Fully aware of Libbi’s growing importance to al Qaeda, American forces tried killing him in a rocket attack while he was in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province in 2007, but he survived.4 On January 29, 2008, however, his luck ran out. The notorious Libyan terrorist leader who was said to be al Qaeda’s new number three was tracked down by the CIA and killed alongside twelve Arabs, Taliban fighters, and Central Asian Turkmen militants by a drone near Mir Ali in North Waziristan.5 There were no reported civilian deaths from the strike.
Although jihadist websites around the world hailed the martyrdom of Libbi as a success, his death was perhaps the greatest loss for the terrorists since the drone assassination of the previous al Qaeda number three, Muhammad Atef, in 2001. After his death, local Taliban militants took Libbi away for burial—but only after cordoning off the destroyed compound, a practice they would continue in upcoming strikes.
The second strike of the new year took place on February 28, 2008, near the village of Kaloosha, an area in South Waziristan believed to have significant al Qaeda activity.6 The missiles hit a house belonging to a tribesman with “well-known links to fighters in the area,” according to Al Jazeera. Both Al Jazeera and the Arab newspaper the Gulf News reported that ten of the thirteen victims were Arabs, presumably fighters or terrorists with ties to al Qaeda.7 There were no HVTs involved in the strike, but it was nonetheless against Arabs, which in the FATA context meant al Qaeda terrorists or fighters. Once again the strike was surgically precise, and no civilians were killed.
The third recorded strike of the year took place on March 16, 2008, in the village of Shahnawaz Kot near the town of Wana in South Waziristan. At least eighteen people were killed in this strike on a home belonging to a Noorullah Wazir, who was described by local residents as a Taliban supporter. Local residents claimed that “foreigners linked with Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants” were staying in the targeted compound at the time of the attack (thus far all the attacks in 2008 were on Arabs).8 Although there was no proof that the attack was carried out by a drone, the Washington Post reported the following details based on interviews with local sources: “Local residents said they heard the sound of a warplane overhead, then three successive explosions. The strike, which demolished the house, also left several people wounded. ‘When I heard the explosions, I rushed to the place where it happened. I saw dead bodies scattered everywhere,’ said Aziz Ullah Wazir, a village resident. ‘There were scores of people surrounding the collapsed building.’”9 Drones often attack in waves, which could explain the multiple explosions.
By now very few people in the FATA did not know that American drones were hunting Arabs. The stepped-up pace of CIA drone strikes in the first three months of 2008 (one per month, the fastest pace by far up to this point) had finally also begun to garner considerable attention in the United States. Six days after the March 16 attack, Newsweek revealed that the pace of strikes had accelerated after high-level U.S. officials had reached a new understanding with President Musharraf. CIA director Michael Hayden and Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell had convinced Musharraf that updated targeting rules were needed because the militants in the FATA were now at war with both the U.S. and Pakistani governments.10 Hayden reportedly told Musharraf, “Mr. President, we’ve seen a merger. You’ve been slow in recognizing this merger between Al Qaeda and Pashtun extremists. Now they’re coming out of the tribal areas not just to kill us, but to kill you. They’re after you now.”11 Convinced that the Pakistani Taliban were now the enemy of Pakistan, Musharraf agreed to expand the parameters of the drone strikes. The new agreement gave the CIA “virtually unrestricted authority to hit targets in the border areas.”12
In addition, a New York Times article mentioned a “relaxation” of the rules under which the CIA could launch strikes on al Qaeda targets. According to this article, instead of having to confirm the identity of a suspected Taliban or al Qaeda leader before attacking him with a drone, the CIA could strike convoys of vehicles that bore “the characteristics of al Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run.”13 Further details of this extraordinary development were revealed in a book by New York Times journalist David Sanger. Sanger wrote, “In a process that had taken months, Bush had expanded what Hayden and McConnell called ‘the permissions.’ He simply lowered the standard of proof needed before the Predators could strike. For the first time the CIA no longer had to identify its target by name; now the ‘signature’ of a typical al Qaeda motorcade, or of a group entering a known al Qaeda safe house was enough to authorize a strike.”14
This new license to kill based upon mere suspicious behavior was far beyond the original parameters of the rather limited assassination strikes that had worried George Tenet back in 2001. A subsequent Los Angeles Times article revealed even more about the expanded targeting parameters granted to the CIA by the Bush administration in early 2008. According to the article, the CIA now had permission to rely on “pattern-of-life” analysis based on surveillance by overhead drones that could fly for up to forty hours.15 If suspected militants on the ground were filmed over time engaging in suspicious activities (such as, presumably, infiltrating Afghanistan with weapons, training in known al Qaeda and Taliban camps in the FATA, transporting heavy weapons or explosives used in warfare against NATO or Pakistani troops, and entering known terrorist guest houses with Arabs), then the CIA had blanket permission to kill them based on their hostile “signatures.”
