Predators
Also by Brian Glyn Williams
Afghanistan Declassified: A Guide to America’s Longest War
The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience
and the Forging of a Nation
The Last Warlord: The Life and Legend of Dostum, the Afghan Warrior
Who Led US Special Forces to Topple the Taliban Regime
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Predators
The CIA’s Drone War on al Qaeda
BRIAN GLYN WILLIAMS
© 2013 by Brian Glyn Williams
All rights reserved
Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press
Maps courtesy of Canguo Liu.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Brian Glyn.
Predators : the CIA’s drone war on al Qaeda / Brian Glyn Williams. — First Edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61234-617-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-61234-618-2 (electronic)
1. Qaida (Organization) 2. Terrorism—Religious aspects. 3. Drone aircraft—United States. 4. War—Moral and ethical aspects—United States. I. Title.
HV6431.W5655 2013
327.127305491’1—dc23
2013006662
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.
Potomac Books
22841 Quicksilver Drive
Dulles, Virginia 20166
First Edition
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my wife, Feyza
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 The Death of a Terrorist
2 A History of the Pashtun Tribal Lands of Pakistan
3 Enter the Predator
4 Operation Enduring Freedom
5 Manhunt
6 The Drone War Begins
7 Who Is Being Killed in the Drone Strikes?
8 Spies, Lawyers, Terrorists, and Secret Bases
9 The Argument for Drones
10 The Argument against Drones
11 The Future of Killer Drones
Appendix: Drone Specifications
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author
PREFACE
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States, the world’s lone remaining superpower, launched itself across the globe in a war against terrorists who had struck at its heart on September 11, 2001. Among the most novel aspects of this campaign was the use by an ostensibly civilian organization—the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—of a new generation of unmanned, remote-control planes known as drones to kill the enemy hiding out in remote sanctuaries in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. (The military has been in control of most drone operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.) Thousands of people, both terrorists and civilians, have been killed and many more continue to die in this aerial assassination campaign, yet there has been no thorough study of this remote-control warfare in remote lands to date. Critics and supporters of the drone killings debate the issue, often passionately, without having a basic outline of the vast covert operation.
As a historian I have made an effort in this book to fill this void, to record the history of what amounts to an all-out CIA drone war on the Taliban and al Qaeda in order to inform the debate on this controversial topic. In essence this book takes hundreds of disparate reports of drone attacks and weaves them together into one narrative. This work is not a polemic designed to cast moral aspersions on the campaign nor is it meant to condone it. Neither is it a study about the ethics and morality of this new cutting-edge killing technology. It is purely a record of these extraordinary events for the generation experiencing history’s first remote-controlled drone war. Proponents and opponents of the campaign can do with this story what they will.
But first a word of caution: Because the CIA, the primary organization that runs the drone operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, rarely acknowledges this covert counterterrorism campaign, this book is based entirely on open-source documents from the West and Pakistan. These sources can be flawed, but when taken together they are incredibly useful in providing new insights and the first overview of this murky chapter in the war on terrorism.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my parents, Gareth and Donna, who inspired me to study Muslim Eurasia in my youth and have continued to support me up until today. Thanks also to Feyza, my forbearing wife, for putting up with my obsession with drones these last few years. Teshekur (thanks) are also due to my parents-in-law, Feruzan and Kemal Altindag, who once again gave me a quiet place to write in their house on the coast of Turkey. I would also like to express my gratitude to Rafay Alem and his wife, Aysha, for letting me stay with them in their home in Pakistan. Tim Paicopolos did a masterful job of editing this volume, so I also owe him a debt of gratitude.
In this work I cite a drone study carried out in conjunction with my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, Avery Plaw and Matthew Fricker, so thanks to them as well. Thanks also to my chairmen/colleagues Len Travers and Mark Santow for providing me with a supportive, collegial environment in which to write this book. This work also benefited from the drone studies of Bill Roggio and Alexander Mayer at the indispensible Long War Journal, Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the New America Foundation, and Noah Shachtman and other writers at Wired, so thanks to them for their excellent research. And shukriya to my Pashtun driver, Saki, who risked his life driving me through the tribal zones of Pakistan. Thanks to Canguo Liu for creating the wonderful maps found in this book and to my colleague at the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth, Spencer Ladd, for recommending Liu. I would also like to thank Jason Seto for the constant barrage of stories related to drones he has sent me over the years. Lastly I would like to thank my former PhD advisers, Uli Schamiloglu and Kemal Karpat, for guiding me in my journey to understand the history of Muslims in Afghanistan and surrounding regions.
1
The Death of a Terrorist
Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world.
—Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud
It is perhaps the worst-kept secret in the war on terror. In 2004 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched what amounts to an all-out airborne war, its most extensive assassination campaign since the Vietnam War, against Taliban and al Qaeda members hiding out in Pakistan’s wild tribal zones. Thousands have been assassinated in this covert bombing campaign, which is being waged by remote-control drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), known as Predators and the more advanced Reapers. These high-tech weapons in the sky have indisputably killed hundreds of al Qaeda and Taliban leaders who are actively planning new terrorist attacks on the American homeland or on Coalition troops in neighboring Afghanistan. Whether acting in a “force protection” role against Taliban insurgents trying to cross the Afghan-Pakistani border and attack U.S. and Coalition troops operating in Afghanistan or attempting to disrupt al Qaeda’s future acts of mass-casualty terrorism, the UAV drones are merciless and efficient killers. The enemy never knows when or wher
e the machays (“wasps,” as they are known in the local Pashtun language) are going to strike next and lives in constant fear of being incinerated by Hellfire missiles fired by high-flying UAVs that are barely visible from the ground.
With their ability to loiter for up to twenty-four hours and use high-resolution cameras to follow their targets from afar, the UAV drones have added a level of precision to this bombing campaign that has never been seen in previous aerial campaigns. Whereas in earlier bombing campaigns high-flying jets dropped clumsy, unguided five-hundred-to-two-thousand-pound “dumb bombs” on their targets, the slower propeller-driven Predators and Reapers hover over their targets, track their “pattern-of-life movements” with high-resolution and infrared cameras, and fire smaller missiles and mini-bombs that are guided by lasers or satellites.
But as precise as they may be, the drones’ Hellfire or Scorpion missiles and Paveway guided bombs have also killed civilian bystanders. Scores of Pakistani tribesmen whose only crime was to be near a targeted al Qaeda convoy or Taliban hujra (compound or guest house) have been killed as unintentional collateral damage. The killing of Pakistani citizens on Pakistani soil by distrusted foreigners has, not surprisingly, caused a backlash of anti-Americanism in this proud country. The paradox then is that America’s most effective tool in killing high-value al Qaeda and Taliban targets may also be driving average Pakistanis to see the United States as their enemy. This could undermine the unstable pro-American government in this sprawling nuclear-armed country of 190 million people and inadvertently help recruit new terrorists.
SOUTH WAZIRISTAN AGENCY, PAKISTAN, AUGUST 5, 2009
This conundrum is best illustrated by the drone hunt to kill Pakistan’s most wanted man, Baitullah Mehsud. Mehsud was the leader of a coalition of Pakistani Taliban groups known as the Tehrek e Taliban e Pakistan (TTP). In 2007 Mehsud declared war on Pakistan and began to send waves of suicide bombers against Pakistani targets from his remote hideout in the mountainous tribal zones of Pakistan’s northwestern border with Afghanistan.1 These suicide bombers eventually killed thousands of Pakistanis.2 In one year alone (2009) Pakistani sources claimed that more than three thousand Pakistanis were killed by the Taliban.3 The murderous campaign was a slow-motion version of al Qaeda’s 2001 attack on the United States, and by 2008 Pakistan had surpassed Iraq as the number-one target for suicide bombers. No one seemed safe from the Pakistani Taliban terrorist mastermind who had no compunction about deliberately killing men, women, and children in his war against the “pro-American puppet” government of Pakistan.
Among Mehsud’s most famous victims was the former president of Pakistan, the wildly popular Benazir Bhutto, who had just returned from exile bravely promising to stand up to the Taliban “cancer” that was devouring her country. Although many conspiracy-oriented Pakistanis have blamed everyone from the Israelis to the Pakistani government itself for killing Bhutto in December 2007, Mehsud had loudly promised he would kill her if she returned to Pakistan, and he appears to have fulfilled his promise.4 Upon hearing of her death at the hands of his assassins, he is reported to have gloated, “Fantastic job. Very brave boys, the ones who killed her.”5
But Bhutto was not the only one to die in Mehsud’s bloody terror campaign. Mehsud’s fedayeen (suicide bombers) entered holy Sufi-mystic shrines, hospitals, factories, anti-Taliban jirgas (tribal meetings), mosques, Pakistani army and Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) bases, a Marriott hotel, polling stations, police recruitment posts, political rallies, refugee camps, and other public places and detonated themselves, slaughtering and maiming countless civilians. The unprecedented slaughter was a shock to many Pakistanis who had previously been tolerant of the Taliban. Mehsud’s objective seemed to be to shatter Pakistani civil society just as the insurgents had previously done in Iraq.
