Brian Williams - Predators

To support U.S. operations, the Pakistanis joined with the CIA to create a network of local spies and informants who were actively involved in hunting for al Qaeda HVTs. One Pakistani security officer told Time magazine that the CIA had installed sophisticated surveillance equipment in several ISI offices to monitor radio and Internet communications between al Qaeda members. 68

The results of this continuing collaboration remained mixed, according to a 2006 Los Angeles Times report based on interviews with CIA operatives who served alongside the ISI: “American spy agencies depend heavily on cooperation from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, elements of which are believed to have long-standing ties to the Taliban. Underscoring the lack of trust, a former high-ranking CIA official said that the United States typically gives the Pakistani government less than an hour’s notice before launching a Predator missile strike, largely out of fear that more time might allow ISI sympathizers to tip off targets.” 69

At roughly this time a drone made headlines in the war effort that was the Americans’ main focus at this time, Operation Iraqi Freedom. In June an Air Force drone was used to monitor a safe house where Iraq’s most notorious terrorist leader, Abu Musab Zarqawi, the “Butcher of Baghdad,” was said to be hiding. The loitering drone sent back live video of the house and finally recorded Zarqawi entering the isolated farmhouse on June 7. On the basis of this video, the Air Force directed two F-16s to bomb the house with five-hundred-pound bombs since the Predator’s two Hellfire missiles were not deemed powerful enough to destroy the house. Zarqawi, a bloody terrorist who had introduced suicide bombings, sectarian death squads, and beheadings to the insurgency in Iraq, was killed. 70The death of this charismatic leader who had created al Qaeda in Iraq in 2004 caused a collapse of leadership in his organization. Although several lackluster leaders came after him, none of them had the leadership qualities and fame of the notorious Zarqawi.

Despite this success in Iraq, the situation on the Afghan-Pakistani front was deteriorating. By the spring of 2006 the Afghan Taliban had fully rein-filtrated Afghanistan from their safe havens in Pakistan’s FATA and had launched a full-blown insurgency-terrorism campaign. At this time the most effective Taliban commander was none other than the former CIA-sponsored mujahideen leader based in North Waziristan, Jalaludin Haqqani. His insurgents introduced Iraqi-style terrorism, complete with unbearably gruesome, videotaped beheadings, suicide bombings, and improvised explosive device attacks, to Afghanistan. Safe from American troops in their North Waziristan sanctuary, Haqqani’s terrorists began a concentrated campaign to wreck Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s dreams of bringing peace and prosperity to his war-weary people.

The situation on the Pakistani side of the border was not improving either. Having lost hundreds of their troops to tough Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, the Pakistani authorities decided to sign yet another face-saving peace treaty with their enemies in October 2006. The so-called Waziristan Accords in essence led to the creation of a Taliban state often called the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan. An article in the Weekly Standard vividly described the accords, which recognized the de facto secession of Waziristan from Pakistan, as follows:

Yet even in the wake of Pakistan’s earlier surrender of South Waziristan, this new agreement, known as the Waziristan Accord, is surprising. It entails a virtually unconditional surrender of Waziristan.

The agreement is, to put it mildly, a boon to the terrorists and a humiliation for the Pakistani government.

Immediately after the Pakistani delegation left, al Qaeda’s flag was run up the flagpole of abandoned military checkpoints, and the Taliban began looting leftover small arms. The Taliban also held a “parade” in the streets of Miranshah. Clearly, they view their “truce” with Pakistan as a victory. It is trumpeted as such on jihadist websites….

The ramifications of the loss of Waziristan are tremendous. The region that Pakistan has ceded to the Taliban and al Qaeda is about the size of New Jersey, with a population of around 800,000. 71

Despite the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars invested in Pakistan, the Pakistanis had surrendered control of their territory in Waziristan to the Taliban and al Qaeda. The terrorists were now free to plan more terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and against the West from their autonomous state located right on the Afghan border.

This development could not have come at a worse time and represented a victory for the Pakistani Taliban, all three Afghan terrorist factions, and of course al Qaeda. Al Qaeda’s vitality in the FATA was vividly demonstrated in the fall of 2006, when British security agents foiled an attempted al Qaeda plot to use liquid explosives to blow up as many as ten passenger jet airliners. To this day airline passengers cannot store liquids in carry-on baggage as a result of this plot, which would have seen hundreds of people killed when their planes exploded in midair. The planners of the liquid bomb plot had received direct orders from the al Qaeda leadership in the FATA. 72This close call and links to the FATA further galvanized the CIA’s efforts to assassinate al Qaeda leaders before they could organize additional mass-casualty terrorism attacks in the West.

Then, in October 2006 the Pakistanis claimed to have located Zawahiri, once again in the Damadola region of the Bajaur Agency. He was said to be under the protection of two local pro-Taliban militants, named Maulvi Liaqat and Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, who operated a madrassa in the Chenagai suburb of Damadola. ( Maulvi is a term for a high-ranking mullah.) This madrassa and the region in general were known as a hotbed for jihadists, who were said to cross the border to fight U.S. troops in the neighboring Afghan province of Kunar. Three thousand local militants had recently gathered at the madrassa to express their solidarity with Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, whom they claimed were their “heroes.” 73

As a result, the NSA began monitoring the region with high-resolution satellites and found evidence of militants from the madrassa training for combat. 74The CIA also began to monitor the “terrorist training facility” with Predator drones, which locals saw flying in the area in late October (remember that drones can provide more than twenty-four hours of close-up surveillance in ways that satellites, which have to rely on orbits, cannot). 75Finally, at around 5:00 a.m. on October 30, 2006, the decision was made to attack the madrassa with drones. A fusillade of Hellfire missiles was launched into the seminary. The aftermath was worse than it had been on any previous or subsequent strikes. As local villagers shifted through the rubble, they found as many as eighty-two people dead. Among them was one of the militant heads of the “terrorist compound,” Maulvi Liaqat.

Local villagers, however, said that at least twelve of the victims who died in the attack were teenagers—which in and of itself would not exclude them from the ranks of the militants, but this information was nonetheless damning in the eyes of many. 76A report by the Pakistani newspaper the News , titled “Most Bajaur Victims Were under 20,” was even more damning and claimed that “one of the deceased was only seven-years old, three were eight, three nine, one was 10, four were 11, four were 12, eight were 13, six were 14, nine were 15, 19 were 16, 12 were 17, three were 18, three were 19 and only two were 21-years old.” 77If accurate, this claim would indicate that the CIA had targeted a school and primarily killed young students.