Drone strikes continue in Pakistan as Senate panel cuts aid
he helped the CIA locate Osama bin Laden’s hide-out in Pakistan last year. Inwashington, administration officials and members of Congress reacted with fury over the sentencing.
The Senate, which had already slashed foreign aid to Pakistan, moved on Thursday to cut another $ 33 million in military assistance, $ 1 million for each year Afridi was sentenced to prison. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said: “All of us are outraged at the imprisonment and sentence of some 33 years, virtually a death sentence, to the doctor in Pakistan who was instrumental — not on purpose, but was instrumental and completely innocent of any wrongdoing” in the raid that killed bin Laden.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also condemned the sentence, saying the administration had raised the case with Pakistan and would continue. “We regret both the fact that he was convicted and the severity of his sentence,” she said at the State Department. “His help, after all, was instrumental in taking down one of the world’s most notorious murderers. That was clearly in Pakistan’s interests as well as ours and the rest of the world.”
In northwestern Pakistan, a U. S. drone struck militant hideouts, killing seven to 10 people believed to have been militants, Pakistani officials and local residents said Thursday.
Thursday’s strike occurred in Hasso Khe in the Lar Dewar area of North Waziristan, an area considered a redoubt of local and foreign militants. Most of the militants killed in the strike were Uzbek fighters who belonged to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, said local residents who were reached by telephone.
A strike the day before, in the village of Datta Khel Kalai, also in North Waziristan, killed four suspected militants, The Associated Press reported, citing Pakistani intelligence officials.
The U. S. drone strikes are immensely unpopular in Pakistan and have caused increasing friction between the two countries. While the United States views the remotely piloted aircraft as vital in the fight against militants, the drones are seen as a breach of national sovereignty that also cause civilian deaths.
Politicians across the Pakistani political spectrum have been unanimous in their criticism of the strikes. A spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Affairs Ministry on Thursday called the continued strikes against international law, adding: “They are illegal, counterproductive and totally unacceptable.”
The Pakistani Parliament has made ending the drone campaign a requirement for restoring access to NATO’S supply lines that run through Pakistan to Afghanistan, despite signals from senior government and military officials last week that they were ready to allow a deal to go through, albeit only at a much higher transit fee for each NATO container.