Whereas previously the CIA had been limited to killing high-ranking targets who were on a kill list known as the Joint Integrated Prioritized Target List (this list included mainly Arab al Qaeda terrorists and high-ranking Taliban members who were considered “personality strikes”), they now had authorization to go after a much wider range of suspiciously acting targets, described as rank-and-file foot soldiers, via “signature strikes.” Much of the catalyst for this new policy came from the U.S. military, which was eager to see the CIA play a “force protection” role in disrupting cross-border insurgent activities in neighboring Afghanistan. While the CIA was initially agnostic about the need to go after lower-level Taliban operatives based on their pattern-of-life signatures, they soon became avid converts to this new counterinsurgency role.16 In essence, overnight the CIA became a sort of covert military force operating in Pakistan, only without the accountability and scrutiny that the U.S. military faced.
The new policy essentially meant that the CIA would spread its kill net wide and start assassinating lower-level militants whose identities were not even known. The widening of what had previously been a limited, targeted assassination campaign of confirmed HVTs to include a range of suspected targets raised the hackles of some observers. Especially since the new targeting guidelines were to be based, to a certain extent, on remote-control surveillance evidence. One Bush national security aide said, “It’s risky because you can make more mistakes—you can hit the wrong house, or misidentify the motorcade.”17
There were also moral and ethical questions involved in relying on newly evolving technology to kill a wider range of people across the globe. One blogger worried, “Think about that: we’re potentially killing people based not on what we know about an individual, but what we have observed solely through the camera of a drone.”18 Noah Shachtman commented in the widely read Danger Room section of Wired.com, “Once upon a time, the CIA had to know a militant’s name before putting him up for a robotic targeted killing. Now, if the guy acts like a guerrilla, it’s enough to call in a drone strike.”19
While U.S. officials cautioned that the drones would be called off if there were risks of civilian casualties from a strike, the limited assassination campaign was broadening into what could best be described as an aerial war. Clearly Bush White House officials felt that under the laws of war they had the legal right to wage an asymmetric aerial campaign against terrorists and fighters preparing terrorist acts and waging war on U.S. troops from cross-border sanctuaries and havens in the autonomous tribal regions of Pakistan.
But t
hat was not all. The demand that the CIA seek “concurrence” from Pakistan’s government was later dropped from the agreement that made the CIA director “America’s combatant commander in the hottest covert war in the global campaign on terror.”20 Previously the Pakistanis had been allowed the right to concur with an intended strike or to veto it. When that right was dropped from the agreement, the chances of Pakistani ISI officers with mixed loyalties warning the drone targets in advance were greatly reduced. According to former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, on several occasions the Pakistanis had tipped off drone targets in advance of a strike.21 The most notable case of the Pakistanis tipping off a Taliban target, according to Matthew Aid, occurred when ISI agents warned Jalaludin Haqqani of an impending drone strike.22
Although the expansion of the drones’ targets and the end to the right of concurrences might have bothered the Pakistanis, who were always sensitive about the issues of sovereignty, collateral damage deaths, and their close ties to the Afghan Taliban (as opposed to their war with the Pakistani Taliban), larger events on the ground in the FATA at this time actually favored the widening of the campaign. In mid-December of the previous year five disparate jihadi organizations had officially organized themselves in the FATA as the TTP. They chose as their head the soon-to-be-notorious leader Baitullah Mehsud, whose assassination was outlined in chapter 1. This loose umbrella organization was created in part as a response to the drone strikes and Pakistani military incursions into the militants’ de facto secessionist state.
