Threats by the US that it would take unilateral action against Pakistan if it were not seen to take action against the Haqqani Network and the Afghan Taliban – the way the US would have us do – seem to have now been carried out. On Wednesday, there were reports of a drone attack at a refugee camp in Kurram Agency on Wednesday having killed at least three people. Claims from some US sources that a commander of the Haqqani Network was killed in the unilateral drone strike have not being verified. While Kurram Agency is believed by the US to be the headquarters of the Haqqani Network, its fighters hiding in a refugee camp there would be rather strange. This marks the second drone attack of the year and continues the increase in such attacks since Donald Trump took power last January. Drones strikes such as these also show why we have continued to so strongly condemn the US drone programme. Such strikes, apart being a gross violation of Pakistani sovereignty, tend to mostly affect vulnerable civilians. The US always claims that its drone attacks have only killed militants but past experience has shown us that drone operations routinely count any male as a militant. Predictably, the US embassy in Islamabad has denied that any US-led action had struck a refugee camp but, as always, it has also refused to confirm that it had carried out a drone attack at all, making it impossible to take anything the US says at face value.
We do not know as yet how many people were killed in this drone attack but as more information is gathered it is likely to rise. That this particular drone attack was officially condemned by the Foreign Office – the first time it has done so since the attack in Balochistan which killed Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour in 2016 – shows the new depths to which ties between the US and Pakistan have sunk. The US has cut off most security assistance to the country and rebuffed our offer of taking action ourselves on the basis of shared intelligence. This will make it even harder for both countries to cooperate in the fight against militancy and could even affect non-security ties. The Trump administration seems to have decided to see its relationship with Pakistan through the lens of its war in Afghanistan and its desire to cultivate closer ties to India. With thousands more US troops expected in Afghanistan, it would come as no surprise if there was a steep increase in the frequency of drone attacks. But, as the experience of the US in the past has shown, the more drone strikes it launches in Pakistan, the more chances of peace are diminished. Unilateral military action has been counter-productive in the past and this time will be no different.