Predators

by Williams, Brian Glyn

  The Wikileaks documents from 2009 and 2010 show that Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Gilani similarly opined of the drones in private, “I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”92 Gen. Shah Shuja Pasha summed up his views of the Taliban and al Qaeda when he said, “We would obviously like to fix these rogues. They are killing our own people and are certainly not the friends of this country.”93 In addition, General Kayani asked the United States for “continuous Predator coverage of the conflict area” during his forces’ campaigns against the Taliban in the FATA.94 This request was answered in the affirmative during Pakistani operations in South Waziristan, and one U.S. military official told the Los Angeles Times, “We are coordinating with the Pakistanis. And we do provide Predator support when requested.”95

  Kayani’s public position was quite different, however, according to a classified U.S. cable about Kayani and the government of Pakistan (GOP) released by Wikileaks:

  The strikes have put increasing political pressure on the Pakistani government, which has struggled to explain why it is allowing an ally to violate its sovereignty. The GOP so far has denied recent media reports alleging that the U.S. is launching the strikes from bases in Pakistan. Kayani knows full well that the strikes have been precise, creating few civilian casualties, and targeted primarily at foreign fighters in the Waziristans. He will argue, however, that they undermine his campaign plan, which is to keep the Waziristans quiet until the Army is capable of attacking Baitullah Mehsud and other militants entrenched there.96

  In his book The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier, Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul wrote of a similar disconnect between what the Pakistani leadership secretly wanted and their public stance. Gul wrote,

  Most Pakistanis, including members of the media and mainstream political leaders, view the attacks as a violation of their national sovereignty. But privately even top generals support drone strikes. In a recent meeting with a handful of Pakistani journalists, a very senior general told us, “As long as they take out the guys who are a threat to us all, why crib about it?” Leading government officials, including Prime Minister Gilani, will agree even if publicly they condemn the drone strikes.97

  One former U.S. official said of the Pakistanis’ formulaic criticisms of the drone strikes, “There’s always been a double game. There’s the game they’ll play out in public, but there has always been good cooperation.”98 National security analysts Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the Washington, D.C.–based New America Foundation summed up Pakistan’s duplicity:

  For Pakistani politicians, the drone program is a dream come true. They get to posture to their constituents about the perfidious Americans even as they reap the benefits from the U.S. strikes. They are well-aware that neither the Pakistani Army’s ineffective military operations nor the various peace agreements with the militants have done anything to halt the steady Talibanization of their country, while the U.S. drones are the one surefire way to put significant pressure on the leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. This is called getting to have your chapati and eat it too.99

  Some Americans who knew what was going on vis-à-vis Pakistan’s public criticisms of the drone strikes found Islamabad’s position to be hypocritical. Senator Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, for example, summed up U.S. frustrations with the Pakistanis’ double-dealing when he said, “For them to look the other way, or to give us the green light privately, and then to attack us publicly leaves us, it seems to me, at a very severe disadvantage and loss with the Pakistani people.”100 But this seemed to be the price the U.S. government was willing to pay to launch the drone attacks that the Pakistani government felt it could only secretly support.

  The next strike was on November 19. It was very unusual in that it did not take place in the FATA; up until this point, all drone strikes in Pakistan had taken place in North and South Waziristan and, to a much lesser extent, Bajaur. The November 19 strike took place in the village of Jani Khel, in the province of Bannu, which is located in the North-West Frontier Province, a Pashtun-dominated “settled” land that was one of Pakistan’s four main provinces. (This constituent part of Pakistan became known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2009.) Three “foreigners” and one local Taliban fighter were killed in the strike on a compound run by a Taliban leader named Parpand.101 No civilian deaths were recorded. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry nonetheless lodged a protest with Ambassador Patterson owing to the depth of the strike into Pakistan proper.102

  The next attack took place three days later, on November 22, in the village of Ali Khel in North Waziristan. At least four people were killed in the strike, among them a very interesting British-Pakistani terrorist named Rashid Rauf. Rauf had fled his native Britain and moved to Pakistan after killing his uncle and escaping an arrest warrant for his involvement in the notorious plot to use liquid explosive to blow up ten civilian jet airliners in 2006.103 Rauf was arrested in Pakistan, but before he could be put on trial, he escaped. He subsequently married the daughter of the founder of Jaish al Muhammad, a Pakistani militant group, and began to plan other terrorist strikes. Justice finally caught up with the murderer/al Qaeda terrorist when the drone killed him in North Waziristan. Rauf’s Pakistani lawyer played on local Pakistani sentiments when he said, “He was an innocent man a god-fearing, devout polite man and this is an extra-judicial killing.”104

  The next strike took place on November 29 in Chashma, North Waziristan, and killed three people. Information about the victims’ identities is not available.105 There was an uncharacteristic lull in drone attacks until one struck an undisclosed location in South Waziristan on December 11, killing seven Punjabi militants.106 There were no recorded civilian casualties in this strike.