At this time the militants also went on the offensive and conquered the last remaining free zones in Swat Valley. The suicide bombings and the invasion of Swat infuriated the Pakistani military and civilian leadership and came to be seen as a major threat, not just to the U.S. and Afghan governments, but to Pakistan itself. Many Pakistani leaders felt that the previously tolerated militants had gone too far. For this reason, the Pakistani authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to a stepped-up drone campaign against the newly aggressive Pakistani Taliban.
For its part, the CIA was better prepared than ever to take advantage of the growing hostility between the Pakistani military-government and the Pakistani Taliban thanks to the development of a deadly new drone model known as the MQ-9 Reaper. Whereas the original MQ-1 Predator was a surveillance craft that had been retroactively jerry-rigged to carry two missiles, the much larger Reaper was specifically designed as a killing platform. The $20 million Reaper could carry eight times the payload of its smaller Predator predecessor (that is, the same number of missiles as an Apache Longbow attack helicopter), was not limited to Hellfire missiles, and could deliver two five-hundred-pound Paveway laser-guided bombs or JDAMs.23 The Reaper carried the same payload as an F-16 manned fighter jet (1.5 tons) but could stay aloft ten times longer.24 As one military expert put it, with the Reaper “you have a lot of ammo circling overhead on call for short notice strikes.”25 The Reaper could also fly to a target three times faster than the Predator and loiter for slightly longer periods of time (up to forty-two hours). The Reaper was a Predator on steroids, and it gave the CIA what the military called “deadly persistence” in the hunt for al Qaeda. The Reaper had already made its debut on the Afghan battlefield with great effect in the fall of 2007, and it soon began making kills in Pakistan’s tribal zone as well (although there were fewer of these new aircraft in operation than there were Predators).26
On May 14 a drone struck again, this time in the infamous Damadola region of Bajaur, a major hotbed for cross-border insurgency activity into Kunar. According to Pakistani sources, this strike took place on a compound in the hamlet of Khaza, where “militants had gathered for dinner.”27 The initial strike set off a chain of blasts from explosives collected in the targeted house. Between six and twelve people were killed in the strike and resulting explosions, which, interestingly, did not cause any uproar in the region—primarily because the compound was owned by an Afghan who was a former Taliban defense minister named Maulvi Obaidullah.
The former Taliban minster and his civilian family were not the only ones to die in the attack. At the time they were hosting an important guest named Abu Suleiman “al Jazairi” (the Algerian). Al Jazairi was al Qaeda’s director of external operations and was responsible for running the terrorist group’s European and British operations.28 He was said to have trained British Muslims who traveled to Pakistan to learn how to carry out terrorist operations.29 His death was a remarkable example of how the drones could help preempt future terrorism by killing HVTs who were plotting future attacks from remote hideouts.
A Reaper may well have been involved in the next drone strike, which occurred in the Wana region of South Waziristan on May 16. According to an al Qaeda video that eulogized those killed in the strike, the attack killed a prominent Pakistani jihadi trainer named Dr. Arshad Waheed and twenty other Taliban and al Qaeda militants.30 Once again there were no civilian deaths on this occasion.
The next air strike, in early June, came about in more confusing circumstances and actually involved the death of Pakistani Frontier Constabulary troops. Probably delivered by a piloted U.S. aircraft, the strike took place after Afghan troops were ambushed by Taliban near the Afghan-Pakistani border. Another air strike was called in to support the troops, but it inadvertently hit a nearby Pakistani Constabulary post killing eleven Pakistani paramilitaries. Eight Taliban were killed and eleven wounded in the strike.31 The Pakistanis were understandably furious.
