You Don’t Have to Go Home But You Can’t Drone Here: U.S. Evicted From Secret Pakistani Air Base

December 12, 2011, 12:15am

It would almost be funny if it weren’t so grimly prophetic: The U.S. cannot catch a break with its unmanned aerial vehicles.

If the drones aren’t sick or falling from the sky, they’re (maybe) being downed in Iran by Iranian hackers or they’re (well, NATO’s drones, to be fair) blowing up at least 25 Pakistani soldiers along the border with Afghanistan. Officials in Pakistan were so incensed at this last blunder that late last month they ordered the Central Intelligence Agency, who’d been conducting drone strikes somewhat secretively out of Shamsi, an air base in western Pakistan, to get the hell out and fast.

Videos by VICE

And so they did. A final flight carrying American personnel and equipment flew out of Shamsi sometime yesterday.

Which brings the known U.S. drone-base site count down to paltry dozens – and that might be low-balling it.

The Shamsi pull-out may be a clear and stunning admission of tail-between-the-legs disgrace, true. But as one high-ranking American counterterrorism official tells The New York Times, vacating the base will by no means end U.S. drone-ops in Pakistan, a country that publicly criticizes the U.S.‘s unmanned aerial meddling while backing strikes in secret. (See rare, graphic photos from the black hole that is Pakistan’s drone theatre here.) “The United States retains robust capabilities to fight Al Qaeda,” the official says, “and its militant allies. Our operations will continue.”

It goes far beyond Pakistan’s craggy tribal regions. The U.S. has flown drones in at least five other countries – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia – and is assembling a constellation of graysite drone bases in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula to support its ramped-up shadow war against Islamic militants in Somalia and Yemen.

One of these bases is in Ethiopia; a second in Yemen; and a third in Seychelles, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, where U.S. officials, according to cables leaked via WikiLeaks, pleaded with island leaders to keep the counterterrorism missions under wraps. There are murmurings that a fourth CIA base may be occupying an air strip in Saudi Arabia. It’s known, too, that the Americans have launched, or are launching, both surveillance and weaponized drones from bases in Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Uzbekistan, and Djibouti.

These are just a few of the bases we actually know (precious little) about. Remember that the U.S. has some 1,000 military bases flung across the world, many of which can, and no doubt will, house drones.

A Reaper drone suns itself in Seychelles (via U.S. Africa Command)

Of course, domestic bases are critical in sustaining the drone wars. It used to be that the Air Force was willing to open up some of these UAV flight centers – there are at least 15 of them – however slightly, for transparency’s sake. After filling out some forms of intent and being transferred over the phone 400 times a reporter could, with some luck, be allowed to scope out the day-to-day joystick riding at, say, Creech air base in the Nevadan dessert. But now the USAF is just straight up keeping out the press, in effect graysiting drone homes on U.S. soil.

So really, how embarrassed is the U.S. right now? Probably really embarrassed. Officials in the Obama administration and with the Pentagon are declining to publicly comment on getting booted from Shamsi. As if to say OK, fair enough, we’ll just shut up and stop pretending to be at least sort of open about some of our most nefarious engagements, now.