American journalists treated the incident as if Feinstein had revealed a state secret, but media sources such as the BBC, the New York Times, and CNN had long before reported that the drones were based in Pakistan.2 Even though Western media had previously reported on the Pakistani bases, Feinstein’s public acknowledgment brought them to the attention of the Pakistani public for the first time.
In response, the Pakistani embassy in Washington announced, “There are no foreign bases in Pakistan.”3 Pakistani defense minister Ahmad Mukhtar similarly rebutted Feinstein’s incautious remark and added, “We do have the facilities from where they can fly, but they are not being flown from Pakistani territory. They are being flown from Afghanistan.”4
But the truth came out five days later, when London’s Times published an article that featured satellite images obtained from Google Earth that clearly showed Predator drones on a runway in Shamsi.5 Pakistan’s Dawn subsequently reported the news and claimed, “The existence of drone bases inside Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counter-terrorism than has been publicly acknowledged.”6 Shireen Mazari of the Pakistani News went even further and published a scathing opinion piece on the Shamsi revelation:
What many of us had suspected seems to have now been revealed by no less a person than the Chairperson of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein—that US drones operating in Pakistan are in fact flown from an airbase in Pakistan….
Official sources have lost all credibility. After all, we have been officially briefed on more than one occasion that no drone flew without the knowledge of the Pakistani military….
The brazenness with which the government has chosen to lie not only to its people but to Parliament shows how little it cares for either…. In retrospect it is a sick mind that will continue to harp publicly on how the drone attacks are encouraging extremism and must be stopped while covertly there has always been a Pakistani acquiescence to these drone violations of our sovereignty.7
Tempers were soothed somewhat when it was revealed that the United States had created a base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border, to fly drones into the FATA. Many drones were shifted to Jalalabad, where they were said to take off almost hourly. The issue of the secret CIA drone base at Shamsi was, however, brought up again in 2009, when the New York Times reported that the CIA had hired contractors from the firm Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater) to guard the base’s perimeter and load bombs and missiles onto the drones.8 Xe/Blackwater had gained great international notoriety after several of its armed contractors in Baghdad gunned down seventeen civilians in 2007. News of the massacre made its way to Pakistan and other Muslim countries in the region. When Pakistanis heard that contractors from the notorious company were operating in their country at Shamsi, there were howls of rage, and the CIA was forced to end its contract with Xe in 2009.
Shamsi came up again in June 2011, when the Pakistanis announced that they were closing the base to punish the United States for withholding promised funds.9 The United States, however, announced that it had already ceased operations at the base and transferred them across the Afghan border to the base at Jalalabad. But this move did not seem permanent, and in December 2011 the Pakistanis again announced they were closing the base after U.S. Apaches and AC-130 gunships accidentally killed twenty-four Pakistani border troops during a firefight in a place called Salala. Regardless, the existence of secret CIA bases and Xe contractors on Pakistani soil created a sense among many Pakistanis that the United States was attempting to occupy their country.
THE ARREST OF RAYMOND DAVIS AND THE DATTA KHEL STRIKE OF MARCH 17, 2011
Rumors of CIA and Xe agents running around Pakistan became even more widespread after a CIA contractor named Raymond Davis was arrested for gunning down two Pakistanis trying to rob him in the eastern city of Lahore on January 27, 2011. Subsequent reports indicated that the two men killed were actually ISI spies tracking Davis.10 When the Pakistanis arrested Davis, an ex–Special Forces soldier, they found a pathrai drone tracking chip on him. He was also found to have traveled to the FATA region twelve times without official permission.11 If this were not enough, his mobile phone was found to have made calls to Waziristan.12 The Pakistani media reported that Davis’s main task was “to keep CIA network intact in the tribal agencies as well as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.”13 One Pakistani official said, “This is not the work of a diplomat. He was doing espionage and surveillance activities.”14 For their part, the Americans claimed that Davis was a “diplomat” and therefore had immunity.
As a result of the embarrassing affair, which led to widespread anti-American protests and exposed the CIA’s covert operations in Pakistan, the Pakistani government demanded that hundreds of U.S. operatives in the country leave. Tensions rose between Islamabad and Washington, and in an effort to placate the Pakistanis during the nearly two-month period that Davis was in custody, the CIA called a monthlong halt to the drone strikes. A Taliban commander said of Davis’s arrest and the resulting lull, “The arrest of this guy is a very positive thing for us. Our forces used to be hit by attacks every other day. Now we can move more freely.”15
Davis was released on March 16, 2011, following a diyya (blood money) payment of $2.3 million to the slain robbers’ families, and the drone strikes began in force the very next day. The drone attack in Waziristan on March 17 had been strongly opposed by the new U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, who felt that a strike coming so close on the heels of Davis’s release was insensitive and would infuriate the Pakistanis.16 The CIA, however, overrode Munter’s concerns, and the ensuing strike turned out to be a greater mistake than Ambassador Munter could have predicted.
The March 17 strike killed between twenty-six and forty-four people in Datta Khel, a Taliban-controlled village in North Waziristan.17 Although news sources initially claimed that those killed in the strike were “militants,” the New York Times subsequently reported that as many as fifteen of the people killed in the strike were actually tribal elders.18 Others killed in the strike were described as merchants and tribal police. It became apparent that the elders had been engaged in a jirga designed to settle a dispute between two tribes over a chromite mine. Since the territory in question was controlled by the Taliban, a high-ranking commander loyal to Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur was officiating at the jirga. While the elders and Taliban militants were meeting, as many as four missiles slammed into the jirga, killing the high-ranking Taliban leader, ten of his followers, and numerous civilians. A BBC account of the Datta Khel strike reported, “Officials say two drones were involved. One missile was fired at a car carrying suspected militants. Three more missiles were then fired at the moving vehicle, hitting it and the nearby tribal meeting, or jirga.”19