, including real-time video feeds and communications intercepts gleaned by remotely piloted aircraft, was intended to help defuse a growing dispute over how to use the UAVs and which country should control the secret missions flown in Pakistani airspace.
American military officials told the New York Times Wednesday that there was no plan to allow the military to join the CIA in operating armed drones inside Pakistan. They thus disputed a report in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday that said Pakistan had been given joint control of armed American military drones inside Pakistan. Schmitt and Mazzetti write that Obama administration officials are vigorously resisting sharing the drone technology with Pakistani security forces, but officials from both countries said compromises were possible.
The Obama administration has provided the Pakistanis with the surveillance information but has resisted sharing detailed information about how the drones operate. “This is technology we haven’t given to our closest allies — the Brits or the Australians or NATO,” said one senior American official who is working on Pakistan issues.
An inescapable part of this debate is a continuing suspicion by American intelligence officials of the premier Pakistani intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Because the Predators, and now an even more sophisticated UAV called the Reaper, have been among the most successful weapons against al Qaeda and other militant leaders, there is deep concern that any information about the UAVs’ operating patterns, blind spots, and takeoff and landing locations could be leaked to the insurgents and used to take down the drones.