This mishap was not, however, enough to damage the joint U.S.-Pakistani war on al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the drone campaign went on. Several days later a drone struck again, this time in Makeen, South Waziristan, on June 14. Pakistan news reports claimed the strike was an attempt to kill the newly appointed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.32 No civilians were reported killed at this time.
The next drone strike took place in the village of Azam Warsak on July 27. Between five and six people, including a notorious al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction expert, Abu Khabab “al Masri” (the Egyptian), were said to have been killed in the attack.33 Abu Khabab was described as al Qaeda’s “mad scientist,” and he had filmed himself killing dogs in a lab using hydrogen cyanide. the same agent used by the Nazis in their gas chambers.34 He was also said to have been involved in making the explosives used in the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole and in the training of Richard Reid, the failed al Qaeda “shoe bomber” (a Brit who tried to set off a shoe bomb on a civilian-packed airliner over the Atlantic in December 2001).35 Khabab, who had a $5 million bounty on his head, was trained to develop chemical and biological weapons to be used in mass-casualty terrorism against the West and was a major threat.36 His death was cause for celebration among the counterterrorism experts trying to protect the United States from mass-casualty, chemical-biological terrorism.37
The strikes continued on August 13, 2008, with a drone attack on a militant training camp in South Waziristan run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the ex-Afghan mujahideen warlord who was waging a terror campaign in Afghanistan. The strike killed a commander named Abdur Rehman and between nine and twenty-four other militants, including Turks and Arabs, according to Pakistani and U.S. sources.38
The barrage continued a week later on August 20 with a strike on a house in Wana, South Waziristan, that a Pakistani source described as a “known hideout for militants.” Eight people, including “foreign extremists,” were killed by missiles that a Pakistani official said “came from Afghanistan.” Locals who were interviewed said of the wounded owner of the house, “Arabs often stayed with him.”39 No civilians were reported killed in this strike.
The number of drone strikes may have surged at this time because of the concurrent power vacuum in Pakistan; President Musharraf had been forced to resign on August 18,2008.40 The accelerated pace of strikes may have also come as a result of increased pressure on the White House and CIA from a recently released Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the FATA region that found, “The United States has not me
t its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven in Pakistan’s FATA. According to U.S. officials and intelligence documents, since 2002, al Qaeda and the Taliban have used Pakistan’s FATA and the border region to attack Pakistani, Afghan, as well as U.S. and coalition troops; plan and train for attacks against U.S. interests; destabilize Pakistan; and spread radical Islamist ideologies that threaten U.S. interests.”41
As the pressure mounted on the CIA, it took advantage of the political vacuum in Pakistan, and according to Dawn, on August 30 it launched an attack on a house that had been rented out to “foreigners” in the Korzai area of South Waziristan. The Pakistani Daily Times reported that five people, including two Arabs with Canadian passports, were killed in the strike and several Punjabis were wounded.42 By this time Waziristan was home to hundreds, if not thousands, of Punjabi militants who had gradually become known as the “Punjabi Taliban.” At their base in Waziristan, the Punjabi Taliban began to train suicide bombers for missions throughout Punjab and the rest of Pakistan.
One aspect of preceding strike accounts deserves attention, namely, the fact that most of the details on the strikes (such as claims that the owner of a targeted house “rented out to foreigners”) came from Pakistani journalists interviewing locals at the scene. Over and over again Pakistani sources described the attacks as drone strikes on houses or compounds with ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda foreigners. Note that these same Pakistani sources did not describe the targets of the strikes as “innocent civilian residences,” even though Pakistani journalists tend to display anti-American attitudes. According to one study carried out by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, a full 67 percent of Pakistani journalists interviewed in an opinion poll found the drone strikes to be “acts of terrorism.”43 Yet the Pakistani media sources seemed remarkably frank in providing details that would indicate that the targets of the drone strikes were invariably linked directly or indirectly to al Qaeda terrorism or, less often, to Taliban terrorist-insurgency activities.
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