Predators

by Williams, Brian Glyn

  At roughly this time a drone made headlines in the war effort that was the Americans’ main focus at this time, Operation Iraqi Freedom. In June an Air Force drone was used to monitor a safe house where Iraq’s most notorious terrorist leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, the “Butcher of Baghdad,” was said to be hiding. The loitering drone sent back live video of the house and finally recorded Zarqawi entering the isolated farmhouse on June 7. On the basis of this video, the Air Force directed two F-16s to bomb the house with five-hundred-pound bombs since the Predator’s two Hellfire missiles were not deemed powerful enough to destroy the house. Zarqawi, a bloody terrorist who had introduced suicide bombings, sectarian death squads, and beheadings to the insurgency in Iraq, was killed.70 The death of this charismatic leader who had created al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004 caused a collapse of leadership in his organization. Although several lackluster leaders came after him, none of them had the leadership qualities and fame of the notorious Zarqawi.

  Despite this success in Iraq, the situation on the Afghan-Pakistani front was deteriorating. By the spring of 2006 the Afghan Taliban had fully rein-filtrated Afghanistan from their safe havens in Pakistan’s FATA and had launched a full-blown insurgency-terrorism campaign. At this time the most effective Taliban commander was none other than the former CIA-sponsored mujahideen leader based in North Waziristan, Jalaludin Haqqani. His insurgents introduced Iraqi-style terrorism, complete with unbearably gruesome, videotaped beheadings, suicide bombings, and improvised explosive device attacks, to Afghanistan. Safe from American troops in their North Waziristan sanctuary, Haqqani’s terrorists began a concentrated campaign to wreck Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s dreams of bringing peace and prosperity to his war-weary people.

  The situation on the Pakistani side of the border was not improving either. Having lost hundreds of their troops to tough Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, the Pakistani authorities decided to sign yet another face-saving peace treaty with their enemies in October 2006. The so-called Waziristan Accords in essence led to the creation of a Taliban state often called the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan. An article in the Weekly Standard vividly described the accords, which recognized the de facto secession of Waziristan from Pakistan, as follows:

  Yet even in the wake of Pakistan’s earlier surrender of South Waziristan, this new agreement, known as the Waziristan Accord, is surprising. It entails a virtually unconditional surrender of Waziristan.

  The agreement is, to put it mildly, a boon to the terrorists and a humiliation for the Pakistani government.

  Immediately after the Pakistani delegation left, al Qaeda’s flag was run up the flagpole of abandoned military checkpoints, and the Taliban began looting leftover small arms. The Taliban also held a “parade” in the streets of Miranshah. Clearly, they view their “truce” with Pakistan as a victory. It is trumpeted as such on jihadist websites. …

  The ramifications of the loss of Waziristan are tremendous. The region that Pakistan has ceded to the Taliban and al Qaeda is about the size of New Jersey, with a population of around 800,000.71

  Despite the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars invested in Pakistan, the Pakistanis had surrendered control of their territory in Waziristan to the Taliban and al Qaeda. The terrorists were now free to plan more terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and against the West from their autonomous state located right on the Afghan border.

  This development could not have come at a worse time and represented a victory for the Pakistani Taliban, all three Afghan terrorist factions, and of course al Qaeda. Al Qaeda’s vitality in the FATA was vividly demonstrated in the fall of 2006, when British security agents foiled an attempted al Qaeda plot to use liquid explosives to blow up as many as ten passenger jet airliners. To this day airline passengers cannot store liquids in carry-on baggage as a result of this plot, which would have seen hundreds of people killed when their planes exploded in midair. The planners of the liquid bomb plot had received direct orders from the al Qaeda leadership in the FATA.72 This close call and links to the FATA further galvanized the CIA’s efforts to assassinate al Qaeda leaders before they could organize additional mass-casualty terrorism attacks in the West.

