Pakistan has asked the CIA to all but shut down its operations in that country, demanding that the U.S. intelligence agency pull out 335 officers and contractors currently based there. Included in that number are Special Forces advisers to the Pakistani security forces. Even in the worst days of the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States regularly declared each other’s spies persona non grata, there was never an expulsion on this scale. And let’s not forget that Pakistan is supposedly an ally.
Islamabad’s immediate pretext for the expulsions is an American contractor’s shooting and killing of two Pakistanis on January 17, 2011. It’s been reported in the press that the contractor had been working for the CIA. But other reasons cited in that country’s press run the gamut, from anger over American “mercenaries” capriciously killing Pakistanis, to a suspicion that the CIA’s real mission in to seize the country’s nuclear weapons. And there’s also been the old, lingering suspicion that the CIA somehow meddles in Pakistani politics.
