'Drone strikes launched from inside Pakistan'

Washington: A senior US lawmaker said on Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an air base inside that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counterterrorism collaboration with the United States.

The disclosure by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a US official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.

At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise at Pakistani opposition to the ongoing campaign of Predator-launched CIA missile strikes against Islamic extremist targets along Pakistan's northwest border.

"As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said.

The basing of the pilotless aircraft in Pakistan suggests a much deeper relationship with the United States on counterterrorism matters than has been publicly acknowledged. Such an arrangement would be at odds with protests lodged by officials in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, and could inflame anti-American sentiment in the country.

The CIA declined to comment, but former US intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, confirmed that Feinstein's account was accurate. Philip J LaVelle, a spokesman for Feinstein, said her comment was based solely on previous news reports that Predators were operated from bases near Islamabad.

"We strongly object to Senator Feinstein's remarks being characterised as anything other than a reference to an article that appeared last March in The Washington Post," LaVelle said. Feinstein did not refer to newspaper accounts during the hearing.

Many counterterrorism experts have assumed that the aircraft were operated from US military installations in Afghanistan, and remotely piloted from locations in the United States. Experts said the disclosure could create political problems for the government in Islamabad, which is considered relatively weak.

The attacks are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, in part because of the high number of civilian casualties inflicted in dozens of strikes.