The drones are back. After a long pause, the past week has seen a flurry of strikes in Fata — and, as ever, there is little independently verifiable information from the scene of the attacks; nor are the Pakistan and US governments shedding much light on who specifically the targets are.

Yet, for a programme that is mostly murky and always controversial, there are several patterns that can be discerned over the years in the strikes.

Connecting those dots, it appears at the moment that there is renewed cooperation between the Pakistan military and the US administration/CIA on drones, for there has been very little by way of fierce verbal pushback by the Pakistani government over the latest strikes. Relative silence can certainly be interpreted as, at the very least, tacit acceptance and, possibly, active cooperation between the countries. In fact, from the general location of the strikes and their emphasis on North Waziristan where the Pakistan Army is actively engaged in fighting militants, it would appear that active cooperation is taking place — for surely neither the US nor Pakistan could possibly want an errant US-fired missile hitting a Pakistani military target.

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Much of what can bring Pakistan and the US closer together in fighting militancy and terrorism is good for the bilateral relationship as well as a boon for counterterrorism in the region. However, the connection between the tactical and the strategic has often been missing, so that while periods of intense drone strikes have damaged militancy networks in Fata, especially the two Waziristan agencies, they have never really extended to a convergence of overall interests of Pakistan and the US.

There is a sense then that the drone strikes programme and its details are handled in a compartmentalised way, where the only spill-over has been on the negative side rather than the positive side of developing a wider partnership with shared security interests.

Nevertheless, with Pakistan at long last having launched an operation in North Waziristan — thereby necessarily disrupting the operations of Afghan-centric militants with sanctuaries in North Waziristan — and the US mission in Afghanistan vastly decreasingly at least militarily by the end of the year, there is also a possibility that renewed security cooperation, on drone strikes, for example, could lead to a closer understanding on other critical security matters.

A close Pakistan-US relationship may be anathema to some sections of the state and society here and Pakistan may have few real friends left in the US. But impatience, mistrust and suspicion cannot obfuscate the underlying truth: the US and Pakistan need each other. Going it alone has worked for neither Pakistan nor the US — a reality borne out not just by the experience of the past decade and a half but over the course of this country’s history. Better to cooperate than to posture — especially when it’s the militants who stand to gain from the latter.

Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2014