Pakistan to get live feed from UAVs looking for Taliban

NY Times:

As Pakistan escalates military operations against a top Taliban leader, the United States has resumed secret military surveillance drone flights over the country’s tribal areas to provide Pakistani commanders with a wide array of videos and other information on militants, according to American and Pakistani officials.

The sharing of real-time video feeds, communications intercepts and other information with Pakistan’s military is considered essential in the country’s campaign to help hunt down the Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, and destroy his hideouts and forces in the country’s northwest, the officials said.

The increased intelligence cooperation comes as the Obama administration is also speeding the delivery of transport helicopters, body armor and other equipment that Pakistan’s military has requested to help combat Mr. Mehsud and to prepare for a major offensive in the militant leader’s stronghold in South Waziristan, a mountainous region abutting the border with Afghanistan.

The noncombat surveillance flights along the border are different from the flights of armed C.I.A.-operated drones that have attacked several Taliban targets in recent months and days. Last Tuesday, an American drone strike on a funeral in Pakistan’s tribal areas missed Mr. Mehsud by hours, a Pakistani security official said.

Responding to Pakistan’s renewed request for sophisticated surveillance information gets around, at least for the moment, the tensions surrounding the administration’s refusal to grant repeated requests by President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan that his country be given its own armed Predator drones to attack fighters of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the mountainous tribal areas.

American intelligence operatives who conduct the armed drone flights inside Pakistan remain opposed to joint operations with Pakistani intelligence services, pointing out that past attempts were failures. Several years ago, American officials gave Pakistan advance word of planned Predator attacks but stopped the practice after the information was leaked to militants.

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The agreement allows the Pakistani military to request that the American military drones fly noncombat surveillance missions over certain swaths of territory in South Waziristan where it suspects militant activity, the American official said. Video feeds from the drones are relayed to a joint coordination center at a border crossing at the Khyber Pass, where a Pakistani military team monitors the video and sends it to command centers in Pakistan, the official said.

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It makes sense to help Pakistan go after our common enemy, particularly Mehsud who is responsible for mass murder attacks on both sides of the border. I suspect he also has significant ties to al Qaeda.

Pakistan is unlikely to get its own Predators while they are in such short supply for US needs. The plants that make them are working around the clock and still cannot keep up with demand.

The Times makes an interesting distinction between the CIA flights which target specific terrorist and the military intelligence flights. The military is the one that denies involvment in the attacks and the CIA is the one that refuses to comment.