Predators

by Williams, Brian Glyn

  On the following day, August 31, a drone hit a house near Miram Shah in North Waziristan. Once again Pakistani sources reported that several “foreigners” were killed in the strike, but so were a woman and a child, the third pair of civilian casualties that year.44 By this time the drone strikes had become such an accepted part of the battle rhythm of the FATA zone that they did not cause much of an uproar in Pakistan. In my interviews with Pakistanis in the tribal zones and in parts of Pakistan proper in the summer of 2010, I found that this apathy was a product of two unique circumstances. First, most Pakistanis considered the autonomous FATA region to be removed from the rest of Pakistan proper, like a U.S. territory, such as Samoa, Guam, or Puerto Rico, or the Wild West in the 1800s. Second, U.S. combatants or pilots were not directly involved in the assassinations, which targeted people the locals knew were involved in militancy or terrorism. Because unmanned “robot” planes carried out the strikes, the CIA’s violation of Pakistani sovereignty was somehow more palatable than it would have been had they been carried out by manned bombers, like the Soviet air strikes of the 1980s.

  Although the powerful pro-Taliban Islamist parties occasionally criticized the strikes—and even those on the Pakistani secular left who despised the Taliban fundamentalists criticized the strikes as “acts of imperialist aggression”—there were no mass protests like those following the Chenagai and Damadola strikes. Seemingly, by the summer of 2008 the Pakistani leadership had accepted the drone strikes in the FATA as an unfortunate but necessary evil in the state’s new war on the Taliban. If Pakistan wanted billions of dollars in U.S. aid, it had to allow the CIA to kill the common enemy by using its drones. But there would be no U.S. ground forces in the FATA. The hunt would be limited to remote-control planes.

  This last point was challenged on September 3, 2008, when the United States shocked Pakistan by launching a helicopter-borne special operations raid on the village of Musa Nika in the Angoor Ada region of South Waziristan. The village of Musa Nika was a well-known cross-border sanctuary for Taliban insurgents who infiltrated into Afghanistan and attacked U.S. and Coalition troops.45

  According to the New York Times, just prior to the September 3 night raid, U.S. and Afghan troops had pursued a group of Taliban fighters that had attacked them in Afghanistan. The enemy escaped by retreating across the border to the village of Musa Nika.46 There they were safe in their sanctuary—until 3:00 a.m. on September 3. At that time three to five Black Hawk helicopters roared over the village and began to disgorge U.S. Navy SEALs into the target. In the ensuing mayhem, between nine and twenty people were killed, including women and children. The troops in the helicopters killed or captured several suspected Taliban militants and then disappeared into the night. The attack lasted no more than an hour.

  The following day U.S. officials sounded upbeat and hinted that the raid might be a sign of things to come.47 One U.S. military officer said, “You can’t allow a haven. You have to get the areas that they rest, relax and train.”48 A senior U.S. official commented, “The situation in the tribal areas is not tolerable. We have to be more assertive. Orders have been issued.” It later emerged that President George Bush himself had approved the orders calling for a new policy of conducting raids in Pakistan without notifying the Pakistanis.49

  As word spread in Pakistan that Pakistani women and children had been killed by U.S. troops on Pakistani soil, there were howls of outrage from Pakistani leaders across the board. One senior Pakistani official called the night raid a “cowboy action” and criticized it for not targeting anyone “big.”50 The Pakistani Foreign Ministry condemned the attack, calling it “unacceptable” and “a grave provocation … which has resulted in immense loss of civilian life.”51 The following day the Pakistani parliament passed a resolution condemning the raid, and the foreign minister told the National Assembly, “There is no high-value target or known terrorist among the dead. … Only innocent civilians, including women and children, have been targeted.”52 U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson was also summoned to hear a “very strong protest” at the Foreign Ministry.

