Debating Myself

Parliament finally convened on Monday after an election on February 18

So the more I read about this missile strike in Pakistan, the less sense it makes to me. It seems completely ill-timed and appears to have been carried out with little regard at all to the political situation in Pakistan post-election. According to the Financial Times, this is the latest guess about what has happened:

At least fourteen people were killed in a remote Pakistani region along the Afghan border in a missile strike on Sunday believed to have been carried out by a pilotless drone operated by the CIA… “The target was a cluster of homes where Arabs and their Pakistani friends had assembled” said one Pakistani official.

Witnesses said a drone dropped seven missiles on the sprawling, mud-brick compound about three miles outside Wana, the main town in South Waziristan.

The timing seems a bit off though, considering Parliament was set to convene the next day (and did so):

Pakistan’s Parliament meets today [the day after the missile strike] for the first time since three opposition parties agreed to form a coalition government after defeating supporters of President Pervez Musharraf in general elections a month ago. Lawmakers will be sworn in and will choose a speaker and deputy speaker for the 342-member National Assembly, the official Associated Press of Pakistan reported.

But, more importantly, the fact that previous such missile strikes have caused a bit of instability on their own (again from the Financial Times):

In the past, Islamist militants linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban have responded to drone attacks with suicide bombings across the country.

This new threat to instability, in the form of a retaliatory terror campaign conducted after the airstrikes, comes on the heels of violent campaign season, some of which it seems is clear the CIA was responding to (AP):

Just Saturday, a bomb exploded at an Islamabad restaurant popular with foreigners, killing a Turkish woman and wounding 12 people, including four FBI personnel… Saturday’s attack was the first in Pakistan’s quiet capital in several months, and the first targeting foreigners here in more than a year.

Public sentiment in Pakistan for such retaliation by the US military is thin at best:

Pakistanis have also expressed anger over U.S. attacks on militants in the country’s lawless tribal regions along the Afghan border, which often have tacit approval from Musharraf’s government.

So why anger the Pakistanis more? The Pakistani election should be seen as a victory for democratic reform in the region having resulted in the relatively peaceful ousting of a military dictator from the government–hopefully:

The PPP, the party led by Benazir Bhutto before her assassination in December, is forming a coalition with the Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz, the party led by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and the Awami National Party. Sharif has vowed to challenge Musharraf’s rule while Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s widower and the PPP leader, hasn’t ruled out working with the president.

Of course the US has long been close allies with Musharraf and perhaps the new coalition government will be more anti-American and less supportive of US-led efforts in the war on terror in the region. Yet it is hard to see how peppering the Pakistani countryside with seven missiles from a CIA drone could do anything to increase support from the fledgling Pakistani government, and it seems really clear that it is going to spur further anti-American sentiment in the country.

I’m all for fighting the real war on terror and striking at terrorist camps wherever they may be. I may even be receptive to the idea that state sovereignty is largely mythical along borders in the Middle East and pursuing potential terrorist operatives trumps concerns about violating state sovereignty. I even believe it in the best interest of the Pakistanis to let the US fight the brunt of this battle for them, after all it was pro-Taliban elements who struck on Monday (the day of Parliament’s first session):

A bomb blast at a police building in northwestern Pakistan Monday killed three officers and wounded five, state media reported. Several wounded people were rushed to hospital after the attack near the main town of Mingora in the volatile Swat valley where Pakistan’s military has been fighting pro-Taliban militants, police officer Karamat Shah said.

So the question is: why mess with the volatile situation right now? Were the targets such a high priority that the larger political concerns were put aside? Or was this just a revenge operation? I sympathize deeply with the loss of FBI agents killed in the line of duty–they were serving their country in one of the most important ways–but the timing of justice here may wind up getting more Americans and Pakistanis killed in the long-run and threatening the peaceful transition of power in Pakistan.

The strike occurred in northwest Pakistan. Image courtesy of http://www.wordtravels.com/

Many say that we are fighting the war in Iraq at the cost of fighting the “real war on terror” in Afghanistan. If that is true, then what do we make out of the US war on terror being conducted in… Pakistan?

That’s right, apparently the US has launched air strikes in Pakistan–including a strike today killing 18 in a tribal village.

Is it really a good idea to mess with the sovereignty of an already highly unstable and tenuous regional ally?

More on this as it develops.