  The penultimate strike of the year occurred in the village of Tapi Tool in North Waziristan and killed two people. No information about the victims’ identities is available.107 On December 22, the drone blitz of 2008 ended with a crescendo with two separate strikes on Taliban vehicles in the villages of Karikot and Shin Warsak. Eight “militants,” including fighters who fired on a drone with a truck-mounted antiaircraft gun, were killed in the strikes.108 Thus the year’s campaign ended with what Bergen and Tiedemann call “a legacy-building effort to dismantle the entire Al Qaeda top leadership.”109

  The questions that remain at this point are, How did the campaign of 2008 break down in numbers of slain civilians versus militants and where did the strikes take place? A case-by-case analysis of the strikes (each of which is documented by Pakistani or Western sources of repute) leads to the following startling conclusion. The 2008 drone campaign in Pakistan resulted in 317 deaths. Of these, 249 were confirmed militants or terrorists, 36 were classified as unknown, and 32 were confirmed as civilians. In other words, according to the available sources (a majority of which were Pakistani), approximately 10 percent of the victims of the 2008 drone bombing campaign were confirmed as civilians. Although this percentage is higher than desirable, it is also a refutation of the claims that the vast majority of those who die in the drone strikes are civilians.110

  As for the militants, they made up the vast majority of the drone victims. Surprisingly, 162 of the 249 slain militants/terrorists were not Pakistanis; they were instead Arabs, Turks, Central Asians, Canadians, Brits, and Afghans. This important distinction has not been made before and points to a real effort by the CIA in 2008 to kill foreign terrorists instead of local Pakistani Taliban militants. The locals in the FATA had to realize that the drones were not “killing Pakistani civilians every day” (in fact the thirty-two civilians were killed on seven different days in 2008). On the contrary, the CIA was clearly able to distinguish between foreigners who were linked to al Qaeda and local Taliban and to surgically target the former at a much higher rate than has previously been disclosed.

  The numbers suggest that the CIA had an effective on-the-ground spy program whereby it was—
and is—able to use local informants to track foreign terrorists and pinpoint the hujras, madrassas, training camps, and vehicles they were in for precisely targeted destruction. In most cases when civilian women, children, or local sympathizers died, they were in close proximity to a targeted terrorist or militant. Many, if not most, of the slain civilians, such as Haqqani’s wife and grandchildren or the wife and children of the Afghan Taliban member Maulvi Obaidullah, were related to terrorists or insurgents. One can assume that if they were adults, they were aiding and abetting their family members. In other words, in the 2008 blitz, if you were not related to a terrorist, involved in harboring terrorists, or involved in terrorist or militant activities, the odds that you would be killed by a drone in the FATA (or the one strike in Bannu) were very slim. Once again, this fact had to be well known among people living in the FATA.

  In geographic terms, of the thirty-four strikes that occurred in 2008, sixteen were in South Waziristan; fifteen in North Waziristan; one in Bajaur Agency; one in Bannu, which was outside of the FATA; and one in an undisclosed location in the FATA. With the exception of Bannu, all the strikes occurred in FATA territory that was part of a de facto secessionist state run by various Taliban warlords.

  In summary, in 2008 the CIA was largely killing non-Pakistanis and, to a lesser degree, local Taliban in a secessionist part of Pakistan that was openly at war with both Pakistan and the Afghan government. What is remarkable, especially in light of the small number of civilian deaths, is that neither the CIA nor any other branch of the U.S. government sought to disabuse the Pakistanis or Westerners of the misguided notion that the drones were invading Pakistan from Afghanistan and killing mass numbers of civilians. Far from making a case-by-case defense of the campaign using Pakistani sources, the CIA stubbornly refused to comment on the drone war.

  Without an American public relations campaign to counteract the critics’ attacks on the drone efforts, they remained a mystery for most outsiders, who assumed the worst. But in 2009 and 2010 new light began to be shed on the drone strikes from a variety of sources, including U.S. senators, Pakistani politicians, journalists, American-based scholars, human rights activists, pollsters, Google Earth, and even the people of the FATA themselves. Although these revelations did little to change the conventional wisdom that drones invaded Pakistani airspace and indiscriminately killed Pakistani civilians at random, they began to shed some new light on the murky drone campaign for those who cared to dig deeper.

  On the eve of these developments, Barack Obama took office on January 20, 2009. He let it be known that he would discontinue many of the more controversial antiterrorism practices of the Bush administration, such as water-boarding interrogations and the rendition of prisoners to CIA “black sites.” He also promised to close the offshore prison camp at Guantánamo Bay and try its prisoners in the U.S. judicial system. Obama clearly saw these Bush-era practices as public relations disasters in perhaps the most important war with Islamist extremists: the war for the hearts and minds of millions of Muslims. He aimed to create a new dialogue with Muslims. In his first major international speech, which was delivered in Cairo, Egypt, Obama promised a new era of understanding toward the Muslim world. He promised to respect Islam and end the distrust between the United States and Muslims that had been exacerbated in particular by the bloody U.S. invasion of Iraq.

