US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta used his visit to Kabul on Thursday to obliquely warn Pakistan, that the USA was losing patience with Pakistan for its refusal to eliminate safe havens for insurgents who attack US troops. Where Mr Panetta’s focus should have been on the fury in Afghanistan over a Nato air strike that had killed 18 civilians, he attempted to draw a red herring by dragging in Pakistan. Instead of a simple apology, which would result in the Nato containers being allowed transit on the new rates, the US wants the supply line reinstated without any apology for the incident, without stopping the drone strikes, at a price of the USA’s choice. It is because of that that its patience is running out, not because of the attack on a US base in eastern Afghanistan, which is blamed on the Haqqani network. The network has become an Afghan government tool to explain away its failures of governance to the American, and, in turn, the Americans use it to blame Pakistan for their own failures. This is also the way India routinely blames Pakistan for the situation in Afghanistan not favouring its intervention there.
Meanwhile Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined the chorus of Obama Administration voices saying that the drone strikes are both necessary and legal, even though there is mounting evidence that most of victims are civilians, not militants. That issue was raised in Pakistan before UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, who said there should be an investigation into them from the point of view of human rights. This is the UN’s first condemnation of the drone strikes. The condemnation, or rather the questioning, has probably come because the USA is using them more extensively than ever before, and though for the time being still limited to use in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, an expansion is feared.
These statements alone should be enough to convince any remaining friends of the USA in the war on terror, that the adventure was a bad idea, and must now be abandoned.