Brian Williams - Predators

Like Mullah Omar, who refused to turn over bin Laden back in 2001, Nek Muhammad had made a decision to stand up to the Americans. No amount of military incursions or appeasing peace treaties could convince the Stubborn One to turn over his Arab and Uzbekistani guests. Instead, he began launching small-scale attacks on Pakistani troops and declared that his people had “fought a jihad against the Russians and before them the British. Now that the Americans are here we will wage jihad against them.” 24

As the Pakistani Taliban metastasized and began to threaten both Pakistan and the United States, it became clear that Nek Muhammad was the major impediment to joint Pakistani-U.S. operations designed to flush out al Qaeda operatives hiding in the tribal areas. For his part Muhammad seemed to relish the notoriety that came from his decision to stand up to both the Pakistani army and the Americans. In many interviews by the media, he boldly promised to wage total jihad against the Pakistani government and its U.S. allies. Safe in his inaccessible tribal land, surrounded by thousands of armed followers, Muhammad seemed untouchable.

Then, on June 19, 2004, the Pakistani English-language newspaper Dawn reported that the Stubborn One had been killed two days earlier:

Security forces have killed Nek Mohammad and four other tribal militants in a missile attack on a village in Wana, the regional headquarters of the South Waziristan Agency. “Nek Mohammad was suspected to be present in a hideout with his associates and our security forces acted swiftly on the information and that is how he was killed,” a [Pakistani] military spokesman said on Friday.

Residents of Shah Nawaz Kot, a small hamlet about two kilometers south of Scouts Camp, said the 27-year-old militant was killed when his hideout was hit by a missile. The attack was reportedly carried out at 10pm on Thursday night when Nek Mohammad was taking dinner along with his colleagues in the courtyard of the house of his long-time friend, the late Sher Zaman Ashrafkhel, an Afghan refugee from his Ahmadzai Wazir tribe.

Witnesses said that Nek Mohammad’s face bore burn marks and his left hand and leg appeared to have been badly injured in the explosion. “Why aren’t you putting a bandage on my arm,” were his last words, those accompanying Nek Mohammad to the hospital quoted him as saying. 25

Pakistani security forces were thus said to have “acted swiftly” to kill Muhammad with a surprisingly accurate missile strike at night. But the Pakistanis had never carried out such a precise, nighttime strike before, and military experts doubted they had the technology to do so. Pakistani reporters began asking questions in hopes of clarifying how exactly the Pakistani army had carried out this feat. The Dawn story suggested that although the Pakistanis claimed the strike as their own, in actuality it was conducted by an American drone flying from Afghanistan. After dutifully sharing the Pakistani military’s official version of the death of Nek Muhammad, Dawn contradicted the official claim:

Witnesses said that a spy drone was seen flying overhead minutes before the missile attack. There were also reports that Nek Mohammad was speaking on a satellite phone when the missile struck, fuelling speculations that he might have been hit by a guided missile. The precision with which the missile landed right in the middle of the courtyard where Nek Mohammad and his colleagues were sitting, lent credence to the theory. Locals said that the missile created a six feet crater.

An associate of Nek Mohammad, who called the BBC Pushto office in Peshawar, also said that the tribal militant had been killed while speaking on a satellite phone. The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) declined to speculate on how the militant had been killed.

“We have various means and a full array of weapons at our disposal. We have artillery that can fire with precision and we have helicopters with night vision capability which can fire guided missiles. But I am not going to give out operational secrets on how he was killed,” ISPR Director-General Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan told Dawn by phone from Islamabad.

“Absolutely absurd,” was his response when asked about rumors that Nek Mohammad had been killed with the US assistance. “Intelligence is like a jigsaw puzzle, it does not come from a single source on a single time,” Gen Sultan said. 26

Despite the Pakistani military’s claims that it was “absolutely absurd” that the strike had been carried out with U.S. assistance, the eyewitness quoted in the Dawn article claimed to have heard a drone flying overhead just prior to Muhammad’s assassination. The witness also claimed that the victim was speaking on a satellite phone at the time of his death. It should be recalled that Harethi was previously tracked down in Yemen by the NSA after he used a cell phone. It seems likely that Muhammad was killed by a drone after making the same mistake. Clearly the Pakistani military was trying to deflect criticism away from itself for collaborating with the infamous CIA by claiming the strike as its own.

Regardless of who actually assassinated Muhammad, no anti-American protests followed his death because the Pakistanis were successful in their efforts to take credit for the assassination. But CIA drones were operating from Pakistani soil at this time; in January 2003 a Predator had crashed after takeoff at the Jacobabad airfield in Baluchistan. 27

The drones’ presence was even more evident almost a year after Muhammad’s death, when another terrorist was killed in the region, this time a top al Qaeda agent named Haithem al Yemeni. Yemeni was next in line to replace the number-three man in al Qaeda, Abu Faraj al Libbi, who had been arrested by the Pakistanis. Upon his arrest, Libbi had been interrogated and was said to have given details of Yemeni’s movements. These were then given to the CIA, which used a drone to assassinate Yemeni while he was riding in a car driven by a local Taliban warlord named Samiullah Khan. 28Yemeni was said to have been killed near Mir Ali, North Waziristan, on or before May 13, 2005, after being under surveillance by the CIA for more than a week. CIA officers had monitored his movements for several days in the hopes that he would lead them to bin Laden or Zawahiri, but decided to kill him after fearing that they would eventually lose him. 29

At the time, a Cable News Network (CNN) analyst pointed out that if the word of Yemeni’s death at the hands of a CIA drone spread, it could “create political problems for the Pakistani government, which has been quietly cooperating with U.S. efforts to round up or kill al Qaeda operatives.” 30News of the assassination would of course be a public relations disaster for the Pakistani government, whose citizens were among the most anti-American people in the world, should it become known that government officials had given the CIA carte blanche to hunt its enemies on their territory

A National Broadcasting Company (NBC) source shed some important light on the relaxed procedures behind the covert campaign: “Sources told NBC News that the CIA has all the approvals necessary within its counterterror center in Langley, Va., to fire missiles within Pakistan when an al-Qaida target is spotted. The agency does not have to check with the White House or with Pakistani authorities or the CIA director. The purpose is to expedite rapid action in the field in case the opportunity is time sensitive.” 31This little noticed news was actually very important. In effect the Pakistanis and the White House had given the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (actually located in Tysons Corner, Virginia, not Langley) the green light to fire at will in the effort to assassinate targets in Pakistan, without seeking approval from either government. 32