Brian Williams - Predators

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.

The numbers suggest that the CIA had an effective on-the-ground spy program whereby it was—and is—able to use local informants to track foreign terrorists and pinpoint the hujras , madrassas, training camps, and vehicles they were in for precisely targeted destruction. In most cases when civilian women, children, or local sympathizers died, they were in close proximity to a targeted terrorist or militant. Many, if not most, of the slain civilians, such as Haqqani’s wife and grandchildren or the wife and children of the Afghan Taliban member Maulvi Obaidullah, were related to terrorists or insurgents. One can assume that if they were adults, they were aiding and abetting their family members. In other words, in the 2008 blitz, if you were not related to a terrorist, involved in harboring terrorists, or involved in terrorist or militant activities, the odds that you would be killed by a drone in the FATA (or the one strike in Bannu) were very slim. Once again, this fact had to be well known among people living in the FATA.

In geographic terms, of the thirty-four strikes that occurred in 2008, sixteen were in South Waziristan; fifteen in North Waziristan; one in Bajaur Agency; one in Bannu, which was outside of the FATA; and one in an undisclosed location in the FATA. With the exception of Bannu, all the strikes occurred in FATA territory that was part of a de facto secessionist state run by various Taliban warlords.

In summary, in 2008 the CIA was largely killing non-Pakistanis and, to a lesser degree, local Taliban in a secessionist part of Pakistan that was openly at war with both Pakistan and the Afghan government. What is remarkable, especially in light of the small number of civilian deaths, is that neither the CIA nor any other branch of the U.S. government sought to disabuse the Pakistanis or Westerners of the misguided notion that the drones were invading Pakistan from Afghanistan and killing mass numbers of civilians. Far from making a case-by-case defense of the campaign using Pakistani sources, the CIA stubbornly refused to comment on the drone war.

Without an American public relations campaign to counteract the critics’ attacks on the drone efforts, they remained a mystery for most outsiders, who assumed the worst. But in 2009 and 2010 new light began to be shed on the drone strikes from a variety of sources, including U.S. senators, Pakistani politicians, journalists, American-based scholars, human rights activists, pollsters, Google Earth, and even the people of the FATA themselves. Although these revelations did little to change the conventional wisdom that drones invaded Pakistani airspace and indiscriminately killed Pakistani civilians at random, they began to shed some new light on the murky drone campaign for those who cared to dig deeper.

On the eve of these developments, Barack Obama took office on January 20, 2009. He let it be known that he would discontinue many of the more controversial antiterrorism practices of the Bush administration, such as water-boarding interrogations and the rendition of prisoners to CIA “black sites.” He also promised to close the offshore prison camp at Guantánamo Bay and try its prisoners in the U.S. judicial system. Obama clearly saw these Bush-era practices as public relations disasters in perhaps the most important war with Islamist extremists: the war for the hearts and minds of millions of Muslims. He aimed to create a new dialogue with Muslims. In his first major international speech, which was delivered in Cairo, Egypt, Obama promised a new era of understanding toward the Muslim world. He promised to respect Islam and end the distrust between the United States and Muslims that had been exacerbated in particular by the bloody U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In light of these promises, many antiwar activists in the West and antidrone voices in Pakistan felt confident that Obama would have a different take on the drone assassination campaign than his predecessor. The question on the minds of many—from the halls of power in Washington to the Taliban hujras in Waziristan to the Pakistani military headquarters in Rwalpindi—was, would the newly elected Democratic president continue the drone policies of his Republican predecessor?

Three days after Barack Obama’s inauguration, the world learned the new president’s views on the CIA’s assassination campaign in FATA when two separate drone attacks were launched, one in South Waziristan and one in North Waziristan. A Washington Post headline the next day read, “2 U.S. Airstrikes Offer Concrete Sign of Obama’s Pakistan Policy.” 1These strikes encapsulated all the benefits and pitfalls of the drone campaign. Whereas the first one was clean and killed ten militants, among them seven “foreigners,” the second strike, on a hujra owned by a Taliban militant, killed several of the Taliban target’s relatives, including children. 2

This development disappointed those who were opposed to the drone campaign. Several months later one of those disappointed Americans created an iconic image of the antidrone movement by photoshopping an image of the Nobel Peace Prize onto the nose of a drone firing a missile. (Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.) In the tribal regions of Pakistan a group of antidrone protestors organized by the Jamaat e Islami (the Islamist Party) held aloft banners that read, “Bombing on Tribes. Obama’s First Gift to Pakistan,” and the Taliban were said to have drummed up “more hatred for President Obama than for President Bush.” 3By 2011 a Pakistani newspaper was describing the new American president as “the Rambo of Drone Warfare.” 4

Far from ending the drone campaign in Pakistan, Obama ratcheted it up to unprecedented levels: there were 54 strikes in 2009, 117 in 2010, 64 in 2011, and 46 in 2012. In those four years Obama ordered roughly 281 drone strikes. 5In fact, the Obama administration ordered drone strikes once every four days on average, compared to the Bush administration, which ordered a drone strike every forty days on average. 6Obama ultimately expanded the CIA drone program to fourteen “orbits” (an orbit consisted of three drones). 7For all intents and purposes, Obama doubled down on the policy of assassinating terrorists in Pakistan without much criticism from his own party or from Republicans, whose president had begun the drone campaign. By the fall of 2012 Obama had, without any real opposition, carried out 283 strikes in Pakistan (six times more than Bush during his eight years in office). 8