  The Pakistani military raised the biggest objection. Using bellicose terms more suited for an enemy than an ally, the new head of Pakistan’s army, Gen. Pervez Kayani, said that Pakistan’s territorial integrity would be “defended at all cost” and that “reckless actions only help the militants and further fuel the militancy in the area.”53 Lest there be any ambiguity, Kayani added, “There is no question of any agreement or understanding with the coalition forces whereby they are allowed to conduct operations on our side of the border. … No external force is allowed to conduct operations inside Pakistan.”54

  Although the Pakistanis were willing to countenance the occasional civilian death or attacks on militants if they were administered by unmanned drones, U.S. troops landing on Pakistani territory was essentially construed as an act of war. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had grand dreams of commencing a “hot pursuit” targeting campaign against Taliban insurgents operating from safe havens in Pakistan, but clearly the hunt would have to be left to the unmanned drones if the Pakistanis were to be placated.

  In fact a drone strike was launched the following day, September 4. The strike was again in North Waziristan, this time hitting a house whose owner was “known to host foreigners,” according to locals who spoke to the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news service.55 Four people were killed in that strike on territory said to be under the control of Jalaludin Haqqani. None of the slain were reported to be civilians.

  A drone launched another attack one day later on a village near the Afghan border of North Waziristan known as Al Must. One report claimed that six to twelve people were killed in the strike, including “men of Arab descent,” two women, and three children. According to a local source, “Three missiles hit the two compounds, which he said belong to two residents of Al Must, Hakeem Khan and Arsala Khan. It is common for families in these areas to rent part of their compound to foreigners, especially Arabs who are involved in planning attacks against NATO forces in Afghanistan, residents said.”56 Once again the rule seemed to be that Arabs were lightning rods for drone strikes and those who rented rooms to them or were related to them ran the real risk of being killed by a Predator or Reaper.

  The next strike, on September 8, 2008, was against the aforementioned Afghan Taliban leader Jalaludin Haqqani, whose terrorist insurgents had killed more than fifty people in a suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul just two months earlier. The drone strike targeted a madrassa in the North Waziristan town of Dande Darpakhel, which was the Haqqani Network’s Pakistani headquarters. Although the strike aimed to kill Jalaludin Haqqani, or his son Sirajuddin, who was gradually taking control of operations from his aging father, it missed both men. Instead twenty-three people, including one of Jalaludin’s two wives, his sister, his sister-in-law, and eight of his grandchildren, were killed.57 Four al Qaeda operatives were also said to have been killed in the attack.58 A large number of civilians were killed in this attack, which raises the question, Why would Haqqani house al Qaeda Arabs who could attract drone attacks near his wife and grandchildren? Also, did the CIA know there were civilians present at the time and decide to carry out the attack with the aim of killing the notorious Haqqani, despite the risk of civilian casualties?

  Another strike took place in a suburb of Miranshah just four days later on September 12, 2008.59 One source reported twelve “rebel fighters” killed in the strike, whereas another source claimed “seven Taliban” were killed.60 Reports from the strike on two buildings said that once again it appeared that civilians had been killed as well.61

  Five days later a drone strike killed Abu Ubaydah al Tunisi, a Tunisian al Qaeda leader, and between four and six other men in the Bangar Cheena region of South Waziristan. There were no reports of civilian deaths on this occasion, and Dawn claimed that the Tunisian leader and his men were “delivering rockets to a militant camp near the Afghan border.”62 This appeared to be a clean s
trike on a person who could be described as an enemy combatant.

  That same day, September 17, 2008, the Pakistani news site Geo.TV reported, “The Pentagon has claimed that U.S. led coalition forces carried out another drone strike on an ammunition storage facility of Taliban, in which one al-Qaeda member and 3 Taliban militants were killed. The U.S. authorities said they shared the news with Pakistani officials after conducting the strike.”63 This intriguing Pentagon statement can be interpreted in several ways. One interpretation is that the Pentagon (and not the CIA) chose to inform the Pakistanis of a military drone strike on Taliban and al Qaeda that occurred inside Afghanistan. This alternative seems strange, however, for the U.S. military had no reason to share with Islamabad an after-action report on a rather limited drone engagement in a neighboring country. The Pentagon report of a drone strike is also strange in that the military is primarily allowed to operate in recognized combat zones, but not in civilian areas in a country where the United States is not officially at war. The other interpretation is that the U.S. military launched a cross-border drone strike on an undisclosed location in Pakistan in what can best be described as a force protection role and then informed the Pakistanis. This scenario in which the U.S. military attacked an ammunition dump in Pakistan seems more plausible as the CIA had, and still has, a policy of not officially discussing its individual drone strikes.