  In light of these promises, many antiwar activists in the West and antidrone voices in Pakistan felt confident that Obama would have a different take on the drone assassination campaign than his predecessor. The question on the minds of many—from the halls of power in Washington to the Taliban hujras in Waziristan to the Pakistani military headquarters in Rwalpindi—was, would the newly elected Democratic president continue the drone policies of his Republican predecessor?

  7

  Who Is Being Killed in the Drone Strikes?

  It is legitimate to target the people who are targeting you.

  —Democratic senator Carl Levin

  This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities and bases.

  —President Barack Obama

  Three days after Barack Obama’s inauguration, the world learned the new president’s views on the CIA’s assassination campaign in FATA when two separate drone attacks were launched, one in South Waziristan and one in North Waziristan. A Washington Post headline the next day read, “2 U.S. Airstrikes Offer Concrete Sign of Obama’s Pakistan Policy.”1 These strikes encapsulated all the benefits and pitfalls of the drone campaign. Whereas the first one was clean and killed ten militants, among them seven “foreigners,” the second strike, on a hujra owned by a Taliban militant, killed several of the Taliban target’s relatives, including children.2

  This development disappointed those who were opposed to the drone campaign. Several months later one of those disappointed Americans created an iconic image of the antidrone movement by photoshopping an image of the Nobel Peace Prize onto the nose of a drone firing a missile. (Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.) In the tribal regions of Pakistan a group of antidrone protestors organized by the Jamaat e Islami (the Islamist Party) held aloft banners that read, “Bombing on Tribes. Obama’s First Gift to Pakistan,” and the Taliban were said to have drummed up “more hatred for President Obama than for President Bush.”3 By 2011 a Pakistani newspaper was describing the new American president as “the Rambo of Drone Warfare.”4

  Far from ending the drone campaign in Pakistan, Obama ratcheted it up to unprecedented levels: there were 54 strikes in 2009, 117 in 2010, 64 in 2011, and 46 in 2012. In those four years Obama ordered roughly 281 drone strikes.5 In fact, the Obama administration ordered drone strikes once every four days on average, compared to the Bush administration, which ordered a drone strike every forty days on average.6 Obama ultimately expanded the CIA drone program to fourteen “orbits” (an orbit consisted of three drones).7 For all intents and purposes, Obama doubled down on the policy of assassinating terrorists in Pakistan without much criticism from his own party or from Republicans, whose president had begun the drone campaign. By the fall of 2012 Obama had, without any real opposition, carried out 283 strikes in Pakistan (six times more than Bush during his eight years in office).8

  Obama appeared to be more focused on winning the war in Afghanistan than Bush was. Soon after coming to power he announced that he would send an additional thirty thousand troops to fight in what had become known as “the Forgotten War.” During his speech announcing the troop surge in Afghanistan, Obama made his intentions toward the Taliban and al Qaeda abundantly clear: “We are in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from spreading throughout the country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. We cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear.”9

  Obama also broadcast his intentions when he announced, “I will not hesitate to use force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America. … I will ensure that the military becomes more stealthy, agile, and lethal in its ability to kill terrorists.”10 That Obama felt this way should have come as no surprise for those who followed his speeches on the campaign trail when he was running for president. In 2007 and 2008 Senator Obama made it clear to voters that should he become president, he would refocus U.S. energy from Iraq, which he called a “war of choice,” to Afghanistan, which he called a “war of necessity.” In an August 2007 speech Obama firmly declared, “I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.” Lest there was any ambiguity about his stance, Obama continued,

  We have a difficult situati
on in Pakistan. I believe that part of the reason we have a difficult situation is because we made a bad judgment going into Iraq in the first place when we hadn’t finished the job of hunting down bin Laden and crushing al Qaeda. So what happened was we got distracted, we diverted resources, and ultimately bin Laden escaped, set up base camps in the mountains of Pakistan in the northwest provinces there.

  They are now raiding our troops in Afghanistan, destabilizing the situation. They’re stronger now than at any time since 2001. And that’s why I think it’s so important for us to reverse course because that’s the central front on terrorism. They are plotting to kill Americans right now. As Secretary Gates, the Defense secretary, said, the war against terrorism began in that region, and that’s where it will end.11

  By personally condoning the drone strikes, President Obama was simply fulfilling his campaign vow to refocus on Afghanistan and go after terrorist targets hiding out in Pakistan. Obama appeared set to rely on the Bush-era congressional resolution that authorized the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons” found to be linked to the 9/11 attacks. By year’s end more than five hundred militants and a far smaller number of civilians living in the FATA region would be killed as the aerial assassination campaign that was begun under Bush gained momentum under Obama.