Pakistan Shamsi Airbase in Balochistan, Home of U.S. Assassination Drones

The U.S. won’t pay enough money to keep Assassination Drones at Shamsi Airbase in Balochistan, Pakistan? This was exposed for a different reason.

Here’s today’s story in Dawn. com, followed by a story in The Times, from February 17, 2009 about the CIA having Drones at Shamsi Airbase in Balochistan for a long time. Who is fooling whom? Pakistan lands are being used by the U.S. to attack Afghanistan and villages in Pakistan with Assassination Drones. We are at war in Pakistan. Make that now officially Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, our war fronts, now three of them. The Pakistani population will not stand for foreign troops to be on their lands. This will cause the downfall of President Zardari and his government.
There is a “silent coup” going on in Pakistan.

MMQ1 Assassination Predator Drones at Shamsi Airbase, Feb. 2006 Photo, Google Earth, The Times

From Dawn. com:
US forces using Shamsi airbase in Balochistan

ISLAMABAD: The Shamsi airbase in Balochistan is being used by American forces for logistical purposes but the government is not satisfied with payments for the use of the facility, disclosed the defence minister.

Talking exclusively to DawnNews, Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar said that the US was still using the Shamsi airbase, however, the govt is not satisfied with payments for its use. Earlier, the US was also using the Jacobabad Airbase and Pasni for its operations in Afghanistan.

Just a day earlier, the defence minister had also admitted the existence of the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta Shura for the first time but said that the security forces had taken on the Quetta Shura and damaged it to such an extent that it no longer posed any threat.

However, until this admission by the defence minister, the government had so far denied the existence of any Taliban leadership or the Quetta Shura in Balochistan’s capital.—DawnNews

From The Times:
February 17, 2009 Secrecy and denial as Pakistan lets CIA use airbase to strike militants (view video at link)

The CIA is secretly using an airbase in southern Pakistan to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan, a Times investigation has found. The Pakistani and US governments have repeatedly denied that Washington is running military operations, covert or otherwise, on Pakistani territory — a hugely sensitive issue in the predominantly Muslim country.

The Pakistani Government has also repeatedly demanded that the US halt drone attacks on northern tribal areas that it says have caused hundreds of civilian casualties and fuelled anti-American sentiment. But The Times has discovered that the CIA has been using the Shamsi airfield — originally built by Arab sheikhs for falconry expeditions in the southwestern province of Baluchistan — for at least a year. The strip, which is about 30 miles from the Afghan border, allows US forces to launch a Drone within minutes of receiving actionable intelligence as well as allowing them to attack targets further afield.

It was known that US special forces used Shamsi during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but the Pakistani Government declared publicly in 2006 that the Americans had left it and two other airbases. Key to the Times investigation is the unexplained delivery of 730,000 gallons of F34 aviation fuel to Shamsi. Details were found on the website of the Pentagon’s fuel procurement agency.

The Defence Energy Support Centre site shows that a civilian company, Nordic Camp Supply (NCS), was contracted to deliver the fuel, worth $3.2 million, from Pakistan Refineries near Karachi. It also shows the fuel was delivered last year, when the United States escalated drone attacks on Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, allegedly killing several top Taleban and al-Qaeda targets, but also many civilians.

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