Dear terrorists; Pakistan is safe now

The LA Times reports that the CIA has suspended drone attacks in Pakistan to mollify the Pakistani government after the cross border raid last month which killed a score of Pakistani soldiers at a border outpost;

Some officials in the State Department and the National Security Council say many of the airstrikes are counterproductive. They argue that rank-and-file militants are easy to replace, and that Pakistani claims of civilian casualties, which the U.S. disputes, have destabilized the government of President Asif Ali Zardari, a U.S. ally.

I may be mistaken, but weren’t the drone attacks supposed to make up for the President’s unwillingness to provide commanders in Afghanistan with the numbers of troops they requested? And now we won’t even use the drones.

And, oh, by the way, according to the New York Times there are rumors that the Pakistan Army is planning a military coup in the near future (a coup by the Pakistan military, by the way, was the basis for Tom Clancy’s latest novel “Locked On”).

Concern has been growing in Pakistan and abroad that the two crises — a political struggle that has pitted civilian officials against the military, and the fraying relations with the United States — are distracting from deeper threats to stability, primarily the faltering economy and the festering Islamist insurgency

The furor over the US attack on the border outpost may be crocodile tears to mask the Pakistan Army’s plan to toss out the civilian government.

Category: Terror War