Although the Pakistani army made several halfhearted efforts to enter the untamed mountainous region from which Mehsud ran his terrorist state in the tribal province of South Waziristan, they were seemingly incapable of conquering his rugged realm. In fact, Mehsud’s hardy Taliban fighters beat the Pakistani army in several battles, on one occasion capturing more than two hundred Pakistani soldiers and beheading several of them on video.6 One of the oppressed people of South Waziristan claimed, “South Waziristan now seems like a state within the state, and Baitullah Mehsud is running this like a head of government. Now he’s an all-powerful man whose writ and command is visible across the tribal belt.”7
In his breakaway western realm Mehsud’s followers began to enforce a strict version of Islamic shariah law that was similar to the draconian system enforced by the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan prior to 2001’s Operation Enduring Freedom. Movie theaters, DVD stores, and girls’ schools were burned, television sets were destroyed as “satanic devices,” women caught in adultery (often something as innocuous as being caught in public with a man who was not their husband) were publicly stoned to death, those accused of stealing were arbitrarily executed, tribal leaders known as maliks were killed, men were forced to grow long Taliban-style beards, and a gloom settled on the province of South Waziristan and neighboring tribal regions conquered by the Pakistani Taliban. In essence, the secular system of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and the laws of Pakistan had been overturned in Mehsud’s mini-Talibanistan. The darkness of the Afghan Taliban had simply migrated across the border to the Pakistani tribal zone once the Americans invaded Afghanistan.
For many Pakistanis who saw South Waziristan and the other wild Pashtun tribal lands on the northwestern frontier as an autonomous realm (known as the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies, or FATA) that had not really been a part of Pakistan proper, the de facto secession of this territory was not alarming. India, not fellow Muslims, was after all perceived as the main threat to Pakistan, regardless of how fanatical those Muslims might be. The “Talibanization” of Pakistan alarmed the Americans, whose newly elected president, Barack Obama, described this process of radicalization as “a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within” more than it harmed the somnolent Pakistanis who had previously sponsored the Taliban.8
But the Taliban militants were not satisfied with terrorizing average Pashtun tribesmen in the FATA or carving out fundamentalist theocracies in the remote tribal agencies, and they began to move from their autonomous border provinces into Pakistan proper in 2008. Their tribal followers rose up in the scenic mountain province of Swat Valley, which is located about a hundred miles to the northwest of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. In this former tourist resort area, they similarly carved out a Taliban-style militant state and began beheading police, burning girls’ schools and beating girls on video, and enforcing strict Islamic law.9
The videos of the unbearably gruesome beheadings and floggings went viral in Pakistan and finally began to disturb average Pakistanis who had previously been strangely willing to overlook the Taliban’s brutality.10 The violence had come too close to home. By 2009 the Taliban had begun to spread from the Swat Valley to neighboring Buner Province. No one knew where the terrorists would stop. For the India-obsessed Pakistanis, Mehsud and his Taliban vigilantes had finally come to be seen as a national threat.
At this time the desperate Pakistani government began to ask the United States to use its Predator and Reaper drones, which had been targeting al Qaeda and exiled Afghan Taliban leaders in Pakistan’s tribal zones, to kill the man Pakistani officials described as “the mother of all evil.”11 The Americans were only too happy to oblige their allies and had reasons of their own to seek the demise of Pakistan’s most wanted man. Whereas Mehsud’s Pakistani Taliban were mainly engaged in terrorism and war against the Pakistani state, one of the group’s subcommanders, Hakimullah Mehsud, had been attacking U.S. supply convoys traveling through the nearby tribal agency of Khyber to bring supplies to American and Coalition troops serving in Afghanistan.12 Plus, the Americans had been stung by a persistent rumor among paranoid Pakistanis that the United States was somehow sponsoring Baitullah
Mehsud to create an excuse for conquering their state and gaining access to their prized nuclear weapons.13 If this were not enough, Mehsud had also promised, “Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world.”14 Washington and Islamabad agreed that something had to be done about Mehsud.
Thus began the hunt for the notorious Taliban mass murderer. American troops were not allowed on Pakistan’s sovereign territory so the drones were the obvious choice for taking Mehsud out. According to one study, more than a dozen U.S. drone strikes were eventually conducted against Mehsud and his followers once it was decided to assassinate him. But the elusive Mehsud seemed to be impossible to kill.15 He moved from hujra to hujra and rarely gave interviews to outsiders as some of his more media-savvy comrades were known to do. Finding Mehsud in the autonomous mountainous tribal agency of South Waziristan, which was inhabited by almost a half million Pashtun tribesmen, was a Herculean task.
Then, on June 23, 2009, the CIA caught a break when it learned that Mehsud would be attending a funeral in the village of Najmarai in the Makeen District of South Waziristan to commemorate the earlier drone assassination of one of his top lieutenants, named Niaz Wali. CIA drones were scrambled to the scene and sent images to their U.S.-based remote pilots from their high-resolution cameras of the crowd gathered at the funeral. Pakistani spies working for the CIA indicated that the notoriously reclusive Mehsud had blundered and would indeed be in attendance at the funeral along with some of his top commanders. He was somewhere in the crowd of militants and villagers who had gathered to provide a Muslim burial for Niaz Wali and several other slain Taliban fighters. Rarely had so many Taliban leaders gathered in one place at the same time. Although the CIA had previously been comparatively selective in its targeting for fear of killing bystanders and upsetting their Pakistani allies, the decision was made to launch an attack on the funeral. Mehsud was too high value a target for both the Pakistanis and Americans to let him escape. No one in the CIA knew when they would have the chance to kill him again, so the order to fire was given.
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