  This second scenario seems even more plausible in light of writer Jeremy Scahill’s revelations about the existence of a limited U.S. military drone campaign in Pakistan. In a piece for the Nation he described “a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes.” One insider military source speaking of the JSOC drone campaign described it as “a parallel operation to the CIA” and called the CIA and JSOC campaigns “two separate beasts.”64 Another referred to the military campaign as “a separate fleet of U.S. drones operated by the Defense Department [that] will be free for the first time to venture beyond the Afghan border under the direction of Pakistani military officials.”65

  Scahill further reported, “In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country.”66 According to one account, JSOC Navy SEAL teams had raided Pakistan as many as twelve times before raids were stopped after the assault on Angoor Ada in September 2008.67 Following this public relations fiasco, there were several instances in which Taliban fighters who had attacked U.S. troops were chased by U.S. airpower into Pakistan and killed. In the most notable of such incidents, fifty Haqqani Network fighters were killed after fleeing into Pakistan.68

  Further evidence of an ultrasecret drone campaign led by Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s JSOC (McChrystal later became head of all NATO forces in Afghanistan) came from Noah Shachtman writing for Wired.com. During a visit to a secret U.S. military base (most likely in Karshi-Khanabad, or K2, Uzbekistan), he reported,

  Today, those [cross-border JSOC drone] missions have become a regular occurrence. The U.S. Air Force has a fleet of Predator and heavily armed Reaper drones, stationed at Kandahar and Jalalabad Air Fields in Afghanistan. All of these robotic aircraft are allowed to venture occasionally into Pakistani airspace to pursue militants. The government in Islamabad just has to be notified first. Some of the Predators also fly into Pakistan on operations in conjunction with or in support of Islamabad’s military.

  These missions are remotely flown by U.S. Air Force pilots at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada; the footage is shared with the Pakistani government, including at joint coordination centers on the border.

  In addition, some of the military’s Predators and Reapers are placed under the operational control of the CIA, which uses them to conduct their own strike and surveillance missions. Some of those drones take off from Jalalabad, others from within Pakistan itself, at a remote base called Shamshi. According to the New York Times, those aircraft are operated out of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. … From what I can tell, these CIA missions comprise the bulk of the drone flights over Pakistan. And the military has, at times, encouraged the notion that operating the unmanned aircraft was the spy agency’s job.69

  Regardless of whether the source of the upswing in drone strikes in September 2008 was the military’s JSOC or the CIA, there were few criticisms from the Pakistani authorities, who were caught up in the election of their new president, Ali Asaf al Zardari. Zardari was the widower of the recently slain presidential candidate Benazir Bhutto, who had been killed by a Baitullah Mehsud Taliban suicide bomber upon her return to Pakistan in 2007. For this reason the Americans hoped Zardari would be a strong ally, and in this expectation they were not disappointed. Zardari seemed to be willing to stand by the Americans and the war on the terrorists who threatened his state, even if it cost him some popularity among his own people. Zardari referred to the Taliban as a “cancerous” threat to Pakistan and told the Americans that he would “take the heat” if the United States launched a cross-border raid to capture an HVT like bin Laden or Zawahiri.70

  On September 30 the CIA took advantage of the new climate of cooperation, and a drone struck again, this time in Mir Ali, North Waziristan. The drone missile struck the house of a “local Taliban commander” and killed six people.71 On the night of October 3–4 a drone struck yet again. A senior Pakistani military official said of the attack, “Our reports suggest that around 20 suspected militants were killed when a missile hit a house in Mohammad Khel village in North Waziristan. Most were foreigners.”72 There were no recorded civilian deaths on this occasion.

