The US Is Droning Pakistan's Populated Areas (Again)

Sometime early this morning, a volley of missiles obliterated a madrasa in the Hangu district of northwest Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The strike ended a three-week lull in unmanned aerial attacks inside Pakistan, and is believed to have been carried out by US forces. At least six people died in the blast, their bodies charred beyond recognition.

It's not the first time Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, an otherwise populated region (Peshawar, its capital city, is home to 3.6 million people) has found itself in the crosshairs of the globe-spanning shadow wars. But it's been quite some time since it was last rocked by Hellfire: A drone strike hit Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's Bannu district in 2008. That makes today's strike the second such attack to have taken place beyond Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal region, which straddles theAfghan border, since US drone strikes began in Pakistan in earnest in 2004, the Associated Press reports.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province is considerably more populous and developed than any of the FATA, or Federally Adminstered Trible Areas, those craggy and remote tracts that have beared the brunt of US drone strikes. In other words, if we're to believe the US is behind the madrasa attack—the CIA's hunter-killer drones have enjoyed free reign in Pakistan over the past year, so who's to say it isn't?—then it's once again targeting Pakistan's so-called "settled" areas.

Whether it's a one-off hit or a harbinger of things to come is anyone's guess. But cast against the backdrop of a precipitous drop in American drone activity throughout Pakistan, it brings the whole bloody awful mess into even sharper relief. A resumption not only of drone strikes writ large but strikes in borderline-bustling cities, no less, could very well heighten already tense friction between Islamabad and Washington.

To wit: Today's strike came mere hours after Pakistan foreign policy chief Sartaj Aziz's statement that "the US had promised to not conduct drone strikes while the Pakistan government tries to engage the Taliban in peace talks," reports Al Jazeera. As of this writing, the US has kept mum on Aziz's remarks.

It's an open secret, of course, that Islamabad has made a habit of greenlighting US drone attacks within Pakistan while publicly blasting the strikes. (Curiously, Islamabad stated last month that only 3 percent of drone casualties have been civilians.)  While it's unclear, then, that that's the case here, that Islamabad did in fact sign off on the Hangu strike, Pakistaini officials were nevertheless quick to criticize the attack, which along with three students and two teachers took out two militants allegedly linked to the Haqqani network, the AP reports.

Today's stikes "are a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and territorial integrity," Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement released this morning. "There is an across the board consensus in Pakistan that these drone strikes must end… It has been consistently maintained that drone strikes are counter-productive, entail loss of innocent civilian lives and have human rights and humanitarian implications."

Just ask Shaukat Yousufzai, health minister for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government. "Now no place is safe. The drones are now firing missiles outside the tribal areas," Yousufzai,referring to what happened this morning in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, told Pakistan's Dunya TV. "It is Hangu today. Tomorrow it can be Karachi, Lahore or any other place."

@thebanderson