  Then, in October 2006 the Pakistanis claimed to have located Zawahiri, once again in the Damadola region of the Bajaur Agency. He was said to be under the protection of two local pro-Taliban militants, named Maulvi Liaqat and Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, who operated a madrassa in the Chenagai suburb of Damadola. (Maulvi is a term for a high-ranking mullah.) This madrassa and the region in general were known as a hotbed for jihadists, who were said to cross the border to fight U.S. troops in the neighboring Afghan province of Kunar. Three thousand local militants had recently gathered at the madrassa to express their solidarity with Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, whom they claimed were their “heroes.”73

  As a result, the NSA began monitoring the region with high-resolution satellites and found evidence of militants from the madrassa training for combat.74 The CIA also began to monitor the “terrorist training facility” with Predator drones, which locals saw flying in the area in late October (remember that drones can provide more than twenty-four hours of close-up surveillance in ways that satellites, which have to rely on orbits, cannot).75 Finally, at around 5:00 a.m. on October 30, 2006, the decision was made to attack the madrassa with drones. A fusillade of Hellfire missiles was launched into the seminary. The aftermath was worse than it had been on any previous or subsequent strikes. As local villagers shifted through the rubble, they found as many as eighty-two people dead. Among them was one of the militant heads of the “terrorist compound,” Maulvi Liaqat.

  Local villagers, however, said that at least twelve of the victims who died in the attack were teenagers—which in and of itself would not exclude them from the ranks of the militants, but this information was nonetheless damning in the eyes of many.76 A report by the Pakistani newspaper the News, titled “Most Bajaur Victims Were under 20,” was even more damning and claimed that “one of the deceased was only seven-years old, three were eight, three nine, one was 10, four were 11, four were 12, eight were 13, six were 14, nine were 15, 19 were 16, 12 were 17, three were 18, three were 19 and only two were 21-years old.”77 If accurate, this claim would indicate that the CIA had targeted a school and primarily killed young students.

  Pakistan’s military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, claimed that all those who died in the madrassa attack, regardless of their ages, were militants and explicitly stated that there was “no collateral damage.”78 Although some have tried to argue that the victims in the second Damadola strike were all innocent students, the fact that leaders from the mosque subsequently vowed to send out “squads” of suicide bombers to punish the Pakistani military for its role in the strikes would suggest otherwise.79

  Regardless, the slain Maulvi Liaqat’s chief ally in the village, Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, stirred up local anger at the Americans and the Pakistani government. During a speech to as many as ten thousand mourners, Mohammad declared, “The government attacked and killed our innocent people on orders from America. It is an open aggression.”80 He then promised to continue to wage jihad against the Americans and Pakistani government. Such threats became reality a week later when a suicide bomber dressed in a shawl rushed into a training area where Pakistani soldiers were doing their morning exercises and blew himself up. The result was devastating. Forty-two soldiers were killed and twenty wounded in the largest ever suicide bombing of Pakistani troops.

  Given that hundreds of troops had already been lost in the fight in Waziristan, the loss of forty-two soldiers in the bombing prompted further debate throughout Pakistan. One Pakistani general argued, “We need a major rethink of the entire policy. We should not be fighting America’s war. We have to solve our own problems. If we are dictated to by outsiders it will end up like Iraq or Afghanistan.”81

  Still, the drone strikes went on. In January 2007 the Pakistani military joined the hunt for al Qaeda, and there were reports that laser-g
uided bombs dropped by Pakistani jets had hit al Qaeda compounds in the tribal region of South Waziristan. This angered local tribal leaders, who felt that previous peace treaties with the Pakistani military had forbidden such activities.82 Perhaps in response to pressure from the tribes, the Pakistani army in 2007 signed yet another peace treaty, this time with Maulvi Faqir Mohammad. The treaty was essentially a capitulation that ceded the northern tribal agency of Bajaur to Mohammad and his militants. This very same Faqir Mohammad had offered protection to Zawahiri, sent thousands of local tribesmen to support the Afghan Taliban in 2001, and openly declared his support for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, whom he labeled “heroes of the Muslim world.”83