  On October 9 a house east of Miranshah, North Waziristan, whose owner was hosting foreigners, was hit by a drone. At least six people, including three Arabs, were killed in the attack.73 Three days later a drone struck again in Miranshah, killing five people, but there were no reports on the victims’ identities.74 Just four days later, on October 16, a drone struck in the village of Taparghai, South Waziristan. This strike killed four people, “some of them Arabs,” including Khalid Habib, the number four in al Qaeda and head of their operations in the Pakistani tribal regions.75 Habib and the other Arabs were killed in their Toyota station wagon in one of the first recorded hits on a vehicle in Pakistan.

  On the night of October 22–23 a drone struck again, this time against the Haqqani Network in a village just outside Miranshah, North Waziristan. Locals reported, “One missile hit a room in the compound where the militants were sleeping.”76 Three days later a drone struck a “facility/alleged militant compound” in a village near Wana, South Waziristan.77 Twenty people were killed in this strike, among them Mohammad Omar, a Taliban commander who had been close to Nek Muhammad.78 Interestingly enough, the drone missile completely destroyed Omar’s compound but only “damaged” two neighboring houses.

  Five days later, on October 31, a drone struck again in Wana, killing six foreigners and a local tribesman who was hosting them.79 That same day a drone also struck in neighboring North Waziristan, killing a prominent al Qaeda leader named Abu Jihad al Masri and two other “rebels” who were traveling in a car with him. Masri was an Egyptian and a high-ranking propaganda expert who appeared in a video with Ayman al Zawahiri.80 There were no civilian bystander casualties in this strike.

  Shortly after these strikes, on November 4, the Americans chose a new president, Barack Obama. But this did not slow down the pace of the kills in Bush’s final months in office. On November 7 a drone attacked an al Qaeda training camp located near the Afghan border in the village of Kumsham, North Waziristan. According to a Pakistani source, “Between 11 and 14 militants, mainly foreigners, were killed in the strike.”81 Among those killed were seven al Qaeda operatives and one Taliban commander. Once again there were no reports of civilian casualties in the attack.

  On November 14 a drone attacked again, this time in the village of G
aryom near Miranshah, North Waziristan, an area described as a “hotbed of Al Qaeda and Taliban support.”82 In this strike twelve people, including “nine foreign militants, believed to be Al Qaeda fighters,” the homeowner, and two of his family members, were also killed.83 The message for other Pashtuns who might have been tempted to host foreign al Qaeda fighters in their houses was clear: You run the risk of having your home and family destroyed if you provide sanctuary to foreign terrorists-militants.

  At this time President Zardari, who was visiting New York, publicly claimed that the drone strikes were “counter-productive and violated Pakistan’s sovereignty.”84 This pro forma statement was obviously meant to garner support among his own people, who strongly disliked the idea of a foreign power operating with impunity on their own soil, killing what many believed were almost exclusively innocent Pakistani citizens. The Pakistani people wanted their leaders to publicly stand up to the American “invaders.” But secretly Zardari was said to have told the Americans, “Kill the seniors. Collateral damage worries you Americans. It does not worry me.”85 He also said, “There are no differences between Pakistan and the US over any issue, including drone attacks.”86 He even made a plea for the United States to give his country access to the drones. He told a U.S. delegation, “Give me the drones so my forces can take out the militants.” That way, “we cannot be criticized by the media or anyone else for actions our Army takes to protect our sovereignty.”87

  Zardari seemed to appreciate that the drone attacks were helping his country avoid military casualties they would have sustained had they directly attacked the terrorists’ lairs. According to a Wikileak cable from Ambassador Patterson, “Referring to a recent drone strike in the tribal area that killed 60 militants, Zardari reported that his military aide believed a Pakistani operation to take out this site would have resulted in the deaths of over 60 Pakistani soldiers.”88 Similarly, a spokeswoman for Zardari’s political party, the Pakistan People’s Party, declared, “There is a segment in the country who support the drone attacks, and they feel that drone attacks have been helpful in eliminating many of the militants.”89 One military officer told AFP, “The Pakistani army supports drone strikes because they are efficient for eliminating TTP people … and give it a good reason not to start a dangerous offensive in North Waziristan.”90 Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States added, “Pakistan has never said that we do not like the elimination of terrorists through predator drones.”91