The government of Pakistan was not informed before the U.S. targeted the Taliban’s top leader Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansour last week, a senior U.S. military official has confirmed to the Washington Examiner.
The strike was carried out late Friday night Pakistan time in a remote area of Baluchistan province near the border with Afghanistan, and killed Mansour. He took over the Taliban last year, after it was publicly revealed the previous leader Mullah Omar had died in 2013.
Pakistan’s foreign ministry denounced the attack in a statement Sunday, saying the drone strike violated Pakistani sovereignty.
The Pentagon downplayed the official reaction, implying that Pakistan’s leaders were well aware the U.S. would take a shot at Mansour, if the opportunity arose.
“We have an ongoing dialogue with the Pakistanis and the Afghan government on all matters on which we have mutual interest. We have had ongoing discussion with them to include people we’re targeting, to include this individual, and we had conversations with them both before and after,” said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Defense Department spokesman.
But the military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, would not say why Pakistan was not informed until after the fact. In the past, the U.S. military has not trusted the Pakistani Intelligence Services not to compromise the secrecy of the mission.
That was the case in 2011 when the U.S. also did not inform Pakistan about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden until well after it was over.
The official also argued the Friday attack did not constitute a shift in U.S. policy to more aggressively target the Taliban, with whom technically the U.S. is not at war.
The Pentagon said the drone strike was conducted by U.S. special operations forces, under their existing authority to protect U.S. troops, and was in response to “specific imminent threats,” that Mansour was plotting.
“This is not a change in authorities at all. This is us continuing to do what we’ve been doing which is conduct strikes of a defensive nature when we see anybody, whether it’s Taliban or anybody else doing things of a threatening nature to U.S. and coalition forces,” Davis said.
