Iran To Afghanistan: Stop U.S. Drone Flights

Iran escalated its confrontation with the United States on Thursday over the captured  American spy drone launched from Afghanistan, warning the Afghan government to halt such surveillance flights.

Any further flights would be regarded as a hostile act, the Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said in an interview with Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency.

His warning threatened to drag Afghanistan directly into the conflict for the first time.

There was no immediate response from the United States or Afghanistan to Mr. Salehi’s admonition. But Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, visiting with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai in Kabul on Wednesday, said that surveillance flights over Iran would continue despite the loss of the drone. Mr. Karzai was more circumspect, saying Afghanistan wanted “the best of relations” with all its neighbors.

Iran has said it captured the drone — a sophisticated, batwinged RQ-170 model with radar-evading features — by way of an electronic attack on the aircraft’s navigation system as it hovered over northern Iran on Dec. 4, causing it to land without damage.

The drone was operated remotely by C.I.A. controllers in Afghanistan, in what American officials have acknowledged was part of a stepped-up effort to monitor suspected Iranian nuclear sites. The officials have said the drone was lost through an unspecified technical malfunction.

“We have called on the Afghan government to seriously pursue the case, and under no circumstances let such events happen again, as such events will be regarded as unfriendly,” Mr. Salehi said. He called the drone flight a “hostile and aggressive act.”

COLONEL SIXX:  IN OTHER WORDS, IF YOU CAN’T CONTROL THE PEOPLE IN YOUR COUNTRY THAT HAVE TURNED YOU INTO WHORES,  WE WILL BECOME YOUR NEW PIMP!

Last week Iranian television showed images of what it said was  the captured drone, apparently intact, and called it an intelligence windfall that Iranian experts would reverse-engineer.

Iran reacted with a mixture of outrage and incredulity after President Obama said on Monday that the United States had asked Iran to return the drone.

COLONEL SIXX:  IRAN LAUGHS AT OBAMA.  BUT OBAMA IS GOING TO PUT YOU IN JAIL FOR NO REASON,  AS LONG AS  HE WANTS TO,  AND YOU ARE HAPPY TO HAVE YOUR LAZY BOY AND THE REMOTE CONTROL.

“That is a shameless demand raised by the U.S. President,” Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hejazi, the deputy chief of staff of the Iranian military, was quoted by the semiofficial Fars News agency as saying. “They raise such claims instead of apologizing to our Islamic establishment and people.”