Pakistan bends again as it grants US warplanes access to its skies

Furore over speculation Islamabad may have secretly agreed to lease an airbase to Washington comes after American jets used Pakistani airspace to bomb Taliban forces

This is Pakistan’s second change of tack to fix ties with the US, after army chief shifted national security policy away from Afghanistan and conflict with India towards trade and investment with Eurasia

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An unmanned US Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field in southern Afghanistan. Photo: “AP

Published: 8:00pm, 1 Jun 2021Updated: 10:19pm, 1 Jun 2021

In a second major move in recent months to fix ties with the United States, Pakistan has granted permission for American warplanes to use its airspace in support of forces fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The reinstatement of a 20-year-old arrangement saw Pakistani airspace used by American warplanes on at least one occasion during the first week of May to bomb Taliban forces engaged in a major anti-government offensive in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, several renowned Pakistani journalists recently revealed on social media.

They said the resumption of US military air operations over the skies of Pakistan’s sparsely populated western Balochistan province came after a request from Washington to restore access to the Shamsi airbase, 400km northwest of the Chinese-operated Arabian Sea port of Gwadar.

The US was granted use of the airbase at Shamsi, and another at Jacobabad in southern Sindh province, by military dictator Pervez Musharraf after US-led forces occupied Afghanistan in 2002, as Musharraf wrote in his memoir In The Line Of Fire, published in 2006 while he was still president.

After Musharraf stepped down in August 2008, the Central Intelligence Agency continued to use the Shamsi airbase until December 2011 as a maintenance stop for Predator drones carrying out surveillance flights and missile strikes against Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan insurgents and their al-Qaeda allies in the North and South Waziristan tribal regions bordering eastern Afghanistan.

The arrangement was not publicly acknowledged by Pakistan’s government until December 2011, when it announced the expulsion of the CIA from the Shamsi airbase soon after 24 of its soldiers were killed in a clash with US-led forces on the border with Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s former president and military ruler Pervez Musharraf. Photo: AP

Two high-ranking officials, speaking off the record in Islamabad, said they understood that Washington had made a request for the use of Shamsi airbase, amid a sudden flurry of meetings between Pentagon leaders and Pakistan’s powerful army chief of staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa that started in March.