Quoting “an official,” a front page story in Pakistan’s leading English news daily, Dawn, claimed on Saturday that the United States has vacated all airbases in Pakistan, except the Shamsi airbase: “… the airbases near Jacobabad, Pasni, and Dalbandin had been vacated by the Americans ‘a long time ago’… Sources said the Shahbaz airbase near Jacobabad, about 480 kms north of Karachi which was the last airbase vacated by US forces, preceded by the ones near Pasni and Dalbandin.”

This is contrary to a public statement by Pakistan’s Defence Minister in December 2009 on a Talk Show, reported among others by The Nation at the time:

“Defence Minister Ch Ahmad Mukhtar, while responding to former CGS [Chief of General Staff] Lt Gen (retd) Shahid Aziz in a TV interview, has conceded that the airbases at Jacobabad and Pasni continue to be used by US forces in the area without any fresh agreement, in continuance of the agreement made during the Musharraf era.”

To resolve these contrary statements, let us consider a quote from a September 2008 article by Tom Engelhardt:

“There are 194 countries on the planet (more or less), and officially 39 of them have American “facilities,” large and/or small. But those are only the bases the Pentagon officially acknowledges. Others simply aren’t counted, either because, as in the case of Jordan, a country finds it politically preferable not to acknowledge such bases; because, as in the case of Pakistan, the American military shares bases that are officially Pakistani; or because bases in war zones, no matter how elaborate, somehow don’t count.”

In other words, like the drone attacks that were initially claimed to be at the behest of Pakistan by Gen. Musharraf, the airbases that the United States has now agreed to  “share” with Pakistan are said to have been “vacated” by the United States. The fact is that the United States has not “vacated” any bases; it has allowed Pakistan to “partially reclaim” some of these bases that are now “shared” bases. This is not new; as Khalid Hasan had noted in a 2008 article:

“In late December 2001, Pakistan notified the US that the bases at Jacobabad and Pasni might be needed by the Pakistan Air Force, in the wake of rising tensions between India and Pakistan. The facilities were partially reclaimed by Pakistan, and as of early January 2002, both Pakistani and American forces were operating at the two airfields. The US military retained exclusive use of the Dalbandin and Shamsi bases.”

More importantly, no one disputes that the Shamsi airbase continues to be an exclusively American airbase, where no civil or military officer of the sovereign government of Pakistan is allowed without American permission. Shamsi was used for the 2001 American operations to overthrow the Taliban but the Pakistan Government claimed the US left in 2006. However, The Times of London exposed the reality with evidence of a contract to deliver 730,000 gallons of aviation fuel, worth $3.2 million, to Shamsi.

In addition to Shamsi, the United States reportedly controls the following (“shared”) airbases in Pakistan: Dalbandin, Jacobabad, and Pasni.