Brian Williams - Predators

Pakistan’s military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, claimed that all those who died in the madrassa attack, regardless of their ages, were militants and explicitly stated that there was “no collateral damage.” 78Although some have tried to argue that the victims in the second Damadola strike were all innocent students, the fact that leaders from the mosque subsequently vowed to send out “squads” of suicide bombers to punish the Pakistani military for its role in the strikes would suggest otherwise. 79

Regardless, the slain Maulvi Liaqat’s chief ally in the village, Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, stirred up local anger at the Americans and the Pakistani government. During a speech to as many as ten thousand mourners, Mohammad declared, “The government attacked and killed our innocent people on orders from America. It is an open aggression.” 80He then promised to continue to wage jihad against the Americans and Pakistani government. Such threats became reality a week later when a suicide bomber dressed in a shawl rushed into a training area where Pakistani soldiers were doing their morning exercises and blew himself up. The result was devastating. Forty-two soldiers were killed and twenty wounded in the largest ever suicide bombing of Pakistani troops.

Given that hundreds of troops had already been lost in the fight in Waziristan, the loss of forty-two soldiers in the bombing prompted further debate throughout Pakistan. One Pakistani general argued, “We need a major rethink of the entire policy. We should not be fighting America’s war. We have to solve our own problems. If we are dictated to by outsiders it will end up like Iraq or Afghanistan.” 81

Still, the drone strikes went on. In January 2007 the Pakistani military joined the hunt for al Qaeda, and there were reports that laser-guided bombs dropped by Pakistani jets had hit al Qaeda compounds in the tribal region of South Waziristan. This angered local tribal leaders, who felt that previous peace treaties with the Pakistani military had forbidden such activities. 82Perhaps in response to pressure from the tribes, the Pakistani army in 2007 signed yet another peace treaty, this time with Maulvi Faqir Mohammad. The treaty was essentially a capitulation that ceded the northern tribal agency of Bajaur to Mohammad and his militants. This very same Faqir Mohammad had offered protection to Zawahiri, sent thousands of local tribesmen to support the Afghan Taliban in 2001, and openly declared his support for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, whom he labeled “heroes of the Muslim world.” 83

By this time the Pakistani government had essentially ceded three tribal agencies to the Taliban: North Waziristan, South Waziristan, and Bajaur. This Pakistani surrender did not, however, bring a halt to CIA drone strikes in the region. On April 27, 2007, a madrassa in the village of Sadigi, North Waziristan, belonging to a pro-Taliban leader named Maulana Noor Mohammad, was hit with missiles that killed four. 84

The next drone strike took place on June 20, 2007, in the village of Mami Rogha in North Waziristan and led to the death of at least twenty people in what was described as a terrorist training camp. 85At roughly this time America’s sixteen intelligence organizations had also produced their annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which declared that al Qaeda had “protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.” This Pakistani safe haven “allowed al-Qaeda to act with virtual impunity to plan, train for, and mount attacks.” 86One senior military officer would describe the region as “the epicenter of terrorism in the world,” and CIA director Michael Hayden later said, “They [al Qaeda] were coming at us. They were a threat to the homeland.” 87

But even as the CIA continued its efforts to convince the Pakistanis of the dire threat the al Qaeda–Taliban nexus posed, the troubles of Pakistan’s remote frontier finally began to affect those Pakistanis who had turned a blind eye to the rise of the militants. In July 2007 militants from a major mosque, known as the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), in the capital, Islamabad, began to pour into surrounding neighborhoods and clash with storeowners who they claimed were selling “pornographic” digital video discs (DVDs) and videotapes. They also kidnapped local women they described as “prostitutes” and seized control of a nearby government building. Many of the militants were women clad in hijabs and armed with automatic weapons. The militants, who were mainly conservative Pashtuns, then called for the enforcement of strict shariah law—the sort that was already being harshly enforced in Bajaur and Waziristan—in Pakistan. The heads of the Lal Masjid, known as the Ghazi brothers, also threatened to unleash suicide bombers on the capital if the government refused their demands to introduce shariah law nationally.

The Pakistani government had no choice but to act against this blatant challenge to its authority in the heart of the capital and sent troops to surround the mosque. President Musharraf proclaimed, “In the garb of Islamic teaching they have been training for terrorism…. They prepared the madrassa as a fortress for war and housed other terrorists in there. I will not allow any madrassa to be used for extremism.” 88

Pakistani troops then stormed the Lal Masjid and fought with the militants for several days before gaining control of the building. Ninety-one militants and eleven Pakistani soldiers were killed in the fighting. The outcome of the fighting originally seemed like a victory for the Pakistani government, but when word of the siege reached the Taliban in its autonomous “emirates” in Bajaur and Waziristan, it declared an end to the tentative “truce” with Islamabad and the beginning of jihad on the Pakistani state. The independent lands of Talibanistan were now officially at war with the Pakistani state, and Pakistanis could no longer pretend that the war on the terrorists was purely in the interest of the Americans.

Among the Taliban’s first act was to send scores of suicide bombers against civilian and military targets, murdering more than a hundred in less than a week. 89The Pakistani military was thus forced to respond and invaded Waziristan, setting off battles that led to the deaths of hundreds of Taliban fighters, Pakistani troops, and civilians. The Taliban responded to this assault by invading the so-called settled lands of the Pashtun-dominated NorthWest Frontier Province and seizing control of Swat Valley, just a hundred miles to the west of Islamabad.

As this “creeping Talibanization” was being carried out by the Pakistani Taliban, the CIA launched a drone strike on the most effective of all the Afghan Taliban militants hiding out in North Waziristan, Jalaludin Haqqani. The November 3, 2007, strike on a compound owned by a local militant but used by Haqqani’s fighters killed five people described as “militants” by the Pakistanis. 90

This strike probably took place without the support of the Pakistanis, who had considered the North Waziristan–based Haqqani to be a “strategic asset” to be used in neighboring Afghanistan. 91Although the Pakistanis were at war with the Pakistani Taliban, they still protected the Afghan Taliban. The Americans’ suspicion that their Pakistani allies were working with Haqqani, their worst enemy in Afghanistan, was confirmed when the CIA intercepted communications between Pakistani ISI agents and Haqqani terrorists who subsequently carried out a suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed fifty-four people. 92

Clearly the Pakistanis were at odds with the United States over the basing of the Afghan Haqqani Network in North Waziristan, and the CIA drones had to unilaterally carry out operations against this key Pakistani terrorist ally. (CIA drones ultimately killed two of Haqqani’s sons, Mohammad and Badruddin.) The Americans and the Pakistanis were also at odds when it came to Mullah Omar and the main Afghan Taliban group he lead. Omar was allowed to live unmolested in the Pakistani town of Quetta after he told his Afghan Taliban followers not to join the Pakistani Taliban in attacking the Pakistani government. One journalist described the Afghan Taliban’s sanctuary in Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal zones, which included much of north Baluchistan: “As I traveled through Pakistan and particularly the Pashtun lands bordering Afghanistan, I felt as if I were moving through a Taliban spa for rehabilitation and inspiration…. Quetta had become a kind of free zone where strategies could be formed, funds picked up, interviews given and victories relished.” 93