The Pakistani government had no choice but to act against this blatant challenge to its authority in the heart of the capital and sent troops to surround the mosque. President Musharraf proclaimed, “In the garb of Islamic teaching they have been training for terrorism…. They prepared the madrassa as a fortress for war and housed other terrorists in there. I will not allow any madrassa to be used for extremism.”88
Pakistani troops then stormed the Lal Masjid and fought with the militants for several days before gaining control of the building. Ninety-one militants and eleven Pakistani soldiers were killed in the fighting. The outcome of the fighting originally seemed like a victory for the Pakistani government, but when word of the siege reached the Taliban in its autonomous “emirates” in Bajaur and Waziristan, it declared an end to the tentative “truce” with Islamabad and the beginning of jihad on the Pakistani state. The independent lands of Talibanistan were now officially at war with the Pakistani state, and Pakistanis could no longer pretend that the war on the terrorists was purely in the interest of the Americans.
Among the Taliban’s first act was to send scores of suicide bombers against civilian and military targets, murdering more than a hundred in less than a week.89 The Pakistani military was thus forced to respond and invaded Waziristan, setting off battles that led to the deaths of hundreds of Taliban fighters, Pakistani troops, and civilians. The Taliban responded to this assault by invading the so-called settled lands of the Pashtun-dominated NorthWest Frontier Province and seizing control of Swat Valley, just a hundred miles to the west of Islamabad.
As this “creeping Talibanization” was being carried out by the Pakistani Taliban, the CIA launched a drone strike on the most effective of all the Afghan Taliban militants hiding out in North Waziristan, Jalaludin Haqqani. The November 3, 2007, strike on a compound owned by a local militant but used by Haqqani’s fighters killed five people described as “militants” by the Pakistanis.90
This strike probably took place without the support of the Pakistanis, who had considered the North Waziristan–based Haqqani to be a “strategic asset” to be used in neighboring Afghanistan.91 Although the Pakistanis were at war with the Pakistani Taliban, they still protected the Afghan Taliban. The Americans’ suspicion that their Pakistani allies were working with Haqqani, their worst enemy in Afghanistan, was confirmed when the CIA intercepted communications between Pakistani ISI agents and Haqqani terrorists who subsequently carried out a suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed fifty-four people.92
Clearly the Pakistanis were at odds with the United States over the basing of the Afghan Haqqani Network in North Waziristan, and the CIA drones had to unilaterally carry out operations against this key Pakistani terrorist ally. (CIA drones ultimately killed two of Haqqani’s sons, Mohammad and Badruddin.) The Americans and the Pakistanis were also at odds when it came to Mullah Omar and the main Afghan Taliban group he lead. Omar was allowed to live unmolested in the Pakistani town of Quetta after he told his Afghan Taliban followers not to join the Pakistani Taliban in attacking the Pakistani government. One journalist described the Afghan Taliban’s sanctuary in Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal zones, which included much of north Baluchistan: “As I traveled through Pakistan and particularly the Pashtun lands bordering Afghanistan, I felt as if I were moving through a Taliban spa for rehabilitation and inspiration…. Quetta had become a kind of free zone where strategies could be formed, funds picked up, interviews given and victories relished.”93
Although the Pakistanis did not allow the CIA to use their drones to kill Taliban leaders in Quetta because the city was part of Pakistan proper, they did occasionally move against Afghan Taliban when pushed. This had happened on December 19, 2006, when Pakistani agents informed the Americans that a high-ranking member of the Taliban’s Shura (Inner Council), Mullah Akhtar Usmani, was crossing into Afghanistan. Usmani was said to be in charge of Taliban operations in Afghanistan and was designated as Mullah Omar’s successor should he be killed.94 His location was determined when his telephone communications were intercepted by a drone. The CIA dispatched a Predator to his location, and the drone killed him and two of his deputies with missiles while they were driving in their car.95
Although ties between the CIA and ISI remained strained as the year 2007 drew to an end, such examples of occasional cooperation boded well for the uneasy Pakistani-American alliance. It became clear that further cooperation would be needed if the CIA was going to expand its drone operations further into the FATA region, which was obviously the agency’s intent. Still, few could have envisioned the upsurge in killings that began in 2008.
6
The Drone War Begins
The political consensus in support of the drone program, its antiseptic, high-tech appeal and its secrecy have obscured just how radical it is. For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war.
There was nothing to indicate that in 2008 the CIA would transform its limited targeted assassination campaign of just a few strikes per year (between one and five) into a full-blown aerial campaign of thirty-four strikes. In just a few years the CIA had gone from having deep reservations about using drones to becoming, in the words of one agency official, “one hell of a killing machine.”1 But as the campaign stepped up, the growing perception in Pakistan was that the drones seemed to have a unique capacity to kill innocent civilians, not their actual targets, al Qaeda and Taliban militants.
A case-by-case analysis of the strikes sheds some much needed light on the nature of the drones’ targets. Contrary to claims that “99 percent” of those killed in drone attacks are civilians and “1 percent” terrorists, a systematic analysis of the 2008 strikes shows that the vast majority of those killed were terrorists. Over and over again the drones seemed to find their targets with unprecedented accuracy and take them out cleanly.
THE FEDERALLY ADMINISTERED TRIBAL AGENCIES OF PAKISTAN, 2008
The first drone strike of 2008 fit the limited HVT assassination pattern of previous years. It took place in North Waziristan and targeted an Arab, Abu Laith al Libbi, a top al Qaeda leader who directed a February 2007 suicide bombing outside a gate at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, that killed twenty-three people, mainly civilians, while Vice President Richard Cheney was visiting.2 Libbi was al Qaeda’s main liaison to Afghan Taliban fighters. In one of his videos he called for Westerners to be kidnapped, and in another he called for an assault on Israel.3