'It is surprising that he would be so missed in death when he was so despised in life,' a British friend based in New York said about Hakimullah Mehsud. This friend ´ quite sympathetic to Pakistan sufferings in the last decade or so ´ and many diplomats in Islamabad are amazed at the reactions to the killing of the chief of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in a drone strike last Friday. Drones are illegal, they say, but equally bad are the militants that they hunt down. The US would not deploy drones if Pakistan would act against those militants, and there are no signs at all that Islamabad or Rawalpindi are moving in that direction. Many are already amazed that in order to target Gen (r) Pervez Musharraf, we are ready to vindicate the two brothers who ran Lal Masjid ´ despite the fact that they had illegally constructed the entire extension of the complex, held Islamabad hostage for over six months, and attempted to enforce vigilante justice by ransacking video rental stores and rounding up policemen and Chinese citizens ´ at the behest of people sympathetic to Pakistani auxiliaries of Al Qaeda. In July 2007, before the law-enforcement operation against them, politicians and the media were criticizing the president for not moving against the rebel cleric. But when the army acted, they began a vicious anti-Musharraf campaign accusing him of killing 'hundreds of innocent students'. The same people ´ driven by political expediency and with little regard for the rule of law ´ are vindicating Hakimullah Mehsud. Let us analyze the American action against Hakimullah and the Pakistani reaction in its historical perspective. Firstly, the military often implied that the CIA deliberately avoided hitting those militants with drones that were targeting Pakistani soldiers and Pakistani interests. With the August 2009 elimination of Baitullah Meshud, the CIA disproved that notion. It then continued to remove any doubts by killing Irfan Mehsud in September 2009, the dreaded...

Pakistan anti-drone stance must be backed by action against militants When UN rapporteur on human rights and countering extremism Ben Emmerson visited Pakistan in March this year, the government of President Asif Ali Zardari asked him to stay away from media attention. He was here to investigate 24 cases of innocent victims of drone attacks. He quietly met with some victim families and government officials, and looked at data put together by the Centre for Research and Security Studies after research in FATA, and particularly in Waziristan. Before leaving Pakistan, he underlined in a statement that US drone strikes violate Pakistan sovereignty and should be stopped immediately. Emmerson said Pakistan needed to be given an opportunity to establish peace in the country, in reference to the 46 strikes inside Pakistan during 2012 that some militants cite to justify their terror campaign. The CIA carried out 72 drone strikes in 2011 and 122 in 2010. This year, the number has gone down to about 23 so far. An attack on a Jirga in North Waziristan that killed about 40 innocent people in 2011, and the killing of 83 civilians in a January 2006 attack on a madrassa in Damadola, were amongst the cases documented by the CRSS. Incident like these drew attention to the killing of innocent civilians in drone attacking. Amnesty International, the Human Rights Watch, and several UN forums cautioned against the use of the predators to hunt down Al Qaeda linked non´state actors, saying it sets a dangerous precedent. This argument often resonated in our private conversations at the United Nations in New York too, where diplomats from leading European nations wondered why their own countries desperately wanted the drone technology. Christof Heyns, another UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings (summary or arbitrary executions), had also objected to the American use of drones, which he said clearly undermined international laws. Some of the drone strikes 'may even constitute...

However controversial his reign as the chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kayani owed his elevation and particularly his second tenure to an overwhelming desire that former Obama adviser Bruce Riedel made an indirect reference to when discussing the difficulties the United States faced in dealing with Pakistan in his absorbing bookThe Deadly Embrace. On page 21, Riedel acknowledges candidly that 'Washington worked behind scenes' to secure a second term for Gen Kayani. This desire stemmed from the cordial notes two Pakistani and three American generals (including David Petraeus and Admiral Mike Mullen) had struck aboard Abraham Lincoln, the US warship in the Indian Ocean some time in July 2008. All five of them, including Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha, sat across the table for several hours to try to understand each other view points on the complex nature of insurgencies that the US-led ISAF troops faced in Afghanistan, and the Pakistani army confronted in its northwestern territories bordering Afghanistan. With this began the honeymoon between Kayani and the American duo of General David Petraeus, then Centcom chief, and Mullen, the chairman of joints chiefs of staff. Gen Kayani had established an excellent rapport with Petraeus and Mullen. On an operational level, both the armies appeared to be working in tandem. This bonhomie bore fruition when, in mid-December 2009, Admiral Mullen told US journalists accompanying him he 'couldn–t give Pakistani Army anything but an ¿A–' for how they–ve conducted their battle so far' in Swat and Waziristan. There was a context to it. Together with Kayani, Mullen had spent several hours flying over the 3,000 meter high mountains and deep gorges in the Swat region. So impressed was Mullen that before leaving Islamabad he requested Kayani to take Gen Stanely McChrystel, then the US commander in chief in Afghanistan, on the same tour so 'Stanely can get a sense of how and what you need to fight in such a difficult terrain.' McChrystal...