In the midst of the ongoing carnage in Pakistan, on September 29 Panetta was in the country and said "the CIA was achieving 100 percent results through the drone attacks."
Articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and Britain's Sunday Telegraph last weekend documented that the Pentagon has transferred Predator and Reaper drones used in Afghanistan to the CIA to mount escalating attacks in Pakistan. As the Washington Post described the policy, "The CIA is using an arsenal of armed drones and other equipment provided by the U.S. military to secretly escalate its operations in Pakistan," adding that the White House is in full support of the practice and that Defense Secretary Gates and CIA Director Panetta had "worked closely together to expand the effort."
In the words of a Brookings Institution analyst, "It's moving from using [drones] as a counterterrorism platform to an almost counterinsurgency platform," in line with the general policy implemented by former and current U.S. and NATO top commanders Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus.
The Washington Post also disclosed that massive intensification of drone warfare "represents a significant evolution of an already controversial targeted killing program run by the CIA" which "in the past month...has been delivering what amounts to a cross-border bombing campaign in coordination with conventional military operations a few miles away." The newspaper also pointed out that the "CIA operations come at a time when the U.S. military has opened a major phase of operations in and around Kandahar." [3]
Regarding the last subject, what had been touted as the decisive battle for Afghanistan, an all-out assault by U.S., NATO and Afghan National Army forces against Kandahar in August, never materialized. Instead, American and NATO special forces are conducting counterinsurgency operations in the province and on the periphery of its capital. As many as 8,000 Afghan civilians have fled NATO operations in the countryside to the capital in recent days.
The integrated strategy the U.S. and NATO are pursuing is threefold: Counterinsurgency operations, including targeted assassinations, in Afghanistan's eastern and southern provinces bordering Pakistan; an unprecedented escalation of drone missile strikes in northwestern Pakistan; and attacks by helicopter gunships in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in combination with drone strikes.
NATO helicopter gunships launched deadly back-to-back attacks in Pakistan on September 25, 26 and 27. On September 30 NATO helicopters again crossed the border into Pakistan and killed three soldiers of the Frontier Corps in the Kurram Agency of FATA. A Pakistani security official stated that the soldiers had fired warning shots to alert the NATO helicopters that they had crossed into Pakistani territory, but that NATO forces fired two missiles at their post and shelled the area for 25 minutes.
The same government official said: "It was an unprovoked attack....NATO helicopters entered our airspace and targeted a paramilitary checkpost, killing three soldiers and wounding three others," and that security forces had taken "suitable measures to respond to such acts of aggression, which will be known to people very soon." [4]
Attacks continued into the new month, with three U.S. drone strikes in North Waziristan on October 2 killing 18 people and wounding what the local press reported as scores. Two days later another missile strike killed four and wounded several others in the same agency. "Officials say the house [destroyed in the attack] belonged to a local resident. The death toll is expected to rise as some of the injured are reportedly in critical condition." [5]
By the same day NATO had lost 12 soldiers in fighting this month.
The reaction in Pakistan was immediate and demonstrative. Even before NATO killed three Pakistani soldiers the provincial assembly of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North-West Frontier Province) unanimously condemned NATO attacks and U.S. drone strikes inside Pakistan, with ruling and opposition parties uniting to table a joint resolution which was "read out by all the leaders one by one" and which "criticised attacks of the NATO forces, terming the US drone attacks direct attacks on Pakistan's sovereignty, and demanded of the Federal Government to take solid steps to stop such attacks in future." [6]
On September 29 a general strike was staged in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with the province's governor warning that the increasing incursions by U.S. and NATO forces represent "an attack on Pakistan's sovereignty." [7]
The next day the Pakistani government halted NATO supply trucks and oil tankers from entering Afghanistan, which policy remains in force with 160 vehicles stopped near the border on October 5.
On October 1 at least 27 NATO oil tankers were attacked and destroyed in Pakistan's southern province of Sindh, which is on the Arabian Sea and doesn't border Afghanistan. Later in the day another attack was staged in the province of Balochistan in which two NATO supply trucks were targeted by rocket fire and two people were killed.
Two days later 28 NATO oil tankers were attacked and 12 people killed in Rawalpindi in Punjab province near the nation's capital.
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