While U.S. officials cautioned that the drones would be called off if there were risks of civilian casualties from a strike, the limited assassination campaign was broadening into what could best be described as an aerial war. Clearly Bush White House officials felt that under the laws of war they had the legal right to wage an asymmetric aerial campaign against terrorists and fighters preparing terrorist acts and waging war on U.S. troops from cross-border sanctuaries and havens in the autonomous tribal regions of Pakistan.
But that was not all. The demand that the CIA seek “concurrence” from Pakistan’s government was later dropped from the agreement that made the CIA director “America’s combatant commander in the hottest covert war in the global campaign on terror.”20 Previously the Pakistanis had been allowed the right to concur with an intended strike or to veto it. When that right was dropped from the agreement, the chances of Pakistani ISI officers with mixed loyalties warning the drone targets in advance were greatly reduced. According to former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, on several occasions the Pakistanis had tipped off drone targets in advance of a strike.21 The most notable case of the Pakistanis tipping off a Taliban target, according to Matthew Aid, occurred when ISI agents warned Jalaludin Haqqani of an impending drone strike.22
Although the expansion of the drones’ targets and the end to the right of concurrences might have bothered the Pakistanis, who were always sensitive about the issues of sovereignty, collateral damage deaths, and their close ties to the Afghan Taliban (as opposed to their war with the Pakistani Taliban), larger events on the ground in the FATA at this time actually favored the widening of the campaign. In mid-December of the previous year five disparate jihadi organizations had officially organized themselves in the FATA as the TTP. They chose as their head the soon-to-be-notorious leader Baitullah Mehsud, whose assassination was outlined in chapter 1. This loose umbrella organization was created in part as a response to the drone strikes and Pakistani military incursions into the militants’ de facto secessionist state.
At this time the militants also went on the offensive and conquered the last remaining free zones in Swat Valley. The suicide bombings and the invasion of Swat infuriated the Pakistani military and civilian leadership and came to be seen as a major threat, not just to the U.S. and Afghan governments, but to Pakistan itself. Many Pakistani leaders felt that the previously tolerated militants had gone too far. For this reason, the Pakistani authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to a stepped-up drone campaign against the newly aggressive Pakistani Taliban.
For its part, the CIA was better prepared than ever to take advantage of the growing hostility between the Pakistani military-government and the Pakistani Taliban thanks to the development of a deadly new drone model known as the MQ-9 Reaper. Whereas the original MQ-1 Predator was a surveillance craft that had been retroactively jerry-rigged to carry two missiles, the much larger Reaper was specifically designed as a killing platform. The $20 million Reaper could carry eight times the payload of its smaller Predator predecessor (that is, the same number of missiles as an Apache Longbow attack helicopter), was not limited to Hellfire missiles, and could deliver two five-hundred-pound Paveway laser-guided bombs or JDAMs.23 The Reaper carried the same payload as an F-16 manned fighter jet (1.5 tons) but could stay aloft ten times longer.24 As one military expert put it, with the Reaper “you have a lot of ammo circling overhead on call for short notice strikes.”25 The Reaper could also fly to a target three times faster than the Predator and loiter for slightly longer periods of time (up to forty-two hours). The Reaper was a Predator on steroids, and it gave the CIA what the military called “deadly persistence” in the hunt for al Qaeda. The Reaper had already made its debut on the Afghan battlefield with great effect in the fall of 2007, and it soon began making kills in Pakistan’s tribal zone as well (although there were fewer of these new aircraft in operation than there were Predators).26
On May 14 a drone struck again, this time in the infamous Damadola region of Bajaur, a major hotbed for cross-border insurgency activity into Kunar. According to Pakistani sources, this strike took place on a compound in the hamlet of Khaza, where “militants had gathered for dinner.”27 The initial strike set off a chain of blasts from explosives collected in the targeted house. Between six and twelve people were killed in the strike and resulting explosions, which, interestingly, did not cause any uproar in the region—primarily because the compound was owned by an Afghan who was a former Taliban defense minister named Maulvi Obaidullah.
The former Taliban minster and his civilian family were not the only ones to die in the attack. At the time they were hosting an important guest named Abu Suleiman “al Jazairi” (the Algerian). Al Jazairi was al Qaeda’s director of external operations and was responsible for running the terrorist group’s European and British operations.28 He was said to have trained British Muslims who traveled to Pakistan to learn how to carry out terrorist operations.29 His death was a remarkable example of how the drones could help preempt future terrorism by killing HVTs who were plotting future attacks from remote hideouts.
A Reaper may well have been involved in the next drone strike, which occurred in the Wana region of South Waziristan on May 16. According to an al Qaeda video that eulogized those killed in the strike, the attack killed a prominent Pakistani jihadi trainer named Dr. Arshad Waheed and twenty other Taliban and al Qaeda militants.30 Once again there were no civilian deaths on this occasion.
The next air strike, in early June, came about in more confusing circumstances and actually involved the death of Pakistani Frontier Constabulary troops. Probably delivered by a piloted U.S. aircraft, the strike took place after Afghan troops were ambushed by Taliban near the Afghan-Pakistani border. Another air strike was called in to support the troops, but it inadvertently hit a nearby Pakistani Constabulary post killing eleven Pakistani paramilitaries. Eight Taliban were killed and eleven wounded in the strike.31 The Pakistanis were understandably furious.
This mishap was not, however, enough to damage the joint U.S.-Pakistani war on al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the drone campaign went on. Several days later a drone struck again, this time in Makeen, South Waziristan, on June 14. Pakistan news reports claimed the strike was an attempt to kill the newly appointed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.32 No civilians were reported killed at this time.
The next drone strike took place in the village of Azam Warsak on July 27. Between five and six people, including a notorious al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction expert, Abu Khabab “al Masri” (the Egyptian), were said to have been killed in the attack.33 Abu Khabab was described as al Qaeda’s “mad scientist,” and he had filmed himself killing dogs in a lab using hydrogen cyanide. the same agent used by the Nazis in their gas chambers.34 He was also said to have been involved in making the explosives used in the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole and in the training of Richard Reid, the failed al Qaeda “shoe bomber” (a Brit who tried to set off a shoe bomb on a civilian-packed airliner over the Atlantic in December 2001).35 Khabab, who had a $5 million bounty on his head, was trained to develop chemical and biological weapons to be used in mass-casualty terrorism against the West and was a major threat.36 His death was cause for celebration among the counterterrorism experts trying to protect the United States from mass-casualty, chemical-biological terrorism.37