Posted on 12/10/2011 6:07:27 PM PST by JerseyanExile
ISLAMABAD -- Pakistan will shoot down any U.S. drone that intrudes its air space per new directives, a senior Pakistani official told NBC News on Saturday.
According to the new Pakistani defense policy, "Any object entering into our air space, including U.S. drones, will be treated as hostile and be shot down," a senior Pakistani military official told NBC News.
The policy change comes just weeks after a deadly NATO attack on Pakistani military checkpoints accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, prompting Pakistani officials to order all U.S. personnel out of a remote airfield in Pakistan.
Pakistan told the U.S. to vacate Shamsi Air Base by December 11.
A senior military official from Quetta, Pakistan, confirmed to NBC News on Saturday that the evacuation of the base, used for staging classified drone flights directed against militants, will be completed tomorrow, according to NBCs Fakhar ur Rehman.
Pakistan's Frontier Corps security forces took control of the base Saturday evening after most U.S. military personnel left, Xinhua news agency reported. Civil aviation officials also moved in Saturday, Xinhua said. Pakistani Military Chief Gen Ashfaq Pervez Kayani had issued multiple directives since the Nov. 26 NATO attack, which included orders to shoot down U.S. drones, senior military officials confirmed to NBC News on Saturday. It was unclear Saturday whether orders to fire upon incoming U.S. drones was part of the initial orders.
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Drill here. Drill now. Bring the troops home and let those “people” kill each other. From Saudi to Pakistan, there isn’t a single one of them that is worth the life an an American.
Oh great now the White House will give Pakistan a drone.
“We have bet on the wrong horse” Winston Churchill
and to think they are flying planes we gave them
Barack Hussein Obama.
Building strong alliances since Jan 2009.
Sure hope the aliens in the UFO’s hear about this and don’t venture into Pakistani airspace!
Same Pakis who didn’t know the SEALs were on the way in multiple choppers are now expecting to locate, and then shoot down, US drones.
Of course, this begs the question of what it considers “its airspace”. We have lots of what could be called drones that pass over Paki territory on a regular basis, some airbreathers, some not. Good luck even spotting most of them, but we can tell which tie-tack you are wearing.
I think it was Bismark who said, “The whole of the Balkans is not worth the life of one pomeranian grenadier!”
I would change that to Pakistan and Afghanistan and American soldier but the idea is the same.
Of course we need to immediately cut off all aid to Pakistan, military or otherwise.
Those duplicitous bastards.
Soon it will be easier to keep a list of Muslim allies that Obama hasn’t lost to the Islamists.
Good. Then we have a fix on where to lob the next volley of arty....
See Turkmenistan for posts and routes. The people there want transportation routes for developing their oil. But lady diplomats might not like it there (lack of malls and palatial accomodations).
Terrorists aren't attacking us because they're rich off oil. They're doing so because they hate our guts. It costs very little to mount terror attacks.
The issue is that we need a response to terrorist freelancers that doesn't involve the wholesale extermination of the world's Muslim population. Our presence in Afghanistan is that response. I'd argue we could do better by leaving and giving the Afghan government an annual military grant equal to Pakistan's annual defense expenditures, about $6b, conditional on the government fighting the Taliban. It would certainly cost way less in both money ($100b a year) and American lives than placing a significant force of GI's in Afghanistan.
Unfortunately,they don’t limit themselves with killing each-other they come here to kill us .
The Pakistanis and their ISI are neck deep in AlQaida and Taliban,the only reason we don’t hit Pakis directly,is their assistance to US in Afghanistan. Since they don’t want to provide that anymore,Pakistan should become a fair target in war on terror.
Problem is that the money you give to them will be stolen for a few years by Government,until they get overthrown by Taliban. At that point we will be back to squire one.
The Muslim world is split in two:moderates who are pathologically corrupt,and extremists who are pathologically murderous.
But for anything to reach Turkmenistan, it either has to come ultimately from Russia, or through the Caucuses, across Georgia and Armenia. And if Russia wanted, they could probably exert a great deal of pressure on those two nations to shut down any transit rights. After all, Georgia got a very good example a few years back of just how lackluster NATO is towards protecting them.
Enough American blood has been shed in the shambles that is Pockistaan. USA should completely exit, no aid, no nada. OBL is dead. Has been since Tora Bora. What in the world are we doing over there and in Afghanistan. We are giving them billions that we borrow from Chicoms. US govt is an idiot.
Actually, we'd be paying our Afghans to fight the minority of Muslims of all nationalities in Afghanistan who want to kill us, and the terrorists the Pakistanis routinely send over the border. It's a lot like sending $7b to El Salvador so that they could put down their communist insurgency. The reason Afghanistan would need our money to match Pakistani defense expenditures is because the Pakistanis outnumber them 7 to 1, and the Pakistani economy is more than 10x as big. That plus the fact that 9/11 was a Pakistani project using Afghan and Arab cut-outs means we have a compelling interest in preventing Afghanistan from once again becoming a terrorist sanctuary.
Just about every government to which we sent aid during the Cold War stole some of that money. But enough went through towards the objective of keeping the local Reds down that a small minority were actually overthrown by their communist insurgencies. The difference between Cold War aid and aid to Afghanistan is that during the Cold War, the defeat of an allied government did not mean thousands of dead in the continental US.
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