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Pakistan’s opinion of drone strikes changing

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: The Pakistani government and the people have become less hostile towards US drone strikes in the Tribal Areas, as, The New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen said, “US and Pakistani strategic interests, which are often very divergent, are kind of coming together”.

In an interview with National Public Radio, he said the Pakistani government was protesting against the drone strikes much lesser than it used to. “The Pakistani government used to say these were bad, but now you may notice that they’ve tended not to really protest so much because, you know, it’s suiting their strategic interest,” Bergen said. “For instance, one of the drone attacks killed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, back in August, a guy who had killed Benazir Bhutto,” he said.

Bergen said civilian casualties in the Tribal Areas from the drone attacks were somewhere around the 29 percent mark, against the earlier figure of over 90 percent.

“I think a lot of people will say, well, a 30 percent civilian casualty rate - that’s absolutely unacceptable. Other people may say, well, these are killing leaders of the Taliban, they’re killing lower-level militants as well, you know, that’s acceptable.” He said the Pakistanis had grown weary of the Taliban “in the last year or so”

“The mood in Pakistan is shifting against the militants anyway. And we’ve got, right now in Waziristan, a major Pakistani military operation, which is also going to put a lot of pressure on these militants. The Pakistani public has really changed its minds about the Taliban, Al Qaeda.

“The operations the Pakistani military is undertaking are no longer seen as, well, this is just doing something America wants. Now, it’s seen as being in Pakistan’s national interest,” he said.

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