Nearly a month of protests in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakthunkhwah (K-P) Province has brought NATO supplies into and out of occupied Afghanistan to a screeching halt, and K-P officials say that’s not changing.
The K-P coalition government’s officials issued a statement of support for the protests, saying they will continue until the US ends its drone strikes against Pakistani territory.
The protests began after the November 20 US strike in Hangu, which destroyed a religious school and killed eight people. Last week, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was in Pakistan demanding the government to immediate end the protests, and threatening the revocation of $1.6 billion in US aid if they are allowed to continue.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had initially condemned the protests and was reportedly planning to shut them down, but the K-P provincial government’s support is going to make that awfully difficult to do, and with the drone strikes hugely unpopular in Pakistan, the sympathy domestically is all with the demonstrators.
Whats Chuck Hagel going to do now?
Obviously his "bully boy" tactics have had no effect so far because Pakistan's PM has lied to his own People and now sits between a rock and a hard place.
He dare not order an end to the protests as his own leadership will then be in peril.