Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry has summoned a top US diplomat today and lodged a formal protest over yesterday’s US drone strike on an abandoned Pakistani high school in North Waziristan, killing four people.
The Foreign Ministry also issued a statement warning that the the attack was a “total contravention of international law and established norms of interstate relations.” It was the first attack since Pakistan’s parliament conditioned the the normalization of diplomatic ties on ending the US strikes.
The summoning also complicates White House claims that its drone program is legal, since it insisted this was predicated on the approval of the nation being attacked, and Pakistan is clearly no longer even turning a blind eye to such strikes.
Pakistani officials have repeatedly issued public demands for the attacks to stop recently, but summoning a diplomat and issuing a formal protest is a further step, suggesting that patience is running extremely thin.
