Tacit Pak agreement on U.S. drone strikes revealed in secret CIA memos

Secret Pakistani-CIA memos have revealed that its government has tacitly agreed to the United States drone program for years, despite publicly denouncing the CIA's air strikes on its tribal regions as a threat to the country's sovereignty.

Top-secret CIA documents showed that top officials of Pakistan received classified briefings on drone strikes and also the casualty counts post-strikes on a routine basis, the Washington Post reports.

The files included maps, as well as before-and-after aerial photos of targeted compounds by dozens of drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal region from 2007 to 2011, which were prepared by the CIA's Counter-terrorism Center specifically to be shared with Islamabad.

The files also exposed the explicit nature of a secret arrangement struck between the two countries over the existence of the drone program, the report added.

The U.S. has been claiming since the beginning that the drone strikes only aimed to kill alleged al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and boasted repeatedly on its success in killing dozens of them in such strikes.

While Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif requested U.S. President Barack Obama to put an end to drone strikes at the White House on Wednesday, Obama refused saying that the drone program was being successfully used to kill targeted militant operatives in Pakistan.