  By this time the Pakistani government had essentially ceded three tribal agencies to the Taliban: North Waziristan, South Waziristan, and Bajaur. This Pakistani surrender did not, however, bring a halt to CIA drone strikes in the region. On April 27, 2007, a madrassa in the village of Sadigi, North Waziristan, belonging to a pro-Taliban leader named Maulana Noor Mohammad, was hit with missiles that killed four.84

  The next drone strike took place on June 20, 2007, in the village of Mami Rogha in North Waziristan and led to the death of at least twenty people in what was described as a terrorist training camp.85 At roughly this time America’s sixteen intelligence organizations had also produced their annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which declared that al Qaeda had “protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.” This Pakistani safe haven “allowed al-Qaeda to act with virtual impunity to plan, train for, and mount attacks.”86 One senior military officer would describe the region as “the epicenter of terrorism in the world,” and CIA director Michael Hayden later said, “They [al Qaeda] were coming at us. They were a threat to the homeland.”87

  But even as the CIA continued its efforts to convince the Pakistanis of the dire threat the al Qaeda–Taliban nexus posed, the troubles of Pakistan’s remote frontier finally began to affect those Pakistanis who had turned a blind eye to the rise of the militants. In July 2007 militants from a major mosque, known as the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), in the capital, Islamabad, began to pour into surrounding neighborhoods and clash with storeowners who they claimed were selling “pornographic” digital video discs (DVDs) and videotapes. They also kidnapped local women they described as “prostitutes” and seized control of a nearby government building. Many of the militants were women clad in hijabs and armed with automatic weapons. The militants, who were mainly conservative Pashtuns, then called for the enforcement of strict shariah law—the sort that was already being harshly enforced in Bajaur and Waziristan—in Pakistan. The heads of the Lal Masjid, known as the Ghazi brothers, also threatened to unleash suicide bombers on the capital if the government refused their demands to introduce shariah law nationally.

  The Pakistani government had no choice but to act against this blatant challenge to its authority in the heart of the capital and sent troops to surround the mosque. President Musharraf proclaimed, “In the garb of Islamic teaching they have been training for terrorism. … They prepared the madrassa as a fortress for war and housed other terrorists in there. I will not allow any madrassa to be used for extremism.”88

  Pakistani troops then stormed the Lal Masjid and fought with the militants for several days before gaining control of the building. Ninety-one militants and eleven Pakistani soldiers were killed in the fighting. The outcome of the fighting originally seemed like a victory for the Pakistani government, but when word of the siege reached the Taliban in its autonomous “emirates” in Bajaur and Waziristan, it declared an end to the tentative “truce” with Islamabad and the beginning of jihad on the Pakistani state. The independent lands of Talibanistan were now officially at war with the Pakistani state, and Pakistanis could no longer pretend that the war on the terrorists was purely in the interest of the Americans.

  Among the Taliban’s first act was to send scores of suicide bombers against civilian and military targets, murdering more than a hundred in less than a week.89 The Pakistani military was thus forced to respond and invaded Waziristan, setting off battles that led to the deaths of hundreds of Taliban fighters, Pakistani troops, and civilians. The Taliban responded to this assault by invading the so-called settled lands of the Pashtun-dominated NorthWest Frontier Province and seizing control of Swat Valley, just a hundred miles to the west of Islamabad.

