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-guided 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.