Brian Williams - Predators

Zardari seemed to appreciate that the drone attacks were helping his country avoid military casualties they would have sustained had they directly attacked the terrorists’ lairs. According to a Wikileak cable from Ambassador Patterson, “Referring to a recent drone strike in the tribal area that killed 60 militants, Zardari reported that his military aide believed a Pakistani operation to take out this site would have resulted in the deaths of over 60 Pakistani soldiers.” 88Similarly, a spokeswoman for Zardari’s political party, the Pakistan People’s Party, declared, “There is a segment in the country who support the drone attacks, and they feel that drone attacks have been helpful in eliminating many of the militants.” 89One military officer told AFP, “The Pakistani army supports drone strikes because they are efficient for eliminating TTP people… and give it a good reason not to start a dangerous offensive in North Waziristan.” 90Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States added, “Pakistan has never said that we do not like the elimination of terrorists through predator drones.” 91

The Wikileaks documents from 2009 and 2010 show that Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Gilani similarly opined of the drones in private, “I don’t care if they do it as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.” 92Gen. Shah Shuja Pasha summed up his views of the Taliban and al Qaeda when he said, “We would obviously like to fix these rogues. They are killing our own people and are certainly not the friends of this country.” 93In addition, General Kayani asked the United States for “continuous Predator coverage of the conflict area” during his forces’ campaigns against the Taliban in the FATA. 94This request was answered in the affirmative during Pakistani operations in South Waziristan, and one U.S. military official told the Los Angeles Times , “We are coordinating with the Pakistanis. And we do provide Predator support when requested.” 95

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.” 98National 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.” 100But 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. 101No 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. 103Rauf 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. 105There was an uncharacteristic lull in drone attacks until one struck an undisclosed location in South Waziristan on December 11, killing seven Punjabi militants. 106There 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. 107On 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. 108Thus the year’s campaign ended with what Bergen and Tiedemann call “a legacy-building effort to dismantle the entire Al Qaeda top leadership.” 109