  As this “creeping Talibanization” was being carried out by the Pakistani Taliban, the CIA launched a drone strike on the most effective of all the Afghan Taliban militants hiding out in North Waziristan, Jalaludin Haqqani. The November 3, 2007, strike on a compound owned by a local militant but used by Haqqani’s fighters killed five people described as “militants” by the Pakistanis.90

  This strike probably took place without the support of the Pakistanis, who had considered the North Waziristan–based Haqqani to be a “strategic asset” to be used in neighboring Afghanistan.91 Although the Pakistanis were at war with the Pakistani Taliban, they still protected the Afghan Taliban. The Americans’ suspicion that their Pakistani allies were working with Haqqani, their worst enemy in Afghanistan, was confirmed when the CIA intercepted communications between Pakistani ISI agents and Haqqani terrorists who subsequently carried out a suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed fifty-four people.92

  Clearly the Pakistanis were at odds with the United States over the basing of the Afghan Haqqani Network in North Waziristan, and the CIA drones had to unilaterally carry out operations against this key Pakistani terrorist ally. (CIA drones ultimately killed two of Haqqani’s sons, Mohammad and Badruddin.) The Americans and the Pakistanis were also at odds when it came to Mullah Omar and the main Afghan Taliban group he lead. Omar was allowed to live unmolested in the Pakistani town of Quetta after he told his Afghan Taliban followers not to join the Pakistani Taliban in attacking the Pakistani government. One journalist described the Afghan Taliban’s sanctuary in Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal zones, which included much of north Baluchistan: “As I traveled through Pakistan and particularly the Pashtun lands bordering Afghanistan, I felt as if I were moving through a Taliban spa for rehabilitation and inspiration. … Quetta had become a kind of free zone where strategies could be formed, funds picked up, interviews given and victories relished.”93

  Although the Pakistanis did not allow the CIA to use their drones to kill Taliban leaders in Quetta because the city was part of Pakistan proper, they did occasionally move against Afghan Taliban when pushed. This had happened on December 19, 2006, when Pakistani agents informed the Americans that a high-ranking member of the Taliban’s Shura (Inner Council), Mullah Akhtar Usmani, was crossing into Afghanistan. Usmani was said to be in charge of Taliban operations in Afghanistan and was designated as Mullah Omar’s successor should he be killed.94 His location was determined when his telephone communications were intercepted by a drone. The CIA dispatched a Predator to his location, and the drone killed him and two of his deputies with missiles while they were driving in their car.95

  Although ties between the CIA and ISI remained strained as the year 2007 drew to an end, such examples of occasional cooperation boded well for the uneasy Pakistani-American alliance. It became clear that further cooperation would be needed if the CIA was going to expand its drone operations further into the FATA region, which was obviously the agency’s intent. Still, few could have envisioned the upsurge in killings that began in 2008.

  6

  The Drone War Begins

  The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.

  —Scott Shane, New York Times, Decembe
r 3, 2009

  There was nothing to indicate that in 2008 the CIA would transform its limited targeted assassination campaign of just a few strikes per year (between one and five) into a full-blown aerial campaign of thirty-four strikes. In just a few years the CIA had gone from having deep reservations about using drones to becoming, in the words of one agency official, “one hell of a killing machine.”1 But as the campaign stepped up, the growing perception in Pakistan was that the drones seemed to have a unique capacity to kill innocent civilians, not their actual targets, al Qaeda and Taliban militants.

  A case-by-case analysis of the strikes sheds some much needed light on the nature of the drones’ targets. Contrary to claims that “99 percent” of those killed in drone attacks are civilians and “1 percent” terrorists, a systematic analysis of the 2008 strikes shows that the vast majority of those killed were terrorists. Over and over again the drones seemed to find their targets with unprecedented accuracy and take them out cleanly.

  THE FEDERALLY ADMINISTERED TRIBAL AGENCIES OF PAKISTAN, 2008

  The first drone strike of 2008 fit the limited HVT assassination pattern of previous years. It took place in North Waziristan and targeted an Arab, Abu Laith al Libbi, a top al Qaeda leader who directed a February 2007 suicide bombing outside a gate at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, that killed twenty-three people, mainly civilians, while Vice President Richard Cheney was visiting.2 Libbi was al Qaeda’s main liaison to Afghan Taliban fighters. In one of his videos he called for Westerners to be kidnapped, and in another he called for an assault on Israel.3