In my piece, I raised an obvious, yet often overlooked, issue when considering and planning for the role of the U.S. military in Afghanistan beyond 2014: "The sovereign Afghan government holds the decisive veto power--and any U.S. officials who believe that President Hamid Karzai or his successor will give the United States carte blanche to use Afghanistan as a platform for CIA drone strikes or Special Forces raids into Pakistan will be sorely disappointed."

Yesterday, Al Jazeera interviewed Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmay Rasool on the prospect of U.S. drone strikes after 2014. He responded:

"Afghan soil will not be used against any country in the region. The presence of the remaining forces in Afghanistan is for training, equipping and securing Afghanistan's security. It has been mentioned, it is going to be mentioned, that this force is not for use against any neighbors in the region."

The Afghan government's final decision on whether to permit U.S. drone strikes and/or special operations raids could change several times over the next twenty months. If Rasool's statement becomes official Afghan policy, however, it will be extremely difficult for the United States to sustain drone strikes against suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan in the future.

This shift could have serious consequences for CIA drone operations. It is hard to envision the Pakistani government re-permitting drone strikes from its territory. Last summer, Pakistan evicted the remaining U.S. personnel from Shamsi Airbase in the Balochistan province, where drones were based since as early as 2006. In recent months, the prime minister, foreign minister, and a parliamentary committee on national security have repeatedly condemned U.S. drone strikes as violations of Pakistani sovereignty.

Last week, an anonymous U.S. official stated: "If the main concern is sovereignty, the Pakistanis might want to deal with the al-Qaeda foreigners who are living within their borders and planning attacks on Pakistan, their neighbors, and the West. These are the true threats to Pakistani sovereignty." For the past ten years, the U.S. government has attempted to tell Pakistan what should be its security threats and how to conceive of their sovereign rights. This has failed.

The United States could attempt to broker an agreement with India to host a CIA drone base for strikes into Pakistan post-2014. However, it is highly unlikely that India would want to aggravate its relationship with its nuclear-armed neighbor and longstanding enemy. Moreover, it is not outside the realm of possibility that Pakistan could misinterpret a U.S. drone for an Indian cruise missile, potentially carrying a nuclear warhead.

The United States could also launch drone strikes from naval platforms in the Arabian Sea. This would be a long distance to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), where most of the strikes have occurred, however, and again carries the risk of misinterpretation.