Kayani’s public position was quite different, however, according to a classified U.S. cable about Kayani and the government of Pakistan (GOP) released by Wikileaks:
The strikes have put increasing political pressure on the Pakistani government, which has struggled to explain why it is allowing an ally to violate its sovereignty. The GOP so far has denied recent media reports alleging that the U.S. is launching the strikes from bases in Pakistan. Kayani knows full well that the strikes have been precise, creating few civilian casualties, and targeted primarily at foreign fighters in the Waziristans. He will argue, however, that they undermine his campaign plan, which is to keep the Waziristans quiet until the Army is capable of attacking Baitullah Mehsud and other militants entrenched there.96
In his book The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan’s Lawless Frontier, Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul wrote of a similar disconnect between what the Pakistani leadership secretly wanted and their public stance. Gul wrote,
Most Pakistanis, including members of the media and mainstream political leaders, view the attacks as a violation of their national sovereignty. But privately even top generals support drone strikes. In a recent meeting with a handful of Pakistani journalists, a very senior general told us, “As long as they take out the guys who are a threat to us all, why crib about it?” Leading government officials, including Prime Minister Gilani, will agree even if publicly they condemn the drone strikes.97
One former U.S. official said of the Pakistanis’ formulaic criticisms of the drone strikes, “There’s always been a double game. There’s the game they’ll play out in public, but there has always been good cooperation.”98 National security analysts Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the Washington, D.C.–based New America Foundation summed up Pakistan’s duplicity:
For Pakistani politicians, the drone program is a dream come true. They get to posture to their constituents about the perfidious Americans even as they reap the benefits from the U.S. strikes. They are well-aware that neither the Pakistani Army’s ineffective military operations nor the various peace agreements with the militants have done anything to halt the steady Talibanization of their country, while the U.S. drones are the one surefire way to put significant pressure on the leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. This is called getting to have your chapati and eat it too.99
Some Americans who knew what was going on vis-à-vis Pakistan’s public criticisms of the drone strikes found Islamabad’s position to be hypocritical. Senator Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, for example, summed up U.S. frustrations with the Pakistanis’ double-dealing when he said, “For them to look the other way, or to give us the green light privately, and then to attack us publicly leaves us, it seems to me, at a very severe disadvantage and loss with the Pakistani people.”100 But this seemed to be the price the U.S. government was willing to pay to launch the drone attacks that the Pakistani government felt it could only secretly support.
The next strike was on November 19. It was very unusual in that it did not take place in the FATA; up until this point, all drone strikes in Pakistan had taken place in North and South Waziristan and, to a much lesser extent, Bajaur. The November 19 strike took place in the village of Jani Khel, in the province of Bannu, which is located in the North-West Frontier Province, a Pashtun-dominated “settled” land that was one of Pakistan’s four main provinces. (This constituent part of Pakistan became known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2009.) Three “foreigners” and one local Taliban fighter were killed in the strike on a compound run by a Taliban leader named Parpand.101 No civilian deaths were recorded. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry nonetheless lodged a protest with Ambassador Patterson owing to the depth of the strike into Pakistan proper.102
The next attack took place three days later, on November 22, in the village of Ali Khel in North Waziristan. At least four people were killed in the strike, among them a very interesting British-Pakistani terrorist named Rashid Rauf. Rauf had fled his native Britain and moved to Pakistan after killing his uncle and escaping an arrest warrant for his involvement in the notorious plot to use liquid explosive to blow up ten civilian jet airliners in 2006.103 Rauf was arrested in Pakistan, but before he could be put on trial, he escaped. He subsequently married the daughter of the founder of Jaish al Muhammad, a Pakistani militant group, and began to plan other terrorist strikes. Justice finally caught up with the murderer/al Qaeda terrorist when the drone killed him in North Waziristan. Rauf’s Pakistani lawyer played on local Pakistani sentiments when he said, “He was an innocent man a god-fearing, devout polite man and this is an extra-judicial killing.”104
The next strike took place on November 29 in Chashma, North Waziristan, and killed three people. Information about the victims’ identities is not available.105 There was an uncharacteristic lull in drone attacks until one struck an undisclosed location in South Waziristan on December 11, killing seven Punjabi militants.106 There were no recorded civilian casualties in this strike.
The penultimate strike of the year occurred in the village of Tapi Tool in North Waziristan and killed two people. No information about the victims’ identities is available.107 On December 22, the drone blitz of 2008 ended with a crescendo with two separate strikes on Taliban vehicles in the villages of Karikot and Shin Warsak. Eight “militants,” including fighters who fired on a drone with a truck-mounted antiaircraft gun, were killed in the strikes.108 Thus the year’s campaign ended with what Bergen and Tiedemann call “a legacy-building effort to dismantle the entire Al Qaeda top leadership.”109
The questions that remain at this point are, How did the campaign of 2008 break down in numbers of slain civilians versus militants and where did the strikes take place? A case-by-case analysis of the strikes (each of which is documented by Pakistani or Western sources of repute) leads to the following startling conclusion. The 2008 drone campaign in Pakistan resulted in 317 deaths. Of these, 249 were confirmed militants or terrorists, 36 were classified as unknown, and 32 were confirmed as civilians. In other words, according to the available sources (a majority of which were Pakistani), approximately 10 percent of the victims of the 2008 drone bombing campaign were confirmed as civilians. Although this percentage is higher than desirable, it is also a refutation of the claims that the vast majority of those who die in the drone strikes are civilians.110
As for the militants, they made up the vast majority of the drone victims. Surprisingly, 162 of the 249 slain militants/terrorists were not Pakistanis; they were instead Arabs, Turks, Central Asians, Canadians, Brits, and Afghans. This important distinction has not been made before and points to a real effort by the CIA in 2008 to kill foreign terrorists instead of local Pakistani Taliban militants. The locals in the FATA had to realize that the drones were not “killing Pakistani civilians every day” (in fact the thirty-two civilians were killed on seven different days in 2008). On the contrary, the CIA was clearly able to distinguish between foreigners who were linked to al Qaeda and local Taliban and to surgically target the former at a much higher rate than has previously been disclosed.