NEW YORK - In an apparent attempt to prepare the ground for resumption of drone attacks in Pakistan, a US media report says that nearly two-month lull in the strikes has helped al Qaeda and several militant factions to regroup, increase attacks against Pakistani security forces and threaten intensified strikes against allied forces in Afghanistan.
Citing unnamed American and Pakistani officials, the New York Times said that the insurgents are increasingly taking advantage of tensions raised by an American airstrike in November that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers in two border outposts, plunging relations between the countries to new depths.
‘It went on to say that the Central Intelligence Agency, hoping to avoid making matters worse while Pakistan completes a wide-ranging review of its security relationship with the United States, has not conducted a drone strike since mid-November’, it said. But the Times, citing several administration officials, said that any stoppage in drone strikes did not signal a weakening of Washington’s counter-terrorism efforts, suggesting that strikes could resume soon.
‘Without commenting on specific counter-terrorism operations, al Qaeda is severely weakened, having suffered major losses in recent years’, George Little, a Defence Department spokesman, was quoted as saying on Saturday.
‘But even a diminished group of terrorists can pose danger, and thus our resolve to defeat them is as strong as ever’, he said.
The paper cited analysts as saying the hiatus coincides with and probably has accelerated a flurry of insurgent activity and new strategies.
The report coincided with the arrival in Washington over the weekend of Pakistan’s Ambassador-designate to the United States, Sherry Rehman, who begins her challenging assignment at a time when US-Pakistan relations, which began to deteriorate after the May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden, are at their lowest ebb.
On the eve of her arrival, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland had said: ‘She (Rehman) does indeed comes at an important time. We’re looking forwarding to having her here in the United States. We will obviously make clear to her that we consider this relationship extremely important’.
Sherry Rehman is expected to present her credentials to President Barack Obama on January 18th.
Citing diplomats and intelligence analysts, the Times said the stoppage in CIA missile strikes, the longest in Pakistan in more than three years, is offering for now greater freedom of movement to an insurgency that had been splintered by in-fighting and battered by American drone attacks in recent months, the Times said.
‘We know that al Qaeda’s leaders were constantly taking the US counter-terrorism operations into account, spending considerable time planning their movements and protecting their communications to try to stay alive’, the official added.
C Christine Fair, an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University who just returned from a month in Pakistan, put it more bluntly that the insurgents are ‘taking advantage of the respite. It allows them to operate more freely’. Over all, drone strikes in Pakistan dropped to 64 last year, compared with 117 strikes in 2010, according to The Long War Journal.
According to the paper, analysts attribute the decrease to a dwindling number of senior Qaeda leaders and a pause in strikes last year after the arrest in January of Raymond Davis, a CIA security contractor who killed two Pakistanis, the Navy Seal raid in May that killed Osama bin Laden and the American airstrike on November 26th.