Not one to miss an opportunity, the intended target of the strike, Zawahiri, quickly released a video response to the attempt on his life. Gloating about his survival, Zawahiri addressed President Bush directly: “Butcher of Washington, you are not only defeated and a liar, but also a failure. You are a curse on your own nation and you have brought and will bring them only catastrophes and tragedies. Bush, do you know where I am? I am among the Muslim masses.”63
Zawahiri was not the only one reacting; the Pakistani government was terribly embarrassed by the incident. As Pakistani protestors demanded the resignation of President Musharraf, the Pakistani government strongly condemned the strike to the U.S. ambassador. Pakistani information minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed called the air strike “highly condemnable” and said the Pakistani government wanted “to assure the people we will not allow such incidents to reoccur.”64
The Damadola strike also appeared to have galvanized an antidrone sentiment among the antiwar movement in the United States as well. One American reverend wrote a blog post for CounterPunch titled “Remember Damadola”:
America’s moral decline is seen in the widespread mainstream acceptance of the murder of women and children and other persons by our government in our name. How little the lives of distant and different human beings seem to count reveals how much we are falling from grace…. President Bush expressed no sympathy to the families and friends of the dead Damadola villagers. No apology to their loved ones, nor to the people of Pakistan. No restitution offered. No explanation given to morally concerned American citizens about the killing of innocent human beings.65
In fact no apology was forthcoming from the U.S. government. On the contrary, one Pentagon official said, “The message to [the Pashtuns of the FATA] is, ‘You have to take a new measure now: your families are not safe if you protect the terrorists.’”66 And despite all the public clamor in Pakistan and the growing antidrone movement in the United States, President Musharraf remained committed to his newfound alliance with the Americans who had by this time paid his country $10 billion in aid. (This total would ultimately rise to more than $20 billion.)
An interesting report in Time magazine from the period provides insight into the relationship between the Americans and the Pakistanis after the Damadola strike:
Although the missile strike provoked a round of protests in Pakistan’s tribal areas that forced President Pervez Musharraf to distance his government from the operation, cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistan in the hunt for bin Laden has quietly deepened. A Peshawar-based Pakistani intelligence official speaking on condition of anonymity says Washington has an understanding with Islamabad that allows the U.S. to strike within Pakistan’s border regions—providing the Americans have actionable intelligence and especially if the Pakistanis won’t or can’t take firm action. Pakistan’s caveat is that it would formally protest such strikes to deflect domestic criticism.67
To support U.S. operations, the Pakistanis joined with the CIA to create a network of local spies and informants who were actively involved in hunting for al Qaeda HVTs. One Pakistani security officer told Time magazine that the CIA had installed sophisticated surveillance equipment in several ISI offices to monitor radio and Internet communications between al Qaeda members.68
The results of this continuing collaboration remained mixed, according to a 2006 Los Angeles Times report based on interviews with CIA operatives who served alongside the ISI: “American spy agencies depend heavily on cooperation from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, elements of which are believed to have long-standing ties to the Taliban. Underscoring the lack of trust, a former high-ranking CIA official said that the United States typically gives the Pakistani government less than an hour’s notice before launching a Predator missile strike, largely out of fear that more time might allow ISI sympathizers to tip off targets.”69
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