The first known missile strike by a US drone in Pakistani territory was carried out in the year 2004, in South Waziristan. Five people, including local Taliban commander Nek Mohammad –who was linked to an assassination plot to kill the country’s military ruler General Pervez Musharraf – were killed in the attack. Wary of naming the CIA in fear of political backlash and public reaction, Pakistan Army owned the attack.
The truth, however, remained buried until April 2013 when New York Times dug it out. In a report, it said that the Taliban commander was killed as part of an understanding that allowed the CIA access to Pakistan’s airspace for drone strikes to hunt down its own enemies – the Taliban.
The public discourse was, however, immensely affected. The Pakistani government publicly denounced these attacks but reportedly allowed the CIA to operate drones from Shamsi airfield. Secret diplomatic cables made public on Wikileaks revealed that Pakistan’s former army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani had tacitly agreed to increased drone operations in 2008.
[quote]Pakistan denounced the attacks publicly but allowed CIA to operate drones from its Shamsi airfield[/quote]
In March 2013, United Nations special rapporteur Ben Emmerson, who led a team to look into the civilian casualties from the CIA drone attacks, confirmed that the attacks were a violation of the sovereignty of Pakistan. But he also pointed out in his report that government officials in Pakistan unambiguously said that the country did not agree to the drone attacks. However, this was contradicted by the US officials.
The Ramstein US airbase in Germany
The drone strikes were stopped in November 2011 after the NATO forces killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in the Salala incident. As a consequence, the Americans were asked to evacuate the Shamsi airfield. It was for the first time that Pakistan officially but circuitously confirmed that drone strikes were carried out from Shamsi.
[quote]Drone attacks in Somalia are carried out from the AFRICOM headquarters in Germany[/quote]
This issue is not peculiar to Pakistan. Drone attacks in Somalia are carried out from the AFRICOM headquarters in Germany. Why is the AFRICOM headquarters based in Germany and not somewhere in Africa? Simply because African countries had not allowed the United States to establish the headquarters or even regional bases in their territories in view of the criticism over the US war on terror and their willingness to become part of it.
An investigative report in Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest newspaper, had uncovered the tacit role of Germany in drone attacks carried out in Africa. “American bombs dropped in Africa are carried by drones commanded in Ramstein, Germany. The German government had turned a blind eye and feigned ignorance. That’s convenient, especially when it had allowed its most important ally to break international law. And then there were the innocent victims of this secret war,” says an article in the newspaper. It helps draw an analogy between what Germany did and what Pakistan had opted for. But Germany, it would seem, was only too willing. As the decision was made to allow AFRICOM to set up its headquarters in Stuttgart, one German government official, the newspaper says, actually advised the US to initially keep a low profile, as this could “otherwise make for headlines in the press and trigger an unnecessary public debate,” as was documented in an internal file.
The decisions in Germany and Pakistan were neither publicly debated, nor taken up at parliamentary levels, understandably under a strategy of not bothering when things could simply be dealt with behind closed doors. This surely put a question mark on the concept of democracy. Like in the case of Pakistan, the US did not ever deny that drone attacks were being coordinated in Germany. What the US did was to simply divert the attention. During a visit to Germany, President Barack Obama said: “But I can say, though, that we do not use Germany as a launching point for unmanned drones as part of our counter-terrorism activities. And I know that there have been some reports here in Germany that that might be the case. That is not.”
Ugandan soldiers hold a small US made drone used in Somalia, during a visit by Hilary Clinton in 2012
In crisis-management public relationing, the tip is to always deny allegations that no one had actually made. The term used by Obama was “launching point”, which in military jargon means the venue from which a drone is actually launched. The drones for the US war in Africa did not take off in Germany. What Obama referred to indicated that the US controlled its drone attacks in Africa from military bases in Germany. This fact was indirectly confirmed by Obama himself in an open letter to the US Congress in 2012 that the US military had taken concrete steps against members of Al Qaeda in Somalia.
As the American bombs dropped in Africa were carried by drones controlled from Ramstein, Germany, with the German government conveniently turning a blind eye and feigning ignorance especially when it had allowed its most important ally to break international law, the US once operated drones from Shamsi airfield with the tacit approval of Pakistan and now it operates from places outside Pakistan.
