Washington-The Pentagon refused on Monday to comment on the charges that the brother of a man, who was killed in a USA drone strike alongside the Taliban’s slain chief Mullah Akthar Mansour, has pressed against US officials.
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Azam’s brother, Muhammad Qasim, filed the complaint accusing “unnamed US officials” of terrorism, murder and damage to property.
If Pakistani authorities did secretly support Mansour’s killing, this “shows that Pakistan is supporting the Afghan peace process by removing a Taliban leader who was a barrier to peace”, Rahmini said. US officials described the car’s driver as a “second male combatant” but according to Pakistani security officials he was a chauffeur named Mohammad Azam who worked for the Al Habib rental company based out of Quetta.
“All indicators confirm that the person killed in the drone strike was Mullah Mansour, who was travelling on a fake identity”, the adviser to the PM on foreign affairs had confirmed. There are effectively two schools of thought on the subject: the first believes that the USA kept the Pakistanis in the dark, a la the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in 2011. Despite cooperating with the United States in targeting al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban leadership, the Pakistani military had been protecting the Afghan Taliban, refusing strikes in Baluchistan.
The “we got him” rhetoric quickly overshadowed the fact that Mansour’s taxi driver, who had unwittingly picked him up at a border crossing between Pakistan and Iran, was also killed in the drone strike.
Last week’s military statement said General Sharif denounced “such acts of sovereignty violations” as ‘detrimental to relations and counter-productive for the ongoing peace process’.
But he had also said that final announcement will made after DNA tests.
There is also a growing feeling in Washington that Islamabad contributed to the inability of the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces to achieve victory in Afghanistan against the Afghan Taliban by allowing the later to use sanctuaries in Pakistan.
Nawaz Sharif before becoming Prime Minister, he said, had unequivocally stated that drone attacks will not be tolerated. He said the death of Mansour sent a clear and direct message to the world that the US would continue to stand with Afghanistan. A New York Times piece confirms that the USA told Pakistan “several weeks ago” that Mullah Mansour was a target and that the Pakistanis provided the U.S.
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Although Taliban new leader Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada has yet to make statement on war or peace, his fighters in tit-for-tat strikes, have speeded up offensives against government interests, and according to the outfit’s website scores of security personnel were killed over the past week across Afghanistan.
