The strikes continued on August 13, 2008, with a drone attack on a militant training camp in South Waziristan run by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the ex-Afghan mujahideen warlord who was waging a terror campaign in Afghanistan. The strike killed a commander named Abdur Rehman and between nine and twenty-four other militants, including Turks and Arabs, according to Pakistani and U.S. sources.38
The barrage continued a week later on August 20 with a strike on a house in Wana, South Waziristan, that a Pakistani source described as a “known hideout for militants.” Eight people, including “foreign extremists,” were killed by missiles that a Pakistani official said “came from Afghanistan.” Locals who were interviewed said of the wounded owner of the house, “Arabs often stayed with him.”39 No civilians were reported killed in this strike.
The number of drone strikes may have surged at this time because of the concurrent power vacuum in Pakistan; President Musharraf had been forced to resign on August 18,2008.40 The accelerated pace of strikes may have also come as a result of increased pressure on the White House and CIA from a recently released Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the FATA region that found, “The United States has not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven in Pakistan’s FATA. According to U.S. officials and intelligence documents, since 2002, al Qaeda and the Taliban have used Pakistan’s FATA and the border region to attack Pakistani, Afghan, as well as U.S. and coalition troops; plan and train for attacks against U.S. interests; destabilize Pakistan; and spread radical Islamist ideologies that threaten U.S. interests.”41
As the pressure mounted on the CIA, it took advantage of the political vacuum in Pakistan, and according to Dawn, on August 30 it launched an attack on a house that had been rented out to “foreigners” in the Korzai area of South Waziristan. The Pakistani Daily Times reported that five people, including two Arabs with Canadian passports, were killed in the strike and several Punjabis were wounded.42 By this time Waziristan was home to hundreds, if not thousands, of Punjabi militants who had gradually become known as the “Punjabi Taliban.” At their base in Waziristan, the Punjabi Taliban began to train suicide bombers for missions throughout Punjab and the rest of Pakistan.
One aspect of preceding strike accounts deserves attention, namely, the fact that most of the details on the strikes (such as claims that the owner of a targeted house “rented out to foreigners”) came from Pakistani journalists interviewing locals at the scene. Over and over again Pakistani sources described the attacks as drone strikes on houses or compounds with ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda foreigners. Note that these same Pakistani sources did not describe the targets of the strikes as “innocent civilian residences,” even though Pakistani journalists tend to display anti-American attitudes. According to one study carried out by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, a full 67 percent of Pakistani journalists interviewed in an opinion poll found the drone strikes to be “acts of terrorism.”43 Yet the Pakistani media sources seemed remarkably frank in providing details that would indicate that the targets of the drone strikes were invariably linked directly or indirectly to al Qaeda terrorism or, less often, to Taliban terrorist-insurgency activities.
On the following day, August 31, a drone hit a house near Miram Shah in North Waziristan. Once again Pakistani sources reported that several “foreigners” were killed in the strike, but so were a woman and a child, the third pair of civilian casualties that year.44 By this time the drone strikes had become such an accepted part of the battle rhythm of the FATA zone that they did not cause much of an uproar in Pakistan. In my interviews with Pakistanis in the tribal zones and in parts of Pakistan proper in the summer of 2010, I found that this apathy was a product of two unique circumstances. First, most Pakistanis considered the autonomous FATA region to be removed from the rest of Pakistan proper, like a U.S. territory, such as Samoa, Guam, or Puerto Rico, or the Wild West in the 1800s. Second, U.S. combatants or pilots were not directly involved in the assassinations, which targeted people the locals knew were involved in militancy or terrorism. Because unmanned “robot” planes carried out the strikes, the CIA’s violation of Pakistani sovereignty was somehow more palatable than it would have been had they been carried out by manned bombers, like the Soviet air strikes of the 1980s.
Although the powerful pro-Taliban Islamist parties occasionally criticized the strikes—and even those on the Pakistani secular left who despised the Taliban fundamentalists criticized the strikes as “acts of imperialist aggression”—there were no mass protests like those following the Chenagai and Damadola strikes. Seemingly, by the summer of 2008 the Pakistani leadership had accepted the drone strikes in the FATA as an unfortunate but necessary evil in the state’s new war on the Taliban. If Pakistan wanted billions of dollars in U.S. aid, it had to allow the CIA to kill the common enemy by using its drones. But there would be no U.S. ground forces in the FATA. The hunt would be limited to remote-control planes.
This last point was challenged on September 3, 2008, when the United States shocked Pakistan by launching a helicopter-borne special operations raid on the village of Musa Nika in the Angoor Ada region of South Waziristan. The village of Musa Nika was a well-known cross-border sanctuary for Taliban insurgents who infiltrated into Afghanistan and attacked U.S. and Coalition troops.45
According to the New York Times, just prior to the September 3 night raid, U.S. and Afghan troops had pursued a group of Taliban fighters that had attacked them in Afghanistan. The enemy escaped by retreating across the border to the village of Musa Nika.46 There they were safe in their sanctuary—until 3:00 a.m. on September 3. At that time three to five Black Hawk helicopters roared over the village and began to disgorge U.S. Navy SEALs into the target. In the ensuing mayhem, between nine and twenty people were killed, including women and children. The troops in the helicopters killed or captured several suspected Taliban militants and then disappeared into the night. The attack lasted no more than an hour.
The following day U.S. officials sounded upbeat and hinted that the raid might be a sign of things to come.47 One U.S. military officer said, “You can’t allow a haven. You have to get the areas that they rest, relax and train.”48 A senior U.S. official commented, “The situation in the tribal areas is not tolerable. We have to be more assertive. Orders have been issued.” It later emerged that President George Bush himself had approved the orders calling for a new policy of conducting raids in Pakistan without notifying the Pakistanis.49
As word spread in Pakistan that Pakistani women and children had been killed by U.S. troops on Pakistani soil, there were howls of outrage from Pakistani leaders across the board. One senior Pakistani official called the night raid a “cowboy action” and criticized it for not targeting anyone “big.”50 The Pakistani Foreign Ministry condemned the attack, calling it “unacceptable” and “a grave provocation… which has resulted in immense loss of civilian life.”51 The following day the Pakistani parliament passed a resolution condemning the raid, and the foreign minister told the National Assembly, “There is no high-value target or known terrorist among the dead…. Only innocent civilians, including women and children, have been targeted.”52 U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson was also summoned to hear a “very strong protest” at the Foreign Ministry.