U.S. drones strike Pakistani militants after six-month lull

LONDON — A U.S. drone struck a militant compound in Pakistan’s tribal belt for the second time in 12 hours on Thursday, killing at least 10 suspected members of the Haqqani network in a suddenly intense resurgence of the controversial CIA offensive in Pakistan.

The U.S. drone strikes, after an almost six-month lull in the operations while Pakistani officials tried and failed to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban, come as Pakistan is mulling a new offensive of its own against militants in the northwestern tribal belt.

But early news reports Thursday offered conflicting comments about whether the Pakistani authorities might have approved the drone strikes or were working in tandem with the Americans — a politically caustic idea in a country where the CIA program is widely hated.

The strikes, both of which were reported to have killed Haqqani operatives, also came two weeks after the release of the U.S. soldier Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had been a hostage of the Haqqanis for five years. A former U.S. military commander has suggested that Bergdahl’s safety now would give more freedom to strike at the Haqqanis.

Pakistani security officials said Thursday that a CIA drone had fired six missiles at the compound 4 miles north of Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan. The attack, which occurred just after 2 a.m. Thursday, targeted a building and an explosives-laden truck parked outside, they said.

Seven hours earlier, a U.S. attack on the same compound had killed at least four people. Initial reports from that attack described the dead as mostly ethnic Uzbek fighters, but the second strike appeared to have been aimed squarely at the Haqqani militants.

The Wednesday and Thursday attacks marked an emphatic resumption of the U.S. drone program in Pakistan’s tribal belt following a nearly six-month hiatus. The last known CIA strike inside Pakistan took place Dec. 25.