Pakistani political analyst Ahmed Quraishi believes the order from Pakistan’s government telling US forces to vacate an airbase in the country's southwest has come as a direct retaliation to US military actions in the region.
Also, he says there is another reason why US forces are not welcome in Pakistan anymore."The US is no longer paying for using Pakistani facilities and Pakistani bases,” he said. “The name for these payments was CSF – that’s the Coalition Support Fund – and the US was paying Pakistan under this heading for the past decade.”“US officials have not said ‘we are not going to pay you,’ but what they’ve said is ‘we are trying, we have some problems in the Congress in releasing the funds,’” he added. “So the Pakistani officials apparently got the message.”Pakistan has instructed the US to shut down and leave the Shamsi air base on June 29. The facility has been serving as a launch pad for Washington's drone attacks against Taliban and Al-Qaeda targets on the Afghan border.Relations between the two allies have been on a downward spiral for months, particularly since American forces killed Osama bin Laden in early May.Ahmed Quraishi believes that Pakistan is edging towards declaring an end to its participation in the war on terror as it has existed since 2001."One of the countries that did not [review their participation in Afghanistan] over the past decade was Pakistan,” he said. “And maybe Pakistan would either pull out of this war or redefine its engagement.”Ahmed Quraishi is one of the many Pakistani commentators who believe that one of the shortcuts to controlling violence and extremism on the border is to end the war on terror in the way the US military has been conducting it.“One of the main reasons for the continuation of violent activity on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border is the mess that the US military has created inside Afghanistan over the past decade,” he said. “One step forward is of course what president Obama has declared, but this is the words, we are yet to see real actions on the ground.”“Afghanistan is a large project for the CIA,” he added. “And we want to see whether they would really wind down.”