Despite the US rejection of Pakistan’s demands to abandon the Shamsi Airbase used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to stage drone strikes, Pakistani officials insisted here on Wednesday that Washington had been sternly told to vacate the base and would do so in the near future.
It was Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar who had said on Wednesday that Pakistan had asked the US to vacate the airbase first. That evoked a sharp reaction from officials in Washington on Thursday, who rejected Pakistan’s demand. “US personnel have not left the remote Pakistani military installation known as Shamsi Air Base and there is no plan for them to do so,” said a US official familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive material, according to a foreign news wire service report from Washington.
“That base is neither vacated nor being vacated,” the official said. The information was confirmed by a second US official, according to the report. A senior Pakistani security official when approached for his reaction to the US position on the issue said that irrespective of what they (US officials) said on the vital matter, the Pakistani authorities had told them to vacate the base.
“We strongly believe that Shamsi Airbase will be abandoned soon,” he said. Pakistan has been urging the US for months now to halt drone strikes and off late the country has conveyed strong concerns to the Obama administration about its intentions to increase the assaults by pilot-less aircraft and also to expand it to more tribal areas, even – where extremely necessary – to some settled regions as well. Another Pakistani official in the Foreign Ministry, who asked not to be named, said that tensions were mounting between Islamabad and Washington over the drone issue despite the fact that hectic “behind-the-scenes efforts” were being made to decrease it.
He said Pakistan had asked the US to vacate the airbase much before May 2, when al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was killed in a special military operation by US forces without taking Pakistan into confidence. “The US officials stopped using the base to stage drone strikes much earlier and whatever they say now in their interaction with the media we strongly believe that they will not have any problem with abandoning the base as they have already shifted most of their paraphernalia required for such attacks across the border to Afghanistan,” he said.